Lecture 4 Flashcards
production of culture perspective
- Concerned with the “worlds” in which cultural products are made and rendered meaningful
- Interested in creatives, gatekeepers, and intermediaries who assist in the production process and assign value to cultural products
cultural products
Cultural products including images, books, televisions shows and the like are made or produced through coordinated efforts and onerous work
cultural fields
“a social universe” made up of consumers and producers (i.e., the field of fashion, the field of haute cuisine, the literary field, etc.)
what defines cultural fields
a “struggle” for positions and position-taking
the belief in value
Participants within a given field have an interest in maintaining their position and in extolling the value of the offerings unique to their field
Symbolic versus commercial success
Significance over money; not interested in monetary revenue per say, but symbolic revenue
*The economic world reversed
- how scholars typically refer to the tension between symbolic vs commercial success
the cost of cultural production
The production of cultural products entails high risk and uncertainty including uncertainty around consumer desire which is fundamentally unknown
how companies navigate the cost of cultural production
Companies often look to successful and more popular companies and take advantage of their ideas
TV Programmers draw from three frames when explaining their decision-making
(1) reputation, (2) genre, and (3) imitation
In order to justify their decisions to others, network programmers
justify their investments by using existing genres and popular writers or actors
isomorphism
similarity
isomorphism and change
makes changes slow as brands imitate one another
problems with miscalculating the market
- Market opportunities are not unlimited
- Audience availability and time is likewise, finite
gatekeepers
play an important role in the field of cultural production, deciding who or what is “in” and “out”
examples of gatekeepers
figures like talent scouts or agents
how gatekeepers accomplish their work
often share their knowledge with one another, producing a network of well-resourced “insiders”; gatekeepers insist on the value of the work that they perform
Editorial market
fashion only needs to appeal to those who ought to know; fewer people
features of the editorial market
- Can be more variation
- Beautiful but in a way we can’t necessarily understand
- Less risk; can diverge because we are not interested in selling to a lot of people
- Today, these looks are still very similar to how they used to be
Commercial market
fashion that appeals to lots of different people; because consumer taste has shifted, these images have also changed
optioning
used to communicate information about a models’ desirousness
cultural intermediaries
- function as arbiters of taste
- They straddle the realms of production and consumption, helping consumers to make sense of cultural products
what cultural intermediaries do
Help to frame different products and make them more or less valuable to consumers
cultural intermediaries accomplish both
discursive and symbolic goals
