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Bourdieu’s published work is multi-thematic and multi-disciplinary, revealing the range of his interests and consistent with his notion that critical research in social science

should endeavour to overcome institutionally imposed disciplinary boundaries and resist research specializations (Susen & Turner, 2011). Over the years, his writings have covered the fields of education, anthropology, language, sociology, the visual and literary arts, photography, museums, universities, religion, mass media and even banking. While Anglo-American academics in the fields of education and anthropology in the 1980s quickly adopted his recently translated works, his reception by scholars in sociology was mixed and their criticisms were often contradictory (Wacquant, 1993). These misreadings and the slow reception of Bourdieu’s work have been ascribed to differences in the structures and emphases of the Anglo-American and French intellectual fields (Guillory, 2000; Susen & Turner, 2011; Wacquant, 1993).

Bourdieu’s reception by media and cultural studies scholars was mixed as well. Garnham and Williams (1980), on the occasion of the publication of Distinction, presented a brief outline of Bourdieu’s field theory and predicted its potential value to the field of British media and cultural studies. However, this optimistic assessment was disputed by Mander (1987) who agreed that Bourdieu was important but contended that his work was of limited value to sociological practices in communication research due to alleged paradigmatic differences. Describing the two distinct approaches to the study of culture, Mander notes that Bourdieu’s focus was on a restricted, socially constructed notion of cultural production that emerges from the structure of relations of social practices rather than individual expressivity in contrast to a cultural studies perspective that examines creative and expressive practices more broadly and does not assume a unified or systematic integration of complex cultural practices (see Hall, 1980; Williams, 1961, 1982).14 A few years later, Garnham (1993) expressed some disappointment with Bourdieu’s inadequate treatment of television in Distinction, especially considering the medium’s importance, in Garnham’s estimation, as a

contemporary cultural practice. For the same reason, Marlière (2000) found this neglect of the media generally in Bourdieu’s scholarship to be puzzling.

Bourdieu did address this gap in his scholarship to some extent, although in comparison with his writings on other aspects of cultural practice, his treatment of the media is modest. The English translation of Bourdieu’s views on television journalism appeared

14_{For a discussion of Bourdieu’s critical assessment of cultural studies, see}

Harker, Mahar, & Wilkes (1990).

in 1998 in one slim volume, On Television. The book, comprising two lectures published together, was likely intended as a stimulus for debate rather than a formal study of journalism. Nonetheless, the work is significant in that it discusses the journalistic field in terms of its logic of practice within which “a set of shared assumptions and beliefs” operate as “mental categories” by which journalists select, reject and interpret information (1998a, p. 47). The book also presents a critical assessment of journalistic power in the context of the field’s domination by the economic field and the undesirable influences that television journalism may have on the autonomy of other areas of cultural production.

Like Bourdieu’s earlier work, On Television also provoked both positive and negative reactions from media and cultural studies scholars (e.g. Couldry, 2003a; Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Marlière, 1998; for an account of the critical response, see Marlière, 2000). Besides On Television, Bourdieu’s only statements concerning the media and

journalistic fields are to be found in an essay examining the journalistic field included in the Benson and Neveu (2005) anthology,15 in various references to journalism, popular culture and mass media made in his other analyses of large-scale production in The Field of Cultural Production (1993a), and in Homo Academicus (1988) where he discusses the effect of journalistic values on academic autonomy and cultural prestige.

Neveu (2007), however, suggests that media and journalism researchers would benefit from exploring Bourdieu’s other writings. For instance, Bourdieu’s works on the sociology of language (1991), on culture (Bourdieu et al., 1990; Bourdieu, 1996a) and on education (1996b) may be useful to media researchers as they address questions concerning language and symbolic power and the autonomy of fields of practice in relation to the influence of other fields. The relational focus of field theory offers media researchers “another unit of analysis” (Benson & Neveu, 2005, p 11) to consider issues concerning journalistic practices and the relation of the journalistic field to other fields. This highlights one of field theory’s strengths, which can be attributed to what Neveu (2007) calls its “bridging power” (p. 344).

