european journal of

Editorial

European Journal of Cultural Studies

Are we all cultural

15(5) 551­–562
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549412445762
An introduction to cultural ecs.sagepub.com

intermediaries in context

Jennifer Smith Maguire and

Julian Matthews
University of Leicester, UK

The term ‘cultural intermediaries’ is good to think with: it has been a productive device
for examining the producers of symbolic value in various industries, commodity chains
and urban spaces, highlighting such issues as the blurring of work and leisure, the con-
servatism of ‘new’ and ‘creative’ work, and the material practices involved in the promotion
of consumption (e.g. Bovone, 2005; Entwistle, 2006; McFall, 2004; Moor, 2008; Negus,
2002; Nixon and Crewe, 2004; Smith Maguire, 2008; Wright, 2005). In addition, cultural
intermediary research offers an important complement to the study of cultural production,
within which questions of agency are typically focused on consumers, and questions of
power on institutions. The concept of cultural intermediaries usefully prioritizes issues
of agency, negotiation and power, moving the everyday, contested practices of market
agents to the fore for the study of the production of culture (Garnham, 2005; Havens
et al., 2009; Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2010).
Generally, research on cultural intermediaries has followed two different (although
not incompatible) directions: cultural intermediaries as exemplars of the new middle
class, involved in the mediation of production and consumption (following e.g. Bourdieu,
1984, 1996); and cultural intermediaries as market actors involved in the qualification of
goods, mediating between economy and culture (following developments in actor-
network theory and new economic sociology, e.g. Callon et al., 2002; Muniesa
et al., 2007). Engagements within and between these streams of work have resulted in
conceptual developments: for example, du Gay’s (2004) discussion of devices and dis-
positions, and Cronin’s (2004) elaboration of multiple regimes of mediation. Nevertheless,

Corresponding author:
Jennifer Smith Maguire, Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester,
132 New Walk, Leicester LE1 7JA, UK.
Email: jbs7@le.ac.uk

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552 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5)

the lack of a common ‘hymn sheet’ has necessarily led to some confusion: research that
deploys the term may fall into either or both of these camps, or neither.
Furthermore, ‘cultural intermediaries’ has been used as a descriptive catch-all for
seemingly any creative or cultural occupation or institution. This diluted use of the
term, in combination with a perceived expansion in the real ranks of those doing this
sort of work, has given rise to complaints that ‘cultural intermediaries’ is an overly-
inclusive, analytically-neutered term: a conceptual muddle that fails to assist in unpacking
the division of labour involved in the construction of cultural goods (Hesmondhalgh,
2006; Molloy and Larner, 2010). In short, the provocation: are we all cultural interme-
diaries now?
By way of a response, let us consider what cultural intermediaries do. They construct
value, by framing how others – end consumers, as well as other market actors including
other cultural intermediaries – engage with goods, affecting and effecting others’ orienta-
tions towards those goods as legitimate – with ‘goods’ understood to include material
products as well as services, ideas and behaviours. In this most generic rendition of what
cultural intermediaries do, the provocation appears not entirely unwarranted. After all,
we all have a hand in the formation of value: the ‘varied impulses and articulations
through which value is formed, added and circulated’ (Amin and Thrift, 2004: xv) are not
restricted to cultural intermediaries alone. However, the work of cultural intermediaries
is not common to all because of its expert orientation. In the struggle to influence others’
perceptions and attachments, cultural intermediaries are differentiated by their explicit
claims to professional expertise in taste and value within specific cultural fields.
Furthermore, cultural intermediaries are not a monolithic occupational group, nor do
they legitimate particular goods, services and practices just as they please. They are dif-
ferentiated by their locations within commodity chains, and the actors and stages of
cultural production that they negotiate with and between. They vary by their degree of
professional authority, and the other cultural and symbolic resources at their disposal to
both influence other actors’ orientations and negotiate the influence of others. In addi-
tion, the goods, services or behaviours that they frame, and the devices through which
that framing is accomplished, also range widely, with each good and device carrying its
own accrued degrees of credibility and durability, which must be negotiated.
Cultural intermediaries impact upon notions of what, and thereby who, is legitimate,
desirable and worthy, and thus by definition what and who is not. This is why cultural
intermediaries matter, not only for the material practices of cultural production, but also
for cultural studies research on those material practices. That is, research on cultural
intermediaries’ impact on the formation of value for particular products or practices
offers a window onto the contested construction of cultural legitimacy more broadly: a
research programme that combines Bourdieu’s concern with the production of the
boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate culture with insights from new economic
sociology (usefully summarized in McFall, 2009) as to how such boundary-producing
work is accomplished pragmatically.
The identification of a multiplicity of cultural intermediaries within cultural fields
underlines the need to explore and detail the lines along which they differ. We need – and
continue to need (du Gay, 2004; Nixon and du Gay, 2002) – greater empirical attention
to the stratification and differentiation of cultural intermediaries with regard to their

