ABSTRACT
Among the many transformations in the world economy during the last quarter-century is the expanded trans-nationalization of cultural production. The industry trade publication The Hollywood Reporter (Turner 2008) reported that in 2007 the major US studios alone generated an estimated $6 billion in international program sales, and as a singular measure this figure is but one small indicator of how the robust production and distribution of cultural products that include film, radio, television, books, music, and new media now constitute an overwhelmingly vibrant global economic sector. Although world markets are not new, what has changed is the rapid acceleration of the globalizing world economy, and, in particular, the organizational arrangements that underlie it. As organizations have become increasingly transnational in scope, industrial arrangements of production and distribution have become more complex. Social theorists (Weber 1978 [1921]) recognized that globalization of industrial forms would be the end-point of modernity, itself the outgrowth of scientific technology and industrial production that has yielded a world of economic markets, legal settings, and political organizations in which social institutions operate under rational organizational principles. In the study of these arrangements, however, organization scholars found that when firms expand into less familiar cultural locales, they are often confronted with ambiguous marketplaces and no clear route to success, and it is within those contexts that firms collectively develop conceptualizations of how their market is structured along lines of, for example, competitive strategies (Fligstein 1996), labor relations (Dobbin et al. 1993), and organization boundaries (Davis et al. 1994) to augment familiar institutional strategies for action. Strategic corporate leaders play a pivotal role in this process (Fligstein 2001). According to neo-institutionalists (Scott and Meyer 1994), the global spread of
organizational forms leads to growing interdependencies among countries, with social institutions eventually resembling one another through worldwide adoption of shared cultural understandings of economic and legal systems. These claims pertain to some extent to the production of cultural products in a global context, but their applicability is less straightforward. As global theorists have observed, incorporating the concept of culture, “the signifying system through which necessarily (among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored” (Williams 1981: 13),
into understanding societal, national, or organizational levels of development is complicated by the many ways in which culture itself is understood as a focus of study (Pieterse 2006). Concepts such as national identity and national culture, for example, are no longer regarded as unitary, and likely never could be (van Elteren 1996). Although discussions among globalization theorists themselves about the theoretical adequacy or utility of their own conceptualizations of culture (see Connell 2007, for example) are beyond the scope of this chapter, such discussions do affect how we understand the significance of an increasingly globalizing industrial system of cultural production because, while cultural products are circulated by powerful corporations, the symbolic creativity they organize, produce, and distribute is not immune from the inequalities of class, gender, and ethnicity present in the industries of contemporary capitalist societies; in addition, cultural products are increasingly significant as sources of wealth and employment in many economies (Hesmondhalgh 2007). Because cultural production as an industrial system encompasses “outputs [that]
are marked by high levels of aesthetic and semiotic content in relation to their purely practical uses” (Scott 2000: 2), and symbolic content plays an increasingly important role in how countries, nations, regions, and cultures interconnect on organizational levels, this chapter addresses what sociologists understand about globalization and cultural production, that is, the trans-national institutional arrangements that are associated with the creation or execution, reproduction, circulation, and exhibition of cultural products.
