On the Symbolic Production of Digital Markets for Cultural Goods

This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.     

Convention on Cultural Diversity

UNESCO has given its Director General a mandate to draft a convention on protecting the diversity of cultural contents and artistic expressions by the fall of 2005. Proponents of the convention view commitments made by countries in trade agreements as weakening their ability to preserve and promote cultural diversity. We review the existing draft wording for a convention, developed before the official involvement of UNESCO, by the INCP, an association representing cultural ministries in favour of insulating their cultural policies from liberalization, and conclude that it fails to meet the necessary conditions for an enforceable rules-based international agreement. In the INCP text, countries are given rights to introduce policies that promote a self-defined cultural diversity. The only obligation is to balance their interests with those of others. No standard of adjudication for balance is offered nor any effective dispute resolution mechanism developed. The ultimate purpose of the initiative may be to form a negotiating bloc within the WTO, but the disparate interests of its members and the lack of tangible benefits from the Convention reduce the credibility of bargaining solidarity. In contrast, the WTO provides a flexible and effective forum for negotiating maintenance of current policy options at a cost of making concessions in other sectors.     

‘Stars’ and places: exploring the spatial organization of media and entertainment industries in China

ABSTRACT

Drawing on an innovative ‘big data’ method, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the geography of media and entertainment industries (MEIs) in China, by examining the specific activities that are performed by celebrities, the key actors in these industries. Compared to previous research on cultural and creative industries, which primarily rely on more traditional statistical data, our study demonstrates a new approach to systemically investigate the spatial organization of the dynamic production process in MEIs. The outcomes reveal that activities focusing on the different value segments of MEIs display rather diverse geographical patterns. Depending on the availability and combination of specific local assets, different locations perform varying functions in the production networks of MEIs. Therefore, the agglomeration of MEIs only partially overlaps with the existing urban hierarchy. In addition, celebrities catering to different media and entertainment markets also exhibit distinct activity patterns, indicating a close and reciprocal relationship between the popularity of celebrities, the activities they perform, the platforms that are chosen, and the commercial value that can be generated as a result. This study contributes to our understanding of the complex development patterns and consequences of MEIs in emerging economies.     

Culturalisation and devices: what is culture in cultural economy?

Theorisation of culture is often absent from research on production in the creative and cultural sector. Further, cultural production has been largely untouched by the insights of the cultural economy approach. Culturalisation is a means of addressing the question of what constitutes culture and thus a cultural (economy) approach. It is the process by which culture and cultural production combine in the ‘operationalisation of the real.’ Culturalisation underpins much scholarship in this journal by posing the (economic) real as a problem of definition in order to illustrate the operations involved in its temporary resolution. The implications of this position need further addressing. There is a feedback between culture as a problem of definition and a cultural approach. Devices can interrogate the relationship between processes of cultural definition and the conceptual parameters of a cultural economy approach. Workshopping, projects and events are put forward as cultural devices emerging from a 10-month ethnography of literary performance in Bristol, England. This illustration shows firstly, how culturalisation occurs in a designated cultural sector to contingently realise culture; and secondly, the implicit logic of cultural economy as culturalisation, typified by the device as method, so as to open a debate concerning its implications.     

REVIEW ESSAY

This paper interrogates the concept of cultural intermediaries through an analysis of the New Zealand designer fashion industry, an industry composed of small networked enterprises which offer a wide range of educational, aesthetic and business services. The authors argue that ‘cultural intermediaries’ can no longer be thought of in terms of particular occupations, spaces or events. Instead, cultural mediation is more productively understood as a function of the multiplicity of activities and relationships organised around the new economic spaces of the fashion industry, all of which are subject to the exigencies of capital accumulation. Moreover, the proliferating activities that comprise the New Zealand fashion industry are profoundly gendered, both in terms of women's numerical dominance and the gendered skills and attributes that these activities mobilise. These women are all producing, mediating and consuming fashion, making up the complex economic and cultural networks which comprise the fashion industry and also supporting the industry through their own fashion consumption and the creation of a broader fashionable sensibility. It is in this context that the authors ask ‘Who needs cultural intermediaries indeed?’     

Cultural intermediaries in the making of branded music events: digital cultural capital in tension

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have overlooked how intermediaries and their digital cultural capital enhance the relationship between brand values and consumer identities; their specific uses of digital technologies; and how those uses are displayed in activities where intermediaries create consumer experiences. This paper thus explores the role that cultural intermediaries (music bloggers and an advertising agency) and their digital cultural capital play in making and communicating a branded music event. Briefly, intermediaries used a set of digital technologies (social media, guest lists, blogs, and websites) to create and orchestrate an authentic and exclusive experience between brands and consumers. We draw on empirical material from interviews and ethnographic work conducted in Santiago, Chile. Our study identifies digital technologies used by cultural intermediaries in communicating branded music events, including as: promotional tools; advertising campaign efficacy evaluation mechanisms; and relational objects that connect advertising agencies, music bloggers, brands, and consumers. By exploring the tensions and conflicts that arise among bloggers and advertising executives, we shed light on the uses and exchanges of digital cultural capital for commercial purposes, resulting from the connections between intermediaries that come from different fields of cultural production.     

