Symbolic representations of cultural industries at content trade fairs: Bourdieu's “economic world reversed” revisited

Interaction Rituals at Content Trade Fairs: A Microfoundation of Cultural Markets

“…The tropes, narratives, and symbols for describing good practices, the whole jargon of doing business in the cultural industries used en passant in conversations is successively and unconsciously adapted by those taking part in interactions. In using them in emotionally grounded situations, practitioners in the field are bound to it and make them a building block of their professional identity (see Gebesmair et al 2022 for details on different narratives in the cultural industries). Even we as researchers learned to perform convincingly at trade fairs and were committed to central aspects of this business culture.…”

“…In a large comparative project on the global trade of cultural goods, we visited six different trade fairs in the book, the music and the TV industries between 2015 and 2017. The main goal of the project was to detect a common “trading culture,” that is, a cross-sectional institutional basis in the field of cultural production and distribution (see Gebesmair et al 2022 ). When conducting fieldwork, we realized that the numerous highly emotional encounters and gatherings during these events play an important role in reproducing the shared culture.…”

“…https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0531-7811 Notes 1. We discuss the cultural function of business events at length in Gebesmair et al (2022). 2.…”