As discussed earlier in this chapter, fields are structured systems of social relations and field theory is concerned with bringing into focus the relational dynamics of these two

15_{Bourdieu’s essay in this collection, “The political field, the social science field, and the journalistic}

domains.A field approach to journalism research can also reconcile the separate threads of research operating within journalism studies. Anderson (2008) presents these

approaches to journalism research as a historical progression extending from the 1970s to the present and following three distinctive “strands” of scholarship: the first,

comprising research concerned with “organisational analysis, objectivity and the professions” (p. 250), engaged with describing journalists’ knowledge and their construction of reality; the second, concerned with researching “culture, narrative and discursive communities” (p. 253) and highlighting journalists’ constructed identity, their role in society and their relationship to authority; and the third, engaged with analysing journalism as a field of practice reintroduces a stronger sociological approach to journalism studies (Benson, 2004). As Benson (1999) explains, field analysis bridges “micro-level” research, concerned with journalistic practice and organisational routines (Anderson’s “strand one”), and the “macro-societal” level of research, concerned with journalism’s relationship to society and the influence of the broader political or economic fields on the journalistic field (Anderson’s “strand two”).

Field analysis ideally addresses both research domains (as the three-step analysis approach presented earlier suggests).16 However, much of the field research that has been conducted has focused on the internal relational dynamics of the journalistic field. Besides the likelihood that this approach may be linked to researchers’ interests, this focused approach may also be more practicable for the purpose of conducting complex studies. As Benson (2005, p. 87) has pointed out, the comprehensive research required for full field analyses (“simultaneously examining historical geneses and trajectories, structural relations among fields and the practices and worldviews of social actors within fields”) makes these kinds of studies considerably challenging and resource intensive. As of 2009, Benson noted that “we still lack comprehensive studies” of news media (p. 403). In any case, the research that has been undertaken to examine media fields has been varied, if not copious (see Benson, 2009), and has provided useful insight into the forms of media as fields of practice. What follows is a brief review of this literature in relation to field analysis.

Bourdieu’s field theory has been used as the framework in a number of micro-level

16

Examples of journalistic field analysis can be found throughout Benson and Neveu’s (2005) Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. Particularly noteworthy is Benson’s (2005) cross-national comparison of the journalistic fields in France and the United States.

studies of the journalistic field focusing on habitus and associated with a range of journalistic practices. Reporters, editors and media staff often share a journalistic habitus and tend to treat certain professional practices, such as standards of journalistic integrity and practices involved with selecting newsworthy stories and ways of writing and reporting information, as common knowledge (doxa). This aspect of journalistic practice has been borne out by the research of Schultz (2007) who employed a reflexive ethnographic approach to observe the process of news story selection in an editorial conference in a Danish television newsroom. She discovered that story choices based on a “journalistic gut feeling” for newsworthiness are structured by silent doxic values and explicit news values.

Much of the New Zealand-based journalism research employing field theory has focused primarily on the habitus of agents in relation to journalism practice (Phelan, 2008; Phelan & Owen, 2010; Rupar, 2007a, 2007b). For instance, Rupar (2007a) examined the reporting on the genetic engineering debate by New Zealand newspapers to consider how journalists’ habitus, in relation to journalistic doxa, influenced the creation of the news text. In another study addressing the same topic, Rupar (2007b) focused specifically on how professional identity is constituted through the logic of the journalistic field and how this identity is reproduced through editorial discourse. Phelan (2008) analysed the discourse of blog texts produced by two New Zealand journalists responding to an academic article and determined that their antagonisms to the academic field is consistent with a broader journalistic habitus of anti-intellectualism that has been reproduced, in part, through journalistic training.

