Abstract
This article analyses the professional ethos and practices of television buyers in France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. During interviews and ethnographic observations, the professional ethos of this ‘cosmopolitan tribe’ proved to be remarkably similar across national backgrounds. This article discusses the relation between personal taste and professional ethos in television buying, pointing to specific forms of ‘cosmopolitan capital’ central to this process. Moreover, it develops a typology of buyers, each type representing a different solution to the tensions between culture and economy, consumption and production and national and transnational inherent in transnational cultural mediation. This analysis of the practices of transnational cultural intermediaries highlights several limitations of Bourdieusian accounts of cultural mediation. Moreover, it opens up new questions about (transnational) cultural mediation, the shaping of professional habitus and ‘the production of belief’ in the cultural field.
Introduction
Every year in October, the red carpets are rolled out in Cannes around the famous Palais des Festivals. Walking these carpets are men and women in business suits and designer clothing, carrying BlackBerries, iPhones and Moleskine notebooks, speaking many languages but mainly English in a variety of accents. The palace is covered in billboards advertising Korean soaps, Mexican telenovelas, Dutch game show formats, American and Australian crime shows, documentaries produced by Al Jazeera, the History Channel and the BBC. This is MIPCOM, the world’s largest fair for ‘audiovisual content’.
During this week in Cannes, the ephemeral transnational television field, usually held together by emails, conference calls, websites, trade journals and of course contracts and business deals, materializes along the Mediterranean waterfront. 1 Inside and around the palace, many small booths are set up where broadcasters and production companies from around the world peddle their wares. Large production houses such as Paramount, Disney, Freemantle, BBC, Telemundo and Globo occupy entire wings of the palace or large tents on the beach. Behind the ‘invitation only’ signs and reception desks, one catches glimpses of private terraces overlooking the marina where waiters in white uniforms serve lunch and pour chilled wine.
The guests of honour at MIPCOM are the buyers: the people responsible for the acquisition of content for television companies and, increasingly, internet platforms, mobile phone companies and other new media. Buyers have their own luxury lounge and easily recognizable name tags, and are explicitly welcomed on screens and banners. They are the ones feted on the private terraces: television buyers in particular are targeted for wooing and pampering. They are the gatekeepers of national television, responsible for all decisions about buying programmes, films, formats and scripts. Even for small markets, this means multi-million dollar deals and decisions affecting millions of people’s daily lives.
Television buyers are transnational cultural intermediaries, mediating between producers and consumers and transnational and national fields. As MIPCOM shows, they are consumers to the producers; yet they are producers to other intermediaries such as programme managers, financial managers, translators, schedulers and public relations functionaries. Buyers are in the middle of the supply chain from international producers to local consumers – and therefore quite invisible to both.
This article analyses the professional ethos and practices of television buyers from four European countries: France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. Who are these people, and how do they make their professional decisions? How do they bridge, translate and negotiate the divergent logics of the various fields and regimes in which they are working? Like all cultural intermediaries, television buyers mediate between culture and economy, and consumption and production (Bourdieu, 1984; Negus, 2002). Moreover, television buyers mediate between national and transnational fields. Growing transnational cultural flows require selection, negotiation and translation by a new class of transnational professionals.
Therefore, television buyers represent an increasingly important phenomenon: transnational cultural mediation. This article attempts to unravel how these ‘gatekeepers’ of European television combine the national and transnational in their work. National comparison enables us to gauge the relative impact of transnational, national and institutional factors on the shaping of buyers’ professional ethos, as well as more generally the dynamics of the increasingly transnational television field.
Looking at television buyers’ professional practices opens up more general questions about the nature of cultural mediation. A recent surge of studies has pointed out the importance of cultural intermediaries to late-modern consumer societies. A growing section of the labour force is engaged professionally with creating tastes, inventing identities and selling lifestyles so central to the lives of modern consumers. These intermediaries are responsible for what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) called the ‘production of belief’. This raises questions about the relation between buyers’ personal tastes and professional habitus. Do television buyers ‘believe in what they sell’, as Bourdieu (1984) suggested? How do cultural intermediaries like TV buyers combine personal taste, professional ethos and the various cultural logics that they are confronted with in their work?
As I will argue, specific forms of ‘cosmopolitan capital’ (Weenink, 2008) are central to television buyers’ professional life. In their work, television buyers draw on specific cultural competencies, skills, styles and repertoires that are shared across the transnational television field, to the point of obliterating national differences in their professional habitus and self-presentation. Hence, this ‘cosmopolitan tribe’ is characterized by distinct forms of capital, setting them apart from their local colleagues. However, within this cosmopolitan tribe I found considerable variations. These variations in buyers’ professional ethos and strategies are caused, first, by divergent cultural and institutional logics in the television field; and second, by the specific nature of cultural mediation. Television buyers are perched between personal taste and professional judgement, consumption and production, culture and economy, global and local. Buyers use various strategies to cope with this intermediate position, identifying more with some ‘regimes of mediation’ than with others. Finally, buyers’ position ‘betwixt and between’ accounts for a distinctive mix of involvement and detachment regarding their work and local surroundings. Hence, buyers show a conflation of personal style and professional ethos that is often observed in the new creative classes.
Cultural mediation and globalization
All cultural production requires mediation between producers and consumers. This work is done increasingly by specialized mediators: literary editors screening manuscripts, artists and repertoire (A&R) people scouting new bands, advertisers marketing brands, newspaper critics choosing products to review. In early studies in sociology and mass communication, such work was conceptualized as ‘boundary-spanning work’ between the world at large and specific cultural fields (Hirsch, 1972; Negus, 2002). Cultural mediation is simultaneously ‘gatekeeping’ and ‘tastemaking’. In the production of symbolic goods, such intermediary work is essential since cultural value is never immediately clear or uncontested: it always must be socially constructed or ‘consecrated’ (Bourdieu, 1993).
