The Dialectic logics of culture and commerce:The Development and changes of Book Publishing Industry in Taiwan
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Lee, Ling-Yee
Abstract
Being cultural commodities, Books are carriers and disseminators of ideas, by which knowledge is passed from authors to readers, from one generation to the next. Because books played a pivotal and crucial role in the intellectual, cultural, and educational sphere, the process of production of book industry is influenced by the conditions beyond the principles of supply-demand model and profit-making. All the belief of publishers and editors, the culture value about books in the society, and the policy of the state would shape the configuration of publishing market. My dissertation explores the market process, changes and consequence of the development and transformation of book publishing industry of Taiwan. Due to the distinct historical and social context, Taiwan’s book publishing industry developed a distinguished model, which some local publishers named “compressed growth”. For one thing, the freedom of speech and publishing was severely monitored and purged until the KMT government lifted the martial law on 1987. From the late 1980s, Taiwan’s publishing industry grew at a rapid and striking rate. There were as many as 10,000 book publishing firms in this country, according to a recent figure, issuing more than 40,000 new titles annually. Given the population and book market are relatively small in Taiwan, the surprising publishing energy in Taiwan is relatively high. Thus, there are two chief problematics of this research. The first one is more general: what are the distinctive logics of the book publishing industry? How does the belief and value of the publishers and other agents influence their commercial operation? How do publishers and other agents in this industry moderate the tension between the goals of culture and commerce? The second one tries to solve an empirical puzzle of publishing industry in Taiwan: why do the publishers publish so much books during the decline of the numbers of reading publics and the period of economic distress? The problem of overproduction and inefficiency of this industry was obvious since the book return rate was more than 40% in recent years. Based on the concepts of the “field” of Pierre Bourdieu, the “publishing chain” of John B. Thompson, and the “circuits of commerce” of Vivianna Zelizer, I construct a conception of “publishing circuits of commerce” as an analyzing framework in my study. The findings suggested that the institutions and logics of the publishing field reinforce the overproduction and the unbalance of supply and demand through the tightly embedded commercial ties. The financial embeddedness through the institutions such as preservation account, the monthly checkout and payment system constitutes a kind of overembededdness, which ossifies the commercial linkages of the production, distribution and sales sectors of the publishing circuits of commerce, and intensifies the inefficiency of the publishing chain. The contributions of this study are as follows. First, as the existed researches about embeddedness and netwok analysis say little about power, my research analyze the power relationship of different agents and organizations; second, I indicate that the effort trying to enhance the efficiency of the distributors and major retail channels does not elevate the efficiency of the whole industry either, but to threaten the survival of other agents in the other sectors. Third, as the great uncertainties of the publishing field, the vital strategy is effectiveness which keeps organizations surviving; as the unpredictability of profit and growth in publishing field, the better strategy is fuzzy logic which try to lower the risk and to be flexible, and the rationalization principle of efficiency would conflict with the logics of effectiveness.
Subjects
publishing field
circuits of commerce
logic of field
effectiveness
uncertainty
SDGs
Type
thesis
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