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Introduction: Globalization and Diversity in Cultural Fields -- Comparative Perspectives on Television, Music, and Literature

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Timothy J. Dowd at Emory University
Timothy J. Dowd
Susanne Janssen at Erasmus University Rotterdam
Susanne Janssen
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Abstract

Scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities often approaches globalization, particularly that involving that media content, by emphasizing such concepts as “imperialism” and “hybridization.” While theoretically rich, this scholarship can sometimes given little attention to how various actors and arrangements can impinge on the global flow and circulation of media content. This special issue seeks to move beyond such limitations by wedding theoretical concerns with an emphasis on empirical evidence—thereby heeding the specific contexts in which globalization unfolds. Our introductory essay thus provides a brief overview of the articles contained within this issue.
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INTRODUCTION: GLOBALIZATION AND
DIVERSITY IN CULTURAL FIELDS – COMPARATIVE
PERSPECTIVES ON MUSIC, LITERATURE, AND
TELEVSION
***
TIMOTHY J. DOWD & SUSANNE JANSSEN
This introduction to a special issue appeared in the following journal:
T.J. Dowd and S. Janssen. 2011. “Introduction: Globalization and Diversity in Cultural Fields –
Comparative Perspectives on Music, Literature and Television.” American Behavioral
Scientist 55 (5): 519-523.
Abstract
Scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities often approaches globalization, particularly
that involving that media content, by emphasizing such concepts as “imperialism” and
“hybridization.” While theoretically rich, this scholarship can sometimes give little attention to
how various actors and arrangements can impinge on the global flow and circulation of media
content. This special issue seeks to move beyond such limitations by wedding theoretical
concerns with an emphasis on empirical evidence–thereby heeding the specific contexts in which
globalization unfolds. Our introductory essay thus provides a brief overview of the articles
contained within this issue.
We live in a world in which creative works, such as books, not only can endure beyond
their time of creation but can also diffuse well beyond their original medium and place of
origin—even crossing national boundaries in the process. Hence, the after-hours writings of a
Cambridge professor in the early 1900s would serve as source material for a New Zealand film
director at the turn of this century, spawning three motion pictures that garnered enthusiastic fans
on each side of the equator and in both hemispheres (Carpenter, 2006; Kuipers & de Kloet,
2009). Such global diffusion of creative works has captured the attention of scholars in the social
sciences and humanities, particularly regarding its implications. For instance, many are
concerned about the fate of diversity in this global context. Some fear that diversity suffers in the
face of cultural or media “imperialism” (Boyd-Barrett, 2006; Grant & Wood, 2004). This occurs
when creative works from dominant nations diffuse to “peripheral” nations and, in the process,
overwhelm and eclipse the creative works of the latter, thereby ushering in a “sameness” across
nations and dampening a once- vibrant diversity. Others take more of a positive view by pointing
to “hybridization” (Kraidy, 2005; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004). This occurs when, facing the
inflow of creative works from abroad, creators combine elements from those incoming works
with their own works, yielding something new that contributes to ongoing diversity. Although
scholarship on both cultural imperialism and hybridization has generated substantial insights, it
also has its limitations, because neither approach captures fully the global situation of creative
works. Most notably, proponents of both approaches can often gloss over those actors and
arrangements that shape how creative works fare within and beyond a given nation (Crane, 2002;
Janssen, Kuipers, & Verboord, 2008).
The articles in this issue seek to avoid such limitations by wedding the theoretical
concerns of cultural globalization with an emphasis on empirical evidence (see Hesmondhalgh,
2007). Denise Bielby (“Staking Claims”) and Giselinde Kuipers (“Cultural Globalization as the
Emergence of a Transnational Cultural Field”) deal with the global flow of television
programming. Each compellingly shows that this flow is not reducible to the dynamic of
dominant versus peripheral nations, especially because an array of individuals and organizations
have collectively constructed a transnational system that moves programming from one nation to
another. That said, the evaluations of key industry personnel within a given nation, as well as
national broadcasting arrangement and policies, shape how television shows cross borders in a
particularistic, rather than uniform, fashion. Consequently, the global flow of these creative
works does not simply lead to dampened or heightened diversity; instead, its impact depends on
what actors and organizations within a given nation do when con- fronting choices about what to
broadcast.
