‘Treating it as a normal business’: Researching the pornography industry

Available accessResearch articleFirst published online June, 2012

‘Treating it as a normal business’: Researching the pornography industry

Volume 15, Issue 3-4https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460712439650

Abstract

This article examines the lack of research on the pornography industry and the means of addressing this situation. Much contemporary pornography research invokes the apparent economic prowess of the pornography industry as justification for its work, yet focuses on the product and its reception rather than on the industry that produces it. In this article I identify and discuss the specific institutional challenges around studying pornography within business studies, and also the opportunities that arose through this work. The research methods used in this study of the North American pornography industry are presented and discussed, together with considerations around access, authentication, and stigma. I challenge the dependence by current scholars on secondary data about the industry by offering theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches with which to gather rich empirical material, thus furthering the wider field of pornography research.

Keywords

Adult entertainment business studies ethnography research methods pornography

What do we know about the pornography industry?

The October 2009 special issue of Sexualities focused on teaching and researching the sexually explicit (Attwood and Hunter, 2009), exploring the concerns, challenges and reflections of academics involved in studying sex media, notably pornography. Yet despite the broad scope of the theme, contributions were notably restricted to media and cultural studies both in terms of teaching (McNair, 2009; Smith, 2009; Waksul, 2009), and research methodologies and analyses (Albury, 2009; Jones and Mowlabocus, 2009). The means and challenges around studying the pornography industry itself remained unexamined, indirectly supporting McKee’s (2009) observations in the special issue that social scientists find it more difficult to research pornography than humanities scholars.

Academic work has followed this trend: a wide body of research has arisen in the past three decades that is devoted to examining various facets of pornography. Yet this work primarily focuses on the nature of the product itself and its effects on both individual consumers and wider society (Attwood, 2002). Current work explores aspects of participatory taste culture (Attwood, 2007) and new economies (Mowlabocus, 2010). However, the commercial aspects of the industry – industrial dynamics, strategy, technological capabilities, organizational structure – have been given less consideration and critical examinations of the industry are notably absent in business studies. As Cronin and Davenport (2001) note, ‘in the literature on the information society and the information economy, the subject of sex, and by extension, pornography, has been undertheorised’; and they also highlight how ‘despite its powerful brand, Playboy Enterprises is not spoken of in the same breath as new entrants like Internet Entertainment Group’.

Moreover, the economic dimension of pornography is often cited as a key reason why scholars must engage with it. This is particularly problematic, as the claims made about the impressive size of the industry’s profits are unreliable. Roberts (2006) notes that ‘the lack of accurate data makes it nearly impossible to gauge market size’. Tanner (2005) cautions against trusting figures generated by the pornography industry itself, noting that ‘the only optimistic figures come from adult content providers, and that’s only to be expected’.

The business aspects of pornography are rarely the actual focus of academic studies and are often merely the justification for such research. This lack of examination is the result of the challenges of studying phenomena related to any facet of sexuality. Sexuality itself is imbued with an ‘excess of significance’ and supercharged with moral meaning (Rubin, 1993a: 11). Academic studies of sexuality are marginal, trivial and are not legitimate studies in terms of their examination of the subject, yet they are perilous in that they frequently prove to be a liability because of public controversy (Vance, 1991). Whilst a certain ‘mainstreaming’ of pornography has occurred, the stigma surrounding it still remains. The increased presence of sexually explicit material in contemporary mainstream culture does not necessarily lead to increased social acceptance, as only certain types of ‘normative’ pornography and sexual expression are acceptable (Attwood, 2006; Wilkinson, 2009). For consumers, there is still a line drawn between the porn world and the rest of pop culture (Hein, 2006). Despite weaknesses in the anti-pornography arguments, pejorative terms and rhetoric are still heavily influential and have shaped how pornography is viewed within contemporary society; and pornography is still often described by words such as ‘violent’, ‘degrading’ and ‘humiliating’, with no acknowledgement that the descriptions are subjective and contextually relative (Ciclitira, 2004). These reactions have framed how the pornography industry has been examined to date. However, the lack of examination also arises from differences in academic disciplines – whilst disciplines such as Queer theory, film studies, cultural studies and gender studies have a long history of examining the pornography industry, such a focus has been lacking in the business studies sector.