Early studies on gatekeeping employed a rather simplistic notion of autonomous cultural fields, separated from both aspiring producers and potential consumers by strong boundaries straddled by gatekeepers with a special ‘eye’. With the rise of the production of culture perspective in sociology (DiMaggio, 1987; Peterson and Anand, 2004), attention shifted towards organizational practices within cultural fields. From this vantage point, cultural mediation is seen as a decision-making process guided by the institutional logics and routines of culture-producing institutions (Ahlkvist and Faulkner, 2002; Bielby and Bielby, 1994; Dowd, 2004; Godard and Mears, 2009). Such institutional logics are reflected in organizational rules, routines, classifications, myths and rituals. Institutions are embedded in wider institutional fields, leading to mutual coordination and imitation between institutions in the same field, often in response to growing interdependence or organizational uncertainty. Gatekeepers play a central role in such intra-institutional processes of adaptation and emulation. In the field of television, this ‘neo-institutionalist’ perspective was employed to unravel institutional strategies to reduce uncertainty in the production of television shows (Bielby, 2011; Bielby and Bielby, 1994; Bielby and Harrington, 2008).
Pierre Bourdieu (1984) coined the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ to describe the work of mediation in commercial cultural fields such as media, fashion or advertising. For Bourdieu, the ‘new cultural intermediaries’ are prototypical of the new petite bourgeoisie, midwives to a new consumerist ethos: ‘from duty to the fun ethic’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 365). Implicitly, Bourdieu draws a firm boundary between the work of these new intermediaries and the work of mediation done in the ‘restricted field of production’ of high art – presumably by non-petites bourgeois with legitimate cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1993, 1996).
Compared with institutional theory, field theory sees cultural mediation as more conflict-ridden and rooted in social processes far beyond institutions and cultural fields. Moreover, the focus shifts from institutional process – gatekeeping – to personal embodiment of structural position: habitus. Cultural intermediaries are engaged in a struggle for legitimacy where different classes and class fractions battle for recognition of their tastes and lifestyles. The rise of cultural intermediaries heralds a new class structure in which these intermediaries are increasingly responsible for ‘the production of belief’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 74) in the new fun ethic. Hence, Bourdieu strongly emphasizes the continuity (‘homology’) between the intermediaries’ habitus and their professional tastes and preferences:
With these ‘need merchants’, sellers of symbolic goods and services who always sell themselves as models and as guarantors of the value of their products and who sell so well because they believe in what they sell, the symbolic authority of the honest, trustworthy vendor takes the form of an imposition that is both more violent and more gentle, since the vendor deceives the customer only insofar as he deceives himself and is sincerely ‘sold’ on the value of what he sells. (Bourdieu, 1984: 365)
The concept of the new cultural intermediary was taken up in theoretical discussions on the cultural logics of late modernity (Featherstone, 1991; Negus, 2002). Like Bourdieu, these authors see new cultural intermediaries as the embodiment of the values and lifestyles of reflexive, consumerist, service-oriented late-modern societies. The actual work of cultural mediation rather disappeared from view in these grand discussions of new worldviews and class structures, while the notion of ‘cultural intermediaries’ became diluted to refer to a wide variety of people working in advanced services (Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2010).
Recent empirical work based in this tradition tried to unpack grand theoretical claims about cultural intermediaries, exploring the actual work of intermediaries in various cultural fields. In empirical studies of the working practices of cultural intermediaries, their class and gender backgrounds and relations between mediators in the media industries, cultural mediation emerges as a fluid social process that is quite different from the mechanistic embodiment of cultural roles sketched by Bourdieu. These studies call into question the presumed continuity between intermediaries’ personal and professional habitus. Empirical evidence suggests that they do not necessarily embody or ‘believe in what they sell’ (Entwistle, 2009; Havens, 2006; Smith Maguire, 2008; Wright, 2005). Several authors interrogated the sharp dichotomies between culture and economy, consumption and production, ‘old’ and ‘new’ intermediaries in ‘old’ and ‘new’ economies (Entwistle, 2009; Negus, 2002; Wright, 2005). In a useful attempt to unpack the notion of cultural mediation, Cronin (2004) analysed intermediaries as relays and translators between various ‘regimes of mediation’. In her account, the division between consumption and production is just one of the gaps that intermediaries must bridge.
This article aims to take this approach a step further by investigating how television buyers mediate between the divergent regimes of mediation in transnational television trade. How do buyers combine and bridge the logics of production and consumption, culture and economy, national and transnational? Taking my cue from neo-institutionalist sociology, I focus on the strategies and resources that television buyers employ to work in these regimes. I am particularly interested how cultural taste functions as a resource or capital in these mediation processes. While recent studies suggest, contra Bourdieu, that cultural intermediaries do not always believe in what they sell, they underline the pivotal role of taste in ‘aesthetic labour’. This leads to back a rather Bourdieusian question: what are valuable forms of cultural capital in these various regimes of mediation, and how do buyers employ and embody them?
Television buyers are unusual cultural intermediaries because they bridge yet another boundary: between the national and the transnational. Increasing transnational exchange has created growing demand for mediation between national institutions and the transnational field (Kuipers, 2011). However, most studies of cultural mediation limit themselves to one national field. Only recently, some studies have looked at mediation in global television from a critical cultural studies perspective (Havens, 2006; Steemers, 2004; Straubhaar, 2007) and from a neo-institutional perspective (Bielby and Harrington, 2008). Both Steemers, studying British television sellers, and Bielby and Harrington, looking at American television abroad, took the selling of TV as a starting point. Havens specifically focuses on the TV merchants working in the global television marketplace, including many television buyers. These recent studies of transnational mediation show that making things flow across national boundaries requires active intervention, negotiation and translation. So far, studies of cultural globalization have paid little attention to the mediation required to make such transnational cultural flows possible (Crane, 2002; Kuipers, 2011). The dominant paradigms of cultural globalization have tended to reproduce the separation between production and consumption. ‘Cultural imperialism’ or ‘homogenization’ approaches stress the production side, essentially presenting consumers as cultural dupes on a global scale; while the flow or ‘network’ perspective of cultural globalization highlights hybridization and heterogenization, directing attention mostly to consumption. Again, the process in the middle – the mediation between consumption and production, local and global – disappears from view. This article turns our attention to this neglected yet crucial aspect of globalization by investigating how buyers mediate between national and transnational fields, and what strategies and resources they use in this transnational mediation.
