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Key Words symbol fabrication, organizational fields, creative careers, autoproduction, markets
* Abstract The production of culture perspective focuses on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. After tracing the consolidation of the perspective in the late 1970s, we introduce six facets of production (technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational careers, and market) and use them to theorize within the production perspective a wide range of research. Third, we show the utility of the facet model in coherently theorizing a research study based in a quite different perspective. Fourth, we explore the recent application of the production perspective in organizational research. Fifth, we outline the recent extension of the production perspective to autoproduction, the study of identity formation, and meaning in informal relations. Finally, we discuss criticisms of the perspective and suggest opportunities for research.
INTRODUCTION1
The production of culture perspective focuses on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. Initially, practitioners of this perspective focused on the fabrication of expressive-symbol elements of culture, such as art works, scientific research reports, popular culture, religious practices, legal judgments, journalism (Peterson 1976), and other parts of what are now often called the culture or creative industries. Recently, the perspective has been successfully applied to a range of quite different situations in which the manipulation of symbols is a by-product rather than the purpose of the collective activity (Crane 1992, Peterson 2001).
Looking back, the utility of the production perspective seems clear, but in the 1970s, when it emerged as a self-conscious perspective, it challenged the then-dominant idea that culture and social structure mirror each other. Then, a symbiotic relationship between a singular functioning social system and its coherent overarching culture was embraced by a wide range of theorists of contemporary society, including most Marxists who distinguished between social structure and cultural superstructure and functionalists such as Talcott Parsons. The former asserted that those who controlled the means of producing wealth shaped culture to fit their own class interests; the latter believed that a set of monolithic abstract values determined the shape of social structure. Breaking from...