This article acts as a response piece to the 2009 special issue by directly addressing this gap. I explore why business studies has mostly ignored pornography to date, and present and discuss research methods used in examining the online sector of the North American pornography industry. In the first section I critically examine previous academic work on the pornography industry, including the extremely limited amount of business studies research into the industry and the institutional factors shaping this lack of work. In the second section I present and reflect on the methodology that I used to examine the pornography industry as part of a research project located in technology and innovation management studies. I emphasize that the research context is used to site the discussion on the research methods used, rather than to directly present results that will be the subject of later work.

The reflexive examination presented here is critical for furthering pornography research: if the size, innovativeness, and economic prowess are key reasons for studying pornography, why do we know so much about the product and yet so little about the industry that produces it? By examining the limits of our current knowledge, and exploring what methods and frameworks may be usefully employed to gather and analyse suitable data about the sector, this article highlights how pornography research can move beyond its current theoretical boundaries to explore new empirical landscapes.

Challenges of examining the pornography industry

To date, the bulk of pornography research has been conducted in the humanities and social sciences, and much of this work focuses on ‘textual analyses and/or the reaction of “average persons” to the industry and/or its productions’ (Tibbals, 2010). As a result, very little prior knowledge exists in both the academic and grey¹ (i.e. non-academic) literatures concerning the pornography industry itself.

The existing data are primarily historical, drawing on secondary, non-peer-reviewed sources, and do not provide a rich description of the industry itself either in terms of its social dynamics, the industry structure, or the revenue models used. Examinations of employees of pornography firms occur at the micro-level of the individual and their personal motivations, rather than from the perspective of firm- and industry-level socio-economic contexts in which these activities occur (Agustin, 2005). Much of this examination focuses on individuals who are directly bodily involved in the production of sexually explicit material through their roles as actors and models rather than on those who are involved in the more business-related aspects including managers, accountants, and technicians (although there may of course be overlap between the two). McClintock describes how managers in the pornography industry are frequently presented as nothing more than ‘sinister, cigar-chewing humanoids’ (1992: 130).

The stigmatized nature of the pornography industry also shapes the manner in which the industry has been examined and commented on. In a discussion on the supply chain of a pornography magazine publishing company, the author notes that the CEO ‘made his fortune by treating it as a normal business’ (I-Spy, 1988: 15). The interviewer of a technology manager for Playboy also noted with surprise how ‘normal’ the working environment was (Goff, 1999).

These challenges of studying pornography are further exacerbated within the business studies sector. Whilst researchers in media studies recognize that pornography forms an important cultural product, this importance has not been recognized by researchers within business studies. Neither the film- or online-based sector of the industry have been scrutinized to any great extent, and examinations of sectors of the entertainment industry (e.g. Hesmondhalgh, 2002; Miller and Shamsie, 1996) do not mention their pornographic relations. However little knowledge there appears to be within reception studies concerning the pornography industry, there actually seems to be even less awareness of the industry in business studies. The work that does exist at the firm and industry level tends to take a historical perspective and centres heavily on material produced in the latter half of the 20th century, with a particular focus on print-based media (e.g. Kendrick, 1997). A few key texts in the academic and grey literatures broadly examine the pornography industry in the USA (e.g. Coren and Skelton, 2002; Lane, 2001) and the UK (Smith, 2005), but to date, Jonathan Coopersmith (1998, 2000, 2006) is the only academic to systematically explore the facets of the industry, yet does so from a historical perspective.

Even studying the ethical issues and stigma surrounding the pornography industry has proven challenging. Baetz and Carson (1999) describe their difficulties when attempting a critical examination of a local pornography company as a business studies teaching case study. Even before the case was written, the authors’ institution raised concerns that the study would legitimize pornography and that students might be encouraged to become customers of the firm in question. Members of the pornography industry were not included as guest speakers to the class, as it was decided that such actions would be equivalent to ‘promoting pornography and legitimizing the company’.

