Trading Cultures. An ethnography of trade fairs for TV programs, music and books.

Global flows of cultural goods and their use in regional contexts have been extensively documented by media and communications scholars since the 1970s. But cultural goods do not travel themselves. They are evaluated, selected and marketed to national audiences in certain ways by so called intermediaries. While our understanding of global flows and local adaptation is well developed, we know little about the people who trade in culture. What are their criteria for selection, what is their understanding of markets and marketing, where do they get information about new trends and how do they adopt it? Picking up insights from new institutionalism and field theory we assume that selling and buying decisions by cultural intermediaries rest on shared beliefs, routines and rules, i.e. a taken for granted trading culture which diffuses throughout global organizational fields. The project aims at an ethnographic account of this trading culture in three different cultural industries: TV programming, music distribution and book publishing. Although these industries differ significantly in terms of economic characteristics, we expect to observe similarities in how industry people conceive their business, evaluate cultural goods and adapt business routines hence forming a kind of cross-media global trading culture which channels the global flow of cultural goods. Trade fairs serve a crucial function in forming and spreading this culture. Beside its main purpose of bringing sellers and buyers from different parts of the world together and facilitating contracting we assume that trade fairs help industry people to assert their occupational identities, refine their evaluative criteria and learn about new business routines. They get answers on questions like: what is this business about, how can we tell good products from poor and which business practices are most appropriate? Hence, we focus on three trade fairs (the TV content market MIPCOM, the music show midem and the Frankfurt Book Fair) in order to reveal the cultural basis of global trade in cultural goods.

International trade fairs play an important role in business life: At trade fairs, companies inform themselves about trends in the industry, services and the range of products offered by competitors, they provide the opportunity to exhibit their products and strengthen the reputation of the company, they are a forum for building and maintaining networks and, of course, for preparing and making business deals. From a sociological perspective, however, industries use trade fairs also to present themselves, to transport an image to the public and to confirm a common identity. They are a place where one can study the ideal self-image of an industry or, in sociological terms, its symbolic representations. In the project "Trading Cultures" we examined six so-called content fairs, i.e. trade fairs such as the Frankfurter Buchmesse or the TV fair MIPCOM in Cannes, where licenses for cultural products such as books, films or music are traded. In doing so, we used the ethnographic method, i.e. we immersed ourselves in the culture of international content trading just like anthropologists do in foreign cultures. By means of participatory observation, qualitative interviews and material available at trade fairs (such as programmes, catalogues and promotional items) we tried to find out something about the self-image, the implicit, often little reflected practices of this industry. We identified five different ways how these industries, which are usually subsumed under the term cultural industry, present themselves: as an idealized form of business, as art for art's sake, as innovation and technology, as entertainment and as public space. It is interesting to note that although these identities are in part quite contradictory, they were observed at the fairs as identities of the cultural industry on an equal footing. This contradicts a central assumption in cultural industry research, particularly in the tradition of the French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, according to which the legitimate definition of the field (or the industry) is always a matter of dispute in fields such as the cultural industry. In contrast, we consider the different symbolic representations at trade fairs as components of a cultural toolkit from which, depending on the situation, professionals in the sector choose legitimations for their actions in order to assert their interests. For example, we find that large corporations such as Google and Amazon, according to context, present themselves as patrons of the arts in the same way as small niche providers, and conversely, small companies use the same business language as large corporations in order to be considered legitimate representatives of their industry. This shows how flexibly symbolic representations are used in business life.