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Smith Maguire and Matthews 553

devices, dispositions, locations within regimes of mediation and impacts. Hence our
focus in this special issue of European Journal of Cultural Studies on context. Here, we
propose that concerted attention to cultural intermediaries as contextualized market
actors offers the most promising way to drive forward our understanding of what cultural
intermediaries do and why they matter.

Cultural intermediaries in context

Properly put, the aim of this special issue is not to put cultural intermediaries in context,
but to put context (back) into considerations of cultural intermediaries. Context may be
a useful analytical device, but it is also an empirical, lived reality. Considering cultural
intermediaries as contextualized market actors (cf. Blair, 2003) is to acknowledge that
cultural intermediaries make, and are made by, categories of cultural legitimacy. Such an
approach requires a sensitivity to markets and value as pragmatic accomplishments, and
regards context as constitutive of agency, not as an external determinant of action (in
other words, cultural intermediaries are not merely the passive bearers of their contextu-
alizing categories; Willmott, 1994).
Considering cultural intermediaries in context requires foregrounding questions about
the objective and subjective conditions of their work. These conditions will include a
cultural intermediary’s personal and professional habitus, formed through his or her
place within the conditions of existence (Bourdieu, 1984): for example, class habitus
as generative of particular practices and tastes, or the relative social prestige and profes-
sionalization of a cultural intermediary occupation and an actor’s specific location (e.g.
seniority) within it. In addition, the distance between the cultural intermediary’s habitus
and the dominant value scheme of the particular market will be relevant to, for example,
his or her adequacy as a proxy (Ennis, 2005, in Moor, 2008) for, or accuracy as a reader
of, the intended market. The conditions of cultural intermediaries’ work will also include
their locations within, and the social and historical specificity of, their cultural fields and
occupational fields, the commodity chains or circuits (e.g. du Gay et al., 1997; Leslie and
Reimer, 1999) within which they are located, and the devices that are dominant, emer-
gent and residual (Williams, 1977) at a given time within those fields and chains. Such
devices will include a cultural intermediary’s operational definitions of the goods and
market in question (including idealized models and measurements of consumers and com-
petitors; Slater, 2002), conventions of quality (Truninger, 2011), and judgement devices
such as rankings and personal and practitioner networks (Karpik, 2010). These and a host
of other devices are necessary conditions of cultural intermediaries’ work: they are the
material and discursive constructs that make it possible for cultural intermediaries to ‘do’
the framing of goods, mobilizing the attachment of intended receivers to goods (McFall,
2009; Miller and Rose, 1997), and attempting to make those social relations (of influ-
ence, attachment and framing) durable (Latour, 1991). However, at the same time,
devices ‘act or they make others act’ (Muniesa et al., 2007: 2): devices may assist cultural
intermediaries, but also may push them. Even from such a preliminary and incomplete
outline, it should be clear that there are a density of contextualizing conditions at play in
enabling and constraining cultural intermediaries’ expert roles in value formation
processes.

