Journal of Cultural Economy

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SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA

INDUSTRIES

Göran Bolin

To cite this article: Göran Bolin (2009) SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA
INDUSTRIES, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2:3, 345-361, DOI: 10.1080/17530350903345579

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350903345579

Published online: 06 Jan 2010.

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 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN
MEDIA INDUSTRIES

Göran Bolin

This article discusses value creation within the fields of cultural production. It departs from
Bourdieu’s field model, and seeks to develop it to fit unrestricted cultural production, for example
television production. Bourdieu for the most part discussed the production of value (or forms of
capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art,
literature). Although one of his best known works dealt with television, one cannot say that he
used the possibilities inherent in his own theory thoroughly enough to analyse this field of mass
production. This article builds on recent discussions on the role of field theory in media studies,
and seeks to contribute to the development of a theory of value production in fields of large-scale
or unrestricted cultural production. It is argued that the conflation of commercial value with other
kinds of value is more intense in the subfield of unrestricted cultural production, as production in
this part of the field needs to obey outer demand in a way that production at the pole of restricted
production does not.

KEYWORDS: Bourdieu; cultural production; digitization; field theory; marketization; media

production; television; value

Introduction
Saying that the media have become commercialized and subsumed market logics
has become a standard opening for debates on the changes within the media over the
past few decades
not least so when accounting for changes in the European media
landscape, or perhaps even more so when it comes to descriptions of the radical
restructurings of the media in the post-Soviet states. Indeed, the media in Europe have
seen dramatic changes, some of which concern the increased competition between public
service and commercial broadcast media, leading to the fact that more areas of radio and
television production are aiming to produce surplus value and economic profits. However,
the discussion also encompasses print and music media, although these have long since,
and with few exceptions, been organized commercially. When it comes to both the music
business and print journalism, these are seen as having become more reliant on
immediate commercial success, and it is often argued that the economic margins by
which they have previously worked have narrowed, leaving little room for experimentation
or daring ventures. This discussion, however, is not restricted to the public service/
commercial broadcasting dichotomy of Western Europe. It is equally present in the US,
where journalism is at times argued to have become overly commercial and to solely yield
to economic values (e.g. Hamilton 2004).

Journal of Cultural Economy, Vol. 2, No. 3, November 2009

ISSN 1753-0350 print/1753-0369 online/09/030345-17
– 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17530350903345579
346 GÖRAN BOLIN

It is obviously hard to deny the increasing importance of the economy for media
production, or the impact of economic logic on the production processes therein.
However, it is equally important not to forget that economic value is but one of the value
forms produced within the media and cultural industries, and it is important to analyse the
conditions for the production of other kinds of value (political, social, cultural, etc.), not
least to understand how they relate and contribute to the valorization process within the
field of media production.
I will therefore in this article discuss and try to further develop a model for analysing
the production of value within the media and cultural industries, based on the field theory
of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu discussed the production of value (or forms of capital) in
relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts. Although one
of his most known works dealt with television (Bourdieu 1998[1996]), one cannot say that
he fully applied the possibilities inherent in his own theory to analyse this field of popular
culture or mass media production, and there is therefore considerable scope to develop
this part of the theory. The ambition of this article is to fill this space by contributing to the
development of a theory of value production in fields of large-scale production.
In the course of this argument I will also take into consideration the fact that media
commodities are becoming increasingly symbolic in kind, and that this has implications for
the theory of value production. A major feature of this is the increased digitization of
media commodities, which makes them entirely symbolic (as well as indefinitely repro-
ducible). A second ambition is to understand the consequences of this, and evaluate the
implications of the circulation of intangible commodities within the media production-
consumption circuit for the valorization process.
The first section of the article lends a historic background to the discussion on media
commodities and commercialization. In the second section I expand this discussion to
include other kinds of value that are produced in production and consumption processes.
I introduce Bourdieu’s field theory here in more detail, and modify it to account for cultural
production in the subfield of undifferentiated mass or popular culture. In the third section
I clarify my model with some examples. In a concluding section I briefly summarize my
arguments and point to further areas of study.

Background
Questions about the marketization of culture have been on the research agenda at
least since the 1930s, when they were taken up by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and
others from the Frankfurt School. Since then the question has intrigued critical media
theory, political economy and other Marxist-inspired research perspectives. Central to the
discussion is the relation between production and consumption, a relation that has
become increasingly problematized over the past few decades, not least from within
certain strands of Cultural Studies, to the point that they sometimes seem to have merged
into a single concept with a single meaning.
Admittedly, regarding the marketization of culture, popular culture and media
production have certainly been affected by market economy for a long time, although
to varying degrees and in a variety of ways depending on the traditional media forms:
print, broadcast and music media, film, art, etc. During the post-war period, however,
rationalizations within cultural production (as in general commodity production) have led
to an increase in the commercial pressures on cultural production (faster turnover rates,
 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA INDUSTRIES 347

streamlining of production, integrated promotional campaigning, etc.). The strong

