Cultural Products and Creative Decisions

• In Event: 359 - Regular Session. Economic Sociology 3

Abstract

Faced with high uncertainty, how do producers in the cultural economy make creative decisions? Drawing on 9 months of participant observation across three advertising firms and interviews with 70 employees of these firms, I identify how advertising practitioners negotiate with clients who are unclear in explaining what they want and who rely on the creative expertise of practitioners to provide a good set of advertisements. I argue that the production of advertisements can be understood as the assembly and performance of iconic scripts. This social process helps us better understand how creative choice sets come to have their particular forms prior to their market debut. Why were Salganik’s (2006) songs the available options in the first place? Why do Godart and Mears’ (2009) fashion models look the way they do when they enter an audition to begin with? Faced with high uncertainty, how do cultural producers decide what specifically to offer as choice sets to clients? The evidence from these advertising agencies suggests cultural producers use the iconic scripts they have learned to perform cultural products for their clients to the standards of their industries.

Author

• Andrew C Cohen, Yale University