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554 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5)

We outline below three dimensions of investigation that highlight the contextual

specificity of cultural intermediaries, what they do and why they matter. First, framing:
all cultural intermediaries are involved in the framing of goods. What is available for
framing and how, to whom and with what degree of constraint they frame goods will
reflect their particular locations within networks of human and non-human actors.
Second, expertise: what differentiates cultural intermediaries from other actors involved
in framing goods are their claims to authority; the bases for that authority will reflect the
specific stocks of professional and cultural capital and subjective dispositions and
preferences that cultural intermediaries have at their disposal. Third, impact: cultural
intermediaries’ framing work is intended to influence others’ estimations of goods as
legitimate and thus lead to attachment; the weight and durability of that influence will
reflect the particular devices, including their expertise, through which cultural interme-
diaries act.
Each of these dimensions suggests a range of empirical entry points for investigating
both ‘family resemblances’ (Nixon and du Gay, 2002: 498), and their specific manifesta-
tions, which vary relative to the contextual reality of particular cultural intermediaries.
These are not the only dimensions of relevance, and they are mutually interdependent.
However, as analytical devices they are especially well-suited to our task of introducing
the special issue articles from Liz Moor, who examines the wax and wane of influence
for the occupation of social marketing in the UK; Giselinde Kuipers, who compares
French, Italian, Dutch and Polish buyers of content for television companies, and their
professional and cultural differences and continuities; Clayton Childress, who explores
the negotiated use of a new market-measuring device by US trade publishing acquisition
editors; Sarah Baker, who considers the role of British retro furniture retailers in the
revaluing of goods; Richard Ocejo, who contrasts cocktail bartenders as cultural inter-
mediaries with their ‘service occupation’ counterparts, neighbourhood bartenders in the
USA; and Benjamin Woo, who investigates the roles and ethos of Canadian ‘nerd’ gam-
ing subculture retailers and event organizers.

Framing
To be a cultural intermediary is to be involved in the framing of goods (products, ser-
vices, ideas, behaviours) as legitimate and worthy points of attachment for intended
receivers. A cultural intermediary’s location within specific cultural and occupational
fields and commodity chains or circuits affords a certain set of opportunities and con-
straints. Thus, the thrust of a context-led analysis is to unpack the conditions and net-
works within which that framing takes place: first, but not only, in terms of those intended
receivers. In the literature on cultural intermediaries and in other discussions of immate-
rial and affective labour, much attention along these lines has been directed at the end
consumer as receiver and the interactive service work of the cultural intermediary (e.g.
Hardt and Negri, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996; Witz et al., 2003). Examples of this sort of
intermediary – directly engaged in interacting with consumer perceptions of and attach-
ments to goods – include retailers (Baker and Woo) and frontline service workers (Ocejo).
However, even in these instances, the cultural intermediary is also situated in networks

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Smith Maguire and Matthews 555

of supply and distribution, which involve having goods framed for him or her and, in
turn, making their choices credible to others: for example, managers, investors, distribu-
tors and so forth.
Kuipers’ interviews with television content buyers in four European countries pro-
vide a richly detailed demonstration of the importance of locating cultural intermediaries
vis-à-vis the human actors to and for whom they frame goods. Noting commonalities in
cosmopolitan dispositions and differences in orientations to their markets and tastes
across her study participants, Kuipers makes the case that for television buyers, the
imagined consumer is as likely to be themselves or their local chain of command (the
national television companies) as it is to be the local consumer. Television buyers are
the ‘consumers’ of audiovisual producers’ goods, and in turn produce particular frames
to render their choices credible to other cultural intermediaries in the supply chain,
including programme managers, financial managers and schedulers. Similarly,
Childress’ account of US trade publishing acquisition editors locates them at a point
further ‘upstream’ from the end consumer, at which the cultural intermediary’s choices
must be made credible to editorial colleagues, public relations functionaries and so forth
in terms of aesthetic and market value. In locating these intermediaries within the com-
modity chains of audiovisual and literary content and formats, Kuipers and Childress
underline the multiple human actors implicated in the formation of value for cultural
goods.
However, as Moor reminds us in her examination of social marketing, there is a diver-
sity of non-human actors contextualizing cultural intermediaries’ work that also require
attention. These include the particular goods available to frame, as well as the established
and emerging tools, scripts and protocols to effect that framing, the competencies
required to employ those devices and the means through which such competencies are
developed and made credible (e.g. qualifications). To this end, Childress’ research pro-
vides a case in point of how devices enable and constrain cultural intermediaries’ work
of framing, offering insight into how acquisition editors strategically engage with
BookScan, a market measurement device that offers data on book sales. Contrary to the
expectation that such devices necessarily reduce cultural production to a simple logic of
sales, Childress highlights cultural intermediaries’ agency in negotiating when and how
to rely on such devices. For example, editors may use BookScan data to simplify decisions
on sales-driven manuscripts, or to construct post-hoc rationalizations for their aestheti-
cally driven choices by creatively deploying the data for constructing profit and loss
projections and identifying competitors.
Thus, framing as a material practice must be situated in terms of its location in
particular networks of human and non-human actors, in order to understand the spe-
cific devices and constraints negotiated by cultural intermediaries in their attempts to
influence how goods are perceived and practised. The articles in this special issue
ably demonstrate the power of detailed qualitative research and historical and ethno-
graphic methods to provide insight into how that influence is exerted and concretized.
In addition to the deployment of field and occupational-specific devices, cultural
intermediaries also accomplish their framing and exert influence through their claims
to expertise.

