Ida Willig

Newsroom ethnography in a field perspective

The reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu offers a promising analytical framework for extending the insights offered by the classical tradition of ethnographic newsroom studies. On a methodological level, Bourdieu’s analytical framework has the potential to help us address one of the key questions in ethnographic research: how should we theorise and empirically investigate context? The question is, not least, practical in nature. When it comes to newsroom ethnography, one of the traditional problems concerns the ‘invisibility’ of certain structures such as the political economy of everyday news work which guides journalist practice. By employing the analytical concepts of ‘journalistic field’, ‘news habitus’ and ‘newsroom capital’, reflexive sociology offers a research strategy for simultaneously studying journalistic practices and the structures that enable and constrain them. A case study of Danish news values is used as a vehicle for presenting Bourdieu’s field theory, which is discussed in relation to newsroom studies more generally. It shows how the ‘context’, often missing in ethnographic studies, can be analysed using the framework of reflexive sociology.

Field Theory and Media Production: A Bridge-Building Strategy

Pierre Bourdieu’s book On Television (1998a), which was published in French in 1996, was an essayistic and critical analysis of the French journalistic field, of the power of journalism and journalists and of the professional ideology guiding the journalistic field, such as a constant drive for ‘scoops’. Before that, Bourdieu had not been addressing media production specifically but had worked with more general questions of cultural production and power. The Field of Cultural production: Essays on Art and Literature (Bourdieu, 1993) and later The Rules of Art (Bourdieu, 1996) present empirical research and essays on art and literature forming a field analysis of the inner workings of small-scale art production; and the seminal work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Bourdieu, 2003), is a mapping of the social space of cultural consumption, proposing a critique of the notion of ‘taste’ and its (naturalized) relation to power. Other work—for instance, Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988), an analysis of the academic field in France—is also important to media production studies as it unfolds and operationalizes the concepts of field, habitus and capital in the context of cultural production.

PR, Lobbyism and Democracy: Mapping the revolving door in Denmark from 1981 to 2015

Abstract The growth of PR in Scandinavia is linked both to the mediatisation of politics and to the decline of corporatism. Studies in Sweden and Norway suggest that one consequence of these changes is the increasing number of politicians who find new careers as lobbyists in the private sector. In this study, we have constructed a data set of all members of the Danish Parliament who have left politics from 1981 to 2015 (n = 613) and identified the number and type of job positions they have taken up subsequently (n = 1,094). We find that, especially from the 1990s, we can register revolving door activity. Still, 89 per cent of all the registered job positions fall outside of lobbyism. 11 per cent of the job positions fall within the wider field associated with the emerging field of policy professionals (including lobbyism), while lobbyism on its own accounts for two per cent of the job positions.