Method
Data collection and participants
Between 2005 and 2009, 31 television buyers: 6 in France, 8 in Italy, 10 in the Netherlands and 7 in Poland were interviewed. These four countries were selected for variation in television tradition, media systems, as well as position vis-à-vis transnational television. 2 At least one buyer at each public, commercial and subscription broadcaster in each of these countries was interviewed. Sometimes several buyers at one organization were interviewed (e.g. the head of acquisitions and a specialist series buyer). Overall, more than half of the buyers working in the field during the time of research were interviewed.
My estimation, on the basis of names listed in the MIPCOM guide and the visitors list of invitation-only LA screenings, 3 is that of all buyers working for the stations in the sample, 43 percent of all French buyers active at the time of my visit, 42 percent of Italian buyers, 88 percent of Polish buyers and 91 percent of Dutch buyers were interviewed. The low percentages in France and Italy compared with Poland and the Netherlands are due to the fact that Italian and French broadcasters employ more buyers, many of them quite specialized (for example, French Canal+ has a buyer only for porn). Moreover, French and Italian broadcasters are hierarchically organized, whereas Dutch and Polish companies are more segmented, leading to easier access and more interviews per company.
All the interviewees were involved in buying fiction for public, commercial or subscription channels. Hence, I excluded digital and mobile channels, and themed non-fiction channels (sports, music, porn, documentaries). All the participants were employees. To my knowledge, there are no freelance television buyers in these four countries. I approached all broadcasters with the same request: to talk to the person most directly involved in buying finished programmes (rather than formats or scripts). In most cases, this led me to the head buyer head of acquisitions; sometimes followed by another conversation with a specialized buyer for series or for specific channels. In all countries, I interviewed at least one person at every national broadcaster. 4
Twelve of the interviewees were men, 19 were women. During the interviews, which typically lasted between one and two hours, we discussed the broadcaster’s buying and programming practices, the participants’ perceptions of the national and transnational television fields, their quality standards and perceptions of the audience. In addition, they were asked about their professional ethos and personal taste; and professional backgrounds and trajectories. Finally, background information on these people was collected: for example, from newspaper interviews they had given, or articles they had written.
Arranging interviews in the television industry usually requires considerable effort and persuasion. Television buyers are busy and important people who have little interest in talking to sociologists. They work in highly competitive fields where information is valuable and, given to the wrong people, may break deals or cost of a lot of money. Some buyers only agreed to speak to me if I agreed not to mention their names or ascribe quotes directly to their company. Sometimes, I persuaded participants to talk to me by listing some other people with whom I had spoken. Since the participants were reluctant to speak about specificities of business deals, it was agreed beforehand that money issues would not be discussed.
Data analysis
All the interviews were transcribed fully and analysed using qualitative data analysis software. As mentioned previously, more than half of the buyers working in these countries at the time, including most head buyers, were interviewed. After data collection in the second country (Poland) was done, data started to ‘feel’ sufficiently saturated: the same stories and discourse were heard, and a typology emerged that was confirmed in the next two studies.
Several participants were contacted again in 2010 for updates. Interview materials were supplemented with ethnographic observation whenever possible, most extensively at MIPCOM 2008 in Cannes. Finally, the media landscapes and organizational structures of television companies in all four countries were analysed.
Findings and discussion
What struck me most during my encounters with television buyers was how alike they were in how they described their work and in their habitus more generally. They had similar speech styles: similar informal, loose, pleasant yet business-like manners – even similar hairdos and clothing styles. In television companies in all four countries, after exchanging my passport for a nametag or keycard at the reception desk, I found myself in lounges with black leather chairs and television sets showing current broadcasts. I then talked to people who all had seen the same new programmes and used the same words to describe them (‘real edgy’, ‘female skewed’, ‘a snappy comedy’, ‘works really well with the 18–30 age bracket’, ‘the characters really come to life in this show’, ‘it’s real innovative, real cutting edge, but you still can relate’). 5 They all read the same magazines and websites and recently went to the same trade fairs. Often, they knew each other. Sometimes this helped (‘If you need a contact in Poland, just call this number and tell him I sent you – and talk to him about motorbikes. He loves motorbikes’); sometimes less (‘Don’t ever tell him you talked to me’). 6
In all four countries, in both commercial, subscription and public broadcasters, buyers described their work in similar terms, containing three main elements. First, buyers keep up with new developments in the international field, scout new shows, watch new programmes and formats and generally look out for interesting content around the world. Second, they conduct negotiations, close deals and sign contracts with producers of finished products, formats and scripts. Third, buyers network: they maintain contacts in the international television world. According to buyers, this is what fairs such as MIPCOM are about. According to a buyer for a Dutch commercial broadcaster, ‘If you want to close a deal at MIPCOM, you’re always too late. All of that has been arranged before. You go to MIPCOM to catch up, to chat.’
Some head buyers of large broadcasters are mainly concerned with negotiations and financial affairs, while some specialists work specifically for one channel, combining buying with programming. However, most television buyers both select acquisitions and negotiate deals. Hence, buyers may be on either side of the business/content (or economy/culture or suit/jeans) divide – but usually they do both. Moreover, even specialized buyers usually have good working knowledge of other aspects. A buyer of a French commercial company seemed at first like a typical ‘suit’, explaining that he left content to ‘his employees’; but then he went on to give me a detailed analysis of the differences between German and American versions of Ugly Betty, demonstrating (rather ostentatiously) considerable insight into popular television and a thorough command of American scriptwriting jargon.
A combination of culture, money and networking in one function is unusual in cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). Apparently, the national/transnational division trumps the culture/money divide: buyers are in charge of all matters related to international acquisitions. This special position gives buyers considerable autonomy from the rest of the company. The duality of buyers’ work was reflected in their social trajectories. The vast majority of them had an academic education in business or economics, or in film or theatre studies. Two Polish buyers had an English degree. In post-communist Poland English skills were scarce, and speaking English is an absolute necessity to function in the Anglophone transnational field.
