Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Transnational Firms and the Knowledge Structure: The Case of the Walt Disney Company

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13600826.2014.961126

1469-798X

Alexandre Bohas,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

AbstractThis paper demonstrates how the study of knowledge can strengthen the analysis of transnational corporations and globalisation through the case of the Walt Disney Company. Disney is emblematic because its prosperity is founded on both global and intergenerational reception, integration and consumption of its products and its imageries. Its transnational preponderance is observed by taking into account its socio-economically grounded power, its intertwined material and ideational universes and its multilayered knowledge structuring. Based on cultural studies methods, world-economy theories and sociological conceptual tools, we assess the Disney Company's ability to structure collective imagination, to orient behaviour and to favour new practices through its media contents, its entertainment activities and its diversified by-products. Consequently, this makes it possible to consider the material and ideational extent of the power of the company. Finally, the specific aspects of the knowledge structure are stressed, particularly its inherent inertia, its geo-cultural dynamics, its co-evolution with material structures and its polarisation around specific symbols, narratives and objects. By doing so, this research contributes to the intersection between the new field of Cultural Political Economy and International Political Economy in the context of globalisation of ideas and identities. About the AuthorAlexandre Bohas is a researcher and lecturer in International Political Economy. He has published in Global Society and Inaglobal, and authored the books Disney: Un capitalisme mondial du rêve and, with Professor Josepha Laroche, Canal+ et les majors américaines.Notes1. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme XV–XVIIIème siècle, vol. 3. Le temps du monde (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993), p. 787. Author's translation.2. Bob Jessop, “Critical Semiotic Analysis and Cultural Political Economy”, Critical Discourse Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2004), pp. 159–174; Jacqueline Best and Matthew Paterson (eds.), Cultural Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2010).3. Concept coined by Donald T. Campbell and used by Bob Jessop. See Donald Campbell, “Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-cultural Evolution”, General Systems, No. 14 (1969), pp. 69–86 and Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, “Towards a Cultural International Political Economy: Poststructuralism and the Italian School”, in Marieke De Goede (ed.), International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 158.4. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.5. Best and Paterson, op. cit., pp. 1–25.6. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London and New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 119.7. Paul Langley, “Power Knowledge Estranged: From Susan Strange to Poststructuralism in British IPE”, in Mark Blyth (ed.), Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy (IPE). IPE as a Global Conversation (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 126–139.8. Bourdieu's habitus is defined as “a system of durable and transposable dispositions which integrating all past experiences, works at each time as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely differentiated tasks.” See Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique (Paris and Genève: Droz, 1972), pp. 178–179. Author's translation.9. Anthony Giddens describes the central concept of practical consciousness as “all the things which actors know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression.” See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. xxiii and also p. 41 et sq.10. Alexander Wendt, “The Agent–Structure Problem in International Relations Theory”, International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1987), pp. 335–370.11. This paper draws on research that examined how the sets of products and narratives diffused by the company entered the daily life of individuals from 2007 to 2012. Our intention was to highlight the reception and the appropriation processes of people who were in turn spectators, consumers and visitors. With this aim, a questionnaire was also administered to 1,074 respondents in different locations in France (Paris, its suburbs, Villeneuve-le-Roi and away from large cities, Saint-Claude, in the Jura region) while it was followed by 18 in-depth interviews of Disney consumers. The questionnaire surveys first respondents' top-of-mind awareness of Walt Disney, then the feelings that Disney imageries invoke in them, third the Disney purchases that they made during the last three years, and finally their socio-economic characteristics (their age, their job and the age of their children). In this paper, references to results and figures come from this extensive research which we have pursued up to now. See Alexandre Bohas, La Firme Disney: Analyse du capitalisme culturel d'Hollywood, Ph.d defended under the supervision of Professor Josepha Laroche at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (15 December 2007) and Alexandre Bohas, Disney. Un capitalisme mondial du rêve (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009).12. See Jessop and Sum, op. cit. See also Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop, Toward a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013). Although CPE made a theoretical breakthrough in IPE, its