Two articles in this issue problematize the content of creative works themselves by
attending to musical genres in a global context. Motti Regev (“Pop-Rock Music as Expressive
Isomorphism”) moves beyond traditional notions of hybridization that merely pit local music
against “nonlocal” music. Instead, he builds the case for a trans- national genre of pop-rock that
complicates the historical, if not idiosyncratic, unfolding of both the local and nonlocal musics in
a wide range of nations by coloring how musicians, critics, and others evaluate both their local
music and their emergent variants of this pop-rock. Jennifer Lena and Richard A. Peterson
(“Politically Purposed Music Genres”) likewise remind us that musical genres have their own
histories, yet they also argue that a wide range of disparate genres follow common trajectories
that are influenced, in part, by their respective origins. Building on their earlier work addressing
various trajectories of genres within the United States, they look here at musical genres that
emerged out of political rather than market concerns in various nations—genres that do (and
sometimes do not) enter the global supply of creative works. Whereas Regev points to growing
similarities in popular music around the world, Lena and Peterson point to the percolating of
genres that potentially can expand the diversity of this global supply.
The remaining articles focus on the reception of creative works in both American and
European nations. Peter Achterberg, Johan Heilbron, Dick Houtman, and Stef Aupers (“A
Cultural Globalization of Popular Music?”) find that although European consumers gravitated
toward American recordings from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, from the 1990s onward, these
consumers have turned increasingly to recordings of local artists. The authors account for this by
pointing to broader political shifts, particularly, the fall of the Soviet bloc. Meanwhile, from
1955 to 2005, critics on both sides of the Atlantic converged and diverged in their consideration
of creative works. Alex van Venrooij (“Classifying Popular Music in the United States and the
Netherlands”) reveals that whereas American critics focus more on commercially successfully
musicians, both American and Dutch critics structure their reviews in terms of racial
categories—comparing musicians of the same racial categories much more than musicians of
dissimilar categories. Pauwke Berkers, Susanne Janssen, and Marc Verboord (“Globalization and
Ethnic Diversity in Western Newspaper Coverage of Literary Authors”) show that a combination
of factors shapes the extent and type of critical attention given to authors of non-Western ethnic
origin. Comparing critics in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, these
researchers demonstrate that variation in coverage stems from factors within each nation, such as
the ethnic composition of the critics’ nation and the receptivity of their national literary field to
ethnic diversity, and factors beyond each nation, such as the relative position of the national
literary field in the literary world-system and strong geolinguistic ties that link the critics’ nation
to other nations. These articles on reception thus make clear that globalization is complicated by
the fact that nations—including economic powerhouses—are not all cut from the same cloth;
consequently, some are more conducive to the flourishing of diversity than others.
Not only do the articles in this issue attempt to move beyond the limits of scholarship on
cultural imperialism and hybridization, but they also represent the culmination of two important
processes. First, these articles contain the third and final installment of papers flowing from an
international conference that occurred in the summer of 2008, Classification in the Arts and
Media: The Impact of Commercialization and Globalization (see Baumann, Dowd, & Janssen,
2009; Dowd, Janssen, & Verboord, 2009). Funded by both the Erasmus University Rotterdam
and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research as part of the VICI project Cultural
Classification Systems in Transition (NWO Project 277-45-001), the scholars featured in this
issue, as well as some 30 others, convened to grapple with how best to approach cultural
globalization and the situation of creative works. We editors thus thank all conference
participants and funders for the role that they played in this issue of American Behavioral
Science. Second, this issue could not have proceeded without the assistance of external
reviewers and the managing editor of American Behavioral Science. Consequently, we thank the
following scholars for offering insights that greatly benefited the authors: Michael Allen, Daniël
Biltereyst, Michael Christianen, William Danaher, Bo G. Ekelund, Andreas Gebesmair, Monica
Griffin, Timothy Havens, Jeroen de Kloet, Frank Lechner, Omar Lizardo, Paul Lopes, Amanda
D. Lotz, Laura Miller, Wouter de Nooy, and Silvio Waisbord. Of course, we thank Laura Lawrie
for the opportunity both to publish this special issue and to work with her. Given the efforts of all
these generous individuals, as well as the contributing authors, we hope that this issue lasts
across time and diffuses widely across national boundaries.