European public service broadcast institutions have been met by commercial competitors,
which has led to considerable changes in their material’s content. Indeed, the print media
and the press have also changed due to changes in the advertising markets, the rise of free
newspapers (e.g. Metro), and an increased emphasis on niche audiences to meet demands
from advertisers. The music industry has developed more refined means of distribution and
marketing, as has film production. Moreover, media commodities are often coordinated
across media forms and genres, so that a film is released together with its soundtrack, a
computer game, etc. In such ways the markets for cultural commodities have become
integrated.
However, not all cultural production is organized on commercial grounds. Many
countries have subsidy systems in order to balance the commercial pressure on cultural
production. Just to mention Sweden as an example, there are subsidy systems for the
press (to uphold a plurality of newspapers), film production (the Swedish Film Institute)
and the Arts Council (Kulturrådet), to add to the public service system within the broadcast
media. However, it is also true that these systems at times have been under fierce attack
and questioned on neo-liberal grounds with the argument that culture should be
economically self-supporting. The debates and the organizational forms of the subsidy
systems naturally vary between countries. But wherever they appear, they counterbalance
the economic logics of cultural production.
A related tendency in late modern commercial production, generally, is that
commodities have symbolic or semiotic qualities that add to their economic (exchange)
value. The increasing emphasis on design and brand names has complicated the way we
can understand the valorization of commodities in media as well as other commercial
production. Beginning in the late 1950s, economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith
(1964[1958], p. 145) pointed to the increased emphasis on marketing and advertising, and
the problems it posed for traditional economic theory. This was further elaborated on by
Jean Baudrillard (e.g. 1981[1972]), who introduced the concept of ‘sign value’ as a
complement to the traditional concepts of use and exchange value. The basis for this was
a perceived shift in the production-consumption circuit, where the symbolic dimensions of
material commodities became more important for the circulation of commodities in
society. The importance of signs for the organization of production within the culture
industries is undisputed, and arguably, sign value has always been a major component of
cultural commodities. However, today many (if not most) cultural commodities are entirely
made of signs, produced through signifying practices.
The development within commodity production towards increased marketization
and an emphasis on sign qualities can be said to have been intensified with the
technological development of digitization, the process whereby media texts are broken
down into digits, and are hence reproducible without a loss of quality. This puts pressure
on record and film producing companies to develop more refined tools for the restriction
of markets in order to secure future profits through copyright legislation
the debates
around file-sharing being a case in point, as file-sharing does not involve ‘tangible carriers’
for the textual commodities (see Wallis et al. 1999, p. 7). However, copyright is only
applicable to (artistic) works, and accordingly other techniques of market restriction
have been developed for other symbolic commodities, such as television formats (format
rights) or fictional characters in literature, film and popular culture in general (trademark)
(see Gaines 1990).
348 GÖRAN BOLIN

The need for such legal techniques has also increased as digitization allows the same
basic narratives to be distributed via several different technical platforms. We may think of
this as a shift on par with the one noticed by Walter Benjamin (1991[1936]) in his essay on
the fate of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction, and see digitization as another
stage in this process, with qualitative consequences for the cultural object at the centre of
it. Indeed, digitization has led to important shifts in the ways commercial value is
generated. Along with this process, the need for the industry to regulate has arisen, but so
has an increased need for more refined ‘means of consumption’ to enable audiences/
readers/users to use digitized texts: when commercial commodities circulate in digitized
form we need complex software and hardware to ‘decode’ the digits into accessible,
consumable form. In order to download a film we need a computer, access to high-speed
Internet, and appropriate software to be able to take part in or consume it, and thereby
realize its value (Bolin 2005a).
George Ritzer (1999) used the concept ‘means of consumption’ to describe theme
parks, shopping malls and related spaces of consumption. I would, however, rather reserve
the term for the technical gadgets needed by media consumers to read media texts