These factors intensify the difficulty in conducting pornography research for business studies researchers. No conferences, conference streams, university research groups or wider research networks in business studies are devoted to the pornography industry, although such structures are available for other industrial sectors (e.g. Biotechnology). This also stands in contrast with humanities and other areas of the social sciences, where communities of research do exist and act as sites for knowledge to be shared, relationships to be built, and the legitimacy of the research field to be developed. As a result, the majority of the conferences and seminars where I presented work during the early stages of my research focused on gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. I was usually the only person working in business and management studies to be present. When I presented work at innovation and business studies conferences later in my research, I was again the only person presenting research on the pornography industry.

Yet theoretical frameworks are emerging within business and management studies with which to examine ‘pariah’ organizations. The ‘dirty work’ literature describes how people may become stigmatized as a result of their work roles rather than their personal attributes (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999; Goffman, 1963). As ‘dirty work’ encompasses both low- (e.g. debt collectors), and high-prestige jobs (e.g. casino managers), it is a suitable framework in which to examine the job roles that exist in pornography beyond modelling and acting. This concept has also recently been expanded from the individual to whole companies through the concept of the ‘core-stigmatized’ organization, in which stigma arises from some core attribute such as routines, outputs, or customers (Hudson, 2008). The grey literature indicates that the organizational capabilities of pornography firms are affected by their stigmatized status. Pornography companies are charged a premium for advertising space that would cost more mainstream companies up to a third less, and advertisements may be pulled at the last minute because of nervous editors (Petrie, 2004). Mainstream service-provider companies refuse to acknowledge any relations that they may have with the pornography sector (Stanley, 2004), and likewise, pornography companies also ‘observe a strict code of silence when it comes to discussing their [mainstream] customers in the media’ (Cosper, 2001). The advertising revenues of photo and movie web-hosting companies are also dependent on how well they police their sites for pornographic material (Angwin, 2006). Likewise, organizations object strongly to their brands appearing on websites that also contain links to pornography sites (Hagerty and Angwin, 2003). Venture capitalists are also unlikely to fund new pornographic ventures (Loizos, 2006) as pornography is described as ‘one investment that [Wall] Street is generally still wary of’ (Sloan, 2006).

The industry also holds particular interest for scholars interested in the relationship between pornography and technology. As Coopersmith (1998) says: ‘If it were not for the subject matter, pornography would be publicly praised as an industry that has successfully and quickly developed, adopted and diffused new technology. But because the subject matter was pornography, silence and shame have been the standard responses’. Yet it is not always clear as to whether the pornography industry has been involved in the innovation and diffusion of new technologies (Coopersmith, 2000), or in the recognition of the economic potential of new technology (Kendrick, 1997: 222; Schlosser, 1997). Various theories for the ongoing relationship between pornography and new technologies have been put forward including pornography’s eternal consumer appeal (Roberts, 2006); customers’ willingness to pay premium prices and buy expensive equipment to gain access (Lane, 2001); and the fact that pornography is text- and image-based so can be leveraged across multiple ICT platforms (Cronin and Davenport, 2001). Members of the pornography industry are also, allegedly, risk-takers who will do anything to avoid being left behind in a highly competitive market (Roberts, 2006). However, without further examination, these claims remain speculative. Despite the challenges, there are therefore many opportunities to examine the business elements of pornography and many reasons to do so. This raises the question: how?

A methodology to examine the pornography industry

In the second half of this article, I describe and reflect on the research methods used to collect data about the business practices and social dynamics of the pornography industry. The methods were used in my doctoral research project, which explored how technological innovation occurred in the pornography industry and the effect that stigma had on these activities through examination of the social networks and knowledge environment of the pornography industry. The work was sited in the socio-economic innovation studies discipline and I undertook the work in the innovation studies department at the UK university where I was registered, and in a US business school as a visiting researcher when I conducted my fieldwork.

As described, there is very little research on the pornography industry in the business studies literature. There is, however, a strong body of work that uses qualitative exploratory methods to describe and characterize the social networks and hierarchies which cut across industries, and the cultural norms and practices of knowledge sharing present in these spaces. In developing the research methodology I was particularly influenced by Annalee Saxenian’s work on Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Saxenian, 1996). Saxenian draws on ethnographic observation from several companies, interviews with workers, industry material and media reports to provide a richly descriptive account of how the varying social norms and practices differentially shape the type of innovation that happens between the rigidly hierarchical Route 128 in Massachusetts, and the horizontal ‘protean’ Silicon Valley in California. Following Saxenian, and other business scholars who have used similar research approaches to examine industrial knowledge practices (e.g. Brian Uzzi’s 1997 work on social networks in the New York garment district), I developed a mixed methodology comprising ethnographic observation, interviews, and a ‘grey’ literature review as a means of collecting rich and nuanced material about the history, structure, and social dynamics of the pornography industry.