reliance on Gramscian and Foucaldian reasoning and terms such as hegemony, discipline and blocs leads it to adopt an external view of these fundamentally social facts grounded on specific contexts, experiences and practices. Second, the concepts such as bloc, formation and material and semiotic co-evolution conduct them to neglect the functioning proper to the semiotic sphere and the possibility that it can lastingly not follow the same line as material worlds. In fact, the assumption of a co-evolution somehow underlies a submission of either the material or the semiotic spheres to the other one. Third, they leave aside interstitial and residual parts and consequently generalise the degree of power and domination. However, these spaces where power is curbed can turn out to be major ones. On this last subject, Jessop, “Critical Semiotic Analysis and Cultural Political Economy”, op. cit., p. 163.13. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Palgrave, 2005 [1974]).14. Jogendra Prasad Singh (ed.), International Cultural Policies and Power (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).15. Gerhard Goehler, “Constitution and Use of Power”, in Philip Cerny, Mark Haugaard and Howard Lentner (eds.), Power in Contemporary Politics. Theories, Practices, Globalizations (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 41–59.16. Max Weber, Économie et société (Paris: Plon/Pocket, 1995), p. 95; Strange, op. cit., pp. 24–25.17. Fernand Braudel, La Dynamique du capitalisme (Paris: Arthaud-Flammarion, 1985), pp. 85–86; Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, op. cit., p. 13 et sq.; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).18. Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); William Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Robert Cox and Timothy Sinclair (eds.), Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).19. Antonio Gramsci, Cahiers de prison. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 40–54.20. Philip Cerny, Rethinking World Politics. A Theory of Transnational Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Daniel Drache and Marc D. Froese, “Globalisation, World Trade and the Cultural Commons: Identity, Citizenship and Pluralism”, New Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2006), pp. 361–382.21. James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).22. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).23. Bob Jessop, “Dynamics of Regionalism and Globalism: A Critical Political Economy Perspective”, Ritsumeikan Social Science Review, Vol. 5 (2013), pp. 3–24.24. Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 91, No. 3 (1985), pp. 481–510.25. Sharon Zukin and Paul DiMaggio, Structures of Capital. The Social Organization of the Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Viviana Zelizer, “Culture and Consumption”, in Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg (eds.), The Handbook of Economic Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 331–354.26. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (London: Penguin, 2009 [1957]); Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980).27. John Hobson and Leonard Seabrook (eds.), Everyday Politics of the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).28. Fernand Braudel, Grammaire des civilisations (Paris: Arthaud-Flammarion, 1987).29. Hobson and Seabrook, op. cit.30. The research by Janet Wasko, Mark Philips and Eileen Meehan constitutes a vast programme which was led in 18 countries with a dozen researchers. However, it regretfully was conducted nation by nation. These methodological choices prevent the identification of socio-economic variations, contemporary upheavals which transnationally reshape frontiers. As a complementary analysis, our research conducted only in France looked for these types of changes through quantitative and qualitative research. See Janet Wasko, Mark Philips and Eileen R. Meehan (eds.), Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2001).31. Wasko et al., op. cit., p. 49.32. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 43 et sq., 17. For more on this constructivist approach, see Stefano Guzzini, “A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2000), pp. 147–182.33. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).34. Mabel Berezin, “Emotions and the Economy”, in Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg (eds.), The Handbook of Economic Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 109–127; for an International Relations approach of emotions which draws on Gilles Deleuze and William James' works, see Andrew Ross, “Coming in from the Cold: Constructivism and Emotions”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2006), pp. 100–121.35. Sophie Thiroux and Pascale Planche, “La socialisation par l'image”, in Myriam De Leonardis, Hélène Fechant and Yves Prêteur (eds.), L'Enfant dans le lien social. Perspectives de la psychologie du développement (Toulouse: Editions Petite enfance et parentalité, 2012), pp. 125–131.36. Thomas Doherty, “The Wonderful World of Disney Studies”, Chronicle of Higher Education (19 July 2006), pp. B10–B11.37. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L'Esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).38. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Scottsdale, AZ: Prism Key Press, 2010 [1936]); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1944]).39. Williams, op. cit., p. 48 et sq.40. Lukes, op. cit.41. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1964).42. