THE TENSION BETWEEN PROFESSIONAL CONTROL AND OPEN PARTICIPATION

Abstract

Amid growing difficulties for professionals generally, media workers in particular are negotiating the increasingly contested boundary space between producers and users in the digital environment. This article, based on a review of the academic literature, explores that larger tension transforming the creative industries by extrapolating from the case of journalism – namely, the ongoing tension between professional control and open participation in the news process. Firstly, the sociology of professions, with its emphasis on boundary maintenance, is used to examine journalism as boundary work, profession, and ideology – each contributing to the formation of journalism's professional logic of control over content. Secondly, by considering the affordances and cultures of digital technologies, the article articulates open participation and its ideology. Thirdly, and against this backdrop of ideological incompatibility, a review of empirical literature finds that journalists have struggled to reconcile this key tension, caught in the professional impulse toward one-way publishing control even as media become a multi-way network. Yet, emerging research also suggests the possibility of a hybrid logic of adaptability and openness – an ethic of participation – emerging to resolve this tension going forward. The article concludes by pointing to innovations in analytical frameworks and research methods that may shed new light on the producer–user tension in journalism.

Keywords:

• boundary work
• digital culture
• institutional logic
• journalism studies
• new media
• newswork
• participatory journalism
• professionalism
• sociology of professions

Acknowledgements

The author thanks C. W. Anderson, Matt Carlson, Henrik Örnebring, Matt Powers, Steve Reese, Gaye Tuchman, the journal's anonymous reviews, and especially guest editor Oscar Westlund for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

This article refers to ‘journalism as a profession’ as it is understood in the United States or western context. While it is acknowledged that much of journalism's professional outlook, training, and routines are broadly shared around the world (Reese 2001, 2010), nevertheless the challenges to journalism – its traditional models of funding and production – are most acute in the developed world, and in the United States in particular (Downie & Schudson 2009; McChesney & Pickard 2011; Waldman 2011).

Journalism, of course, is not just a profession but also a workforce. While this article takes up the professional orientation rather than organizational dynamics, it is important to note that in the manager–subordinate relationship professionalism can be invoked as a disciplinary mechanism (Fournier 1999; Evetts 2003), including in the case of journalism (Aldridge & Evetts 2003). For instance, major corporations have used professionalism to justify charging users for online access and demonizing ‘free’ content – even while they have de-professionalized their workforce by requiring more and faster output on the ‘hamster wheel’ of digital news production (Starkman 2010).

For additional background on this transition, see Schudson and Anderson (2008).

As Schudson and Anderson (2008) point out, ‘Even journalists, who lack many of the structural advantages granted to other professional groups, have achieved some level of jurisdictional recognition via shield laws, for example, and privileged access to political leaders’ (p. 95).

This emphasis on structure relates to the ‘field’ approach to journalism studies inspired by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Benson & Neveu 2005; Schultz 2007; Hovden 2009; Wiik 2010), yet the scope of this paper does not allow for a full discussion in this vein.

Given the importance of specialized and ‘abstract’ knowledge to the definition of a profession, journalism-as-a-profession has always been in an awkward position, as Schudson and Anderson (2008, p. 96) explain: ‘Journalism seems to simultaneously make a grandiose knowledge claim (that it possesses the ability to isolate, transmit, and interpret the most publicly relevant aspects of social reality) and an incredibly modest one (that really, most journalists are not experts at all but are simply question-asking generalists). Abbott's framework, with its focus on knowledge and jurisdiction, helps us see immediately what makes journalism a sociologically anomalous profession’.

For a related and thorough discussion on the social contract of the press, see Sjøvaag (2010).

For a further discussion of controversies associated with Web 2.0 applications, see Fuchs (2011).

Shirky (2008, pp. 17, 21) writes: ‘We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations. … Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise’.