Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies

This paper crosses the research fields of cultural policy and urban
design, and examines a new globally significant experiment in creative
city development/creative placemaking strategy: the Seoul Digital Media
City (DMC).
In order to examine important factors in creative placemaking – the
‘vitality’ and ‘authenticity’ of the DMC – the paper investigates the arts
and cultural/creative activities in the area. In particular, it conveys how
arts and culture is carefully and strategically used as a ‘tool’ to accomplish the national political aim of developing the new urban district as a ‘creative’ urban place and its identity-making for achieving ‘local globalness’ as a global competitiveness strategy.

The literary field has been conceptualized in social scientific work as patterned in particular ways. Historically, popular reading has been linked with contested processes of social change. Tastes for reading have, following Bourdieu, been seen as embedded in continuing processes of distinction and the making of hierarchies. Research has demonstrated the ways in which these hierarchies might be reflective of gender as well as of class relationships. This article examines the findings of the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion study in the light of these debates. The survey gathered data about the types of reading material used by a representative sample of the United Kingdom (UK) population, including their preferences for newspapers, magazines and books. The article reports on a number of possible relationships identified in the study about the location of reading as a social practice, drawing on the survey data and explanatory accounts of respondents' reading preferences drawn from focus groups and interviews. The regularity of participation in reading and ownership of books are outlined in relation to occupational class. Evidence relating to the reading of magazines and newspapers is then examined in the light of contemporary policy concerns. Patterns of taste in books are explored, examining preferences for ‘literary’ genres, gender, education and ethnicity. The article concludes by addressing the position of taste for, and knowledge of, specific works representing a range of positions within the literary field to complete the picture of cultural capital and the literary field in the contemporary UK.

This article argues for a focus on the relationships between retail managers, workers and the objects that they sell in understanding the production of retail spaces and service interactions as meaningful. Sociological and critical management literatures on the service encounter have emphasized the extent to which retail workers are encouraged to display enthusiasm for the things that they sell as part of the process of selling. Indeed, competitive advantage in large modern retail environments is often premised upon the ‘quality’ of customer service and the genuineness of worker engagement with the customer. This article examines these debates in the context of the UK retail book trade and argues that this emphasis in the literature might neglect the extent to which relationships with symbolic goods in consumer society are not simply benign resources for the creation of reflexive selves. It argues that the notion of reading as a worthwhile or respectable leisure pursuit informs the working practices of the book trade. It demonstrates this through interviews with bookshop managers about processes of selection and recruitment and interviews with managers and workers about relationships with customers. Both of these aspects of retail work are informed by relationships to objects that reflect and produce inequalities in cultural capital. In the discourse of the retail book trade, bookshop workers and customers are presumed to be particular types of people with particular orientations to the products being sold. The embodied cultural capital of workers leads to interactions that implicate the bookshop as a site in which hierarchies of cultural value are produced and reinforced.

This paper examines recent debates about the role of what Bourdieu termed cultural intermediaries in the formation and reproduction of the relations of cultural capital. Workers in the cultural or creative industries were given a central place in Bourdieu's schema in the creation of hierarchies of value in the production and consumption of symbolic goods. Subsequent writers about the apparent emergence of a creative economy (Lash and Urry 1994; Featherstone 1991) have given workers involved in the production and distribution of cultural goods a pivotal place in the development of late or post-modernity. More recent work (Negus 2002; Nixon and du Gay 2002) has criticized the validity and coherence of the term as it has come to be understood and called for more rigour in its definition and use. This paper adds to this debate by considering the book trade as a space in which the gap between production and consumption of cultural goods is mediated. It suggests that cultural intermediaries, as cultural workers, are engaged in the reproduction of the cultural aspects of social class by ‘shoring up’ their insecure position in the relations of cultural capital, rather than simply being the taste leaders of a reflexive modernity.

The article discusses the significance of cultural capital for the understanding of the field of housing in contemporary Britain. It explores the relationship between housing and the position of individuals in social space mapped out by means of a multiple correspondence analysis. It considers the material aspects of housing and the changing contexts that are linked to the creation and display of desire for social position and distinction expressed in talk about home decoration as personal expression and individuals' ideas of a `dream house'. It is based on an empirical investigation of taste and lifestyle using nationally representative survey data and qualitative interviews. The article shows both that personal resources and the imagination of home are linked to levels of cultural capital, and that rich methods of investigation are required to grasp the significance of these normally invisible assets to broaden the academic understanding of the field of housing in contemporary culture.

This paper offers an analysis of The Big Read,a television and internet based search for thenation’s favourite book broadcast in 2003, in the light of Bourdieusian accounts of the literaryfield.The Big Read initiative involved an interactive television programme and poll basedaround a list of the most popular 100 works of fiction as proposed and voted for by BBCviewers, listeners and readers. The stories about books and reading that emerge from the programmes and their associated organisations are considered in the light of Bourdieu’smodel of the ‘literary field’. Notions of autonomous and heteronomous forms of cultural production and their relation to cultural hierarchies are considered in the context of theinclusive take on questions of literary and popular reading evident throughoutThe Big Read initiative. Whilst discussions of autonomy and heteronomy in research on cultural productiontends towards a concentration on the pernicious influence of the economic field upon theapparently autonomous field of the cultural, this paper instead identifies and reflects on tworelated sources of heteronomy necessary for understanding the contemporary literary fieldrevealed byThe Big Read . Firstly it draws on insights provided by Bourdieu’s later work totrace the media’s role as mediating or ‘meta-capital’ in organising the position and make-upof the literary field in social space. Secondly it uses material drawn from those governmentaland quasi-governmental organisations involved inThe Big Read to examine the relationship between the literary field and the field of policy. The paper argues that the consideration of the heteronomous influence of both media and policy narratives might offer an importantextension of what Bourdieu can contribute to the analysis of the contemporary cultural field.

In recent years, strong claims have been made for the breakdown of national boundaries and the reformation of national identities in an increasingly interconnected global world – driven in large part by the possibilities and limitations that emerge from an increasingly global media world. It has been argued that new postnational, cosmopolitan subjectivities accompany, enable and feed off globally oriented forms of cultural consumption. This article examines these claims in the light of unusually comprehensive data on the tastes of the white British population collected in a large national sample survey, in-depth interviews and focus groups. By identifying and analysing the geographical spread of the cultural referents of the tastes of the white British we make an empirical assessment of the claims for cosmopolitan identities. We argue that if white British identities are being reformed by processes of globalisation it is, paradoxically, in an increasingly Anglophone direction.

This paper offers some speculative discussion about the current state of the “omnivore” debate, instigated by Richard A. Peterson. It argues that debates about the social patterning of tastes need to take greater account of changed practices of cultural production as well as consumption through the identification of two “stories of abundance” in the cultural realm. The first relates to accounts of the changing and expanding cultural industries, whilst the second considers the rich variety of widely available culture enabled by various technologies of distribution. Taking these stories into account, the paper argues that sociological analyses of cultural hierarchy might lag behind those that are mundane and everyday to both cultural producers and consumers and that an orientation to culture that ranges across established hierarchies is increasingly unremarkable. Such a change is related to the structural and discursive means through which culture is circulated. The paper concludes that cultural analysts need to modify their theoretical models and their methodological approaches to better reflect a variegated field of culture and a more fluid cultural hierarchy. In the tradition of both Peterson and Bourdieu, contemporary analyses of patterns of cultural consumption and taste need to take fuller account of the ways in which culture is produced, circulated and valued if they are to maintain their explanatory power