televisions, computers, MP3 players, portable DVD players, etc. The difference between
Ritzer’s and my use is thus between the means needed for the purchasing of (material)
consumer goods and the means needed for consuming (immaterial symbolic) texts. These
are means that appear at different points on the production-consumption circuit.
It should also be pointed out that I use the concept of immaterial texts and
commodities metaphorically, as digits have a material base in being physical energy
flowing through fibre optic cables. As concepts like ‘immaterial property’, etc., are widely
accepted and inscribed in legal discourse as immaterial property rights, etc., this seems to
have become silently understood and common parlance. The problematic status of digital
objects and commodities from such legal discourses is revealed in the many concepts used,
but it is fair to say that they all try to grasp the ephemeral character of digital commodities,
whether through speaking of immaterial, intangible, symbolic or semiotic commodities,
which we cannot put in our pockets without the use of means of consumption and
distribution.
Several attempts have been made to understand the effects of digitization and new
means of consumption for the generation of economic value (e.g. Oberholzer-Gee &
Strumpf 2007). There are also quite a few studies on the use of digital commodities and
objects, especially downloading (e.g. Blomqvist et al. 2005). The general results are
inconclusive, not least because of the difficulties involved with estimating economic gains
or losses (Lucas 1999; Kretschmer et al. 2001; Rosén 2008). However, there are few studies
on the effects of the general processes of production and how they relate to the production
of other kinds of value besides the economic (but see e.g. Ross 2000; Kenney 1997). In
relation to television production, I have elsewhere analysed how the value of being ‘public
service’ can be struggled over, and how the political and cultural connotations of this
concept have been used as a competitive field strategy by TV4 in Sweden (Bolin 2002,
2004). Public service production further complicates these things, as it competes with
commercial production on the one hand, and on the other does not strive for maximum
profits. Very few, if any, have related the consequences of the contemporary commercial
production context to the actual textual expressions.
As Thomas Streeter (1996, p. xi) argues, ‘the legal and political problems facing
computer communications today are much less unique and much more associated with
 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA INDUSTRIES 349

broadcasting than the oft-heard euphoric rhetoric of ‘‘the information revolution’’ would
imply’. This will be also be my standpoint in the following, and I will draw to some extent
on examples from television production and the commodities and objects produced there
as ‘electronic intangibles’ (p. xi), from a European perspective of the dual structure of
public service and commercial television production.

Economic and Other Value

Value, it is said, is indefinable (Magendanz 2003, p. 443f); nonetheless, there are
connecting terms such as ‘belief’ that can be used to explain its meaning. Most of us have
everyday conceptions of value, one of which is that it is ‘the worth of a thing’
an ‘agreed
or assumed standard, criterion or measure’ (p. 443). ‘Value’ is also both a verb and a noun,
that is, it is both a concept referring to an activity and a concept referring to a ‘thing’ or a
phenomenon. These are naturally connected: a thing is given a value, and hence also
becomes the value it has been given or valued. Value is thus produced socially, in that we,
through interpretations of objects, actions and phenomena around us, give them meaning
in a socially and historically defined space. Standards, measures and criteria are agreed on,
disputed over and negotiated in social interaction. Agreement on the standards or criteria
for judgement does not imply that everyone arrives at the same evaluative conclusion. But
when there is agreement on the principles of judgement, a discursive space is opened for
struggles about which interpretation or evaluation of the thing, person or action is the
most valid (see Frow 1995, p. 19).
As has been pointed to by John Guillory (1993), the concept of value has its ‘origin in
the eighteenth-century discourse of political economy’, where it was introduced ‘in the
struggle to distinguish art from the commodity’, and fundamental in the distinction
between use and exchange value as theorized by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and
later picked up by Karl Marx (p. xiii). The connection between the economic and the
cultural is therefore at the heart of processes of evaluation and value judgements. Value is
constructed socially, but, as Marx (1974[1867]) argued, the social process results in the
fetish character of the commodity, where the social processes (of work for Marx, but here
extended to the social process of evaluation) become hidden in the commodity form as
(exchange) value
the accumulation of which becomes capital. Capital is thus an asset,
something that can assume many forms (money, estate, etc.), and can also be converted
between these forms.
Marx dealt mainly with the production of material commodities and objects. As a
consequence, both use and exchange value in Marxist thinking are the result of raw
material, means of production and labour. Exchange value is the value that is realized
when the commodity is circulated on a market and sold for a price that can be turned into
surplus value, later to be reinvested in the production and ideally turned into new surplus
value. However, as sign value has become more important in the generating of exchange
value, it adds an element of complication to this process, as prices on markets are
becoming increasingly arbitrary. The absence of raw material in commodity production,
and its intense dependence on labour, makes the price-setting mechanisms more diffuse
for consumers, as it has bases other than the raw material that is tooled into artefacts.
When products are composed of digits, labour becomes even more important, as ‘the
commodity, then, is only as good as the labour that goes into it’, as Tiziana Terranova
(2000, p. 48) puts it. Another way to phrase it is that the production of non-tangible
350 GÖRAN BOLIN