We sadly note that one of the contributors to this issue is no longer with us. Richard A.
Peterson (“Pete”) passed away in February of 2010. Yet amid this sadness, we also note that Pete
leaves behind an influential body of research. In fact, his seminal publication in American
Behavioral Scientist some 25 years ago marked a watershed in the sociology of culture
(Peterson, 1976), both enlivening and informing subsequent scholarship on cultural fields of
production (see DiMaggio, 2000; Santoro, 2008). In the years that followed, Pete continued to
champion emergent conceptual issues, inspiring others to join him in the careful study of such
things as patterns of cultural choice (Peterson, 1983), the evolving diversity of pop music, and
the “omnivorous” tastes of high-status individuals (see Dowd & Janssen, 2010; Santoro, 2008).
His collaboration with Jennifer Lena is but a recent example of how Pete was not content to rest
on his laurels but, instead, was motivated to move ever forward intellectually. We are honored,
then, to dedicate this issue to the memory of Richard A. Peterson, and we aspire to follow his
example of creating an enduring legacy of scholarship.
References
Achterberg, P., Heilbron, J., Houtman, D., & Aupers, S. (2011). A cultural globalization of
popular music? American Behavioral Scientist, 55(5), 589-608.
Baumann, S., Dowd, T. J., & Janssen, S. (Eds.). (2009). Classifying culture: Agents, structures,
processes. Poetics, 37(4), 295-398.
Berkers, P., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (2011). Globalization and ethnic diversity in Western
newspaper coverage of literary authors. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(5), 624–641.
Bielby, D. (2011). Staking claims. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(5), 525–540.
Boyd-Barrett, O. (Ed.). (2006). Communications media, globalization and empire. Eastleigh,
UK: John Libby.
Carpenter, H. (2006). The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their
friends. London, UK: HarperCollins.
Crane, D. (2002). Culture and globalization: Theoretical models and emerging trends. In D.
Crane, N. Kawashima, & K. Kawasaki (Eds.), Global culture: Media, arts, policy, and
globalization (pp. 1-28). London, UK: Routledge.
DiMaggio, P. (2000). The production of scientific change: Richard Peterson and the institutional
turn in cultural sociology. Poetics, 28, 107-136.
Dowd, T. J. & Janssen, S. (2010). Obituary: Richard A. Peterson (1932-2010). Poetics, 38, 111-
113.
Dowd, T. J., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (Eds.). (2009). Fields in transition, fields in action.
Poetics, 37(5/6), 399-506.
Grant, P. S., & Wood, C. (2004). Blockbusters and trade wars: Popular culture in a globalized
world. Vancouver, Canada: Douglas and McIntyre.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2007). Internationalization, globalization and cultural imperialism. In The
cultural industries (2nd ed., pp. 212-239). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Janssen, S., Kuipers, G. & Verboord, M. (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The
international orientation of arts and cultural coverage in American, Dutch, French, and
German newspapers, 1955-2008. American Sociological Review, 73, 719-740.
Kraidy, M. M. (2005). Hybridity or the cultural logic of imperialism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Kuipers, G. (2011). Cultural globalization as the emergence of a transnational cultural field.
American Behavioral Scientist, 55(5), 541–557.
Kuipers, G., & de Kloet, J. (2009). Banal cosmopolitanism and The Lord of the Rings: The
limited role of national differences in global media consumption. Poetics, 37, 99-118.