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556 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5)

Expertise
Claims to expertise distinguish cultural intermediaries from others involved in the framing
of goods and the formation of value. Furthermore, different forms of expertise differen-
tiate between the cultural intermediaries involved in the same commodity chain, and
help to explain the degree of asymmetry of influence in relations between cultural inter-
mediaries, and between cultural intermediaries and other actors.1 A context-led analysis
is concerned with the derivation and performance of expertise, specific to a cultural
intermediary’s location. The articles in this special issue highlight at least two compo-
nents of expertise, grouped loosely as professional (more or less reliance on abstract,
standardized devices and qualifications) and personal (more or less reliance on subjec-
tive preferences and tastes). Moreover, they suggest that the personal is necessarily
professional; that is, all cultural intermediaries rely more or less on personal disposi-
tions and cultural capital as the basis of their professional credibility. Indeed, the balance
between the professional and the personal may give rise to variation within a single
cultural intermediary occupation (for example, Kuipers’ four ideal types of television
buyers).
The professional expertise of cultural intermediaries is a contingent accomplishment.
Cultural intermediaries display some aspects of new modes of corporate professionali-
zation, for which occupational legitimization is cast in commercial rather than in ethical
terms, and demonstrated competence is accepted alongside or ahead of qualifications
(Muzio et al., 2011). However, while cultural intermediaries largely lack the hallmarks
of the established professions (Baker, for example, highlights the lack of regulated,
institutionalized points of entry to the occupation of retro retailer), they invest in a ‘pro-
fessional’ disposition and vocational approach to their work: casting it (as per one of the
world’s oldest professions, the clergy) as a service to the sacred –that is, the aestheti-
cally good and culturally legitimate (cf. Wilensky, 1964). Ocejo’s research on cocktail
bartenders provides a clear case for how professional expertise is constructed in both
established and new ways, demarcating cultural intermediaries from their service work
counterparts: here, neighbourhood bartenders. Both make and serve drinks, but cocktail
bartenders have recourse to particular devices for making credible their claims to exper-
tise in framing, rather than simply serving, alcoholic drinks: accreditation programmes,
an abstract body of expert knowledge (mixology), and sets of aesthetic principles
(including heritage, the handcrafted and ‘balance’). In this way, professional expertise
can be understood as the outcome of devices, which in turn serves as symbolic capital
(Schinkel and Noordegraaf, 2011): a device to add weight and credibility to cultural
intermediaries’ attempts to influence others’ perceptions of what are, and are not, legiti-
mate choices and tastes.
In addition to professionalizing devices, expertise is also, crucially, the outcome of
the subjective conditions of cultural intermediaries’ work: their habitus, which affords a
particular aesthetic orientation and forms of cultural capital. For example, Baker examines
how retailers of retro goods work to refashion goods (that otherwise might be considered
as ‘old fashioned’ or ‘used’) as worthy and desirable expressions of good taste. In accom-
plishing this work, the retailers draw on their class position, which is typically lower than
that of their customers: this serves as both a device for imbuing their goods with