commodities becomes more dependent on the belief in the commodities’ specific value by
customers, since there is no comprehensible material base for it. The belief systems
surrounding the design components in the production process are thus of crucial
importance.
Belief is also the central component in fields of production, according to Bourdieu
(1993[1977]). Belief in the value at stake in the field
the value struggled over, that which
is the motor of the field dynamics, is the ultimate product of the field. This means that the
production of belief is also the production of value.
So, when we look at the production of digital non-tangible commodities, it is
apparent that there are other kinds of value circulating in the production than mere
economic ones, and that these other value forms also have an impact on the (economic)
valorization process. Television production, for example, as a special and very transient
form of non-tangible commodity production, is surrounded by a number of intersecting
interests and objectives on the part of the agents involved, which all have a bearing on each
other and influence each other’s value-generating efforts. Technologically and adminis-
tratively complicated, television production involves a range of individuals and organiza-
tions: broadcasters, production companies, advertisers and sponsors, and the individuals
who inhabit these organizations but whose activities cannot all be expected to have similar
personal aims (Bolin 2002). That television production (at least in Europe) can be divided
into public service production not aimed at producing surplus value, and commercial
production, which has this kind of production as its final goal, complicates this even further.
In fact, television production lends itself well to exemplifying the complex web of
value forms that are drawn into late modern cultural production, not least since it is also,
as pointed out by Streeter (1996), an early form of production of intangibles that precede
today’s dominant form of intangible digital production. With the help of the model of
cultural production from Bourdieu (1996[1992]), we can try to analyse the relations
between these as several fields of power, as it is these relations that determine the value
produced. However, I will slightly adjust Bourdieu’s model of the relation between the
field of cultural production and the power field(s) of society, since I find it somewhat
contradictory in its construction. In this I will build further on my discussion of the field
model in Bolin (2004), and on other qualifications and critical remarks made by David
Hesmondhalgh (2006) and Rodney Benson (1999).
All these discussions depart from the field model that Bourdieu (1996[1992])
elaborates on in The Rules of Art (a model in fact developed in articles from the 1970s
onward, some of which are translated and published in Bourdieu 1993). Here he discusses
the field of cultural production as a specific (sub)field of the larger field of power, in turn a
part of the (national) social space (see Figure 1).
The structuring principle for the field of cultural production is the opposition
between the degrees of acquired cultural and economic capital, and between the
consecrated top positions of the field versus the not-yet-consecrated positions of
newcomers, challengers and other agents who have not (at least not yet) acquired
dominant positions within it. Thus, Bourdieu makes a distinction between the sub-fields of
‘small-scale’ and ‘large-scale’ production, where the former consists of production for other
producers, and is thus restricted in its kind. This part of the field is marked by its high degree
of autonomy. Value judgements here are made solely on aesthetic grounds, and production
is produced for its own sake, unaffected by outer demand and influences from other areas
of social space. In the ‘sub-field of large-scale production’, production is directed towards
 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA INDUSTRIES 351

CE+CC+

CE- CE+
CC+ field ofcultural production CC-

Auton + Auton - field of

power
small- large-
scale scale

social space (national)

CE- CC-

CE Capital – Economic Auton + High degree of autonomy

CC Capital – Cultural Auton – Low degree of autonomy

FIGURE 1
The field of cultural production in the field of power and in social space. After Bourdieu
(1992/1996, p. 124)

an unrestricted market of undifferentiated consumers, and success is measured in

widespread popularity and counted in economic terms. This part of the field is low in
autonomy and, according to Bourdieu, has to obey the forces of the economic market.
There are at least three problems with Bourdieu’s model. The first, as Hesmondhalgh
(2006, p. 222) has pointed out, concerns the question of scale. Bourdieu labels the less
autonomous part of the field of cultural production the ‘sub-field of large-scale production’.
However, there are many commodities produced in this part of the field that do not fit this
description. A common misapprehension is, for example, that television broadcasters strive
to reach as large an audience as possible. This model might have been the guiding light for
broadcasters in the past, but today large audiences are considered a problem, since
advertisers do not want to pay for audiences that they do not want to address. In the eyes
of advertisers who want to reach 17 to 25-year-old girls, all other viewers are ‘waste’, and
are in this sense literally worthless. According to a production executive at Swedish TV4, the
company has ceased charging advertisers for audiences over the age of 55, and has started
to ‘give them away for free’ (see Bolin 2004, p. 283).
Furthermore, within the music business, as Hesmondhalgh (2006, p. 225) points out,
most records produced never recover their investment. Out of ten records, the popular
story goes, nine fail. These nine artists, then, or records, seem to destroy rather than
produce economic value. Furthermore, many of the most acclaimed artists of their time
352 GÖRAN BOLIN

