Cultural Work

Understanding the Cultural Industries

Andrew Beck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415289528
• eBook ISBN: 9781134439560
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Cultural Work examines the conditions of the production of culture. It maps the changed character of work within the cultural and creative industries, examines the increasing diversity of cultural work and offers new methods for analysing and thinking about cultural workplaces. Studying television, popular music, performance art, radio, film production and live performance it offers occupational biographies, cultural histories, practitioners' evidence, considerations of the economic environment as well as new ways of observing and studying the cultural industries.

Part I
CONDITIONS

In recent times there has been surprisingly little sustained research on the changing character of work in the cultural industries. Attention in media and cultural studies has tended to be directed toward questions of consumption and response, while political economy has concentrated on mapping basic changes in the overall structure of capitalism and corporate and governmental responses to them, leaving the everyday practice of cultural production as something of a black box.

Cultural Work is one marker of a wider recognition that it is time to reopen this box and “get back to work.” But this cannot be a simple resumption of currents of research already established. The period 1990 to 2000 has also seen a series of fundamental and continuing shifts in the environment in which cultural production takes place. These shifts include: a basic rebalancing of the relations between private and public enterprise; a shift in the bases and forms of public investment and support for cultural activity; the emergence of new kinds of cultural enterprise; the uneven consolidation of global markets; further moves toward concentration and the extension of corporate reach; and the development of new technologies of production and distribution. These developments pose new challenges, both for the questions we ask and the ways we seek to answer them.

Graham Murdock’s keynote chapter sets out, therefore, to do three things: first, to map these shifts; second, to explore the ways they are reorganizing the conditions of contemporary cultural work; and third, to suggest an agenda for future research.

1
BACK TO WORK

Cultural labor in altered times

Graham Murdock

Over the last two decades the cultural industries have increasingly moved to the center of political debates about the transformation of contemporary capitalism. They are frequently celebrated as a “multi-million pound growing force” (Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 2001: 1) and assigned a pivotal role in economic regeneration. Here, for example, is Chris Smith, the Minister responsible for overseeing cultural enterprise in the United Kingdom’s first New Labour government (1997–2001):

During the past few years in Britain we have seen an incredible flowering of the creative industries: [. . .] that rely on [. . .] creative talent for their added value. [. . .] They earn more revenue at home and abroad than the whole of manufacturing industry. And the sheer scale of these figures tells us something about the great sea-change that has occurred in the British economy over the last twenty years.

(Smith, 1998: 31)

Anyone looking to media and cultural studies for relevant information and analyses over that period, however, would have found only a comparatively slim body of relevant research. Attention has been largely focused elsewhere.

When, in 1968, Roland Barthes declared the “death of the author” and anointed the reader as the true originator of the meanings generated by cultural artifacts (Barthes, 1977: 148) he found a ready audience among scholars who had gravitated to the emerging field of cultural studies with the intention of rescuing popular creativity from the condescension of orthodox cultural critics. This emphasis on the “symbolic work of everyday life” (Willis, 1990) pursued through reading, viewing, shopping and DIY culture, was given an added push by the increasing valorization of consumption as a pivotal site of identity formation. Its conceptual attractions were further reinforced by its methodological convenience. Conversations with consumers are generally easier to arrange than interviews with company executives and stressed professionals, and observing the rituals of clubbing, or even a night of family television viewing, is likely to pose fewer problems of access than sustained observations of work in recording studios or boardroom meetings. In the resulting accounts of audience activity, cultural workers appeared, at best, as ghosts at a feast of creative labor, organized elsewhere. While the agency of consumers was dissected in detail and often celebrated, the agency of cultural producers was denied or ignored (Garnham, 2000: 98). And when production was considered, attention was directed to the social and cultural margins rather than to the “centers of professional and specialized cultural production” (Born, 2000: 406).

Recently, however, there have been signs of a shift with researchers in media and cultural studies returning to work as a necessary focus of study: “Those who once talked about texts, readings and resistance have started to think about institutions, industry and policy in a much more pragmatic manner” (Oswell, 1998: 93). This research is still strongly influenced by the dominant structures of attention in media and cultural studies with journalism, television, and the music industry attracting the lion’s share of attention, leaving other significant areas of cultural production, such as novel writing, relatively neglected. But it is an important beginning. Analytically “It is currently fashionable [. . .] to claim that the economic is embedded in the cultural. This claim is true enough, but it tells only part of the story. The other part resides in the complementary claim that the cultural is embedded in the economic; and never has this been more the case than in contemporary capitalism” (Scott, 2000: ix).

