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.