Production Of Culture Research Paper

Two early studies show the promise of what later came to be called the production perspective. First, in their study of the emergence of impressionist art in nineteenth-century France, Harrison and Cynthia White (1965) found inadequate the then prevalent theories that said changes in art are associated with revolutionary changes in society or with the emergence of persons of genius. Instead they found that the older Royal academic art production system survived the economic turmoil and ideological changes of the French Revolution but collapsed a generation later because of the emerging art market created by Parisian art dealers and critics who fostered unconventional artists such as the Impressionists.

Second, noting the set of nineteenth century American novels that traced the battles of lone individuals against nature, novels ranging from the frontiersman stories of James Fenimore Cooper to Herman Melville’s saga of the titanic struggle of a man against a white whale, Moby Dick. Literary critics and Americanists had long asserted that these works evidenced America’s distinctive culture of individualism and entrepreneurship. They contrasted such works with the novel of manners produced by English authors which were held to represent English culture. In her careful analysis, Griswold (1981) put this facile generalization in doubt. She found that the English novels of manners sold better in the United States, as well as in England, than the man-against-nature novels. Significantly, before 1909 American publishers preferred works by English authors because they could be sold in the US without paying author’s copyright fees, while American authors had to be compensated. To sell their work, American authors turned to several specialty topics, including the man-against-nature theme. With the changed copyright law of 1909, American and English authors were put on the same footing, and a rapidly increasing number of American authors successfully published ‘English’ style novels of manners. This fact, that was once read as evidence of ‘the closing of the frontier,’ Griswold sees as an important result of changes in copyright law and its ramifying influences on the literary production process.

Research in the production perspective draws freely on theories, methods, and concepts developed in other branches of sociology. It is, however, distinctive in focusing on the consequences of social activities for culture. Thus, for example, the ‘news-making’ studies of the 1970s exemplify the production perspective because their authors were not satisfied to simply deconstruct the content of news or to trace the organizational and occupational dynamics of news organizations. In addition they highlight the con-sequences of these for the formation and transformation of ‘news’ (cf. Molotch and Lester 1974, Tuchman 1978, Gans 1979).

1. Establishing The Production Perspective

The production perspective emerged in the 1970s largely in response to the failure of the earlier dominant idea that culture and social structure mirror each other. This ‘mirror’ or ‘reflection’ view had been developed by anthropologists who studied small pre-literate groups, where it seemed credible that a self-consistent set of social institutions would be reflected in a cognate coherent set of cultural symbols. The idea that there is a symbiotic relationship between a singular functioning social system and its coherent overarching culture was freely embraced by most theorists of contemporary society as well, including in the 1950s and 1960s most Marxists and functionalists such as Talcott Parsons. The former asserted that those who controlled the means of producing wealth could shape culture to fit their own class interests. The latter believed that a set of monolithic abstract values were more long-lasting and determined the shape of social structure.

The reflection view proved to be of limited use, however, in understanding the relationship between social structure and culture in industrial societies and was also being widely questioned by anthropologists studying preliterate societies. Breaking with the older mirror view, the production perspective—like most of the other contemporary perspectives in cultural sociology—views both culture and social structure as an emergent patchwork and the relationship between them as problematic (Peterson 1979).

Publication in 1976 and 1978 of anthologies entitled The Production of Culture, edited by Peterson and Coser, respectively, signaled the emergence of the production perspective as a coherent and self-conscious approach in culture studies, claiming to be applicable across a wide range of specific fields and genres. Many of the early researchers in the perspective had been trained in the sociology of organizations, industry, and occupations and brought their skills in the analysis of material production to the fields of symbol production. Others came to the perspective with a love of or commitment to a particular form of cultural expression such as opera, rock, dance, television, or literature. A number of developments since the 1970s show the progressive establishment in sociology of the production of culture perspective. Two textbooks and an anthology have appeared with the title The Production of Culture (Crane 1992, Ryan and Wentworth 1998, Gay 1997), and the perspective receives full chapters in recent texts in the sociology of art (Zolberg 1990) and in the sociology of culture (Hall and Neitz 1993).

