Detachment as a privilege: industry participation at TV programming and distribution marketplaces

ABSTRACT

While studies have described the role of international trade fairs in building new industries, few have analyzed the reverse: that of companies detaching from fairs, and the contexts in which such events disappear. We study the processes of attachment and detachment to trade fairs in the television programming and distribution industry, using two polar cases: a recently created trade fair in Africa, at the fringes of the globalized market; and a declining trade fair in eastern Europe, which had once been a hub for international trade. We use quantitative data to characterize the degree of internationalization of these two fairs, and focus with qualitative data on the organization of these events. We show that attachment occurs when a fair is new and unavoidable for industry actors; but in older marketplaces, already integrated in globalized markets, powerful actors can detach from the marketplace and re-embed their commercial interactions into personal networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade fairs
• detachment
• attachment
• television studies
• globalization
• embeddedness

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Franck Cochoy, Michel Grossetti, Emmanuel Lazega, the Editors and anonymous reviewers for their help and advice. We also thank Emilie Vrain and Daniel Frazier for the help with the English writing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Respectively: Marché international des programmes de television (International Market for Television Programs), Marché international des programmes de communication (International Market for Communication Programs) and National Association of Television Program Executives.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR-Multi Level Social Networks).

Notes on contributors

Guillaume Favre

Dr Guillaume Favre is a lecturer in sociology at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University and a researcher at LISST (CNRS). His research deals with the analysis of social networks applied to economic sociology and in particular on the phenomena of cultural and regulatory agency between markets in a context of globalization. He has studied the structures of informal relationships in the TV programs distribution sector in Africa. His research also focuses on the transformations of sociability and personal networks with the democratization of the Internet and new communication media (social media, mobile phones, etc.).

Julien Brailly

Dr Julien Brailly is a sociologist who specialises in social network analysis and economic sociology. He completed his PhD in late 2014 from University Paris-Dauphine in France. He has joined ENSAT-INRA Agir in September 2017, and he is also adjunct researcher of the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (SciencesPo Paris, France), and at the Center for Transformative Innovation (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia). His work focuses on the dynamic of multi-level and multi-sided social networks on market and innovating systems. He works on collective action and the management of common resources, outsourcing in agriculture and trade fairs in TV industry. In the next years, he is going to work on the coexistence of various forms of farming organizations in territories.