The cosmopolitan tribe of television buyers: Professional ethos, personal taste and cosmopolitan capital in transnational cultural mediation

Abstract

This article analyses the professional ethos and practices of television buyers in France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. During interviews and ethnographic observations, the professional ethos of this 'cosmopolitan tribe' proved to be remarkably similar across national backgrounds. This article discusses the relation between personal taste and professional ethos in television buying, pointing to specific forms of 'cosmopolitan capital' central to this process. Moreover, it develops a typology of buyers, each type representing a different solution to the tensions between culture and economy, consumption and production and national and transnational inherent in transnational cultural mediation. This analysis of the practices of transnational cultural intermediaries highlights several limitations of Bourdieusian accounts of cultural mediation. Moreover, it opens up new questions about (transnational) cultural mediation, the shaping of professional habitus and 'the production of belief' in the cultural field. © The Author(s) 2012.