Researchers have also employed field analysis in broader macro-level studies of journalism. This approach extends beyond the internal analysis of a field to consider interfield relations and the hierarchical structuring of the broader social space within which fields operate.17 For instance, in several studies, one group of researchers has used Bourdieu’s field theory as an analytical framework along with text analyses, to

17

The micro-/macro-level distinctions are not so clearly defined as this discussion might suggest and should not be reduced to a simple “inside the field” vs. “outside the field” dichotomy. Micro-level

analyses may also be concerned with field interactions, for instance, when analysing aspects of a field’s

relative autonomy or heteronomy in relation to the economic or political fields. For instance, deciding whether to classify a study of the interdependence of the journalistic and political fields as micro- or macro-level field analysis would pertain to the objectives of the study and whether it is primarily engaged with investigating journalistic practices or field relations. This thesis engages with both aspects of analyses.

reveal cross-field effects exemplified by the mediatising of policy processes in relation to the overlapping fields of journalism and public policy within the political field (Lingard &Rawolle, 2004; Lingard, Rawolle, & Taylor, 2004; Rawolle, 2005). A study of changing interactive patterns of media entertainment culture conducted by Shefrin (2004), combining field theory with Jenkins’ theory of participatory fan culture, argues that the cultural field in relation to the field of power is more permeable as evidenced by the increasingly elevated status and power of cultural producers and the effects on media entertainment corporations by the varied target audiences now accessible through the Internet.

Of particular note, and relevant to issues of symbolic power addressed in this thesis, is the work of Couldry. Couldry’s research (2001, 2003a) has examined the media field’s symbolic power in terms of its interfield effects. For example, one study, drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, identified the effects of media’s symbolic power in relation to its representation of the social world as “hidden injury”,18

or symbolic violence, enacted by people’s willing acceptance of the media’s dominance and control of society’s symbolic resources (2001, p. 162). In another study, Couldry (2003a) responds to what he refers to as a “gap” in Bourdieu’s field theory accounts of the convergence of the media field with other non-media fields; Couldry argues that the mechanisms that underlie media’s symbolic power to transform other non-media fields are unclear. To address this problem, Couldry extends Bourdieu’s notion of the state’s meta-capital and theorizes media power as a form of meta-capital, through which the media exercise influence over what counts as capital in other fields.

Elsewhere, Couldry (2000, 2003b) has described how a celebrity is apparently able to cross the “implied barrier” dividing the distinctive social spaces of the “media world” and the “ordinary (that is, non-media) world” (2001, pp. 171-172). In effect, “fame” or “celebrity”, generated through media exposure, is a form of meta-capital. Couldry’s discussions of media’s symbolic power and meta-capital have led to a number of studies examining these aspects of media power in relation to the constructed identity of the “celebrity” in the literary field (Driscoll, 2008) and the political field (Davis & Seymour, 2010; Street, 2012). This notion of celebrity as media meta-capital will be relevant to the discussion of the symbolic power of television media personalities

18_{Couldry (2001) adopts the term from Sennett and Cobb’s (1972) study of class}

consciousness and the way cultural valuations of success shape the sense of self-worth of the working-class.

presented in Chapter 5 of this thesis.

The subfield of arts journalism plays a significant “mediating” role between the journalistic and visual arts fields as discussed in this thesis. Marchetti’s (2005)

discussion of the generalist/specialist dichotomy and the structuring of these reporters’ roles within the journalistic field in relation to the logic of the marketplace is quite useful to this study. A review of the literature, however, reveals that there are relatively few studies that draw on Bourdieu’s field theory in relation to arts journalism, and all of these examine the state of arts journalism within particular national contexts: the

Netherlands (Janssen, 1997, 1999), the UK (Harries & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2007), Brazil (Golin & Cardoso, 2009), South Africa (Botma, 2008) and Portugal (Nunes, 2004). Two of these (Janssen, 1997; Nunes, 2004) focus on literary and music journalism

respectively, and the others cover a spectrum of arts journalism, including classical and popular music, visual arts, media; none focuses just on visual arts journalism. In the only discussion of arts journalism practice within an Australasian context, Skilbeck (2008) considers arts journalism within a global context of overlapping cultural and economic fields and proposes a new way of writing arts journalism to reflect this

polyphonic environment. All of these researchers use aspects of Bourdieu’s field theory, in varying degrees, to describe the relational features of the particular arts journalism fields with which they are concerned.