Writing Culture and Cultural Value

Abstract

It is through the interplay of economic and symbolic capital that book publishing and the literary industries have historically found traction, since to have money but no network is almost as unavailing as having a notable reputation but no money. As John B. Thompson explains in Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century: “For most trade publishers, the ‘value’ of a particular book or book project is understood in one of two ways: its sales [economic capital]…its quality [symbolic capital]” (Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, p. 10, 2010). This understanding correlates with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the field of cultural production, which situates creative outputs in the context of the social conditions of their production and consumption.