Marc Verboord

Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005

This article charts key developments and cross-national variations in the coverage of foreign culture (i.e., classical and popular music, dance, film, literature, theater, television, and visual arts) in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. elite newspapers between 1955 and 2005. Such coverage signals the awareness of foreign culture among national elites and the degree and direction of “globalization from within.” Using content analysis, we examine the degree, direction, and diversity of the international orientation of arts journalism for each country and cultural genre. Results denote how international arts and culture coverage has increased in Europe but not in the United States. Moreover, the centrality of a country in the cultural “world-system” offers a better explanation for cross-national differences in international orientation than do other country-level characteristics, such as size and cultural policy framework. Recorded and performance-based genres differ markedly in their levels of internationalization, but the effect of other genre-level characteristics, such as language dependency and capital intensiveness, is not clear. In each country, international coverage remains concentrated on a few countries, of which the United States has become the most prominent. Although the global diversity of coverage has increased, non-Western countries are still underrepresented.

Change and Continuity in Newspaper Coverage of Popular Music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands

In this article, we describe general features of popular music coverage in elite newspapers in the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1955 to 2005. Drawing on data from content analysis of over 4,000 newspaper articles sampled in four reference years (1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005), we document broad changes and continuities in the extent, focus, and form of popular music coverage in mainstream media outlets of each country.

The impact of peer-produced criticism on cultural evaluation: A multilevel analysis of discourse employment in online and offline film reviews:

Traditionally, media critics play a central role in the attribution of symbolic value to cultural products. This article studies empirically how the process of cultural evaluation is affected by the rise of peer-produced criticism online. More specifically, I examine how the discourse that critics employ to substantiate their aesthetic evaluations differs across media platforms and is affected by the institutionalization of critics, the symbolic dimensions of the reviewed film and the overall media attention paid to that film. Empirically, this study involves a multi-level analysis of 624 film reviews, which attends to media-level and film-level characteristics. The results reveal that the ascendance of peer-produced content not only challenges the hierarchical model of cultural evaluation, which remains in use, but adds a further dimension. At the same time, differences across media platforms (print, webzines, film blogs, amateur postings) reveal continuous rather than dichotomous patterns, thus emphasizing the blurring of media boundaries.

Globalization and Ethnic Diversity in Western Newspaper Coverage of Literary Authors: Comparing Developments in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955 to 2005

In contrast to most studies on cultural globalization, this article examines the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange between and within (Western) nation-states. Through content analysis, the authors study the extent and composition of newspaper coverage given to literary authors of non-Western ethnic origin—both foreign and domestic—in four nations across 50 years.The analysis reveals, among other things, that newspaper attention to ethnic minority authors appears related to various features of a nation’s ethnic minority population, the extent that a given national literary field is receptive to ethnic diversity, and the relative position of that nation in the literary world-system.

Cultural Mediators and Gatekeepers

markdownabstract__Abstract__ The shaping influence of cultural mediators, in particular their legitimizing power, has led cultural scholars to coin them ‘tastemakers,’ ‘gatekeepers,’ ‘surrogate consumers,’ ‘reputational entrepreneurs,’ or even ‘coproducers’ of the work of art. Yet, in practice, mediators perform highly different and often distinct activities according to their particular contributions in the (increasingly) vertically differentiated process of cultural production. This article discusses the various roles and activities of cultural mediators, followed by a review of the role and impact of critics and other mediators in the production and consumption of culture.

Female bestsellers: A cross-national study of gender inequality and the popular–highbrow culture divide in fiction book production, 1960–2009

This article studies trends in gender inequality in the domain of fiction books between 1960 and 2009 in France, Germany and the United States by analysing bestseller lists and literary award winners. It is argued that gender inequality is larger in fields or genres where more status is at stake for individual agents, as this causes an influx of men who then ‘edge’ women out of the field. The study finds evidence for this mechanism, as the presence of female authors in bestseller lists (exponent of the popular culture system) is larger than that among literary award winners (highbrow culture system) in all three countries. Cross-national differences are consistent (US smallest inequality, France largest), emphasizing the importance of field characteristics in explaining social inequalities in cultural production.

