Symbolic Production And Value In Media Industries

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.