Page 101 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

92 Cultural change and ordinary life

The omnivore thesis: early statements and key themes

The omnivore thesis is a good example of an argument and investigation
produced in the context of American sociology of culture, which has taken a
fair while to be taken up seriously in the European study of culture. Moreover,
the idea has primarily been researched within the context of the sociology of
culture here and relatively little within cultural and media studies. As will be
shown later, this has meant that some of the ways in which the concept has
been investigated have taken particular directions. The reasons for this man-
ner of take-up may have a number of causes, but some of the explanation may
reside with the context in which the theory was developed as well as the
methods used to investigate it.
The prime mover behind the idea, Richard Peterson, is well known as a
researcher on the production of culture. Importantly, at the time that Peterson
was developing his emphasis on the empirical investigation of the production
of culture, a lot of culture and media studies was concerned with the analysis of
texts in accord with a range of more general social and cultural theories. More-
over, what then developed was an analysis of the audience, rather than the
production of cultural forms. It is only more recently that the swing of fashion
has brought the production of culture more into focus. I suggest that this
meant that the wider aspects of the omnivore thesis tended to be relatively
neglected because of the relatively narrow interpretation of Peterson’s work
as concerned with the production of culture. In addition, Peterson’s work on
the production of culture does not start from Marxist principles and, given
the influence of this perspective on some forms of media and cultural studies,
this may have had some effect.
It is important to consider these points because as Peterson himself has
argued, the omnivore thesis can be located within the overall framework of
the production of culture thesis itself. Thus, in a co-authored and authorita-
tive review of the production of culture thesis, Peterson and Anand (2004)
argue that ‘The production perspective was developed to better understand
contexts in which cultural symbols are consciously created for sale, but it
has been adapted to informal situations in which individuals and groups
select among the symbolic products on offer and in the process create
collective meanings and identities for themselves.’ They term this the auto-
production of culture (see also Peterson 2001) and argue that it counteracts
the criticism of the production of culture perspective that it has neglected
fan- and consumption-based studies of culture. This may not be as
straightforward as they seem to suggest (see later). The production of culture
perspective itself concentrates on six facets that condition the production
of culture:

1 technology
2 law and regulation
3 industry structure
4 organization structure
5 occupational career
6 market.