From the outset, the perspective promised not only a way to better understand the shape and form of any particular cultural expression but also to facilitate three kinds of comparisons: (a) comparisons across broad cultural production realms including art, popular culture, religion, science and law; (b) comparisons across the division between ‘elite’ and ‘common’ that tends to emerge in each realm; and (c) comparisons across societal, institutional, or organizational, and microlevels of analysis (Peterson 1976). Progress toward achieving these goals has been uneven (Ryan and Wentworth 1998).

We will review progress and problems in working toward these three goals and point to several emerging lines of inquiry that link the production perspective to other approaches in cultural studies, citing studies that exemplify the perspective, even when the authors have not formulated their work in production terms. We begin by showing the utility of the perspective by reviewing a few specific lines of research. This review will also briefly note, as appropriate, cognate work in other realms.

2. The Production System In The Cultural Diamond

Griswold (1994) has argued that to be complete, the study of any cultural phenomenon, be they books, paintings, legal systems, religious precepts, or news stories, must take into account four classes of phenomena. In addition to a close analysis of the cultural works themselves, they also focus on the situation in which people create works, the nature of the audience, and the relevant aspects of the society at large. She sees these as four points on a diamond with society at the top, the cultural work at the bottom, the creators on the left point, and the audience on the right. With this model in mind, the production system can be seen as a square overlaying the diamond, the square being large enough so that its corners intersect each of the sides of the diamond. This addition makes clear that elements of the production system intervene between each of the four facets of the diamond, so that the influence of each on the others is mediated by the production system.

To illustrate the workings of the production system in shaping culture, Peterson’s (1990) analysis of why rock music became the dominant form of popular music will be used. In the early 1950s, the music industry was blind to the large and growing unsatiated demand for greater variety in music and was deaf to the efforts of musicians who might have satisfied that demand. The music industry was financially as well as aesthetically committed to the big band-crooner style of popular music of the time, and, because of its oligopolistic control of the production, distribution, and marketing of new music, was able to thwart the marketing of alternative styles. Yet in the mid-1950s the power of the music industry oligarchy was broken and the rock of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and Little Richard became the defining force of music in the United States and much of the world. In the middle of the quiescent Eisenhower years, no major political or economic upheaval could account for such change.

Six production factors working together are identified as making possible the rapid cultural change. These include law and regulation, technology, industrial structure, organizational structure, occupational careers, and the consumer market. In brief, with the transfer of network radio programming to the emerging new medium, television, radio turned to playing records as the cheapest effective form of programming. The granting of many new radio station licenses, the arrival of cheap transistor radios, and the development of the top 40 radio-as-jukebox format meant that the listening audience was exposed to a much larger number and far wider range of music. Using the new durable 45 rpm records, and taking advantage of the developing network of independent record distributors, numerous independent record companies experimented with a wide range of new sounds in an effort to tap the unsatiated market demand. In a matter of 24 months between late 1954 and early 1957, rock was forged in this caldron of entrepreneurial creativity (Peterson 1990, Ennis 1992). In the decades since, the large media conglomerates have gradually reconstituted their oligopolistic control of the industry, and the market has been divided into an ever larger number of increasingly homogeneous market segments (Lopes 1992, Negus 1999).

Using the same six variables employed in the analysis of the emergence of rock music, the production perspective can bring some order to a welter of different trends taking place in commercial music at the turn of the millennium. On the one hand, a few artists are accounting for an ever larger proportion of diminishing aggregate record sales, and at the same time there is an explosion in the number and diversity of artists who are making and independently distributing CD recordings. To increase their popularity with the masses of sometime music buyers, megastars such as Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks, Celine Dion, the Spice Girls, and Shania Twain make their work ever more safe and predictable. This aesthetic shift is encouraged by the marketing needs of their record companies who are aggregating into ever larger multinational media conglomerates, dependent for promotion on radio stations whose ownership is rapidly consolidating as well. These large firms can work efficiently only if they sell millions of units of a few recordings. The majors have been able to control the market by effectively controlling the channels of marketing and distribution.