My use of multiple methods was also driven by pragmatism. One of the biggest hindrances to examining the workings of the pornography industry is the lack of quality sources of data (Coopersmith, 2006), not least the potential unreliability of the grey literature concerning the sector, and the accounts of the people in it (Richard, 2002). In addition to collecting a large volume of data, multiple methods also allowed me to triangulate this material to strengthen its quality, and highlight biases.

Ethnographic observation

Richard (2002) implies that it is impossible to gain full knowledge of the business and personalities involved in the pornography industry without full insider knowledge. Ethnographic observation provided a means to get inside and see the industry in its ‘real-world’ context, including the processes and relationships occurring in that space, and the implicit and explicit rules that govern it (Adler and Adler, 1998). There has been a long tradition of its use in sensitive research as a means of gaining access to socially invisible populations with deviant status (Kotarba, 1990). This was particularly important to me as, unlike my peers doing research on topics including the computer games industry and the ‘Silicon Glen’ Scottish high-tech cluster, I had no initial institutional or informal connections to the pornography industry prior to the start of my research,² further validating Coopersmith’s (2006) observation that one central challenge in conducting research into the pornography industry is gaining access to the industry and the resources within it.

I conducted ethnographic observation primarily at business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industry trade shows. Recent work in organization studies highlights the importance of these temporary social organizations (e.g. trade shows, professional gatherings), also known as field configuring events (FCEs). FCEs provide ‘unexpectedly fertile settings’ in which to collect plentiful and varied data. Lampel and Meyer (2008) and I certainly found this to be true. I also conducted site visits to the organizations where my interviewees worked, to a trade industry meeting, and an award ceremony after-party.

The pornography industry trade shows spanned several days, consisting of seminars, a trade floor, and social areas where I met members of the industry, and observed how the show unfolded around me. At seminars I collected detailed information about which matters the industry deemed to be important, including the legal challenges facing the sector such as the 2257 legislation,³ the ‘.xxx’ domain restrictions,⁴ and the Extreme Associates court case;⁵ and the technologies being harnessed by the sector, including traffic monitoring; and business models and funding. Trade areas provided an ideal ‘captive market’ of stalls where I was able to introduce myself to company reps, gather information about their company and products, and ascertain whether they would be open to being interviewed in the future. I collected a vast number of physical items for analysis, including promotional material (colloquially known as ‘swag'⁶), leaflets and documents, and programs which allowed me to collate and document details of the companies present at the event.

As my fieldwork progressed it became apparent that not all trade events were alike. Recent work on the pornography industry has flagged the importance of trade shows, with much of this focus being on the large B2C events such as the AVN Expo and the Erotica Show, which attract tens of thousands of attendees. Researchers such as Jensen (2010), who have spent time in these spaces, have uncritically accepted them as representative of the wider pornography industry. Despite the seminars and panel talks for industry members, however, B2C shows were predominantly a space for the companies, models, and directors to engage in performative mythologizing about the industry as they interacted with their customer base in front of a media audience. Fans outnumbered companies at the B2C shows and played an important role in shaping event culture, reflected in the ‘sexual spectacle’ of these events (Comella, 2010) – a bawdy, raucous atmosphere where models and actors posed for photographs, signed autographs, and made out in ‘girl on girl’ booths; huge crowds of fans milled through the event, mostly male, many in sexually explicit t-shirts; staff from sex-toy companies demonstrated the various sizes, colors, and speeds of their vibrators on the trade floor; and film companies offloaded boxes and boxes of DVDs to customers. The shows were noisy and veered towards rowdiness as a large number of companies and a larger number of fans postured and posed to each other.

