Cultural Intermediaries

The notion of cultural intermediary has been of use to recent research and thinking on consumer culture because it has enabled explorations of how the emergence and reproduction of the latter is hard-wired to broader sets of sociocultural transformations, including transformations to the class structure and to large-scale shifts in the relationship between consumption and production. Mobilized initially by French [Page 389]contemporary social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of cultural intermediary refers to those sets of occupations and workers involved in the production and circulation of symbolic goods and services in the context of an expanding cultural economy in postwar Western societies. Bourdieu included in this category the “producers of cultural programmes on TV and radio or the critics of ‘quality’ newspapers and magazines and ...