Multiple dimensions of mediation within transnational advertising production: cultural intermediaries as shapers of emerging cultural capital

ABSTRACT

The paper re-conceptualizes cultural intermediaries as shapers of “emerging cultural capital” (Prieur, A., and M. Savage. 2013. “Emerging Forms of Cultural Capital.” European Societies 15 (2): 246–267; Savage, M., F. Devine, N. Cunningham, M. Taylor, Y. Li, J. Hjellbrekke, and A. Miles. 2013. “A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment.” Sociology 47 (2): 219–250) and re-frames their practice of signification and negotiation as informed by “multiple dimensions of mediation.” Drawing on a case study of Nike’s transnational advertising production and interviews with key actors within the context of production, the paper examines how the creative/cultural labour process cuts across global and national fields of cultural production and consumption through which popular culture and middle-brow tastes were mediated, signified and represented. In particular, a television campaign for the Japanese youth market was critically analysed to reveal how specific new tastes, lifestyles and consumption practices were legitimized as emerging forms of cultural capital. Consequently, their taste-making practices are profoundly implicated in symbolic struggles and cultural changes emerging within/from the increasingly “globalizing” field of cultural production.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural intermediaries
• Bourdieu
• dimensions of mediation
• cultural production
• advertising
• taste-making
• emerging cultural capital
• sport brand

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor, the associate editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback. We also acknowledge our appreciation for Etsuko Ogasawara who assisted us to access the initial interview site and all the participants who generously volunteered their time for interviews and provided insight into the production context and process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Michael P. Sam http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2625-4426

Notes

1 We acknowledge that legitimation is a contested concept (Hurrelmann, Schneider, and Steffek 2007). As one of the fundamental concepts in the social sciences, legitimacy is too “unwieldly” to engage with on a full-frontal assault (Weatherford 1992). We thank the reviewer for making this point.

2 The “newness” of the new petite bourgeoisie, and therefore the new cultural intermediaries, is attributed not only to the emerging occupations related to symbolic goods and services but to “a strong cultural inheritance and relatively low educational capital” (Bourdieu 1984, 91) that contrast with those of the old petite bourgeoisie.

3 As Smith Maguire (2014) points out, Bourdieu was among many others who attempted to theorize the parallel expansions of the service sectors, cultural industries and consumerism across Western (and some of Eastern) nations during the late twentieth century.

4 This is also asserted by Philips (2005) who suggests that Bourdieu’s concept of the new cultural intermediaries was developed based on Lynes' (1980) concept of “the tastemakers.”

5 Bourdieu’s (1993, 1996) work on the field of cultural production focused largely on the sub-field of restricted production and did not explore the dynamic changes emerging from the sub-field of large-scale/mass production (see Hesmondhalgh 2006). Although he did not use the term “cultural intermediaries” in these studies, it can be inferred that the “old” cultural intermediaries have existed for a longer time and are found in the sub-field of restricted production as taste-makers who consecrate and legitimize avant-garde arts over symbolic struggles emanating from the opposition “between consecrated art and avant-garde art, or between orthodoxy and heresy” (Bourdieu 1993, 83; see also McFall 2002, for discussions on the “old” cultural intermediaries).

6 In the work of Savage et al. (2013, 227), emerging cultural capital was found in association with such activities as “video games, social network sites, the internet, playing sport, watching sport, spending time with friends, going to the gym, going to gigs and preferences for rap and rock.”

7 We acknowledge as a limitation that our analysis focused on the Japanese version of the advertisement as the authors were familiar with the contexts of both school sports environment and advertising production in Japan. Our understanding of the commercials for the other markets was limited due to the lack of knowledge and experience in appreciating local counterparts, and these were therefore used mainly for a comparative purpose.

8 Notably, Goldman and Papson (1996, 4) suggest that Wieden + Kennedy is “[a]n avant-garde of advertisers” who “bypassed the clutter by stylistically differentiating their methods of narrative representation.”

9 This tension is often underpinned by “the apparent dichotomy of commerce versus creativity” (Negus and Pickering 2004, 46). For example, Cronin’s (2004) interviews reveal a case in which Creatives had a moment of nervousness when they received feedback on the proposal from their corporate client and another case in which the client’s requests for inclusion of several advertising messages interfered with Creative’s visual preferences. This dimension has been also discussed in terms of self-exploitation and actualization of cultural workers in our previous work (Kobayashi 2012a).

10 The commercial can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDLPVzd-4-Q

11 Notably, this commercial narrative linking individualistic youth and popular culture is consistent with “the Nike moral vision of sport as an anchor for moral individualism” (Goldman and Papson 1998, 80).

12 It is also worthwhile noting the similarity in Bourdieu’s explanation about how the new cultural intermediaries were susceptible to American influences of popular culture when creating the new forms of tastes and cultural capital that challenged the dominant fraction of the dominant class in France (see also Rocamora 2002 for another example).

13 In other words, the refined concept suggests that, when advertising practitioners or any other creative workers engage in the reproduction of social hierarchies through recursive enactment of production/consumption, they are not acting as cultural intermediaries.

14 In this sense, we note that Holt’s (1998) framing of six “dimensions of taste,” and in particular “local versus cosmopolitan” and “communal versus individualist,” has certain similarity with our analysis of mediation. We also acknowledge that all the interviewees were male, which may reflect a form of hegemonic gender relation in a wider field of advertising production (see Gee and Jackson 2012; Nixon 2003).