The Cultural Industries
Tensions between production and consumption
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| Tensions between production and consumption Although, as its name suggests, the cultural industries approach focuses on the supply side – on cultural production and circulation and their social and political contexts – it does not ignore the activity of audiences and users, which is a charge that is often levelled at political economy approaches and certain versions of media sociology. Instead, the cultural industries approach sees the business of cultural production as complex, ambivalent and contested largely because of certain problems derived from the way audiences behave. Production and consumption are not seen as separate entities, but as different moments in a single process. The connections and tensions between produc- tion and consumption are discussed only rarely in the Schiller-McChesney tradition. Symbol creators The processes of concentration, conglomeration and integration catalogued by the Schiller-McChesney tradition are significant (see Chapter 6 for further discussion), but key researchers rarely comment on how such issues of mar- ket structure affect the organisation of cultural production and the making of texts on an ordinary, everyday level. The cultural industries approach puts symbol creators – the personnel responsible for the creative input in texts, such as writers, directors, producers, performers – in the picture, whereas they are often absent in the Schiller-McChesney tradition. The cultural industries approach has emphasised the conditions facing cultural workers as a result of these processes. 9 Its attention to this important issue makes the cultural industries approach better equipped than the Schiller-McChesney tradition to assess the degree to which cultural production is organised in a socially just manner (see Chapter 2). Download 0.61 Mb. Share with your friends:
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