Page 172 - Culture Society and the Media

162 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
It is not difficult to identify a number of inadequacies in arguments of this
kind. In the first place, by baldly confronting the needs of the artist or producer
with the demands of the audience, the argument fails to take account of the role
of the intermediary organization, which can provide a sort of refuge or shield for
its employees: the distance between producer and audience can allow the former
to avoid any precise definition of relationship and attitude towards the latter.
Seen in this light, the bureaucracy of the organization may have a dual function
for the producer: while regulating his integration into the organizational system,
it may also allow him considerable autonomy. Second, it can be argued that
specialization and professionalization within media organizations have led to the
growth of powerful professional reference groups—either formal or informal in
organization—which both protect individual producers and provide alternative
definitions of success. Third, the argument ignores economic variations between
different media which allow those sectors with low unit costs (and the music or
record industry is one of these) to overproduce, balancing failures against
successes, in an attempt to ensure that no potential ‘hit’ is missed. This allows
for provision for minorities, which may indeed evolve into mass markets—as,
for instance, in the development of reggae music—and provides scope for
innovation and idiosyncracy on the part of producers. Finally, there is a
distinction to be made between standardization of product style and
standardization of productive role.
There is a tendency, in arguments which create a dichotomy between
creativity and industrial process, to blur the line between production
and dissemination activities in mass media organizations. The fact that mass
production techniques and the bureaucratic formal organizaton that goes with
them play a vital role in the circulation of mass media artefacts does not
necessarily mean that industrial techniques are applied to their production. Yet
when Lewis Coser describes the formal organization as an ‘emasculator’ of the
individual’s creativity, resulting in alienation, he ascribes this to the ‘industrial
mode of production’ within media organizations:

The industries engaged in the production of mass culture share basic
characteristics with other mass-production industries. In both, the process
of production involves a highly developed division of labour and the
hierarchical co-ordination of many specialised activities. In these
industries, no worker, no matter how highly placed in the organisational
structure, has individual control over a particular product. The product
emerges from the co-ordinated efforts of the whole production team, and it
is therefore difficult for an individual producer to specify clearly his
particular contribution. (Coser, 1965, p. 325)

Coser’s conclusion is that the individual creative producer, in alienation, holding
his work in contempt, is robbed by the production team of his need to make a
unique contribution. However, such an interpretation begs a number of important