Cultural industry workers who produce Reality TV in Germany: Motivations, skills and identity work

Cultural industry workers make compromises in terms of their cultural capital, their attitudes towards lowbrow culture, and their creative skills to work for Reality TV formats in German production companies with a commercial orientation. They find means to motivate themselves despite some inconvenient working conditions and also find ways to uphold their artistic integrity by either consciously or unconsciously applying identity work strategies. How they (attempt to) accomplish this in spite of possible gaps between their personal standards and the cultural products they produce is subject of this thesis and point of origin for the call of a new conceptualizations which are not only valid in the case of TV production but also transferable to all sectors of the culture industries. This can best be established with the support of concepts and theories from different academic disciplines because analyzing motivations and strategies of cultural industry workers goes beyond the scope of a single discipline. I argue that it is high time for an interdisciplinary approach which is due to the fact that the decisions persons make before starting and during the course of professional lives depend on multiple factors. For instance an individual’s cultural capital might be the trigger to enter this profession and could explain the willingness to compromise potential discrepancies. Testing to what extent cultural capital understood as possessing knowledge in the field of culture and having creative skills exerts an influence is the point of origin. Yet, the sociological concept by Bourdieu, that has been introduced to studies of cultural industries alone are not sufficient to get the full image of what motivates. I am convinced that motivation theories, generally applied in the field of psychology, can assist in exposing the incentives to work for in TV companies. Cultural capital and motivation theories are suitable enough to explain the motivations to work but on their own do not suffice to explain how to maintain artistic integrity whilst producing for Reality TV which next to their lowbrow status often receives disapprobation from the public. Particular identity work strategies complete the innovative approach, namely distancing and evaluative tweaking as well as drawing symbolic boundaries. In order to check all theories and concepts for their applicability, I conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with the creative staff, editors and authors, of TV production companies. Based on the results derived from their comprehensive replies, I make suggestions for how the findings can effectively be employed in this context and how they can their conceptualizations transferred to other domains of the culture industries with comparable patterns. By having realized the rationale of grounded theory, this research will have contributed to invigorate interdisciplinary approaches among sociology, psychology and media studies. The cooperation will expand any type of field research.