Some commentators picture public meanings continually traveling round a circuit in which production and consumption both offer pit stops for refueling and modifications. For the purposes of analysis, they argue, it doesn’t matter at which point you enter this circuit since it can only be understood as an integrated system. This position has been forcefully put by Paul du Gay and his colleagues in their account of the life and times of the Sony Walkman. They envisage cultural artifacts moving within a “circuit of culture” made up of inter-linked processes of representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation and insist that “you have to go the whole way round before your study is complete” (du Gay et al., 1997: 4). At first sight, this is an attractive solution to the difficulties presented by the notion of determination and its long association with models of relatively rigid relations between a productive base and a cultural superstructure. Any attempt to trace the career of cultural objects that claims to be comprehensive must integrate multiple moments and levels of economic, social, and symbolic activity. However, an analysis that sees production and consumption as mutually constitutive still has to specify “the nature, strength, direction and duration” of their interrelations. “Mutuality does not mean equal influence” (Mosco, 1996: 5–6). Because “production is processually and temporally prior to consumption” (Born, 2000: 406) it remains determinant in Raymond Williams’s revised sense of exerting pressures and setting limits on interpretation and use. This is why exploring the dynamics that are currently reshaping the professional production of public culture is an essential first step to understanding the symbolic textures of everyday life. Studying cultural work is at the heart of this enterprise since it is precisely at the points where creative agency rubs up against structural pressures, organizational strategies and occupational formations that the cultural sites, experiences, and meanings offered to the public are shaped in decisive ways.

Despite the general dearth of work on cultural labor in media and cultural studies, there is a range of resources we can call upon in embarking on this enterprise. Some have been developed against the grain of fashion in cultural analysis, others have been produced by scholars in other areas, notably political economy, sociology, economics, cultural and economic geography, and anthropology. In the space available here, I simply want to draw up a preliminary inventory of these resources and point to some of the key issues that are emerging as foci for research and debate.

We can distinguish six main currents of relevant research and theorizing:

1. analyses of the general shifts currently taking place in the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and their implications for the organization of cultural production.
2. attempts to map the structure and operations of the contemporary cultural industries as a whole or particular sectors within them. These have come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including: economists interested in investment opportunities (e.g. Vogel, 2000) or business economics (Caves, 2000); economic geographers concerned with the spatial distribution of production (e.g. Scott, 2000); and sociologists and political economists wanting to trace the connections between industrial organization and cultural diversity (e.g. Flichy, 1980; Gitlin, 1983).
3. studies of organizational structures and market strategies of the major corporations and public organizations involved in cultural production. Examples here include Bill Ryan’s work on corporate forms of cultural production (1991) and Tom Burns’s case study of the BBC (1977).
4. research on the organization of cultural occupations or occupational segments using interviews or questionnaires to construct cross-sectional snapshots of particular groups of workers at a particular moment in time (e.g. Tunstall, 1964; 1971).
5. in contrast, research on the careers pursued by cultural workers follows cohorts through time, using personal interviews or questionnaires to examine patterns of entry, advancement, situational experience, and drop-out (e.g. McRobbie, 1998; Paterson, Dex, and Willis [2003]). Alternatively, analysts may use the “found” materials in biographies to construct accounts of career dynamics (e.g. Toynbee, 2000).
6. finally, there is a range of ethnographic studies that employ direct observation of specific cultural projects (such as the making of a film or a television play) or sites of production (such as newsrooms or recording studios) to examine how external pressures and internal power plays organize creativity and shape the diversity and style of public expression in particular circumstances.

Although these various traditions of analysis work at very different levels of generality they should be seen not as self-enclosed domains of study, but as a set of Chinese boxes. The aim must always be “to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two” (Mills, 1970: 14).

Capitalisms: political economies of transition

In his influential model of “fields,” Pierre Bourdieu (1993) envisages particular sectors of cultural production, such as the music or television industries, as fields of play on which the various actors (corporations, regulatory bodies, star players, consumer groups, professional organizations, and trade unions) are engaged in a permanent struggle to maintain or advance their position and alter the rules of the game to their advantage. Within these fields, particular organizations operate as micro-fields, with their own continuing contests for internal position. Consequently, as he argues, in his recent work on journalism in France, “to try and understand what journalists are able to do, you have to keep in mind first, the relative position of the particular news medium [within the field of news production] and second, the positions occupied by journalists themselves within the space occupied by their respective newspapers or networks” (Bourdieu, 1998: 40). Work on the logics of cultural enterprise and the organization of cultural production has a lot to say about these two interlocking fields of external and internal contest and their consequences for the diversity of cultural production. However, Bourdieu is also careful to point out that all cultural fields are embedded in the meta field of economic relations as a whole, and that shifts at this level can re-order sub-fields and alter their dynamics in important ways. Consequently, as a first step we need to examine competing models of shifts in contemporary capitalism as a general system and identify both the problems they pose and the opportunities they open up for key players in the field of cultural production.