are actually economic successes (e.g. Bob Dylan, The Beatles, etc.). So, how can we
understand this in relation to the field theory?
The solution is, I believe, to be found in Bourdieu’s theory of the production of belief
(Bourdieu 1993[1977]). The problem with the Bourdieuan terminology is that the concept
of large-scale production privileges an emphasis on the scale of production, rather than its
aim. The question of consecration is, then, not so much coupled with how many records
(or books, paintings, etc.) you actually sell, but with the way you relate to your production.
So, whether or not Dylan sells an infinite number of records is beside the point. His
legitimacy depends on the fact that he does not seem to care whether or not he sells, that
is, he is not aiming at achieving economic success. At least he convincingly appears to act
beyond or above economic goals in his cultural production, and in this respect convinces
his audience of his artistic autonomy. So, if one can convince others that the motives for
production are not economic but are instead artistic, and can thereby produce an
authentic aura as an artist (rather than as a profit-maker), one can get away with being
economically successful. As this example suggest, it might be better to speak of sub-fields
of restricted and un-restricted or heteronomous production, and altogether avoid
concepts of scale.
The second problem is connected with the strong emphasis Bourdieu places on ‘the
two fundamental principles of differentiation
economic capital and cultural capital’
(Bourdieu 1996, p. 5). The opposition between cultural and economic value is certainly
of great importance, but as has been pointed out by Rodney Benson (1999,
p. 485), the opposition is also problematic. The emphasis on the dichotomous character
of the structure obscures the fact that other kinds of value can be involved in the power
struggles within the field. For example, non-commercial, public service television
production cannot be explained by this model, since stakes are not made to produce
profit, and success is not measured in terms of economic value. Public service television is
more reliant on the production of political, and perhaps also educational, values in order
to gain legitimacy for its activities and to secure broadcasting licence agreements (see
Bolin 2004).
A third problem is whether there is only one field of power in society, as Bourdieu
suggests both in The Rules of Art (1996[1992]) and in his analysis of the French elite schools
in The State Nobility (Bourdieu 1996). This problem is unaddressed by both Benson and
Hesmondhalgh, but is in my view a key explanation of the two other problems they raise

especially that of the dual opposition between the cultural and the economic.1 If political
value is produced within the field of political power, would it not be more productive to
regard this as a separate field of power than to include it in a general power field?
Furthermore, if there were one comprehensive field of power, that field would certainly
not only be structured by high and low assets of economic and cultural capital. It is quite
clear that Bourdieu’s field model is inadequate for explaining relations between the most
powerful agents in society even at the national level, since all these agents do not struggle
over the same positions, and do not argue the same value judgements over the same
objects and phenomena.
As a consequence of the above objections, I would like to propose another model
for analysing field relations in order to explain how several kinds of value are produced,
especially those produced in the sub-field of undifferentiated and unrestricted media
production.
 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA INDUSTRIES 353

One of the crucial factors that can account for the production of multiple value
forms is the question of autonomy, and the relative dependence between fields. In Figure
1, autonomy is higher in the sub-field of restricted production, and lower in the sub-field
of unrestricted production. This means that the value produced in the latter sub-field is
more sensitive to influences from forces outside of the field of cultural production.
Bourdieu emphasizes the economic as an explanation, and argues that the sub-field of
weak autonomy is low on cultural assets and high on economic ones. However, I suggest
that although the forces of the economy are hard to neglect, at times there are other kinds
of value that are influential to the value generation within the field of cultural production.
I have tried to illustrate this in Figure 2.
In Figure 2 it is proposed that the economic power field is but one of the fields of
power that are influential on the part of the field of cultural production with low
autonomy. Indeed, for commercial media production, audience statistics and lifestyle
analysis are of utmost importance. However, for public service television it is obvious that
it is not primarily the commercial field that is important, but rather the political and
perhaps even the educational or academic field of power (the field that governs
knowledge value). It is within the power of agents in the political field to decide on
licence rights and concessions charters for broadcasters such as Swedish SVT, TV4 and
British ITV. This is also why it is important for public service broadcasters to engage in
audience measurement, since this is the tool that can produce arguments that a company
is fulfilling certain public service goals: to reach all citizens and not avoid elderly viewers,
to provide for minority programming, etc. It is not only the market that wants to
compartmentalize the audience in segments, but also the sphere of politics.
So, we can conclude that production within sub-fields of weak autonomy needs to
produce sign value to add to the economic value (e.g. political, economic, educational,
etc.). As a last section of this article, I would like to exemplify this by discussing two
kinds of intangible commodities that are produced in media industries, and see what
kinds of value are produced, and in relation to what intersecting interests or valuation
processes.

Political

Economic
Cultural

Educational/
academic

FIGURE 2
Outline of the relations between four fields of power.
354 GÖRAN BOLIN

Two Kinds of Intangible Commodities

In sub-fields of undifferentiated production with relatively lower levels of autonomy,
there are two basic commodities circulating
texts and audiences. Although these two
commodities are interconnected, they are also of different kinds, not least depending on
the national, organizational and legislative contexts of production, all of which are
components that affect the belief systems in which production is embedded. Hence they
become attributed with different kinds of value. As they are intangibles, however, the
principles for their production are similar.
It should be acknowledged that there is also a range of other commodities and
objects circulating within cultural production: artists, journalists and television hosts,
technical know-how (as well as technical gadgets), and other things drawn into the
‘consumptive production’ of popular music, film, computer games and television
programmes, to again use theoretical concepts from Marx. I have chosen these two
examples because they are common to production in many sectors of the cultural
industries, and they have the character of being subject to evaluation not only from the
field of economics, but also from other fields of power in society.