The interviews in France, Italy and Poland were done in English, and the interviews in the Netherlands in Dutch, but even the Dutch participants often lapsed into English when discussing their work. All of them were fluent in English, which they used in remarkably similar ways. Their shared jargon involved aesthetic terms such as ‘edgy’, business language referring to target groups and age brackets, and cross-over terms such as ‘good production value’. They even regularly used the ultimate cliché of the cultural industry: ‘This show is like X meets Y.’ This cliché phrases the constant tension between risk-avoidance and innovation: something is new yet exactly like two other things they know have worked (Bielby and Bielby, 1994).
Without exception the buyers interviewed believed that there is such a thing as quality which can be recognized by professionals like themselves. Quality, first, means high ‘production value’: TV that is well made, well acted and well written. Secondly, quality shows provide ample opportunities for audiences to ‘relate to’ or ‘identify with’ the programme and its characters. Thirdly, a good show strikes the right balance between similarity with other series and innovation. Several participants supplemented this rather formalistic definition of quality with personal or emotional elements, whereas others took care to separate personal taste from professional quality. However, all of them repeated these three basic elements. This unanimity about quality underlines the great similarity between buyers’ professional ethos in four different countries. Moreover, it underscores the existence of transnational aesthetic standards in the television field, also noted by Havens (2006) and Bielby and Harrington (2008).
A ‘cosmopolitan tribe’
Television buyers to me seemed like a ‘cosmopolitan tribe’: a highly networked group of transnational professionals with similar standards, values, manners and even rituals such as annual gatherings in Cannes. 7 They are bonded not just by common professional interests, but by shared tastes and styles that set them apart from local compatriots. This is signalled by ‘totems’: the prominently displayed BlackBerries and smartphones, still comparatively rare during the start of the research in 2005. The ubiquitous Moleskine notebooks (www.moleskine.com/moleskine_world) represent all the attributes of their cosmopolitan capital: sophistication, internationalism, the aura of art and history in a highly commodified ‘brand that encompasses a family of nomadic objects dedicated to our mobile identity’. At home, their offices were adorned with posters of international series, and often name tags from fairs such as MIPCOM or LA Screenings were displayed prominently. A Dutch buyer had a mannequin in her office wearing all her name tags from previous fairs. I call these buyers a ‘tribe’ to capture these strongly signalled cosmopolitan allegiances, demonstrated specifically by shared signs and styles. Somehow the buyers manage to manifest a striking sense of similarity and commonality across long distances and national boundaries.
In part, this shared ethos may be the result of European buyers’ similar and relatively weak position in the transnational TV field (Kuipers, 2011). International television production is dominated by a few producers, mainly American and British. They constitute the ‘center’ or ‘dominant fraction’ of the transnational TV field (Bielby and Harrington, 2008; Havens, 2006; Kuipers, 2011; Straubhaar, 2007). European television companies are increasingly dependent on the international market to fill their ever-expanding airtime. This usually means more American programmes, films and formats, especially on commercial channels (Bens and Smaele, 2001). Despite the grand reception at MIPCOM, European television buyers are relatively powerless in the transnational television world.
However the cross-national resemblance of these transnational professionals is not exclusively the result of American or Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Despite their use of English, European buyers did not strike me as particularly ‘Americanized’. Television buyers from different European countries are integrated into transnational networks that often bypass Americans and Britons. This transnational lifestyle and orientation produces mutual adaptation and imitation and the development of a transnational, perhaps post-national ethos. Their easy and energetic manners, fluent English, distinctive jargon, stylish hairdos and black Moleskine notebooks reflect the cosmopolitan capital that is at the heart of TV buyers’ trade.
These shared styles and signs constitute, a form of capital. Speaking the same language and sharing the same aesthetic preferences form a useful strategy: a resource to smooth transnational interactions. In their professional affairs – and an interview qualified as professional as much as a visit to Cannes – buyers are upwardly oriented towards their colleagues in the transnational field, rather than to their compatriots. However, these shared tastes also constitute cosmopolitan cultural capital in a less pragmatic and more strictly Bourdieusian sense. The ephemeral, ‘placeless’ transnational field is held together to a large extent by such shared tastes and styles. In addition, at home, as we will see, the cosmopolitan orientation provides buyers with an important compass: their cosmopolitanism is the prime orientation in dealing with the tensions inherent in their work. It demarcates their specific position within their companies, constantly underlining the link with the transnational field.
Few people are born cosmopolitan, and certainly none of the television buyers interviewed reported an unusually international background. This raises the question as to how this professional cosmopolitanism relates to personal habitus. Moreover, their professional quality discourse, often clearly separated from personal taste, casts doubt on Bourdieu’s insistence that cultural intermediaries ‘believe in what they sell’, or in this case: buy.
Do they believe in what they buy? Professional ethos and personal taste
Although television buyers from the four countries shared many characteristics, they differed on two dimensions. 8 These dimensions, I will argue, represent different strategies to cope with the tensions inherent in television buying: between culture and economy, production and consumption, national and transnational. First, personal taste and professional preference completely overlapped in some of the participants, whereas others did not care for the things they bought and were quite unembarrassed to say so. Therefore, they varied on the characteristic identified by Bourdieu as most characteristic of cultural intermediaries: the overlap between lifestyle and work. This dimension I call ‘aesthetic distance’. Second, the buyers varied in professional distance. Some buyers described their decision-making process as primarily based on gut feeling, finding what fitted their brand, client or audience without much procedure or protocol. Others had a more distanced, analytical stance towards their work and preferred to rely on expertise and standardized information.
Variation on these dimensions led to four ideal-typical kinds of buyers, graphically represented in Figure 1. I have ‘assigned’ each informant one category, but this is a simplification. Few participants consistently and completely matched these profiles. Rather, they represent four distinct logics of television buying. Buyers may adapt their logic: for example, when buying for different channels.
