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The Market for Symbolic Goods - Coggle Diagram
The Market for Symbolic Goods
All goods have symbolic value, however, the creative industries are noted for the production of goods that generally serve an aesthetic or expressive rather than a clearly utilitarian purpose.
Two principles of legitimacy, centering on the symbolic and the economic, structure the reception of the creative industry products.
To be appreciated, they must satisfy the symbolic; to be viable, they must address the economic.
The term "creative industries" itself stimulates disquiet, evoking concerns that marketization and the imperatives of the commodity form fundamentally change cultural products, cultural producers, and cultural labor, challenging culture´s perceived role as a public good and as a creative civilizing force.
What makes a work of art a work of art and not a mundane thing or a simple utensil?
The answer lies in the intrinsic of the object, an individual´s pleasure and enjoyment in response to the artifact. To others the answer lies in the role of the institution: "The art object... is an artifact whose foundation can only be found in an art world, that is, in a social universe that confers upon it the status of a candidate for aesthetic appreciation".
Cultural or symbolic goods differ from material goods an that one can "consume" them only by apprehending their meaning.
Social conditions heavily influence aesthetic experience, the work of art is given only to those who have received the means to acquire the means to appropriate it.
Capitals
Social capital is the actual and potential resources in durable networks of less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition.
Cultural capital exists as an embodied state of long-lasting "dispositions" acquired through the socialization of family and peers, and "work on oneself" in acquiring "cultivates" habits and states; an objectified state of valued, cultural material objects.
For Bourdieu, cultural and social capital, both in objectified and embodied forms, are capital because their basis lies in a universal equivalent of labour-time: capital is accumulated labour.
Cultural and social capital are convertible into economic capital under certain conditions but they remain distinct and separate forms.
Symbolic capital
Essentially, symbolic capital is field-specific capital a form of legitimacy or respect granted according to that which is valued within the field; the prestige that reflects knowledge of, and recognition within, the field.
Symbolic cultural capital is thus the capacity to define and legitimize cultural and artistic values, standards, and styles.
Symbolic capital is intimately linked to power. Symbolic power is the performative power of meaning, the power of consecration, to make something exist in the objectified, public, formal state which only previously existed in an implicit state.
The "art market" exists through the cultural complex of critics, art historians, museum directors, professors, collectors, dealers, auctioneers, and experts.
The role of the critic in mediating artistic appreciation influences the assessment of cultural production; the pre-selection of goods for potential consumption is affected by, and through, the filtering of several "boundary spanners", drawing on detailed, though rarely articulated, knowledge of a field.
Copyright and intellectual property right protection (IPR) is a vital element of business models: intellectual capital rendered into a form of property and then be protected and traded.
The creative industries are part of two different social worlds simultaneously, the commercial and the cultural.
Some of the claims made for the creative industries, and one of the reasons for their appeal to political agenda, are their ability to satisfy a number of demands. Of personal and social benefit through education and cultural development, they are also identified as important in shaping cultural and community identity.
Measures of value are especially exacerbated where cultural goods are not necessarily produced by and for market activities. Their valuation necessarily depends on mechanisms of translation,i.e. how the "value" of culture and creative products are rent calculable through metrics and language.
The relative balance and weight of capitals influence not only broad organizational structural, strategy, and design issues within publishing houses but also the daily practices that inform job roles and decisions.
Decision-makers evaluate, classify, choose, and justify their actions according to collective conventions that define what is legitimate and feasible reflecting the relative balance of the economic and cultural.
An example of this talking about publishing is that an indigenous publishing industry potentially plays an important role in protecting and promoting a cultural and national identity in the choice of works it chooses to publish and distribute. Given some of the pressures imposed by the wide economic field, this role may become more constrained.
The issue is how creative and cultural goods come to be affirmed, evaluated, and valorized, by whom, and for what. The opposition between money and culture reproduced in the publishing industry reflects the tensions between the symbolically valid and the economically viable in all creative fields.
Certain characteristics make the marketability of creative goods difficult and distinct: an inherent unknowability, and an infinite variety.