Texts as Intangible Commodities and Objects

In everyday life, we probably often think of works of art, films, music, books,
newspapers and computer games as the outcome of cultural production. However, in
order for these texts to be of economic value, they need to be surrounded by regulatory
frameworks, as texts open for all to access cannot have exchange value (but, of course, can
have use value). Some texts have always been intangible to a certain extent (we cannot
take home with us the play we just attended at a theatre), whereas other texts have been
bound to a physical form. With digitization these latter texts have been freed of their
tangible form, free to circulate on a range of platforms, and hence harder for their owners
to control. Legislation has naturally always been needed to constitute these as properties.
Textual commodities with narrative closure
that is, works
are easily definable in
sign economies and consequently heavily dependent on copyright. However, copyrights
are but one of the commodity forms that come out of the media industries.
Another commodity form is the trademark, as already pointed to in the beginning of
this article. Trademarks are not connected to works, but to characters in fictional stories, so
that others cannot capitalize on a known fictional character by putting him/her/it in
another fictional story. You cannot take Donald Duck and make up a new adventure
featuring him, as he is the property of Disney. In combination with copyright law,
trademark law extends the area of property for cultural producers, which is of great
importance for the computer game industry, since computer games do not have the
structure of closed narratives and hence cannot be as effectively protected by copyright
law as can traditional literature.
A similar commodity form that has appeared on the increasingly globalized
television market is the format (Moran 1998). Formats are more problematic to control
than are copyrighted texts. Copyright law only makes sense if you have individual works
that can be identified and distinguished, for example a song, a film or literary work.
A format is weaker than this. Basically, it is an idea for the main components in a television
 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA INDUSTRIES 355

series (e.g. Big Brother), and the commodity you sell is this basic idea, that can then be
modified or adapted to suit regional contexts (Bolin 2005b). For this idea to become a
commodity, it has to be documented in the form of a ‘bible’, preferably as detailed as
possible in order to be considered judicially valid as intellectual property. The legal
frameworks for formats are as yet weak, although there are examples of court cases
(Humphreys 2008). Although the legal frameworks are weak the market for formats still
functions, which can only be explained by a common belief in the value of formats and of
having a market for them.
Seemingly, format trade only involves disputes over the commercial value of media
texts, especially since this is the object of legislative efforts worldwide. And, of course,
formats are developed by production companies to produce economic surplus value.
However, if we consider the fact that the public service broadcasters of Europe also
engage in format production and, indeed, that one of the first productions
Expedition
Robinson, or Survivor as the international versions are labelled
was produced by Swedish
public service broadcaster SVT in 1997 and a few years onwards,2 we realize that this was a
production that did not aim to produce economic surplus value. So, how can we
understand this?
The answer to this question can be found in the specific relations of production in
which SVT is subsumed. As a public service broadcaster, SVT has to obey a public service
licence agreement decided on politically, where certain aims are formulated. Those who are
familiar with the public service context will recognize the aims of inclusiveness (all parts of
the population should be addressed, including all ages, sexes and ethnicities), and that
programming should uphold a certain level of quality, provide a certain amount of children’s
programming, be representative of all geographical parts of a country, be informative, be
educational, etc. Furthermore, until recently the commercial broadcaster TV4 also had to
obey these conditions, in exchange for the privilege of being the only commercial
broadcaster that reaches the whole of Sweden through terrestrial broadcasting. As I have
argued in more detail elsewhere (Bolin 2004), this means that there are fair amounts of
political and educational value produced both within the public service organizations and in
(at least some) commercial organizations. And when the then programme director of SVT
was questioned by journalists and in public cultural debate about why SVT produced
Expedition Robinson, it was on the grounds of its societal value of being public service and
upholding public service goals that he defended himself. The specific outer demand he was
addressing seemingly came from the field of political power (perhaps also the field of
educational and academic power). Public service television (and cultural producers with
similar conditions) do not respond to demands from the economic field of power, as this
field has very little influence on that part of the field of cultural production, and cannot
successfully make claims on what it should produce and how to do it.
Formats, however, are not the only way the text commodity appears in a more
complex form. With some format production we enter into the realm of ‘transmedia
storytelling’ (Jenkins 2006), whereby texts are constructed across platforms. Jenkins argues
that the specific form of ‘collective intelligence’ (p. 50) that viewers produce, shows ‘how
entertainment companies are reappraising the economic value of fan participation’ (p. 58).
In the next few paragraphs I will discuss this value production process in terms of
audiences and viewers, readers, listeners.
356 GÖRAN BOLIN