Types of television buyers
Aesthetes most resemble cultural intermediaries as described by Bourdieu, or scouts in the music industry described by Negus (2002): they buy what they like and like what they buy. Seven informants (23%) matched this description. Aesthetes come in two varieties, representing opposite ends of the television spectrum. Popular aesthetes genuinely enjoy popular international fare. Some popular aesthetes work for large companies, such as the buyer for self-consciously lowbrow Dutch SBS. He visibly enjoyed talking about his acquisitions, which he discussed in emotional, often sensuous terms like ‘tasty’, ‘hot’, ‘exciting’, ‘made me feel good’. Most popular aesthetes worked for small youth-oriented channels such as Comedy Central and French/Italian Canal Jimmy. When I interviewed the buyer for French Jimmy, he had just renewed the contract for the 1980s car and cowboy hat comedy The Dukes of Hazzard (known in French as Shérif fais-moi peur) because he enjoyed it so much. Elite aesthetes have an intellectual, highbrow taste in series and movies. The Dutch buyer for the intellectual public net was such an aesthete, as was the head buyer of Polish public television. The latter explained: ‘I leave all series to my colleague who is still young. American, English, German – they are always terrible.’ Elite aesthetes are (understandably) rare in TV acquisition; they mostly work for smallish public networks.
Buyers who buy what they like, but with more professional distance, I call educators. This is the rarest type: five informants (16%) matched this type most closely. Educators rely on their own taste, but also want to develop their audiences’ taste by buying things that audiences might learn to appreciate. They are more strategic than aesthetes, often discussing programming and scheduling techniques at length. A favourite strategy is a clearly labelled and ‘branded’ slot for documentaries or quality series and movies. A Dutch buyer for public TV was very proud of her invention of a Saturday night slot for British quality police drama as a more upscale, European, public alternative to the commercial channels’ American cop shows.
Educators work in public television or for subscription channels, which are less immediately dependent on ratings and have time to develop audiences. They buy middlebrow genres such as documentaries and British drama. Sometimes, they choose more risky and innovative fare: American quality drama such as The Wire, Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire, or edgy alternative comedy such as 30 Rock or Little Britain. Often, they were dedicated to teaching their audiences international tastes:
We believe also that we can train the audience too. We don’t believe that globalization is killing diversity. (Sky/Fox Italy, subscription TV)
Of the 31 buyers interviewed, 19 explicitly distanced themselves from their acquisitions – at times to the point of admitting that these acquisitions had nothing to do with the quality criteria they had laid out minutes before in the interview. Mercenaries, of which I encountered eight (26%), have an engaged, intuitive approach to buying TV. They rely on their gut feeling to find the best product for the audience/company they work for. The few buyers without an academic degree were such mercenaries: for example, the buyer at Italian public RAI, who had learned the business in the wild start-up years of Berlusconi’s Mediaset (incidentally, his transfer from Mediaset to RAI aptly illustrates the power politics of Italian television).
Mercenaries work at commercial, public and subscription channels. I did not find the mercenary type in France, but they were common in Italy – which testifies to the rather wild, unprofessionalized contexts of Italian TV. An Italian buyer at commercial channel La7 expressed the mercenary ethic most clearly:
I don’t think about my work as economic or commercial work, but much more in terms of editorial and programming work. Because I don’t work for money, I work for a channel, a brand. So in my mind first of all I have a brand, and then I have the money and I go to buy what is useful for our brand. There’s competition now with documentaries; I’m trying to win the fight in terms of documentaries. I think that I’ll win because we have for our schedule … We have to put on many many documentaries so we have large volume deals with the owners of the History Channel brand.
Clearly, mercenaries do not necessarily select popular or commercial genres – sometimes, they try to ‘win the fight’ with documentaries. Moreover, as this story from a Dutch public TV buyer illustrates, they operate quite independently from their bosses, despite their adhesion to the brand:
When you get the chance to buy something good, you just mustn’t let it slip. So the other day [seller], he often comes to Amsterdam, and then I arrange tickets. When I’m in London he takes me out. Selling often is very personal … he brings up this show and it took me six weeks not to make the decision, but to convince others. So I tell them, it’s totally AVRO [broadcaster], it’s good quality, good production value [in English], and it fits our profile, like ER, Practice, Without a Trace – it all fits, and it’s not trash. It really matches AVRO’s image: attention to safety, health, stuff like that. So it matches all the way, and The Practice is ending, so we need a successor. So it all came together.
Finally, there is the analyst, the commonest category, with 11 representatives (35%). Analysts work for public, commercial and subscription TV and move easily between channels. They rely on professional, standardized knowledge: ratings, professional reports, international market surveys, guidelines, analyses of audience profiles, but also content analyses of shows or audience focus groups. A French analyst explained:
I’m not really close to the artistic side. I think my principal ability is to be able to organize an artistic department with people, audience – products that are not products in fact. So it could be the print or something else. It’s always the same thing. It’s very close to advertising, with the commercial, the client, the artistic … Yes, the only difference maybe is that I have to be sufficiently involved not to be cheated by anyone, by the price or by the quality of what I’m buying. So I must be able to judge what are you selling me – so that’s the difference to an other job.
A Polish buyer for a commercial broadcaster commented on the tension between professional distance and personal pleasure, which is most typical of this type:
It is very much the rational analysis that helps, you see, and also after so many acquisitions and so many programmes that we have to watch, somehow you can feel it too. But sometimes it doesn’t necessarily correspond to my taste and what I would like to watch in my free time. But I think it is also – if I didn’t work here maybe I could watch such programmes more frequently because I would watch them as something new and something that I would be curious about.
Analysts are commonest in highly professionalized fields and companies. Hence, they were most prevalent in France, with the most competitive and professionalized television field. Like educators, analysts often discussed strategies to sell things to reluctant audiences. They were most unwilling to discuss their own taste, objecting that this had nothing to do with their work. Yet they most strongly believed in professional judgement of quality, and were the most adamant defenders of the professional quality discourse of the field.
