The Cultural Intermediaries Reader

Jennifer Smith Maguire, Julian Matthews, Jennifer Smith Maguire, Julian Matthews, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446201336, 9781446201329
• eBook ISBN: 9781473907393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"A rich selection of readings that expose the shadowy underworld of critics, bloggers, tweeters and stylists who have become essential guides to the good life of cultural consumption... a long overdue examination of how cultural intermediaries work, and how their work supports the new capitalist economy."
- Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College and City University 

"An array of talented contributors, skilfully brought together by the editors, show how the concept of cultural intermediaries can cast light on cultural production, and on media, culture and society."
- David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds

Cultural intermediaries are the taste makers defining what counts as good taste and cool culture in today?s marketplace. Working at the intersection of culture and economy, they perform critical operations in the production and promotion of consumption, constructing legitimacy and adding value through the qualification of goods. Too often, these are processes that remain invisible to the consumer?s eye and in scholarly debates about creative industries.

The Cultural Intermediaries Reader offers the first, comprehensive introduction to this exciting field of research, providing the conceptual and practical tools needed to analyse these market actors. The book:

• Surveys the theoretical terrain through accessible, in-depth primers to key approaches (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Callon and the new economic sociology).
• Equips readers with a practical guide to methodology that highlights the central features and challenges of conducting cultural intermediary research.
• Challenges stereotypes and narrow views of cultural work through a diverse range of case studies, including creative directors of advertising and branding campaigns, music critics, lifestyle chefs, assistants in book shops and fashion outlets, personal trainers, bartenders and more.
• Brings the field to life through a wealth of ethnographic data from research in the US, UK and around the world, in original chapters written by some of the leading scholars in the field.
• Invites readers to engage with proposed new directions for research, and comparative analyses of cultural intermediaries' historical development, material practices, and cultural and economic impacts. 

The book will be an essential point of reference for scholars and students in sociology, critical management, cultural studies, and media studies with an interest in cultural economy, creative labour, and the past, present and future intersections between production and consumption.

Part I Conceptual and Methodological Foundations

1 Bourdieu on Cultural Intermediaries

Jennifer Smith Maguire

… these ‘need merchants’, sellers of symbolic goods and services who always sell themselves as models and as guarantors of the value of their products, who sell so well because they believe in what they sell … (Bourdieu, 1984: 365)

A student of cultural intermediaries is likely to be familiar with Pierre Bourdieu and – by virtue of oft-quoted passages, such as that above – some of the content of Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Bourdieu’s mammoth contribution to the sociology of cultural consumption. First published in 1979, Distinction presents cultural intermediaries as a group of taste makers and need merchants, whose work is part and parcel of an economy that requires the production of consuming tastes and dispositions (1011). Although cultural intermediaries are not discussed in a level of detail commensurate with the scale of Bourdieu’s study, the popularization of Bourdieu’s concept as a focus of research owes much to academic taste makers, who framed it as one of value for scholars of cultural studies and sociology of consumption (e.g. du Gay et al., 1997; Featherstone, 1991). More recently, research on cultural intermediaries has been engaged to a greater extent with actor network theory, economic sociology and cultural economy (e.g. Callon et al., 2002, 2007; see Nixon, McFall and others in this volume). Such engagements have contributed conceptual clarity and empirical detail, but sometimes at the price of forgetting Bourdieu (cf. Hinde and Dixon, 2007).

The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Bourdieu’s larger project, and then identifies five interrelated dimensions of his account that pertain to cultural intermediaries. These five points are not exhaustive; rather, they are intended as a set of sensitizing themes and signposts, offering an invitation to return to Distinction.

Distinction: A Taste of the Big Picture

Bourdieu’s oeuvre was broadly concerned with the processes by which social stratification is reproduced, vis-à-vis forms of economic and cultural capital, and the pursuit of social prestige (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). In the case of Distinction, the specific focus of the research was on how social stratification is reproduced and legitimated through notions of taste, as they are expressed and enacted through consumption. The research

sought to determine how the cultivated disposition and cultural competence that are revealed in the nature of the cultural goods consumed, and in the way they are consumed, vary according to the category of agents and the area to which they are applied. (13)

The findings regarding that variance established two relationships. On the one hand, there is a close link between cultural practices (e.g. what people like to do, and how they do it) and educational capital and social origin (i.e. the amount of formal education received, and social class of parents); on the other hand, people with similar amounts of education from different social origins may be similar in what they like and do in areas of ‘legitimate’ culture (e.g. their views of modern art or composers – knowledge that is more readily transmitted via education) but will differ most in areas of everyday life, such as clothing, furniture and food choices (13,78, passim).

