Culture in transnational Interaction: how Organizational Partners Coproduce Sesame Street

Abstract

Given the extraordinary politicization of culture in an era of globalization, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries during the last five decades. Sesame Street’s ubiquity around the world presents us with the question I address in this article: how do partner organizations work together, on the ground, to locally adapt a hybrid cultural product? Using data from real-time interactions between NY staff and partners, I show how teams from different cultures who do not share collective representations are able to create them through transnational interaction by: (1) constructing value to align their interests (2) exchanging complex cultural knowledge to customize and build alliances together. The Sesame Street case, then, allows us to grapple with “culture in interaction” at the transnational level, shedding light on culture in transnational interaction.