There is now universal agreement that contemporary capitalism either has moved, or is in the process of moving, from its “classical” state, based on the manufacture of material goods, to a new condition. But there is fierce disagreement about the defining features and dynamics of this emerging formation. One influential body of work identifies it as a shift from Fordism, centered around the mass production and consumption of standardized goods, to Post-Fordism, based on flexible specialization and niche markets (see Amin, 1994). However, as critics have pointed out, this binary opposition draws altogether too sharp a distinction between past and present and pays too little attention to uneven development (Hesmondhalgh, 1996). Consequently, in recent years attention has shifted to models that focus on the networks and flows made possible by innovations in communications technology (notably computerization, broadband cable systems, and geostationary satellites) and argue that in the new social order, the old, heavy, production of material goods is being replaced at the center of economic activity by the weightless, liquid, movements of information, images, and experiences creating what Lash and Urry call “economies of signs and space” (1994). This general argument has been pursued with particular vigor by Manuel Castells, who proposes that the organizational focus of activity within this informational and communications-based capitalism is shifting from firms to the business projects based around networks of shifting alliances and partnerships (Castells, 2000: 11). This fits the move from inhouse to independent production in the British television industry in the 1990s and the new contractual relations between majors and independents in the record industry rather neatly. But does it illuminate the central tendencies in the cultural industries as a whole at the present time? I would argue that it doesn’t.

In advancing his model, Castells is at pains to point out that it “is still in its exploratory stage” and should be read “as a work in progress” (Castells, 2000: 6). His characterization may turn out to be correct but, for now, it remains a possible destination rather than a general condition. If we want to make sense of how changes in the dynamics of capitalism have affected the organization of the cultural industries over the last two decades, we need to begin with a process that is already both well advanced and ubiquitous – marketization.

I am using the term “marketization” here to describe all those shifts in public policy that have had the effect, first, of enlarging the scope of market relations and the degrees of operational freedom allowed to corporations and, second, of confirming market measurements of success as the yardsticks against which all institutions are judged, including those still formally in the public sector. As I have argued elsewhere, for analytical purposes it is useful to distinguish four main aspects of this general process (Murdock, 2000).

Privatization. The disposal of public assets to private investors and the consequent conversion of the organization into a profit-seeking corporation, as in the sale of TF1, formerly France’s leading public service terrestrial television channel.

Liberalization. The introduction of competition into markets which were formerly dominated either by a single supplier (as in the case of British television before the launch of ITV) or by two or three large concerns (as with the BBC/ITV duopoly before the roll-out of cable and satellite services).

The re-orientation of regulatory regimes to give corporations increased scope for maneuver. Examples include: the relaxation of rules governing the degree of concentration allowed in media markets and the loosening of restrictions on cross-media ownership; the weakening of labor laws; moves away from hands-on to “light touch” regulation and greater reliance on self-regulation by the industries themselves; and the dilution of public interest requirements. The net effect of these changes is to shift the center of regulatory gravity from the defense of the public interest (however defined) to the promotion of corporate interests.

Corporatization. Moves to encourage or impel public organizations to act as though they were commercial corporations. Examples include: the conversion of Television New Zealand into a State Owned Enterprise with a statutory duty to return a surplus to the Treasury; the BBC’s increasing involvement in commercial enterprises and public–private partnerships; and the introduction of internal markets in service provision, as in the BBC Producer Choice initiative.

The period 1980 through 2000 has seen variants of these four processes become increasingly pervasive across the major capitalist economies. Taken together, they have precipitated a fundamental shift in the historic bargain struck between public and corporate interests during the high tide of Welfare Capitalism between 1950 and 1980, increasing both the size of the market sector and its competitive advantages.

This process of marketization has been further extended and accelerated by two other shifts.

The first is the continuing movement from analog to digital forms of coding and communication. By allowing all forms of expression – voice, music, still and moving images, texts, and data – to be produced, stored, and distributed in a single, universal, language of 0’s and 1’s, this simple shift has given additional impetus to the growing integration between the cultural industries, the computing industry, and the telecommunications industry. When charting this process, however, it is vital to avoid technological determinism in all its forms. It is not the new machines themselves that are restructuring cultural production but the ways corporations are choosing to deploy them.

The second shift is the emergence of a new global economic playing field. Capitalism has always aspired to global reach. The passage of time may have consigned many of the predictions that Marx and Engels made in the Communist Manifesto to the history of ideas, but one projection now jumps off the page with renewed force and relevance. As they sat down to write, the profits from Britain’s early adventures in mercantile capitalism were already helping to un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Conditions
• Part II Practice
• Part III organization
• Part IV Representation