The B2C shows therefore presented the pornography ‘shop front’: the performative, brash, outward face of the industry, where companies played up to the image of what pornography looks like to an audience of fans and media who were waiting to be entertained. For researchers interested in marketing and customer engagement, large B2C trade shows would be invaluable sites for data collection. My research, however, focused on the ‘back of the shop’, on the business-to-business relationships, and on networks within the industry. After collecting initial material from the B2C shows, I found that the B2B events were more fruitful sites of observation in the later part of the work. These events included smaller B2B trade shows, trade association meetings, and awards’ ceremonies.

The nature of these B2B events varied enormously from their B2C equivalents. B2B shows were smaller, with several hundred attendees, no fans, and no noticeable mainstream media presence. Very few actors and models attended unless they held other roles such as CEOs; instead, the events were populated with the men and women who worked in marketing, management, PR, legal support, and (less commonly) technical support. This was particularly useful for me, as I specifically aimed to speak with people who were involved at all stages of the process of technological research, development, and marketing, both directly and indirectly. Unlike B2C shows, the main purpose of B2B shows was networking – meeting new potential clients and affiliates; sharing information about the industry; and catching up with old friends. They were also comparatively calmer than the B2C shows, where people were often too harried to speak with me for very long in between talking to customers, manning their stall, running between events, and retrieving new stock. In contrast, the structure of the B2B shows gave me more opportunities to talk to people; in addition to seminars, panel discussions, and keynotes, informal socializing was also timetabled in through drinks’ receptions, dinners and, at one memorable show, laser tag.

The B2B shows provided an excellent site in which to learn about the business models used by the industry, and how these models shaped, and were shaped by the tightly knit social community cutting across the online sector. Several recent studies have collected data about pornography business models, including specialized-content niches (Bridges, 2010) and affiliate networks (Johnson, 2010). However, the people who actually work in pornography companies are not consulted as part of this research, so there is little contextualization of the use, or development of these revenue models; instead, the material is used as a tool to further the authors’ claims about the harmful nature of pornography. Collecting direct empirical data about these areas from the people who worked in them was therefore particularly important. Through the panel discussions at B2B shows and networking events I was able to gather data about both the technical element of the affiliate program, including the use of banner ads, and online-traffic monitoring. I also was able to explore the social factors behind the use of the business models, including the role of the industry community in facilitating social relationships between affiliates at trade events, and on industry-specific, online message-boards. These discussions were also useful in sensitizing me to commonly used, industry-specific terminology.⁷

Unlike the B2C shows, several of the B2B events were closed-access forums. I was invited to some events by people I had met during fieldwork, including an awards’ ceremony; for others, I had to apply for access myself. An example of this was at the Phoenix Forum in Arizona, which was, at the time of fieldwork, only accessible to industry members. Before registering, I was asked to provide full information about myself, including details of my research and background, and also to provide details of industry members who would validate me. My presence at these closed events played an important role in legitimizing me to industry members, particularly after I had attended several of the shows, and had become recognized and known. This provided some of the strongest authentication for my work; the event attracted people with a bona fide interest in the business of pornography, and by attending, I was included in that group by industry members themselves. This increased access to data helped substantially over the course of the fieldwork, as people became more willing to talk with me, and to share information more honestly; and also to pass on information that they thought would be useful.

The B2B events also allowed me to observe the narrower ‘slice’ of the industry that my research focused on – specifically, the North American online sector – rather than the overwhelming mass of sectors present at the large expos that included online content, mobile content, video, photos, toys, lingerie, and other associated ‘novelties’. The data I collected in my time in these spaces demonstrated clearly that ‘pornography’ is not a homogenous mass but instead a massive, complex industry comprising different sectors, business models, communities, and cultures. The ‘old-school’ video community was wary of the younger ‘new-school’ online sector, and trade organizations tried to bridge that gap. Members of the ‘toys and novelties’ sector were able to engage with mainstream retailers with seemingly more ease than content producers could; and the super-branded world of Playboy was light-years away from the experiences of a solo webmaster in Arizona. It would therefore be disingenuous to say that the B2B events provided a more ‘accurate’ picture of the pornography industry than their B2C counterparts – instead, attending several types of events allowed me to construct a fuller picture of how companies in the pornography industry manage their identity and relationships with different parties across the industrial value chain, from suppliers, to contractors, to end-users.