Beyond embodied positions: professional ethos and institutional logic
This typology of television buyers according to professional and aesthetic engagement versus distance challenges the Bourdieusian view on cultural intermediaries. The buyers’ belief in what they buy varies considerably. Certainly, they all believe in something. Some believe in analysis and ratings, others in making audiences care for middlebrow TV, others still in The Dukes of Hazzard; and some believe in their ‘feel’ for the brand. However, despite their shared quality discourse, they certainly do not all believe that what they buy is quality, or even that buying quality is what they should do.
The four types of television buyers are not typical of, or restricted to, specific countries or cultures. This underscores television buyers’ cosmopolitan habitus: national background has little influence on their professional life. However, neither do they straightforwardly embody or personify positions in the field. Therefore, in order to understand and explain the professional ethos of television buyers, we must go beyond Bourdieusian ‘embodied positions’ in the national cultural field, transnational TV field or class system.
Here, the neo-institutionalist approach seems more helpful to understand buyers’ attitudes towards their profession. Professional ethos is shaped by the interplay of structural positions in the national and the transnational fields, along with more specific institutional logics and traditions and national ‘repertoires of evaluation’ (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000).
Let me clarify this by looking at Poland. Although the last to enter, Polish buyers were clearly part of the cosmopolitan tribe. Yet when asked about their personal taste, they all were staunch defenders of the superiority of highbrow taste. This highbrow orientation is a distinct national cultural repertoire in which Poland stood out from the other countries. The most highbrow buyer in this study I met at Polish public television. The post-Communist heritage of public state television makes it quite impervious to ratings and internationalization compared to public TV elsewhere. Polish buyers in commercial companies had similar highbrow tastes, but they were analysts or, at some subscription channels, educators. A small, recently started digital channel employed a mercenary. Of the two large Polish commercial channels, one had a more rebellious, popular style, whereas the other was more businesslike and formal. Both were clearly modelled after distinctive international styles: the ‘hip’ TV company versus the global media empire. The buyer at the first company had a much more trendy demeanour than her counterpart at the competitor. This illustrates the interplay between institutional logics, field dynamics, national repertoire and transnational dynamics. All factors are needed to understand individual buyers’ practices.
As mentioned in the previous section, some types of buyers have an elective affinity with particular institutional settings. Popular aesthetes are at home in small niche companies, educators in public and subscription TV. Mercenaries and analysts work in all sorts of companies. However, the professionalized climate of French TV is favourable to analysts, whereas the Italian media field favours the more informal, engaged mercenaries. Institutions also have their own particular styles, logics, goals and ‘feel’, as highlighted by the hip versus the more business-like stations in Poland. Sometimes television buyers are selected because they embody this institutional identity, like young buyers at niche channels.
Usually, there is a two-way process of adaptation between institution and person. Television buyers gradually incorporate the institutional culture and develop a feel for the company’s identity. Simultaneously, buyers influence organizational culture. With a less highbrow buyer, Polish public TV might have been more international. Had the French buyer not liked The Dukes of Hazzard so much, the French public might have had to miss it. In particular, since buyers have great power in their organization and typically are the only one or one of few, with their position, their individual decisions may have great impact and long-lasting effects.
Engagement and distance in cultural mediation
Cultural intermediaries translate and negotiate between various, often contradictory, regimes of mediation. The question suggested by the neo-institutional approach that I address here is: what strategies and resources do buyers employ to bridge or negotiate between these regimes? The four ideal types represent four distinct strategies, drawing on different resources to cope with the tensions inherent in television buying.
Television buyers are perched between culture and economy, consumption and production, national and transnational. Typically, they identify more with one domain than another. Switching between these regimes, buyers move between involvement and distance. The dimensions of aesthetic and professional distance present different positions vis-à-vis these regimes. Figure 2 represents the relation between the typology and ‘regimes of mediation’.
The professional ethos of television buyers
The ‘aesthetic distance’ dimension represents different ways to deal with the tension between culture and economy, taste and money or quality and commerce: a tension well documented in studies of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993, 1996; Hesmondhalgh, 2007). The television field has no clear separation between ‘mass production’ and ‘restricted production’. Instead, the opposition between autonomous and more profit-oriented activities cuts across most television companies (Kuipers, 2011). As we have seen, television acquisition generally entails both: they have to know content and spot quality and to know finance and talk business. This requires buyers to move back and forth continuously between somewhat contradictory mindsets and ‘languages’, discussing the same thing as a commodity one minute, as an aesthetic experience the next. However, generally they are more oriented towards one of these two poles, drawing primarily on either cultural and aesthetic or economic and business resources.
Aesthetes and educators prioritize culture, taste and quality over economy, money or commerce. They make their personal taste into professional asset – as mentioned previously, a luxury that they can afford because they usually work at the more autonomous side of the TV field. Mercenaries and analysts separate their personal taste from professional preferences by embracing a formalized professional quality discourse or by identifying good content with a specific brand or identity. These more distanced understandings of quality minimize the tension between money talk and culture talk, yet still enable buyers to take content seriously. However, the gap between personal and professional taste often remains a source of tension, expressed through irony, jokes, self-reflexivity and other markers of ‘role distance’ (Goffman, 1961).
As Figure 2 shows, the ‘professional distance’ continuum is related to the tension between consumption and production logics. Like all intermediaries, TV buyers mediate between production and consumption. They buy from producers or, more specifically, from specialized sellers working for production companies. To these producers they are the consumers, and they lavishly entertained at MIPCOM to prove this. Yet they are sellers to the people at their home company – as illustrated by the buyer cited above who spent six weeks convincing his boss. The buyer’s intermediary position often comes with rapid role reversals: from critical consumer abroad to convinced seller at home, facing other sceptical consumers. Again, strong engagement with one role leads to distance, even alienation, from the other.
Buyers usually had a much clearer idea from whom they were buying, than for whom they were buying. Buyers’ identification with the transnational makes them more ‘consumers to producers’, than ‘producers to consumers’. An Italian buyer for public TV quickly rerouted my question about consumers:
Can you also develop this ‘nose’ [for quality] for people that are very different from you, teenagers, 20-year-old women?
