Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry

Zafirau, Stephen

doi:10.1007/s11133-007-9083-8

Cited by 62 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…The entertainment industry has a particular reputation among ethnographers for being difficult to penetrate. Previous ethnographers studying the entertainment industry have described challenges in gaining access to field sites and observing backstage conversations (Grindstaff, 2002;Zafirau, 2008). On the other hand, I gained access relatively easily through a personal contact.…”

Section: The Case Of Reality Televisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dealing with reality: Market demands, artistic integrity, and identity work in reality television production

Wei

2012

Poetics

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Cultural industry workers at times compromise the values and tastes that are important parts of their artistic identities to accommodate commercial demands. I argue that workers resolve frustrations that arise from such compromises through identity work, individuals' active construction of their identities in social contexts. Using ethnographic data from fieldwork at a reality television production company, I describe two identity work strategies, distancing and evaluative tweaking, that workers use to maintain their artistic integrity despite producing work that does not meet their standards of quality. The manner through which these strategies emerged during micro social interaction differed between managers and non-managers. Managers used distancing and evaluative tweaking to simultaneously do identity work and regulate their employees' identities when justifying decisions that threatened shared values and tastes. On the other hand, employees distanced themselves from managers while venting to colleagues about managers' decisions that conflicted with their idiosyncratic values and tastes. These dynamics are illustrated through a setting that has received insufficient ethnographic attention, reality television production. Some reality television workers prefer to portray "real" and "authentic" situations. These workers employ identity work strategies to maintain artistic integrity when distorting reality to create the drama and conflict they consider marketable. AbstractCultural industry workers at times compromise the values and tastes that are important parts of their artistic identities to accommodate commercial demands. I argue that workers resolve frustrations that arise from such compromises through identity work, individuals' active construction of their identities in social contexts. Using ethnographic data from fieldwork at a reality television production company, I describe two identity work strategies, distancing and evaluative tweaking, that workers use to maintain their artistic integrity despite producing work that does not meet their standards of quality. The manner through which these strategies emerged during micro social interaction differed between managers and nonmanagers. Managers used distancing and evaluative tweaking to simultaneously do identity work and regulate their employees' identities when justifying decisions that threatened shared values and tastes. On the other hand, employees distanced themselves from managers while venting to colleagues about managers' decisions that conflicted with their idiosyncratic values and tastes. These dynamics are illustrated through a setting that has received insufficient ethnographic attention, reality television production. Some reality television workers prefer to portray "real" and "authentic" situations. These workers employ identity work strategies to maintain artistic integrity when distorting reality to create the drama and conflict they consider marketable.

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Section: The Case Of Reality Televisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dealing with reality: Market demands, artistic integrity, and identity work in reality television production

Wei

2012

Poetics

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“…First, concierges play a key role in impression management for their clients in both professional and personal networks, performing "reputation work" (Zafirau 2008) on their behalf. In making consumption decisions, concierges act as a kind of identity proxy, sending signals about the client via choices about home décor, clothes, entertaining, and so on.…”

Section: Class Roles and Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Production of Distinctions: Class, Gender, and Taste Work in the Lifestyle Management Industry

Sherman¹

2010

Qual Sociol

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Drawing on participant observation and interviews, this paper analyzes the paid labor of lifestyle production. In particular, I look at jobs in the lifestyle management industry that involve making consumption-related aesthetic choices with and for clients. This is taste work, and workers are taste brokers, who mediate between clients and markets, between clients and other people, and between clients and their own desires. Taste brokers shape not only clients' consumption decisions but also their class performances and dispositions. I argue that taste brokers also reproduce legitimate social differences in three ways: by fostering distinctions between "good" and "bad" taste; by reinforcing the association between particular tastes and particular class positions; and by casting women as both better at and responsible for making aesthetic decisions.

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“…In the post-fordist transformations of capitalism, emphasis is placed on creativity as valueproducing labor: including soft skills such as reputation, visibility, and networking, which are capitalized and valued as essential assets to secure and maintain jobs. This work has been termed variously as 'free' (Terranova, 2000), 'reputational' (Zafirau, 2008), 'relational' (Baym, 2015). 14.…”

Section: Conclusion: Men In the Spoiled Garden Of Playmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communication games: dating coaches, masculinity, and working at play in Seduction Communities

Wallace

2017

NORMA

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This article examines the work of affective labor in remediating experiences of inhibition and insecurity among heterosexual men in 'seduction communities': communities of men who train each other in embodying seductive masculinity to pick up women. Considering how men in seduction communities construct and enact symbolic boundaries in their performances of seduction, this paper will seek to answer the following question: what do seduction communities reveal about the vulnerabilities and frailties of masculinity in the US today? Based on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in New York City, I examine the ways in which men experience states of cognitive absorption, affective license, and also of disability and abjection in fashioning themselves as objects of female desire through rituals of shared affective labor among men. I argue that men experience culturally based ambivalences around norms of self-help -including ideas of freedom, dependency, and addiction -in ways that complicate heteronormative masculine identities. I furthermore assert that self-fashioning through seduction training invokes ideas of work and play in order to differentiate contradictory ethics of persuasion and self-expression, and that these ideas in turn instantiate different technologies of embodiment that reproduce inequalities between men along lines of race and class. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry

Cited by 62 publications

References 40 publications

Dealing with reality: Market demands, artistic integrity, and identity work in reality television production

Dealing with reality: Market demands, artistic integrity, and identity work in reality television production

The Production of Distinctions: Class, Gender, and Taste Work in the Lifestyle Management Industry

Communication games: dating coaches, masculinity, and working at play in Seduction Communities

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