Dimensions of Conventionality and Innovation in Film: The Cultural Classification of Blockbusters, Award Winners, and Critics’ Favourites

Today’s complex film world seems to upset the dual structure corresponding with Bourdieu’s categorization of ‘restricted’ and ‘large-scale’ fields of cultural production. This article examines how movies in French, Dutch, American and British film fields are classified in terms of material practices and symbolic affordances. It explores how popular, professional, and critical recognition are related to film production as well as interpretation. Analysis of the most successful film titles of 2007 offers insight into the film field’s differentiation. Distinction between mainstream and artistic film shows a gradual rather than a dichotomous positioning that spans between conventionality and innovation. Apparently, the intertwining of small-scale and large-scale film fields cannot be perceived as a straightforward loss of distinction or an overall shift of production logics, but rather as ‘production on the boundaries’ in which filmmakers combine production logics to cater to publics with various levels of aesthetic fluency and omnivorous taste patterns.

Arts Journalism And Its Packaging In France, Germany, The Netherlands And The United States, 1955–2005

In the second half of the twentieth century, the volume, content and appearance of arts journalism in Western daily newspapers have changed significantly in accordance with wider transformations in the arts and journalism. Previous studies have focused on (1) which culture receives attention, (2) the way culture gets attention, and (3) economic pressures underlying transformations. In this article we aim to bring these strands together by analyzing how changes in the packaging of arts journalism have evolved in relation to the cultural content which is discussed and the volume of (cultural) advertising that is featured in newspapers. We conduct a content analysis of the coverage given to both “highbrow” and “popular” art forms in French, German, Dutch and US elite newspapers for four sample years: 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005. The results show that newspapers all seem to converge into a balance between news reporting and reviewing. We find evidence for an increased catering for the needs and interests of audiences in some aspects (e.g. more popular culture) but not in others (e.g. no more human interest). Finally, most newspapers show an increase in cultural advertising, although the European newspapers in our sample contain much less advertising than the American ones. A stronger presence of advertising is positively related to both a lifestyle orientation of newspapers and a focus on popular culture.

Institutional Recognition in the Transnational Literary Field, 1955–2005

Contributing to research on social processes of cultural de-hierarchization, this article explores how critical recognition in elite newspapers is related to the recognition that authors receive from other agents in the literary field in the past half-century. We distinguish four types of institutional recognition: (a) long-term recognition in literary encyclopedias, (b) short-term recognition through literary awards, (c) recognition through bestseller list success, and (d) recognition through the prestige of publishers. Our study uses a sample of articles from 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005 in French, German, Dutch and US elite papers (N=2,419), as well as further information on the extent to which fiction book authors discussed in the newspaper sample received the above forms of institutional recognition. We conduct cluster analysis to inductively establish how these forms of recognition are related, and multinomial logistic regression analysis to predict membership of clusters. Throughout the period 1955–2005 we consistently find three author categories: the unrecognized, the contemporary prestigious, and the historical prestigious. Countries differ, however, in the extent to which these categories are represented in newspaper literary coverage. Our analysis of factors determining membership of these clusters points to the lasting importance of symbolic capital, but also to the transnational nature of institutional recognition as local and international recognition show highly similar patterns.

Reading behaviour from adolescence to early adulthood: A panel study of the impact of family and education on reading fiction books

In this article we study how the frequency of book-reading – a form of legitimate culture – develops in the period from adolescence to young adulthood and how it is influenced by parents’ education, parental reading socialization climate, school and their interactions. In disentangling parental and educational effects we contribute to the cultural reproduction–cultural mobility debate. We use multi-actor panel data on three cohorts of Dutch secondary school students (and their parents) who took part in a classroom survey between the ages of 14 and 17, and who participated in at least one of the follow-up surveys two, four and six years later. We find that the amount of book-reading is more strongly associated with education than with parents’ reading socialization. The influence of parents increases slightly in the period from adolescence to young adulthood. Differences in reading behaviour between students of different educational programmes increase during secondary education, but decrease in the period after secondary schooling. The transition to tertiary education hardly affects the frequency of reading. Overall, the results are more in line with the cultural reproduction model than with the cultural mobility model.