Making and selling culture

To what extent do moviemakers, television and radio producers, advertising executives, and marketers merely reflect trends, beliefs, and desires that already exist in our culture, and to what extent do they consciously shape our culture to their own ends? In-depth interviews with ten executives from the "culture industry" and five scholarly analyses examine that question, and address the issues of power and authority, meaning and identity, that arise when cultural producers define and react to audiences.

These reflections by key players provide an unprecedented view, as editor Richard Ohmann writes, "into the ways cultural producers imagine or know markets and how such knowledge figures in their decisions about what events, experiences, and products to make."