Those specific findings sit within a bigger picture: Bourdieu’s conceptualization of taste (56, passim). Tastes are social; they are acquired through conditioning relative to social origin and trajectory (e.g. class position, education and upward or downward mobility), and are experienced as if they are natural and personal. Notions of ‘good taste’ and definitions of ‘good culture’ are oriented around the dominant group, but – in being socially constructed rather than inherent – are subject to negotiation by groups seeking to improve or defend their social position. Both because they are experienced as natural and because they are stratified in legitimacy relative to the dominant group’s ‘good’ taste, expressions of taste unite people (who do and like similar things and tend to come from similar origins) but also separate them from others with unlike tastes and origins. This is true not only of the appreciation of and access to established or ‘elite’ culture, but also – as noted above – the quotidian culture of dressing, home decorating, cooking and so on. In sum, taste is a mechanism of social reproduction: it enables the continuation – and veils the arbitrariness – of hierarchies between and within class groups.2

With his broader argument in mind, we can make better sense of Bourdieu’s interest in cultural intermediaries as those who ‘perform the tasks of gentle manipulation’ of tastes (365): they are both shaping tastes for particular goods and practices, and defining and defending (new class) group positions within society. The remainder of the chapter offers a five-point primer to Bourdieu’s discussion, with regard to understanding cultural intermediaries’ context, location and defining attributes:

1. New economy, new class relations
2. New occupations
3. Taste makers
4. Expertise and legitimacy
5. Cultural capital and dispositions

As a precursor, we must bear in mind that Distinction was based primarily on French survey data collected in 1963 and 1967–68. The account of cultural intermediaries is thus located in a particular time and place (some of the economic and cultural parameters of which are highlighted in point one),3 but it is also a prisoner of the research design. Built into the analysis of the survey data were existing measures used by the INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques) for socio-occupational groups: cultural intermediaries (already) existed as a petite bourgeois category of occupations (505). This creates confusion with regard to cultural intermediaries: are they (simply) an INSEE socio-occupational category? Or, should they be defined by their role as taste makers? A typical Bourdieusian approach to cultural intermediaries takes the former route, locating them specifically within the new petite bourgeoisie, which

comes into its own in all the occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services. (359)

Within that large and internally differentiated class group are cultural intermediaries, ‘the most typical of whom are the producers of cultural programmes on TV and radio or the critics of “quality” newspapers and magazines and all the writer-journalists and journalist-writers’ (325).

Such a definition is problematic. The work of mediating cultural forms is performed by a range of occupations, which are neither monopolized by petite bourgeois critics, nor confined to the realm of ‘creative’ work (e.g. Negus, 2002; Nixon and du Gay, 2002). However, if Bourdieu’s use of the specific term ‘cultural intermediaries’ is locked to the INSEE category, his analysis of what they do – the mediation of cultural forms, the pedagogic work of shaping tastes – spans his discussion of the ‘new occupations’ of the new petite bourgeoisie and new bourgeoisie (as discussed in points two and three). This chapter adopts the wider angle lens of the ‘new occupations’ to read Bourdieu on cultural intermediaries, and, as such, endorses the latter route: a conceptual approach that defines cultural intermediaries by what they do (Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2010, 2012).

1. New Economy, New Class Relations

Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural intermediary occupations is informed by what he regarded as a ‘new economy … whose functioning depends as much on the production of needs and consumers as on the production of goods’ (310). Bourdieu was not alone in noting the expansion of a consumer economy over the 20th century and considering its consequences for the rise of a consumer culture (e.g. Lash and Urry, 1994; Slater, 1997). In this new economy, ‘changes in economic production … place ever greater emphasis on the production of needs and the artificial creation of scarcity’ (369). Hence the need for needs merchants and taste makers.

