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Casting nets and framing films: an ethnography of networks of cultural production in Beirut
Full text linkFilmmakers first received widespread academic attention as case studies into the
increasing casualisation of labour in post-industrial economies. Their precarious
existence in project-based labour markets provided much food for thought about the
future of work, while their status as artists and producers of culture entered them into
debates around just what art is and how to approach it. But in light of recent
transformations in the cultural industries and the accompanied blurring of boundaries
between production and consumption, academic understandings of the lives
filmmakers lead have also been somewhat blurred. This ethnography of networks of
cultural production in Beirut re-introduces filmmakers into the very sociological
debates that they helped spark. Might a return to the situated experience of these
theoretically and methodologically challenging people, who form workgroups and
collaborate with each other repeatedly across projects as they craft their own careers,
shed productive light on academic understandings of precarity, cultural production
and indeed our increasingly confusing relationships with the objects around us?
With that in mind, in this thesis I ask the following research question: how are
networks of film production formed and maintained in Beirut? Based on an ‘insider’
ethnography of various film projects weaved into a mixed-methods social network
analytic methodology, I adopt a relational sociological approach that conceives of
production networks as akin to social worlds and find three analytic planes to delve
deeper into: markets, objects and relationships.
In relation to markets, I echo the argument that current classification systems of
cultural production are too consumption-based and adopt a social network markets
framework more sensitised towards production. Here, I find that the cyclical, project-based
relationship of patronage that ties production networks to their clients is highly
varied and contingent, shaping not only the process of cultural production but also its
organisational structure. Further, I argue that the management of these contingencies
is key to the potential repeat collaboration not just with clients (and their own social
networks), but fellow producers as well.
But past projects do not simply disappear once completed, they might well come back
to haunt their makers. Drawing upon ethnographic and recent historical data on a
number of web-series that emerged out of Beirut between 2009 and 2012, I compare
using two-mode networks the past and more recent projects my interlocutors were
involved in. Here, I find that one’s past projects shape one’s future by conducing or
hindering their chances of finding new work. Moreover, and perhaps more
importantly, I find that filmmakers (and those around them) increasingly define
themselves (and are defined by others) in relation to the past projects they have done.
Over time, though, as filmmakers collaborate on an increasing number of films, their
relationships take on deeper characteristics than monochrome economic
considerations. Here I draw upon the notion of embeddedness to shed light on
emergent meaning at the network level across a number of projects and, therefore,
the emergent social world-ness of networks. While the first set of findings relates to
debates in the sociology of work and the second to those in the sociology of cultural
production, my final analysis shows just how intimately the two are connected. I
conclude by highlighting the potential of empirically-grounded relational sociological
approaches to finessing our understandings of cultural work in its economic, social,
but also material and technical contingencies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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