Interviews

Despite being incredibly rich sources of diverse data, the trade events – both B2B and B2C – had their limits. An emergent issue in the fieldwork was that the shows were not wholly inclusive, and, in particular, technology companies and individual technologists were less likely to be present there. Trade shows were also ultimately business events that took place over a short period of time, and attendees often planned their own packed timetables to also include meetings with members of other companies. Whilst I was fortunate enough to engage with several hundred people at the events, very few had the time to speak with me in a quiet space for an hour or more. Interviews were a suitable method with which to discuss in detail specific aspects of the industry with individuals, in a quiet and private space.⁸

Material from trade shows had indicated that the popular technologies developed by the sector included online traffic-monitoring tools, and interviews allowed me to examine topics around these technologies in more depth. This included directly asking about the process of technological development in the companies; how financial and knowledge resources were sourced; and how technologies diffused across the sector. Exploring these questions in interviews was necessary, as they involved a long and detailed discussion that I wanted to conduct away from the hectic nature of the trade show. I could not explore the topic at trade events specifically with technologists, as few attended the show; and this was a further topic covered in interviews when exploring the structure of the industry’s social networks, and the manner in which technologists were relatively untouched by the stigma surrounding the rest of the sector.

The private space of interviews also allowed me to explore sensitive topics such as the personal background of interviewees, opinions about other people and companies in the sector, and confidential company information. I drew in material from the observation work, to match my observation of practices with my interviewees’ accounts of these practices. This included the ways that people were welcomed (or not) into the community at trade events, and the role that trade events played in shaping the entry to the online sector’s industry. I explored this question with several interviewees, who I had also met at trade events, who confirmed that coming to trade events was a vital part of being welcomed into the sector, as it allowed people to prove that they were ‘real’ (i.e. not just ‘trolls’ on a message-board), and also for them to display ‘honest, humble’ behaviour in person to the people that they might want to work with.

Grey literature

The final research method used was a grey literature review. I had begun this review initially for pragmatic reasons as, at the outset of the research, practically the only information that was available about the pornography industry was that found in the grey literature. The initial phase of the literature review focused on material from the mainstream media, including news articles, and documentaries. I had aimed to use this material to construct the history and structure of the pornography industry, and the location of technologically innovative activity within it. However, it quickly became apparent that much of this material was highly sensational and weak on validity⁹ – as Richard (2002) noted, ‘in running to cover [pornography] journalists have left their skepticism at the door [and] don’t use their usual standards when reporting about porn’. When I cross-referenced articles it became clear how unreliable and spurious the claims in them were, particularly around the size of the industry’s profits and customer base, and the structure of the industry.¹⁰ Rather than assuming that there was truth in these publications, I used them instead as pointers toward particular facets of industry structure, and their technological innovations.

In contrast to mainstream reporting, material from the pornography industry’s trade publications, including Adult Video News (AVN), AVNonline, XBIZ, Adult Industry News (AINews) and Klixxx,¹¹ proved to be much more valuable and valid. As documents, the articles and advertisements provided information about the companies in the sector, and the names of their employees; business deals; legal concerns; and industry trends and forecasting. This information was used to draw up an industry database of firms and their employees from which the initial interview ‘hit-list’ was created. However, when triangulated with other data, the trade press yielded even greater richness. I could explore issues raised in articles with industry participants; for example, I noticed that companies that filed patents were treated as noteworthy and exceptional in news articles, so I used this as a starting point to examine how pornography companies protected their innovations, if not by patenting. I was also able to explore whether the opinions presented in comment pieces by well-known industry ‘faces’ were representative of views held by the wider sector, or were instead, as one interviewee described, ‘the drum that [that writer] always bangs’.¹²

Gaining access to the industry publications was a challenge, as none of them were available from the usual media and academic archives in either the USA or the UK. Publications which had complete online archives were easily accessible, including AVN and AINews. However, publications with limited, or minimal online presence could only be accessed through direct interactions with members of the publishing houses, and I was dependent on staff at AVNonline, XBIZ, and Klixxx to provide me with a large, but incomplete, selection of back-issues over the course of the research.