Furthermore, cultural intermediaries cannot be understood outside of changes in class relations arising from the expansion of higher education. As sex- and class-based barriers to educational qualifications diminish, several things occur. There is an ‘overproduction of qualifications, and [a] consequent devaluation’ (147) – a process familiar to any university student today. At the same time, as access to bourgeois jobs is arguably more open (with points of entry structured through educational qualifications), competition for those jobs intensifies:

The combined effect is to encourage the creation of a large number of semi-bourgeois positions, produced by redefining old positions or inventing new ones, and designed to save unqualified ‘inheritors’ from down-classing and to provide parvenus with an approximate pay-off for their devalued qualifications. (150; see also 357, passim)

These new occupations are the ‘refuge’ of the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie who, failing to acquire appropriate educational capital, are in danger of déclassement, and the sons and daughters of the petite bourgeoisie (and working class) who have acquired appropriate educational capital, but find that their expectations of upward social mobility are not matched by objective opportunities (147).

Therefore, cultural intermediary occupations are, for Bourdieu, an effect both of an economy requiring the production of need, and of class anxiety about upward and downward social mobility. It is the latter factor that attracts most of Bourdieu’s attention: this strengthens his understanding of the subjective dynamics at play for the new petite bourgeoisie; however, it is also a limitation, as noted by critics who complain that Bourdieu largely ignores the institutional, political-economic context of cultural industries and the division of labour that has developed therein (e.g. Garnham, 1986)4. With that in mind, let us now consider Bourdieu’s view of these new occupations.

2. New Occupations

Bourdieu’s concern was with the new, or intensified, professionalization of existing occupations (as noted by his contemporaries; e.g. Wilensky, 1964), through which the new class fractions could distinguish themselves from their established counterparts (358). Critics have called into question the ‘newness’ of Bourdieu’s economy (as one uniquely involved in the production of cultural tastes) and cultural intermediary occupations (e.g. Nixon and du Gay, 2002); nevertheless, what is of particular use in Bourdieu’s account is the emphasis on the professionalization of occupations that mediate between the fields of production and consumption.

The redefinition of old, and invention of new, occupations is especially found in the ‘most ill-defined and professionally unstructured occupations, and in the newest sectors of cultural and artistic production, such as … radio, TV, marketing, advertising, social science research and so on’ (151). As noted above, most of the attention in Bourdieusian cultural intermediary research has been on the new petite bourgeois occupations involved with presentation, representation and the provision of symbolic goods and services (359). In moving into these new sectors of the economy, the new petite bourgeoisie could exploit the relative lack of bureaucratization in order to match the occupations to their ambitions (359).

However, Bourdieu also discusses the new bourgeoisie, who have adapted to ‘the new mode of profit appropriation’ (311) through new occupations – in particular, executives ‘in marketing or management’ (301), and

the vendors of symbolic goods and services, the directors and executives of firms in tourism and journalism, publishing and the cinema, fashion and advertising, decoration and property development. (310–11)

These new ‘masters of the economy’ (315), in concert with the petite bourgeoisie, are the ‘vanguard’ of new tastes for goods, and a new ‘art of living’ (370–1). Yet, despite their obvious significance, there remains a lack of attention to the new bourgeois fraction of cultural intermediaries and their relationship to the new petite bourgeois occupations. While research might implicitly draw from across a class spectrum (in fashion, for example, studies of buyers as well as sales assistants: see Entwistle, 2006; Pettinger, this volume), the study of intermediaries reflects social scientists’ difficulty in gaining access to the powerful as research subjects.5

Both class fractions of new occupations are involved in the creation of wants. The new bourgeois cultural intermediaries are the instigators of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Thinking With Cultural Intermediaries
• Part I Conceptual and Methodological Foundations
• 1 Bourdieu on Cultural Intermediaries
• 2 Cultural Work and Creative Industries1
• 3 Cultural Intermediaries or Market Device? The Case of Advertising
• 4 The Problem of Cultural Intermediaries in the Economy of Qualities
• 5 Ethnographic Research and Cultural Intermediaries
• Part II Cultural Intermediary Case Studies
• 6 Advertising
• 7 Branding1
• 8 Public Relations Practitioners
• 9 Arts Promotion
• 10 Fashion
• 11 Popular Music
• 12 Lifestyle Media
• 13 Journalism
• 14 Fitness
• 15 Clothing
• 16 Book Retail
• 17 Food and Drink
• References
• Index