Lena, J., & Peterson, R. A. (2011). Politically purposed music genres. American Behavioral
Scientist, 55(5), 574–588.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2004). Globalization and culture: Global mélange. Oxford, UK:
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Peterson, R. A. (1976). The production of culture: A prolegomenon. American Behavioral
Scientist, 19, 669-684.
Peterson, R. A. (1983). Patterns of cultural choice: A prolegomenon. American Behavioral
Scientist, 26, 422-438.
Regev, M. (2011). Pop-rock music as expressive isomorphism. American Behavioral Scientist,
55(5), 558–573.
Santoro, M. (2008). Culture as (and after) production. Cultural Sociology, 2, 7-31.
van Venrooij, A. (2011). Classifying popular music in the United States and the Netherlands.
American Behavioral Scientist, 55(5), 609–623.
*****
Timothy J. Dowd is an associate professor of sociology at Emory University and was
Erasmus Chair of the Humanities at Erasmus University Rotterdam (2007-2008). He
specializes in cultural sociology, with much of his research focusing on such issues as the
construction of the orchestral canon in the United States, the extent of diversity in
popular music, the careers of musicians, and the state of music sociology. He and
Susanne Janssen are currently editors-in-chief of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research
on Culture, the
Media and the Arts.
Susanne Janssen is a professor of sociology of media and culture and head of the
Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her
research focuses on the agents and institutions involved in the creation, dissemination,
and valuation of literature, film, popular music, and other art forms and the social and
institutional conditions under which cultural artifacts are produced and received. She
works on various large-scale, international comparative research projects, titled Cultural
Classification Systems in Transition and Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory, and
Cultural Identity.
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A positive correlation with the reception of animation and manga was found only for the image of the production area for animation, and the correlation was, for the most part, negative concerning the image of the area in the production of the other 13 types of manufactured goods or services. Finding 2: Reception of movies, music, and television dramas contributes to improvement in the image of other manufactured products or services. The other three types of creative content correlate positively with the image of the production area for a variety of manufactured goods and services. In particular, movies had a positive correlation with images for automobiles, furniture, medical products and other types in both Japan and Korea. With regard to television dramas and music, content produced in Japan had a higher positive correlation with the images of other manufactured goods and services than that produced in Korea. 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  • MEDIA CULT SOC
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Obituary: Richard A. Peterson (1932–2010)
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This is a testimonial that Susanne Janssen and I wrote for Richard A. Peterson -- our dear colleague and a board member of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media, and the Arts.
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Full-text available
  • Oct 2008
This article charts key developments and cross-national variations in the coverage of foreign culture (i.e., classical and popular music, dance, film, literature, theater, television, and visual arts) in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. elite newspapers between 1955 and 2005. Such coverage signals the awareness of foreign culture among national elites and the degree and direction of “globalization from within.” Using content analysis, we examine the degree, direction, and diversity of the international orientation of arts journalism for each country and cultural genre. Results denote how international arts and culture coverage has increased in Europe but not in the United States. Moreover, the centrality of a country in the cultural “world-system” offers a better explanation for cross-national differences in international orientation than do other country-level characteristics, such as size and cultural policy framework. Recorded and performance-based genres differ markedly in their levels of internationalization, but the effect of other genre-level characteristics, such as language dependency and capital intensiveness, is not clear. In each country, international coverage remains concentrated on a few countries, of which the United States has become the most prominent. Although the global diversity of coverage has increased, non-Western countries are still underrepresented.
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Classifying Popular Music in the United States and the Netherlands
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2011
This article focuses on the classification of popular music by newspaper critics in the United States and the Netherlands. By using the “mentions technique” of Rosengren, the author investigates cross-national differences in the use of commercial, aesthetic, and racial logics in the classification of popular music artists, relating them to field-level and macrostructural differences between the United States and the Netherlands. U.S. reviewers are found to mention commercially successful artists more often than their Dutch counterparts. Racial boundaries appear to be strong in both countries.