Access and legitimization

A key consideration in doing research on any sensitive subject is how the researchers authenticate themselves and their research, and how this affects the type of data that they have access to. Previous work on sensitive subjects indicates that, because of the personal and social risks involved in their work, members of the pornography industry may require greater authentication of researchers before choosing to participate in research (Glazer, 1982; Rubin, 1993b). The subjects of sensitive research are also more likely to participate if they believe that the research recognizes their work as legitimate, would give insight into the work, and would reduce the stigma around it (Hubbard, 1999). I have addressed some of these issues already around specific research methods, but there were also broader issues across the work which I will explore here.

Legitimization was a particular concern throughout this project from the earliest planning stages onward. Part of this was driven by concerns from faculty at the department where I was based, who were enthusiastic about the project, but cautioned care and sensitivity in its undertaking. As discussed earlier, one of the reasons why the pornography industry has repelled attention from business scholars is likely to be its controversial reputation, which has the potential to mirror back stigma onto the researcher and her or his organization. Throughout the project I had regular meetings with a research committee, who interrogated the research methods I was using, my findings to date, and the academic justification for the research for business and management studies generally and innovation studies specifically.¹³ Several colleagues emphasized that my work would be subject to higher standards than comparable studies on ‘proper’ industrial sectors such as steel or automobile manufacture.

As the work progressed I also became increasingly aware of the importance of legitimizing myself and my work in order to get access to information. Provisionally, it would have been possible just to gather information from openly available sources including the online trade press articles and the trade shows that were open to the public. I had suspected that collecting information from shows would be problematic, as previous work indicated that deviant social populations are difficult to contact, unused to legitimized academic research, and highly distrustful of purported ‘researchers’ whom they perceive as having more journalistic, sensationalist intent (Sanders, 2005, 2006). Yet actors, models, directors, and customers were present in large numbers at the open trade shows and, despite my initial apprehensions, were friendly and willing to talk with me. This raised questions about whether researchers in these spaces need to legitimize themselves before participants will speak with them; for example, it is unclear whether Jensen (2010) legitimated his research or background in any way at the events that he attended, yet he was able to interview pornography directors about the content of their movies despite (or because of) turning up with a camera crew in some cases.

However, as described earlier, data available from ‘open’ sites would not have been sufficient for me to answer my research questions, and I needed more complex data in order to contextualize and describe the wider ecosystem of the industry in a nuanced way. Rather than simply taking accounts from participants or trade press at face value, I also needed material from multiple sources in order to be able to triangulate this data, and discover the limits and biases of it. Triangulating data between the different types of shows, and the accounts of shows from several different interviewees, indicated that the information available from trade shows was biased because they were performative sites in the industry. At B2C shows, pornography companies and their employees performed the sexual spectacle of what porn what expected to look like – unapologetically cocky, raunchy and loud – and were accustomed to performing to the outside world of fans and media in these spaces.

I realized that legitimization techniques were going to be crucial in accessing the less visible parts of the pornography industry, so I made myself known to the industry social network throughout the fieldwork. Some of this was unintentional thanks to the highly interconnected community in the online sector. During my first formal interview, my interviewee indicated that she had discussed me and my research with the person I would be interviewing later that week; I had organized these interviews separately, and had been unaware that the two knew each other. By embedding myself into this network I became known to a large number of people, including several influential ‘movers’ who were able to authenticate me and my research to their peers.¹⁴ This was necessary as, in contrast to the openness at the ‘front of shop’, I encountered some of the type of suspicion and hostility described by sexuality researchers at the ‘back of shop’, in spaces away from the B2C shows. It is inevitable that, because of these factors, I was not able to access as many participants as I would have liked. Whilst the visible status of pornography actors and directors meant that they were probably used to outside attention and questions about their work, middle managers, marketers, and technologists were not. I was asked to provide proof of personal identification at some interviews, in the form of driving licence and credit cards. Many participants said that they suspected that I was actually from the Federal Bureau of Information (FBI); or that they did not find it credible that any university department would conduct serious research into their industry, and presumed that there had to be an ulterior government motive for the work. At a later stage in the research, several participants told me independently that they had initially distrusted me, but that they had got over it by spending time with me and getting to know me better, and were therefore willing to talk more freely with me. By immersing myself in the sector, I gained access to a far richer dataset, including fuller access to the trade press, site visits, invitations to private events, interviews with senior personnel, and sensitive information about both companies and the personal lives of their employees.