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Back Editions, 1983); Williams, op. cit.43. Josepha Laroche and Alexandre Bohas, Canal+ et les majors américaines. Une vision désenchantée du cinéma-monde (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2008), p. 72.44. Dominique Marchetti (ed.), En Quête d'Europe. Médias européens et médiatisation de l'Europe (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004).45. Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 178.46. Jeffrey F. Rayport, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Cate Reavis, “Disney's ‘The Lion King’ (A): The $2 Billion Movie”, Harvard Business School Cases (1998).47. Walt Disney Company, Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings for Fiscal Year 2013 (Burbank: Walt Disney Company, 2013).48. See David Held, Anthony G. McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 21.49. See B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy. Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1999); Bernd Schmitt, “Experience Marketing: Concepts, Frameworks and Consumer Insights”, Foundations and Trends in Marketing, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2010), pp. 55–112.50. Hoggart, op. cit.51. In this paper, inertia will be defined as the tendency, property or state to remain unchanged and to continue to act uniformly through time unless an external force changes it. This definition is close to Descartes or Newton's original meaning.52. The Walt Disney Company initiated the first successful full-length animated film in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which was followed by movies such as Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940). Although its animation productions varied according to creativity cycles, the studio imposed a de facto monopoly on this genre not only because of its success and the costs of such productions but also owing to the cultural dimensions which it gained through the years. Nevertheless, the crumbling of this monopolistic position took place more than 50 years later with the success of Pixar Studios, which launched in 1995 the first computer-animated film, Toy Story. However, the latter remained distributed by Disney. The real collapse happened in the late 1990s with the rise of two studios: Dreamworks Animation SKG with the films Antz (1998) and Shrek (2001) and Blue Sky with the movie Ice Age (2002). Both were distributed and financed by companies other than Disney.53. Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, op. cit., p. 38.54. Ibid., pp. 38–39. Author's translation.55. Thomas Risse-Kappen (ed.), Bringing Transnational Relations Back In. Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Andrew P. Cortell and James W. Davis Jr, “Understanding the Domestic Impact of International Norms: A Research Agenda”, International Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2000), pp. 65–87; Jeffrey T. Checkel, “International Norms and Domestic Politics: Bridging the Rationalist–Constructivist Divide”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1997), pp. 473–495. On the importance of ideas, domestic politics and transnational relations, see Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Ideas do not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Structures and the End of the Cold War”, International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 2 (1994), pp. 185–214.56. Hall et al., op. cit.57. Rosenau, op. cit.58. Marc Abélès, Anthropologie de la globalisation (Paris: Payot, 2008); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization”, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Robert Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 45–68.59. Georges Balandier, Le Détour. Pouvoir et modernité (Paris: Fayard, 1985).60. Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979).61. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1973 [1899]); Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983 [1969]). Dominique Pasquier showed the extent to which symbols produced by cultural industries constituted, for teenagers, so many signs of social marking and distancing. See Dominique Pasquier, Cultures lycéennes. La tyrannie de la majorité (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2005).62. Meehan et al., op. cit., p. 121.63. Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning: Cross-cultural Readings of “Dallas” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).64. Ian Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Menthuen, 1985).65. Quotation from the interview of Bill Mechanic, former head of international distribution at the Disney Company (4 August 2006).66. On this policy, see Laroche and Bohas, op. cit.; Armand Mattelart, Diversité culturelle et mondialisation (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).67. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien (Paris: Gallimard, 1990 [1980]).68. Hobson and Seabrook, op. cit., p. 197.69. Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, “Six interpretations de la série ‘Dallas'”, Hermès, Nos. 11–12 (1992), p. 125.70. Hobson and Seabrook, op. cit., p. 197.71. Laura M. Holson, “Disney Bows to Feng Shui”, New York Times, 25 April 2005.72. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange (London: BFI, 2005).73. Jessop, “Dynamics of Regionalism and Globalism”, op. cit. On the distinction, see also D. Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).74. In sociological terms, this phenomenon corresponds to a case of hysteresis. See Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Liber, 1997), p. 190.75. Lukes, op. cit.76. Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy (London: Sage, 2003), pp. 22–24; Alan Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).77. Pierre Veltz, Mondialisation, villes et territoires: une économie d'archipel (Paris: PUF, 2005).78. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, op. cit.