The hegemony of this star-marketing system is being challenged by a new system of promotion and distribution that is coming into being. Since the late 1980s the technology has been available to make possible the digital recording of music and, therefore, the storage, reproduction, and transmission of sound without any decay in quality. Given the increasing power of Internet technology, its maintenance as a free highway of information, and the availability of inexpensive software, making it easy for any musician to create a ‘home page’ and transmit sound. In this emerging field independent music producers can make, market, and distribute their work independent of the major media conglomerates.

If this system develops successfully, it can increase the power of artists, reduce the power and profitability of the large firms, foster an explosion in the number of artists and firms able to reach wide audiences, and significantly increase the levels of experimentation in popular music, creating new markets for an explosion in the range of music regularly on offer. It is as likely that, through the elaboration of copyright and censorship law, together with control of the patents for the technology necessary for the new system, the major firms will keep control of developments in popular music.

3. The Promise Of Comparative Analysis

One of the features of the production perspective is that it facilitates comparative analysis of three sorts: comparisons across symbol-producing realms, comparisons between elite and popular forms within each realm, and comparisons across societal, institutional, and microlevels of analysis. To date, most studies in the production perspective have focused on particular fields, and progress toward fulfilling the promised benefits of comparison has been uneven, as we will show.

3.1 Comparisons Across Symbol-Producing Realms

Mid-twentieth century functionalists argued that cross-realm comparisons are fruitless because each has its own unique core value. Essentially Parsons (1961) argued that science deals in experimentally established fact, law deals in reason, art deals in aesthetics, and religion concerns faith in the supernatural. The nominalist stance of the production perspective, however, problematizes these differences, making the assertion of uniqueness a residual to be asserted when no similarities can be established.

The expectation that the same range of processes are present in all realms of culture production, be they religion, art, science, law, etc. does not mean that new discoveries in physics are produced in the same way as is new religious doctrine. Rather it means that the differences can be explained, in large part, by the conditions of production in each of the realms (Crane 1976). For example, knowledge in physics today is largely controlled by a single subsidized and self-perpetuating worldwide ‘priesthood’ that works to allocate resources and rewards in ways that perpetuate its views; at the same time, religious doctrine varies greatly from country to country, and, particularly in the United States, a wide range of religious specialists mu compete with each other in an open market for the lay consumer’s attention and for resources, loyalties, and rewards.

These differences, however, are not inherent in the nature of the subject matter of these two realms, as can be seen by reference to earlier times when the production systems of science and religion were very nearly reversed. In the eighteenth century, English scientists supported themselves and their work by periodic shows of spectacular findings that induced laymen to give them further support, and in the seventeenth century religious scholars worked with the support and protection of an Established Church orthodoxy and defied it only in mortal peril of their lives. Likewise, eighteenth-century French painters worked with the protection of an all-powerful Academy, while today they work in conditions of near perfect competition. In each of these instances, the movement from one sort of production system toward the other has had profound consequences for every aspect of the art world, including even what is considered to be art (White and White 1965, Becker 1982).

As recent research on the roles of women in each of the symbol producing realms has shown, much less dramatic changes in the nature of the production process may have major consequences for a particular class of producers. Systematic comparison across realms will highlight the structural and symbolic underpinnings of such institutional discrimination.

3.2 Distinctions Between High And Low

An invidious distinction between artifacts, practices, and practitioners considered reverentially and those who are considered to be profane is found in each of the culture-producing realms, and this fact furnishes a great opportunity for comparisons both within and across production realms. To date, however, the distinction has done more to inhibit such comparisons because the truth value vested in high (art, science, religion, law) symbols and the honor status accorded to those in the fields where they are produced is often seen to render these fields incomparable with each other and also with the low counterparts in their own realms (Gans 1974).

Working from the nominalist stance of the production perspective, one can cut through these problems by asserting that any of the invidious high–low distinctions are not inherent in the cultural objects, but rather they involve a social, or better, a cultural construction of reality. At issue are the questions: who gets to make the designations, on what basis are they made, and within what range are they accepted. There are a number of excellent case studies touching on these issues, but there has been very little thinking about the conditions supporting one system of evaluation or another across all the realms of cultural production. The most systematic efforts in this direction can be found in the works of Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues. In the paragraphs that follow, two issues are considered: the mobility between high–low categories, and the differentiation and de-differentiation of high and low.