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Staking Claims: Conveying Transnational Cultural Value in a Creative Industry
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2011
This study examines who speaks to cultural value in the world market for television, what criteria are invoked for product appraisal, and how aesthetic criteria are deployed to explore the ways in which cultural arbiters and critical appraisal contribute to transnational culture worlds. Findings reveal that product appraisals consist of rational, concrete criteria that signal profitability alongside aesthetic criteria that reflect dimensions of entertainment. In the absence of professional critics, the public discourse of industry boundary spanners proved crucial to marketplace gatekeeping and the organization of global television’s market environment.
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Introduction: Fields in Transition - Fields in Action
Article
Full-text available
  • Oct 2009
  • POETICS
This is the into to a special issue that Susanne Janssen, Marc Verboord, and I co-edited for Poetics (Volume 37 / Issues 5-6). It featured contributed articles by Andy Bennett; Rodney Benson; Pauwke Berkers; Laura E. Braden; Michèle Ollivier, Guy Gauthier, & Alexis Hiêú Truong; and Diogo L. Pinheiro & Timothy J. Dowd.
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Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire
Book
  • Jan 2007
In Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire, an international team of experts analyze and critique the political economy of media communications worldwide. Their analysis takes particular account of the sometimes conflicting pressures of globalization and "neo-imperialism." The first is commonly defined as the dismantling of barriers to trade and cultural exchange and responds significantly to lobbying of the world's largest corporations, including media corporations. The second concerns U.S. pursuit of national security interests as response to "terrorism," at one level and, at others, to intensifying competition among both nations and corporations for global natural resources.
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Politically Purposed Music Genres
Article
  • Apr 2011
Building on previous work documenting musical genre forms in the United States, this exploratory study reports the discovery of a new type, which the authors term the politically purposed genre. They find two major types: those sponsored by governments, which benefit from national distribution and legal protection, and an anti—status quo type supported by an opposition party or constituency that shares its critique of the existing sociopolitical and economic order. Four nation-cases have been examined: the People’s Republic of China, Chile, Serbia, and Nigeria. The authors examine each case in turn and close with a discussion of the limitations and possibilities of this discovery.
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Pop-Rock Music as Expressive Isomorphism: Blurring the National, the Exotic, and the Cosmopolitan in Popular Music
Article
  • Apr 2011
Expressive isomorphism is characterized as the process through which national uniqueness is standardized so that expressive culture of various nations, or of social sectors within them, comes to consist of similar expressive forms and stylistic elements. Expanding on Meyer, the presence of pop-rock music in world culture is discussed as a major manifestation of expressive isomorphism. This is done by looking at these aspects of pop-rock music: electric instrumentation, ritual classification, ritual periodization, diffusion of styles and genres, legitimation discourses, and the emergence of ethnic rock. Following Bourdieu, a sociological account that focuses on recognition and status concludes the article.
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Cultural Globalization as the Emergence of a Transnational Cultural Field: Transnational Television and National Media Landscapes in Four European Countries
Article
  • Apr 2011
This article analyzes cultural globalization as the emergence of a transnational cultural field, integrating Bourdieusian field theory with globalization theory. Drawing on interview materials and secondary data analysis, it compares the “opening up” of national television fields in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland and the formation of a transnational TV field with (partly) its own standards, practices, and cultural geography. Cultural intermediaries, such as television buyers, are crucial to this transnational field, mediating and maintaining relations between the national and transnational arenas. These transnational professional create transnational practices and quality standards and diffuse them into national cultural fields.
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Culture As (And After) Production
Article
  • Mar 2008
This paper discusses the contribution of Richard A. Peterson to the discipline of sociology in general, and the sociological study of cultural production and consumption more particularly. It illustrate the main tenets of the 'production of culture' perspective proposed by Peterson from the early 1970s onwards, its intellectual genealogy, and the impact this perspective has had on the development of the sociology of culture in different countries. The paper also considers some of the criticisms addressed to the production of culture approach by scholars who have insisted on more interpretivist or critical analyses of culture. The paper concludes by arguing for the heuristic usefulness and epistemological relevance of an approach to cultural analysis which, while still cultivating a sense for the specificities of cultural objects as symbolic representations and meaning structures, is empirically focused on institutions and forms of social organization.
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