No, don’t get mixed up: I am not a programmer, I am not a programmer … I am the buying arm. You are, you tell me what you really want me to buy; it is up to me go find it for you, or it is up to me also to find it on the market and to propose it to you; and then it is there is always an ongoing daily dialogue with the channels for something. So they want something they tell me or I propose something. I tell them, they want something that we discuss: ‘All right’, we explain to them, ‘You want something that doesn’t exist on the market.’ ‘I want a series like this and this and that’. And I say: ‘They don’t produce series like that. If you want one like this you produce it yourself. It doesn’t exist on the market. It doesn’t exist, so just forget about it.’ Or we try to push some choices on others and explain to the channels what the market is offering. ‘You want a show from Fox? I am sorry, Fox still has an output deal 9 with [station name]. So you like a show from Fox, just forget it, you know?’ So there is an ongoing dialogue. Also, I was a former programmer. So I like to say that I don’t understand programmes, but it is not really true. I like to say it just because it is kind of ironic. When we talk with the channels it is their decision at the end of the day. But let’s say that there is a talking way to maybe help them make their decision, for example.
Attempts to get participants to talk about actual television viewers often led to redirecting or ducking the question or to uneasy moments of silence. When pushed, buyers typically resorted to generalities and clichés (‘Polish are very Catholic’ 10 , Buyer for Polish subscription TV; ‘Italians like beautiful people’ 11 , Buyer for Italian subscription TV) or marketing talk about age brackets and lifestyle groups. This puzzled me until I realized that they, like the Italian cited above, often think of managers and programmers at their home companies as their target group. Actual consumers were many steps and intermediaries removed from them. Hence, buyers could do their job easily without thinking of their viewers.
The professional distance dimension, then, represents the level of engagement vis-à-vis buyers’ imagined consumers. Here, aesthetes and mercenaries are the ones making the professional personal (Smith Maguire, 2008) by strongly identifying with a particular imagined consumer. On the one hand, aesthetes believe that they buy for people like themselves, whereas mercenaries (like the Italian cited above) are guided by a strong sense of a company identity, brand or ‘feel’. This engagement serves to bridge the gap between producer (or buyer) and consumer.
On the other hand, educators and analysts have no such imagined consumers. Their primary orientation is with production and producers; hence they employ all sorts of strategies to find, create or train audiences, and use ratings and audience profiles to help them understand elusive viewers. Sometimes these professionals use indirect forms of personalization. A buyer at a Dutch public channel for older viewers told me that she bought for her parents-in-law. At a Dutch commercial channel, they invented fictitious viewers, including names, living arrangements, job histories and secret ambitions. However, all buyers are forced to move back and forth between the domains of consumption and production. Neither the identification strategies of merchants and aesthetes, nor the analytical approach of educators and analysts, can fully resolve this tension.
Finally, television buyers mediate between the transnational and the national. Their upward orientation, cosmopolitan ethos and enthusiastic embrace of transnational styles attest to their strong personal identification with the transnational. Indeed, this is where buyers were most similar: in their personal involvement and incorporation of cosmopolitan capital. This is the backdrop to Figure 2: the dimension on which they all score alike.
However, their embrace of the transnational made for considerable distance from local regimes, practices and audiences. The following interview excerpt with a French buyer, a typical analyst, aptly illustrates the distance from the national, as well as the cultural and the consumption side of his work:
It was my first job to sell worldwide, to sell programmes from France from Europe. But you know, buying or selling, it’s the same job.
It’s the same thing?
It’s the same thing, it’s just reversed. If you buy, you buy lower. If you sell, you have to sell to the highest.
But it’s the same thing. So, on the basis of your experience, working in many places, can you tell me if there is something specific about the French audience?
[silence] Sorry?
Do you think … would you say that the French audience is very specific? Would you say that? Because when you’ve sold French television to other countries too, you can probably compare.
No, we watch, no … The good ideas, they come from abroad. So we do – when we do good television in France, because we see good things. And we take the ideas of the others, Germany, Spain, the States. So more or less what works in France, works in Germany, works in England, works in Spain. It’s more or less the same market, not only for fiction but it’s the same for the formats. Sometimes the format, it doesn’t work in Spain, it works in France. But you know when you have a big format, big franchise, like CSI, it’s what’s going to work.
This notion that ‘the good ideas come from abroad’ was prevalent among buyers; although this participant was rather strident in insisting that the same things work everywhere.
The national aspect of buyers’ work was conspicuously absent in the interviews. I often noted a certain blindness to national specificities, as in this excerpt. Their distance regarding local affairs was expressed not only through reflexivity and irony and distance from the more local aspects of TV programming, but also through disparaging or patronizing remarks about local audiences and colleagues:
Most people in Polish television don’t understand international TV. (Buyer, subscription channel, Poland)
So what about the Italian audience? Do you think there’s anything about the Italian audience I need to know?
We are better than the TV we make.
I really hope so. 12
No it’s really true. Someone said to me you are much smarter than your TV, yes!… We take the worst things from the outside television world and so we take the worst from the USA.
French audiences simply are not ready for the edgy, the American or English humour. It is arriving with the younger people, but the French are very conservative, slow. (Buyer, Canal Jimmy, France) Many of the new quality series from HBO are too highbrow for Dutch viewers. Sometimes we give them to the public channels, The Sopranos, Mad Men – but even there they don’t work. (Buyer, SBS, Dutch commercial channel)
Their transnational, anti-local orientation is where buyers believe in what they buy the most. Here, they truly seem to buy and sell their own lifestyle. In their cosmopolitanism, personal and professional collapse.