3.3 Cultural Mobility

In the arts, particular works and artists, and even entire genres, experience aesthetic mobility over time (Becker 1982, Griswold 1986). DeVeaux (1997) details the sociopolitical and music industry conditions that caused the aesthetic mobility of jazz from folk to popular to fine art music. In the religious realm in the United States, there has historically been a cycle in which the established church organization becomes increasingly rigid and out of touch with people’s felt needs, and a number of reformist charismatic groups form to serve the demand. As the established churches loose power the surviving reform groups become ever more established and church-like.

3.4 Changing Criteria Of Prestige

The distinction between popular culture and high art that was such a fixture of American society by the middle of the twentieth century (Gans 1974) only began to be clearly articulated in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The differentiation of high–low was driven by the class interests of rising status groups, and the criteria for claiming prestige has changed in recent decades (Crane 1992). There is evidence that the highbrow exclusiveness that was at the core of cultural capital at mid-century has been replaced by a cultural capital based on cosmopolitan, even omnivorous, tastes. Volume 25, numbers 2 and 3 of Poetics are devoted to describing this changing representation of status through taste displays.

4. Micro, Institutional, And Societal Levels Of Analysis

The production of a culture model has been formulated at the level of personal interaction, relations among organizations, and the workings of entire societies. Ideally, work at each of these levels complements work at the other two, and while this may happen in the best individual studies, the theoretical questions and research techniques employed at the three levels are different enough that research has tended to develop separately, and practitioners working at different levels of analysis do not learn all they might from each other.

The great strength of studies that explicitly take into account societal level conditions is their view of the culture industry as an expression and reinforcer of the sociopolitical system of the larger society and the attendant systems of domination and subordination, including social class, ethnicity, religion, and gender. Excellent studies can be cited. The danger in looking from the societal level is that the workings of the production process may be seen to follow automatically from the society-level constraints. This need not be the case, as exemplified in a number of empirical works which show the way in which societal values and beliefs are mediated by the culture industries.

Production studies that focus primarily on the organizational or institutional level take advantage of the decades of studies of particular organizations, occupations, industries, and the theoretical developments in these research specialties. Because researchers want to remain value-neutral, they tend to bracket their own aesthetic and political views and use un-critically the aesthetic judgments and ideological stances implicit in the symbolic field being studied. Thus the work of these researchers helps to perpetuate the established categories of the systems they study. At the same time, their reports expose for public review the workings of the systems which create and perpetuate self-serving classifications of a given field (cf. Lamont and Fournier 1992).

Production studies that focus primarily on the microlevel of interaction between persons draw from the rich tradition of research in symbolic interaction-ism, as well as from the social-psychological elements of the sociologies of occupations and/organizations. The most wide-ranging and influential work in this tradition is Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds (1982). He shows that by bracketing societal and institutional levels of analysis, one can illustrate how groups of symbol producers create and are shaped by the conventions of aesthetic judgment and collaboration in culture production. In effect such microlevel studies focus less on the production of culture and more on the culture of production (Fine 1992).

Some microlevel studies can be criticized for un-reflexively assuming the perspective of the group or occupational category under review, and thus obtaining an incomplete and misleading reading of the field. This ‘going native’ as it were is cognate to the problem of becoming an unwitting apologist for the institution under study, and the research strategy of comparison across subfields is one of the best ways of guarding against unreflexively adopting the perspective of just one of the groups in a production system.

5. The Production Perspective In Cognate Areas

The production perspective has proved a useful model for organizing ideas and research in a number of areas where the production of culture is itself not the conscious aim of the activity.

5.1 Reception And The Autoproduction Of Culture

Reception by the reader, listener, viewer, or purchaser has always been a central concern in cultural studies. The term ‘reception’ suggests the end of a communication process. However, reception is an active process of selection, interpretation, and recombination of elements that can be seen as the production of a symbolic world which is meaningful for ‘consumers.’ A prime question here is how people go about selecting cultural elements, and in turn, the meanings that they attach to them. This production of a lifestyle for oneself and one’s group is best referred to by the Latin word for self—‘auto’ thus the autoproduction of culture. The autoproductions of marginalized groups such as youth, ethnics, eccentrics, and the like have received much scholarly attention, but all individuals and collectivities create lifestyles that display their patterning of cultural choices (Peterson 1983). A growing number of studies focus on how people of different sorts produce meaning out of mass-mediated symbols.

