ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author made use of an ‘art world’ approach to discuss creativity in different forms of cultural production. He focuses on how the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed a similar – though in places crucially different – theory of a ‘field’ of cultural production. Simply put, there are four main differences between the two approaches. None of these differences was totally ignored by Howard Becker in his outline of a theory of art worlds. He talked about the effects of training, for example, on artists. When people think of different forms of cultural production in a way they come to realise that differences are established and maintained in three main ways and that a field therefore consists of three interdependent entities: people, products, and institutions. One way to imagine the structure of relations in a field is to see them as part of a value chain between ‘upstream’ suppliers and ‘downstream’ customers.