Conclusions

My intention in writing this article has not been to minimize or to belittle the contributions of authors in the 2009 Sexualities special issue, nor of the wider community of pornography and sex media researchers who have contributed to the rich and vibrant body of literature around pornography that has developed over the past two decades. Instead, I have sought to highlight the limits of this research as it currently stands, and describe ways of moving beyond these limits through interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and new empirical methods.

There is a wealth of material about the pornography industry available to scholars. As FCEs, trade shows offer access to hundreds of companies and their employees. Researchers can observe how pornography companies market themselves to customers and the media at B2C shows, and observe the dynamics of industry communities at B2B events. Trade publications provide further documentation of the industry’s activities and personalities, and are somewhat more reliable than the hyperbole found in the mainstream media. Information about business models, technology development, revenue streams, reputation management, content production, organizational dynamics, and ethical considerations can be gathered from all of these sites, and explored in more detail through interviews. I would, however, caution over an emergent issue in recent pornography research, namely an obsession with size. As well as using the alleged size of the industry’s turnover as a motivation for research, several scholars have drawn on data from the large trade shows such as the AVN Expos, and trade press such as AVNonline, on the grounds that they are the largest and most well known of their type. Whilst their size is not in dispute, my experience has shown that the data available from these sources cannot be taken at face value as representative of the industry as a whole, or of any sector within it. Instead I encourage future researchers to go further behind the scenes and persevere to seek out material from further inside the industry – whilst this material might be more difficult to get hold of, it will be invaluable in building up a fuller and more detailed picture of the sector.

Beyond methodology there are further challenges that may impact on future researchers. One outcome of this work was the mirroring of the stigma that I was examining back onto myself, as described by Lee (1993: 9):

Where deviant groups are being studied research can become problematic for the researcher. This seems to be true in particular for researchers on human sexuality, who have not infrequently remarked on their stigmatization by colleagues, university administrators and students.

At the most extreme end of this phenomenon, Kirby and Corzine (1981) describe this as ‘stigma contagion’, whereby researchers on sexual deviance come to share the stigma attached to the stigma that they are studying. I was subjected to constant questioning about the social and academic value of the research from my peers and therefore needed to constantly justify and validate the research. I also experienced trivialization of my work (Troiden, 1987), including being asked whether I would be able to give academic presentations on my research ‘with a straight face’. I also experienced the ‘charmed circle’ aggregation of all deviant acts into one cognitive space (Rubin, 1993a); despite emphasizing that I was researching the legal pornography sector, one of the most frequent questions asked was the degree to which I encountered child pornography. I have had frequent conversations about the moral implications of my work which were directed at my personal life, including the frequent question of ‘What do your parents think about what you do?’ and the wider ethical implications of legitimating the pornography sector through the work. Many of the experiences recalled here have been described elsewhere and are well known to gender and sexuality scholars (e.g. Vance, 1991). However, it is valuable to highlight them here for the benefit of business studies researchers who want to investigate the pornography industry, yet may not be aware of the personal and professional impact of conducting such work.

In furthering pornography research, McKee (2009) calls on researchers in the humanities to look beyond their ‘endless theorising’ and learn the value of empirical research, and for social scientists to explore ‘the possibility of new ideas that could move research traditions in interesting directions’. Whilst I support this call for greater incorporation of empirical data and interdisciplinary approaches, I argue that researchers should not incorporate material uncritically from the pornography industry into their work, but must be aware of its biases and limits. It is no longer sufficient for sex media scholars to justify their work on unproven assumptions around the economic and technological value of pornography; if they cannot provide evidence for these claims then it weakens the case for their own research. The next critical stage of pornography research must therefore involve critical empirical examination of the business and economic facets of pornography, to both further the field as a whole, and to justify the many disciplinary strands of work within it. With this article, I have provided an initial indication of the theories and tools that could be used in such future work.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Award No. PTA-030-2003-01277.

Notes

Georgina Voss was awarded her PhD in Technology and Innovation Management by SPRU, University of Sussex. She currently holds positions as a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts, Brighton University, as a Tutorial Fellow in Innovation and Ethics at the University of Sussex, and as an Honorary Research Associate at the Science and Technology Studies Department, UCL.

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