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Smith Maguire and Matthews 557

working-class authenticity, and a form of competence with regard to successfully access-

ing and operating within house clearances. At the same time, retailers’ passion for retro
and their intricate knowledge of the field and trade serve as means for making them-
selves and their wares credible to more affluent consumers. As a source of expertise,
cultural intermediaries’ affective investments in the goods being framed is echoed in
Woo’s ‘nerd’ retailers, who are always already fans, equipped with a mastery of arcane
trivia and personal gaming collections to legitimize their sincere investment in the field.
Moreover, Woo’s retailers identify with their market: they are their own ideal consumer.
Similarly, Moor gives an example of social marketers specializing in specific minority
and ‘problem’ populations. Here, expertise takes the form of a personal (ethnographical
if not biographical) insight into and grasp of the cultural norms and dynamics of the
intended market.
In different ways, all of the articles demonstrate how authority and credibility are
linked to the relative congruence between a cultural intermediary’s habitus, and the
dominant schemes of value and appreciation at work in their particular fields and
markets. Through that congruence, cultural intermediaries develop their distinctive
expertise in the form of a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1990): the ability to read the
market of receivers, appraise aesthetic worth or potential, identify with the brand or
company and so forth. These various forms of expertise, in combination with the
range of devices employed in the framing of goods, shape the relative capacities of
cultural intermediaries to impact upon the formation of value and constitution of
categories of cultural legitimacy.

Impact
All cultural intermediaries are implicated in the construction of legitimacy, although the
primacy of that intended impact will vary between different cases. In addition, the scale
at which impact is accomplished will vary. By virtue of their cultural field, occupation
and position in a commodity chain, cultural intermediaries will be involved at different
scales in their work of framing goods as legitimate, from face-to-face interactions
‘upstream’ (e.g. Childress’ acquisition editors) and ‘downstream’ (e.g. Ocejo’s mixolo-
gists), to the scale of the institution or field (e.g. Moor points to developers of training
programmes in social marketing). A context-led analysis is concerned with disentangling
how that impact is made durable: not, as Moor reminds us, to simply list the various
devices at play, but to differentiate between their relative approaches, contributions and
degrees of ‘success’.
Cultural intermediaries are differentially equipped to build networks with devices,
routines, measurements and other materials in order to make their impact durable (Latour,
1991), such that it extends beyond their particular interactions and accomplishments and
takes on the quality of a convention. For example, Woo highlights that while gaming
retailers and event organizers have relatively limited agency compared to the ‘nerd’
scene’s primary culture producers in determining what goods are made available, never-
theless they build a coherent, if precarious, network via their retail spaces. Through their
inventory selections, patterns of product placement within the store and inclusion of
tables for customers to trial new games, retailers frame particular goods and spaces for

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558 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5)

fans, and others for the public: a spatial and material concretization of the retailers’ work-
ing definitions of fans and non-fans, and what is legitimate to the nerd subculture.
However, in focusing on impact, one should not assume success on the part of the cul-
tural intermediary. Again, Woo provides a useful example of how failure to effect an
intended impact (e.g. a poorly attended screening) may lead to employing other devices
(such as a reflexive staff meeting focused on trying to understand the nature of the
failure).
Turning from the ‘how’ to the ‘what’ of impact, we have made the case that cultural
intermediaries are involved in the framing of goods as legitimate and that this, in turn,
implicates them in wider processes of constructing categories of cultural legitimacy.
The articles in this special issue provide a germane reminder that such categories are not
synonymous with a traditional bourgeois cultural canon. Certainly, there are cultural
intermediaries invested in value schemes that continue to rest on juxtapositions of elite
and popular, restricted and mass, artistic and commercial. For example, against the
mass commercial products they sometimes select, acquisition editors and television
buyers frame some choices – those that reflect their tastes – as better. As the articles
demonstrate, cultural legitimacy is being negotiated with regard to the goods specific to
any number of cultural fields, including – in the case of Moor – the values and practices
of everyday life.
Moor looks at the development of social marketing in the UK since the 1970s, during
which time marketing concepts or devices extended beyond their originally intended use
for engineering purchases towards the mobilization of particular behaviours, as in the
case of health promotion. Social marketers’ intended impact is not directed at consumer
purchases, but consumer behaviour more broadly; however, it does this through the same
devices as conventional marketing, attempting to reduce the distance between demand
and supply, and tastes and goods. For social marketing, it is about bringing into align-
ment the practices and values of particular (problem) populations, and state agendas with
regard to productivity, citizenship and sustainability. In her historical research, Moor
suggests how social marketing was brought into being and made durable (e.g. via devices
for marking and reproducing membership, such as journals, conferences, academic qual-
ifications), such that its practitioners could then enlist additional actors (e.g. training
programmes), specify and codify their expertise and confer authority on their utterances
(publication and circulation of benchmark criteria and guidelines) and, on the whole,
effect an asymmetry in relations such that the social marketer could ‘frame’ particular
behaviours as legitimate (e.g. socially responsible drinking, self-care through diet and
exercise) with authority and durability.
Cultural intermediaries are implicated in constituting and circulating categories of
legitimate culture and thus, possibly, in challenging and changing them. We need to take
seriously the cultural production of legitimacy, to regard notions of what is good and
desirable as arbitrary, and thus as material accomplishments that involve interdependent
networks of human and non-human actors, rather than as monolithic or static canons.
This is not simply about definitions of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture; this
is more broadly about constructing the boundaries around ‘established’ (cf. Elias
and Scotson, 1994) or legitimate culture that may be built with notions of the elite and