New lamps for old: financialised governance of cities and clean energy

ABSTRACT

Using a six-year case study of Glasgow’s Sustainable City business model, this paper examines interactions between financialised governance of cities and clean energy strategies. Research on the role of cities in developing clean energy has paid limited attention to the interaction with financialised governance of infrastructure, which makes the implementation of plans largely dependent on private investment. A conceptual approach combining economic sociology of actor networks and urban political economy is used to analyse the career of the business model designed to transform old infrastructures into new clean energy assets. The analysis focuses on interactions between city council, public bodies and electricity distribution network business. Climate policies are creating uncertainties for energy businesses over revenues from ageing networks, suggesting scope for alliance with local governments. Making new liquid assets for clean energy from old infrastructure is however shown to be a process marked by instability and reversals. In conclusion, it is argued that concepts from actor-network theory and urban political economy used together reveal the hidden contingencies of financialisation in particular socio-technical interactions, and their materiality in the context of climate change.     

From shanzhai chic to Gangnam style: seven practices of cultural-economic mediation in China and Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.     

Revisiting the Importance of Detachment in the Dynamics of Competition

In this paper, we adopt the framework of analysis of the economy of qualities [Callon, M., Méadel, C. & Rabeharisoa, V. (2002) ‘The economy of qualities’, Economy and Society, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 194–217] to describe the sales and marketing practices of a French farm supply company whose products have uncertain characteristics and disputed effects. We show that this uncertainty leads sales staff of the company to develop an argument designed to generate attachments but also, and even more importantly, detachments. We also show that these detachments and attachments do not just concern the farmer, the company and its products. To understand the competitive dynamics involved here, it is also necessary to focus on the associations that are broken and established with natural entities, actors in the supply chain, institutions of agricultural science and conceptions of the farming profession.     

The Consumption of Cultural Products: An Analysis of the Spanish Social Space

This article analyses the social consumption of cultural products by Spaniards from the standpoint of microeconomics and sociology. By comparing Lancaster's ``new consumer theory' to Bourdieu's theory, we show the usefulness of simultaneous analysis of consumption from both perspectives. The results provide evidence supporting the hypothesis of expressive functions, distinction and symbolic properties of cultural products. In addition, the ``new consumer theory' has various implications for both cultural policymaking and marketing of cultural products.     

国内外文化创意城市建设对比研究

文化创意城市发展模式对全球城市应对后工业化困境功效卓著。首先,描绘国外文化创意城市概念从“萌生”到“成熟”的路径衍化。其次,总结了国内外著名文化创意城市,维也纳、哥本哈根、巴黎、伦敦、北京、上海、深圳和杭州的发展经验。再次,从目的、方向、路径等方面通过比较视角梳理国内外文化创意城市建设的差异。最后,总结对我国文化创意城市建设的启示,认为应将文化创意城市发展融入城市总体发展规划,大力促进当前“双创工作”深入开展,并在充分尊重城市历史文化基础上凝聚市民大众共识,形成文化创意城市发展方向,来促进我国文化创意城市的发展。     

超大城市中的公共空间生活意象 ——夜市从纯商业向文创活力方向发展研究

中国城市的公共空间中一直存在群众自发形成商业活动的传统.在超大城市拥挤且有限的公共空间里,如何创造群众自发参与的公共空间,形成积极的城市生活意象,是值得深入思考的问题.中国有很多"草根夜市",是大城市作为"不夜城"的重要组成部分.但随着城市的发展,传统的夜市形式逐渐被取缔.以上海、武汉等超大城市为研究对象,调研夜市发展...     

Cultural Capital

Economists traditionally distinguish between three forms of capital: physical capital, human capital and natural capital. This paper proposes a fourth type of capital, cultural capital. An item of cultural capital is defined as an asset embodying cultural value. The paper considers usage of the term cultural capital in other discourses, notably sociology after Bourdieu, and contrasts these with the proposed usage in economics. The relationship between cultural and economic value, upon which the economic concept of cultural capital relies, is explored, and the possible implications of cultural capital for economic analysis discussed, including issues of growth, sustainability and investment appraisal. The paper concludes with some suggestions for further theoretical and empirical research.     

PERFORMING CALCULATION IN THE ART MARKET

The purpose of this article is to suggest a model of calculation in art markets based upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and of actor-network theory. It will be argued that Bourdieu's concepts of capitals, economic, symbolic and cultural are useful for the specificity they lend to value making processes in the art market. However, actor-network theory's proposal of a distributed form of agency between humans and non-humans (e.g. calcualtion tools) is favoured here, posing a fundamental challenge to Bourdieu's notion of agency as resting solely at the hands of human agents. In order to understand the performance of calculation, this article explores the role of catalogues as an example of a market device in the Scottish auction market. It will be argued that the performativity of the catalogue cannot be fully understood without taking into account not only how it represents and enacts the value/s of aeshtetic objects, e.g. paintings, but also how this performance is mediated by its role as an aesthetic object.     

The Anthropology of Giving: Toward A Cultural Logic of Charity

Modern elite charity is class-centered and exclusionary, employing charitable exchange ritual, like the primitive potlatch, for structured loss and exchange, both affirming and concealing status and power, obfuscating yet illuminating privilege. Traditional models of charitable giving are often Eurocentric and monocultural, employing a market model-based ‘exchange theory’ assuming that giving is a series of dyadic, reciprocated ‘purchases’ by donors seeking maximum utility. Looking at modern charitable giving as a ‘total social fact’ (Mauss) we can detect patterns behind elite charitable giving that make seeming relinquishment of wealth a declaration of power. Nonprofits are embedded in these dynamics as the elite gift economy expresses itself through modern charitable giving.