Making the personal professional through personal involvement is indeed an effective way to cope with the tensions of mediation. However, nobody can identify personally with all aspects of television buying. As the omnipresence of analysts – characterized by both professional and aesthetic distance – illustrates, professionalized mediation strategies certainly work. However, in the end, involvement – believing in what you do, if not buy – seems most effective in doing intermediary work. Hence all buyers, including the analysts, opted for identification with the transnational at the cost of neglecting and even disparaging the national. Therefore, their cosmopolitan habitus functions not only as sign of allegiance to the transnational field, but also as a resource: in the transnational field, embodying cosmopolitanism is the easiest (and nicest) way to do business, and cosmopolitan capital is the most universal currency.
Conclusion
Transnational mediation, cosmopolitan capital and the production of belief
In this article I have analysed the professional ethos and practices of television buyers: transnational cultural intermediaries in the television field. I described this group as a cosmopolitan tribe: their shared manners, standards, networks and language represent the cosmopolitan capital required for their trade. This cosmopolitan capital consists not only of knowledge of the field or mastery of professional discourse, but also a more general aesthetic orientation, setting them apart from their local colleagues, uniting them with the transnational field.
Weenink (2008) coined the term ‘cosmopolitan capital’ to describe Dutch parents’ attempts to prepare their children for a globalized world by trying to provide them with resources that are especially useful in the transnational arena, such as language skills, international experience and openness to cultural diversity. I have expanded Weenink’s concept by showing how people working in a transnational arena indeed employ specific cosmopolitan resources in their professional lives. Also, I have shown how these resources, at least in the media field, are often aesthetic rather than instrumental. Interestingly, buyers’ employment of cultural capital is very reminiscent of Merton’s (1968) famous description of cosmopolitans – as opposed to locals – in exerting political influence. For Merton, cosmopolitans are brokers whose influence depends on their knowledge of and connections with the outside world. In today’s jargon this translates rather neatly as mediation through cosmopolitan cultural and social capital.
However, despite these similarities, there were considerable differences in the professional ethos of television buyers. I distinguished aesthetes, educators, mercenaries and analysts, differing along the twin dimensions of professional and aesthetic distance. These variations in professional ethos I then explained, first, on the basis of the intersection of institutional logics at the organizational, field, national and transnational levels – different institutional settings ‘match’ different types of buyers. Second, I related these variations to the tensions between various regimes of mediation. Different buyers cope with these tensions between culture and economy, production and consumption and national and transnational in different ways. Strong personal engagement with some logics leads to greater detachment, a more analytical stance and more role distance regarding other regimes and logics of mediation. This causes variations in professional ethos, as well as more general reflexivity and fluidity in their working practices.
This account of the working practices of this particular group of transnational cultural intermediaries has more general implications for our understanding of cultural mediation, the shaping of professional habitus and production of belief in the cultural field. First, I have argued for a combination of Bourdieusian field theory with insights from cultural studies and neo-institutionalist sociology. My analysis underscores some limits of the Bourdieusian perspective on cultural intermediaries. Television buyers certainly are not ‘sincerely “sold” on the value of what [they] sell’. Instead, they straddle various regimes of mediation, sometimes quite sold on what they sell, and at other times considerable more sceptical or distanced. As I have argued, neo-institutionalist cultural sociology quite helpfully supplements field theory and critical cultural studies here. Institutionalist analyses of cultural mediation direct attention to the specificities of institutional logics, and the manifold strategies and resources employed by actors in the cultural industry. As I have developed it in this article, cosmopolitan capital emerges as one of the prime resources, but certainly not the only one available to television buyers.
Television buyers do not necessarily believe in the quality and value of the products that they buy and sell. In this sense, they do not believe in what they sell. However, their strong personal involvement with their work underlines that they do believe in something. Buyers believe in their capacity to spot quality, to educate and train audiences, to recognize what is good for their brand or to analyse and read ratings. However, most devotedly, they believe in their ‘feel’ for the international market and the mores and manners of the transnational TV field.
All cultural production is based on belief. The value of cultural goods, from TV programmes to highbrow art, is never given; it is always socially constructed. Institutional sociologists and field theorists alike point to the elusive nature of the social processes shaping cultural value: they are based on institutional classifications, myths and rituals (Peterson and Anand, 2004), or on the ‘illusio’ of the field (Bourdieu, 1996). In his studies of the art world, Bourdieu (1993, 1996) seems less critical of this process of production of belief than in his treatment of petite bourgeois cultural intermediaries. Perhaps Bourdieu, too, was taken in by the illusio of high art.
The primary goal of television acquisition is the mediation between national and transnational. This is the locus of buyers’ most embodied and embedded styles, tastes and beliefs. I have described buyers as a cosmopolitan tribe in order to capture the unexpected, striking occurrence of shared styles, tastes, discourses and practices in a group scattered across various countries and language areas. Whereas different buyers chose different strategies to cope with tensions between culture and economy, consumption and production, all the participants sided with the cosmopolitan side of the national/transnational divide.
However, this involvement with the cosmopolitan comes at a cost. Engagement with one logic leads to detachment from another. This leads to various forms of role distance, including the self-reflexivity and irony often observed to be typical of late-modern times and the creative classes, a certain alienation from audiences or products and a notable tendency to disparage the local.
As cultural fields are becoming more transnational and commercial, traditional dividing lines are becoming more blurred. Thus, tensions between various regimes of mediations are growing. This makes both maintaining and producing belief in cultural value increasingly fraught. All too often, acceptance of one particular illusio shatters another. Television buyers cannot maintain a similar level of belief and engagement throughout their professional routines. In this respect, they are typical of all cultural intermediaries in the current age: despite their strong personal engagement, they can never believe in all aspects of what they buy.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to the participants, who freed up time in their busy schedules to receive me. Moreover, I want to thank Timothy Dowd, Thomas Franssen, Susanne Janssen, Jeroen de Kloet, Julian Matthews, Jennifer Smith Maguire and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on previous versions of this article; and to Don Weenink for suggesting to me the extremely useful notion of cosmopolitan capital.
Funding
This research was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO, Veni grant 451-03-091.
Notes
Biographical note
Giselinde Kuipers is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and Norbert Elias Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has published widely on humour, media, cultural globalization, cultural industries and comparative sociology.