Audiences, Users and Labour

A main component in the production/consumption circuit is labour, which,
according to Marx, is the key to understanding how surplus value is generated. However,
in late modern sign commodity production a discussion on the nature and character of
labour that includes audience activity has arisen. Amateur media production and
interactivity on the part of the media user has been discussed in these terms, and
examples are given on texts in web communities that are produced by the users
themselves. The idea of user-generated content has popped up in relation to journalism
(Örnebring 2008), computer and video games (Banks & Humphreys 2008; Dyer-Witheford
2003), and social network sites (Terranova 2000). Calculations have been done to show
that the ‘GDP per capita in synthetic worlds is far higher than in the real world’s poorer
economies, such as those of India and China’, as Edward Castronova (2005, p. 13) argues in
reference to online gaming.
The debate on the role of labour in late modern digital economies takes many forms.
One part concerns the conditions of labour (e.g. Mosco & McKercher 2008). Another comes
from autonomist Marxists scholars and concerns ‘immaterial labour’, by which they mean
that labour ‘that produces an immaterial product, such as ideas, images, forms of
communication, affects, our social relationships’ (Hardt 2005, p. 176). Aside from the fact
that I find the concept misleading (certainly, it is not labour that is immaterial, but rather
the result), in this context I will restrict myself to discussing the argument that the
television audience works in the service of the networks while watching, an argument first
made by Dallas Smythe (1977), but later more thoroughly discussed by Sut Jhally and Bill
Livant (1986) and updated ‘for an era of new-media interactivity’ by Mark Andrejevic
(2002).
Admittedly, audiences are being increasingly drawn into the processes of generating
economic value. However, rather than ‘working for the networks’ as Jhally and Livant claim,
it is probably more fruitful to regard audience activity not as labour, but as the raw material
that is tooled into a commodity by the media industries and sold as a commodity to
advertisers (Meehan 2000). This is also why a concept like ‘user generated content’ and
related concepts like ‘produser’ and ‘prosumer’ (Bruns 2008) are ideological concepts,
obscuring the fact that this specific kind of production is not compensated for by the
industry (although it naturally can have personal value outside the market for the
individual). We can also see that this discussion has been part of an ongoing debate since at
least the 1940s: ‘The customer is not the king, as the culture industry would like to have us
believe, not its subject but its object’, writes Adorno (1975[1967], p. 12) in a follow-up essay
to his and Horkheimer’s culture industry essay.
The text commodity, then, is a means to construct audiences to sell to advertisers (or,
in the public service setting, to construct political legitimacy). These audiences are
constructed from audience statistics and lifestyle segmentation techniques, and depending
on what kind of outer demand it answers to, the accounting differs between public service
and commercial broadcasters. On the commercial market, prices are set according to
agreements between broadcasters and advertisers to meet the demands of the latter. On
the public service ‘market’, where success is measured in terms of political and cultural
legitimacy, audiences are still accounted for along the same principles, but with the
significant difference that the audience ‘commodity’ is constructed according to its political
 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA INDUSTRIES 357

(or cultural, educational, etc.) value rather than its commercial one. So while the commercial
industry accounts for an audience that is demanded for by advertisers, the public service
companies package their commodity in terms of ethnic, age, geographic, etc. measurement
to answer to their licence agreements with the state (if we use the Swedish example). Both
markets, however, are served by the same accounting system using people meters.
All media researchers know that ‘the audience’ is a very slippery category (see Ang
1991). Audience statistics are of course only representations, based on statistical
calculation and probability theory. Audiences, as commodities, in fact have very little to
do with the social subjects that watch, read and listen to media texts. This is naturally
common knowledge among media analysts and marketing executives. Nonetheless, all
these people negotiate the value of their respective audience, and come to agreements on
this value, irrespective of the methodological uncertainties surrounding audience
statistics. As Streeter (1996, p. 281) points out, ‘[t]he most striking fact about the
statistically mediocre character of ratings is how little industry members care about it’. You
could say that the parties involved act as if this were not the case, as if statistics equalled
social reality. In these negotiations numbers become real, and are the basis for real prices
set. This is what I would say is the belief in the system that is activated. And this is also
because everyone involved knows that there is no other way to come to an agreement on
prices. So when people at Swedish TV4 say that they give certain older audiences ‘away for
free’, this is only based on the common agreement among those involved that these
specific segments are worthless.
The symbolic or semiotic form of the audience commodity freed from any social
referent (the viewers) is thus a more effective commodity in the capitalist economy, since
its turnover rate is more rapid. It is continuously renewed each day by new audience
figures in the process of semiotic realization of its commercial value.
This means that these symbolic markets are ‘universes of belief’, as Bourdieu
(1993[1977], p. 82) puts it. These are markets that produce symbolic commodities in which
the relation between the commodity and its social referent is ‘misrecognized’ and thus
recognized as a commodity with a specific value on this specific market. This also explains
the empiric fallacy of Smythe, Jhally and Livant, and Andrejevic, who see statistics as
representative of reality: it is not the viewers who work, but rather the statisticians.
Seemingly, this would support arguments for commercialization of the media made
within some parts of media research, where economic market logics seep into media
production. It is also true that Bourdieu has been accused of economism, and of reducing
everything to exchange value (e.g. Skeggs 2004), something that he defends himself
against (e.g. Bourdieu 1992[1980], p. 112). However, it would be more accurate to say, in
line with Guillory (1993, p. 322), that all kinds of production today are embedded in or
related to capitalist modes of production
including those that do not aim to produce
economic value: ‘the market is the historical condition and not merely the proper analogy
for the extension of the value-concept to all acts of judgment’ (p. 324). This is the
commensurability that also makes different kinds of value
economic, aesthetic, social,
political, etc.
into value in its singular form, indeed also the manoeuvre that Marx makes
initially in the first chapter of Capital, where he immediately collapses ‘exchange value’
into its shorthand ‘value’.
358 GÖRAN BOLIN

