Symbolic representations of cultural industries at content trade fairs: Bourdieu's “economic world reversed” revisited

Abstract

From business events such as content trade fairs, we can learn about the institutional logics of contemporary cultural industries. In our ethnographic fieldwork at six different trade fairs in three industries (book, music and TV), we identified five ways of legitimating the commercial production and distribution of cultural goods: cultural industries are represented as an idealized form of business, as art for art's sake, as innovation and technology, as entertainment and as a public sphere. Our findings both confirm and contradict Bourdieu's theory of cultural production fields. In accordance with Bourdieu's description of the field as a reversed economic world, we observed an industry which struggles to disguise ordinary economic transactions, such as negotiating deals, ordering services or making contracts. In contrast to Bourdieu, we do not find a strong homology between a position in the field and its symbolic representation. Rather, we observed that small enterprises from the restricted field of cultural production as well as large-scale producers and distributors of cultural goods use the same narratives to legitimate their practices. Borrowing from recent advancements in organizational institutionalism, we interpret the symbolic representations at trade fairs as a cultural toolkit from which people in the industry strategically choose in order to pursue their interests.