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Smith Maguire and Matthews 559

restricted culture, but also may be made through notions of trendiness, authenticity,
morality and so forth.
On this, the literature on cultural intermediaries, cultural omnivorousness (e.g. Johnston
and Baumann, 2010; Warde et al., 2007) and cosmopolitanism (e.g. Beck, 2002; Lamont
and Aksartova, 2002) could usefully benefit from closer links in order to explore how
cultural intermediaries are actively engaged in constructing, and not simply exemplifying,
new canons of good taste. Thus the impact of cultural intermediaries extends beyond the
framing of specific goods. On the one hand, they contribute to the wider reproduction of
‘legitimacy’ as a dominant convention for the stratification of culture, and thereby the
inclusion or marginalization of particular groups and cultural forms and practices. On
the other, they contribute to the expanding definition of culture itself – what Moor calls the
work of culturalization – whereby new areas and aspects of everyday life are identified as
‘cultural’ problems, and thus brought into the sphere of interventions via particular
devices, forms of influence and cadres of experts.

Conclusion
In closing, we note that while the ‘cultural turn’ has generated significant and nuanced
accounts of the agency of consumers, and compelling analyses of the macro-structures of
consumer culture, in our scholarship and popular imaginaries the market remains
removed by and large from our considerations of culture. We would suggest that cultural
studies, with its own repertoire of devices and conventions organized around questions
of power, negotiation and agency, is particularly well-suited to the production of more
adequate, rich and ethnographic accounts of the market as a lived, social practice, and of
the ‘empirical intricacies of agency’ (Muniesa et al., 2007: 1) for market actors. However,
beyond a broad critique of the petite bourgeoisification of consumer culture, research on
the work of cultural intermediaries has yet to exercise fully its pragmatic potential to test
(and perhaps destabilize) the boundaries around cultural legitimacy (cf. Overdevest,
2011). This is a potential that resonates with the heritage of cultural studies (Williams,
1961) and its forward momentum (Grossberg, 2010; Oswell, 2006). With an eye to both
what they do and why they matter, research on cultural intermediaries offers a timely
direction for developing cultural studies’ grasp of cultural economic processes, and the
political dimensions of the market as culture.

Note
  1. Research that traces successive framings and negotiations along a commodity chain remains
rare, and thus as yet we lack an adequate, contextualized grasp of contestations and resist-
ance to framings from within commodity chains (see Méadel and Rabeharisoa, 2001 for an
exception).

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Biographical notes
Jennifer Smith Maguire is a sociologist of culture and consumption in the Department of Media
and Communication, University of Leicester. She is the author of Fit for Consumption: Sociology
and the Business of Fitness (Routledge, 2008) and has published widely on the intersection of
consumer culture, fitness and the body. Her current research examines how cultural intermediaries
construct value via notions of provenance and authenticity in wine markets in Australia, France
and China.

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562 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5)

Julian Matthews is a sociologist of the media and culture in the Department of Media and
Communication, University of Leicester. He is the author of Producing Serious News for Citizen
Children (Edwin Mellen, 2010), and has published on news production and the news representa-
tion of social problems. He convenes the British Sociological Association Media Study Group and
is an editor of Sociology Compass.

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