Conclusion
In the above I have argued for a more refined analysis of how value is created in
media and culture industries. Many examples are drawn from television production, but as
argued, television production shares many features with other kinds of contemporary
cultural production of intangible commodities. In the course of this argument I have
presented a modified model of Bourdieu’s analytical tools in order to make them better fit
production in an area where most commodities are entirely symbolic, which, as I argue,
makes the signifying practices in the form of, e.g., audience measurement and market
analysis techniques, increasingly more important for the construction of economic and
other values.
That I have engaged quite extensively in television production is not entirely a
coincidence. With digitization it follows that more cultural commodities circulate on
markets similar to those of the traditional mass media
television and radio. This means
that the relation between producers and consumers becomes altered, and that market
models become increasingly adapted from the mass media industry, where audiences are
estimated, packaged and sold to sponsors and advertisers. The industry that creates
(economic) value by selling tangible commodities will differ in its strategy from the
industry that creates value by selling its audiences. Following from this concentration on
production of intangible commodities, economic value is produced according to the same
principles as other kinds of value (political, cultural, educational). And as such, all value
relations are more obviously interconnected. However, there will still be specificities
connected to production within different cultural sectors, and these differences need to be
analysed empirically (the computer game industry compared to the music business, for
example). This is so not least because different intangible commodities will have different
capabilities of constructing audiences, and there are intense efforts being made today to
develop more refined means of constructing the audience or user commodity for
advertisers or others who want to buy this good: behavioural targeting (e.g. on social
network sites such as Facebook), virtual ads (in social worlds like Second Life), product
placement (building narratives around consumer goods), ‘advergaming’ (mix of advertis-
ing and interactive online games) and ‘asynchronous ads’ (triggered by behaviour, but
with delayed appearance to avoid being experienced as intrusive) are but a few of the
buzzwords circulating within the advertising industries, and new business alliances are
developing
for example between textual producers, search engines (Google, Yahoo!) and
ISPs
trying to ‘monetize’ user behaviour and to administrate the attention of ‘the digital
consumer’.3
In the wake of this renewed interest in transforming the activities of viewers, readers
and listeners, there is also a need to further explore the role of labour in connection to this,
something I have largely avoided in the context of this article. The business is changing
rapidly, and this is an area that needs to be engaged in for those who seek to understand
the dynamics of contemporary media industries.

NOTES
1. This is also unresolved in Nick Couldry’s (2003) article on the media as producers of
‘meta-capital’, an argument that Couldry makes by analogy with Bourdieu’s theory on the
field of power in The State Nobility (1996). For all the merits of Couldry’s article, we are left
 SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION AND VALUE IN MEDIA INDUSTRIES 359

with the same problem: is it more helpful to regard the power relations as played out
within one field of power, or is it, as I suggest, better to regard the situation as
constructed by several competing fields of power? Although the media are certainly
in
the same way as the educational system
one of the most powerful agents of exercising
symbolic power (i.e. to produce naturalized representations of reality), the media do not

in the same way as the state
have the coercive power to force these representations
upon other fields. In this respect it is more helpful to think of the relation between the
field of media production and other fields of power as a web of interrelations.
2. The format was developed by British production company Castaway, but SVT was the
first broadcaster to produce and air the show (Steemers 2004, p. 175).
3. Much of these concepts and business models were discussed at the Changing
Advertising Summit: New clients, new consumers, new communications, London, 13
October 2008 (see mediaguardian.co.uk/advertisingsummit, last retrieved 27 November
2008).

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Göran Bolin, Professor of Media & Communication Studies, School of Culture & Communication,
Södertörn University, S-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden. Tel: 46 8 608 4218.
Email: goran.bolin@sh.se