In the 1940s a ‘mass culture’ was seen as the unreflexive response to the seductions of the mass media (Rosenberg 1957), dissolving the social class-based hierarchy of class cultures by which wage worker, tradesperson, business person, and farmer could readily be distinguished. While the extreme elitist alarm over massification has fewer proponents now (Gans 1974), much of the debate since has focused on the question of the degree of fit between social class, defined in relationship to production, and culture class defined in relationship to consumption. Gans (1974) and Bourdieu (1984) assert that the fit between social class and culture class (groupings of people sharing patterns of consumption) is quite close. However, their perceptive analyses of the United States and France respectively reveal numerous autoproducing status groups that cannot easily be fit into a linear hierarchy.

More recent studies of autoproduction of culture suggest that most people of high status (in the United States at least) are now little concerned with the old class markers of cultural capital that centered on the appreciation of the fine arts. They no longer shun as inferior all forms of popular or mass culture (Goffman 1951). In their study of the musical tastes of the full range of occupational status groups, Peterson and Kern (1996) suggest that the cultural symbols of class position are undergoing a profound transformation. While the top strata were earlier characterized by an elitist and exclusive interest in the fine arts and avoidance of other cultural expressions, now persons and groups show their high status as cultural omnivores, consuming not only the fine arts but also showing a knowledgable appreciation of many, if not all, forms of cultural expression. Near the bottom of the status hierarchy, in sharp contrast to the old conception of the undiscriminating couch potato of the mass audience, they find groups who are univores, that is, people involved with a single form of cultural expression.

The systematic study of the autoproduction of culture is going forward rapidly along several fronts: (a) ethnographic studies of distinctive groups tease out the processes by which group members appropriate and incorporate cultural symbols for their own purposes; (b) other studies show the re-appropriation of the mass media-disseminated pop culture by youth and other specific taste groups; and (c) population surveys with increasingly sophisticated culture questions are becoming available, making possible a much richer understanding of patterns of cultural choice.

5.2 Tradition, Collective Memory, And Boundary Formation

Early anthropologists, folklorists, and sociologists developed the idea of ‘tradition’ as the repository of all that is ancient and virtually unchanging. This fitted the needs of both romantics seeking the ‘noble savage’ and imperialists needing a rationale for ethnic and racial exploitation. In recent decades this view has been attacked on all sides as factually incorrect and self-serving. For example, Hobsbawm (1983) in a study showing that much of the British monarchial tradition was in fact purposefully created in the middle of the nineteenth century, has coined the felicitous term ‘invented tradition’ to describe this kind of production of culture.

The term ‘collective memory’ is now often substituted for ‘tradition’ in recognition that the past is continually reinterpreted to fit the changing needs of the present. Some studies point to specific individuals or groups of memory ‘doctors’ and ‘cultural entrepreneurs.’ One of the most exciting applications of the idea of the mutability of collective memory has been in the study of the manipulation of memory in the service of making status distinctions along the lines of gender, race, class, etc. Gusfield (1963), in one of the earliest works of this sort, studied the role of status politics in the efforts of the (old-family Protestant) Women’s Self-Temperance League to stigmatize the alcohol-use norms of immigrant Catholics. A wide array of applications of this sort of culture-production study can be found in Lamont and Fournier’s (1992) anthology, Cultivating Differences.

6. Prospects

Research perspectives tend to come and go over the years, so what are the prospects for the production perspective? The numerous emerging developments described above show that the production perspective continues to gain utility for significant research and theory development. The perspective has proved an essential part of any full analysis of cultural phenomena, although some practitioners in cultural studies still do not take into account the influence of production factors. The globalization of production and the high rate of technological development as well as changes in censorship law and intellectual property rights make it all the more imperative in the twenty-first century to take into account the changing influence of production factors. Whether under the distinctive designation ‘production of culture’ or not, future scholars will find it rewarding to ferret out the many ways in which the system of culture production influences what culture is and what it can become.

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