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Analytical Frameworks features of the cultural industries in the Introduction. Also valuable are detailed studies
of particular industries, such as Coser et al.’s (1982) study of book publishing.
The work of these sociologists in the USA, developed in parallel to that of the French cultural industries writers already mentioned, was groundbreak- ing, but it is only when it is synthesised into a more comprehensive vision of how cultural production and consumption
fit into wider economic, politi- cal and cultural contexts that an analysis of specific conditions of cultural production really produces its explanatory pay-off. The cultural industries are treated implicitly by some of the US organisational sociologists and their management studies heirs as isolated systems, cut off from political and soci- ocultural conflict. Issues of power and domination are sidelined. The condi- tions of creative workers are hardly registered, other than the admittedly important fact that they are granted more autonomy than workers in other industries. The world of the rip-off,
the shady deal, the disparity between the glass skyscrapers of the multinational entertainment corporations and the struggle young artists and musicians endure to stay afloat financially is scarcely considered. As with communication studies, I think that these problems derive from the political perspectives underlying the work of these writers. There is undoubtedly a democratising impulse at work. The aim is to demystify creativity and to understand and question hierarchies of taste and value. Sociologists such as Howard Becker show an admirable interest in the resourcefulness of cultural producers in their everyday lives. However, while this is a valuable counter to easy, glib assumptions about our pow- erlessness in the face of giant cultural industry corporations, much of the sociology of culture
and management studies seems, at times, insufficiently concerned with questions of power. As Paul Hirsch (1990[1972]: 643) put it in an article that has been highly influential in subsequent management and organisational studies, his organisational approach ‘seldom enquires into the functions performed by the organization for the social system but asks, rather,
as a temporary partisan, how the goals of the organization may be constrained by society’.
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Acting as temporary partisans of media organisa- tions would be a form of false objectivity for political economists.
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