Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson

Last Lecture.

Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (now the story must be told in the past tense, though in 2007 Hanne used the present tense). He was a specialist on computer–human interfaces and had published numerous technical papers on aspects of programming, virtual reality and software design. But in September 2007 Pausch’s career suddenly took an unusual turn. He had been invited to give a lecture at Carnegie Mellon in a series called ‘The Last Lecture’ – a series in which professors are asked to think about what matters most to them and sum up the wisdom they would like to pass on to their students in a single lecture, as if it were their last. By a tragic twist of fate, this was, in all likelihood, one of the last lectures that Randy Pausch would be giving: this 46-year-old father of three was dying from a terminal form of pancreatic cancer. The lecture, on the subject of ‘really achieving your childhood dreams’, was delivered to an audience of some 400 students and staff on 18 September 2007; the hour-long lecture was videoed so that his children could watch it when they were older. In the audience was a columnist from the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Zaslow, who had heard about the lecture on the grapevine and driven down from Detroit to attend. Like many who were there, Zaslow was deeply moved by the occasion, and he wrote a short article about it for his column in the Wall Street Journal. The article appeared on 20 September with a link to a short five-minute clip of highlights from the lecture. ABC’s Good Morning America TV show saw the article in the Journal and invited Pausch on to the show the following morning. Media interest grew and Pausch was invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show in October. In the meantime, the lecture video was posted on YouTube and millions of people watched either the short clip or the full-length version.

Shortly after the article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, publishers in New York began emailing Pausch to see if he would be interested in writing a book based on it. ‘I found this laughable,’ explained Pausch, ‘since at the time the palliative chemo was not yet working, and I thought I was down to about six weeks of good health.’ But after some reflection he agreed to do it, on the understanding that he would co-author the book with Jeff Zaslow and that Jeff would actually write it. Jeff contacted his agent in New York and the agency took charge of preparing a proposal and submitting it to publishers. The agency turned down a pre-emptive bid and sent out a short, 15-page proposal to numerous New York publishing houses in October. Within two weeks they had done a deal. ‘So how much did it go for?’ you ask Hanne. ‘$6.75 million,’ she replies. ‘$6.75 million?! You must be joking!’ ‘No, seriously, it was bought by Hyperion for $6.75 million,’ she explains. ‘They closed the deal a couple of weeks ago. It will be a short book, about 180 pages, and they’re planning to publish it next April.’ You can’t quite believe what you’ve just heard. Why would anyone pay $6.75 million for a book called The Last Lecture by a professor of computer science with no track record as a successful author? Maybe $40,000 or $50,000, you think, or perhaps even a modest six-figure sum if you were feeling particularly bullish. But $6.75 million? How could a publishing company talk itself into laying down this kind of money on what would seem like a wild bet? To an outside observer this seems amazing, surprising, utterly bizarre. Even Pausch himself confessed to being astonished by the size of the advance (‘the book getting a large advance-on-royalties took us both by surprise’). How can we make sense of this seemingly bizarre behaviour? To many it will seem like another example of the ‘irrational exuberance’ of markets, but is it really as irrational as it seems?

      To answer these questions properly we will need to step back from the details of our story and make a detour. We will need to understand something about how the world of trade publishing has changed over the last 40–50 years and how it is organized today – who the key players are, what pressures they face and what resources they have at their disposal. We will also need to introduce some concepts that will help us make sense of this world, and help us to see how the actions of each key player are conditioned by the actions of others. For these players are not acting on their own: they are always acting in a particular context or what I shall call a ‘field’, in which the actions of any agent are conditioned by, and in turn condition, the actions of others.

Publishing fields

What is a field? I borrow this term from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and freely adapt it for my own purposes.¹ A field is a structured space of social positions which can be occupied by agents and organizations, and in which the position of any agent or organization depends on the type and quantity of resources or ‘capital’ they have at their disposal. Any social arena – a business sector, a sphere of education, a domain of sport – can be treated as a field in which agents and organizations are linked together in relations of cooperation, competition and interdependency. Markets are an important part of some fields, but fields are always more than markets. They are made up of agents and organizations, of different kinds and quantities of power and resources, of a variety of practices and of specific forms of competition, collaboration and reward.

      There are four reasons why the concept of field helps us to understand the world of publishing. First, it enables us to see straightaway that the world of publishing is not one world but rather a plurality of worlds – or, as I shall say, a plurality of fields, each of which has its own distinctive characteristics. So there’s the field of trade publishing, the field of scholarly monograph publishing, the field of higher education publishing, the field of professional publishing, the field of illustrated art book publishing and so on. Each of these fields has its own peculiar traits – you cannot generalize across them. It’s like different kinds of games: there is chess, checkers, Monopoly, Risk, Cluedo and so on. To the outside observer they may all look similar – they’re all board games with little pieces that move around the board. But each game has its own rules, and you can know how to play one without knowing how to play another. And publishing is often like that: people who work in the business tend to work in one particular field. They become experts in that field and may rise to senior positions of power and authority within it, but they may know nothing at all about what goes on in other fields.

The second reason why the notion of field helps is that it forces us to look beyond specific firms and organizations and makes us think, instead, in relational terms. The notion of field is part of a theory that is fundamentally relational in character, in the sense that it assumes that the actions of agents, firms and other organizations are oriented towards other agents and organizations and predicated on calculations about how others may or may not act in the field. Agents, firms and other organizations never exist in isolation: they are always situated in complex relations of power, competition and cooperation with other firms and organizations, and the theory of fields forces us to focus our attention on this complex space of power and interdependency. The theory constantly reminds us that the actions of any particular agent or organization are always part of larger whole, a system if you like, of which they are part but over which they do not have any overall control.

      The third reason why the notion of field helps is that it calls our attention to the fact that the power of any agent or organization in the field is dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources or capital that it possesses. Power is not a magical property that some individual or organization possesses: it is a capacity to act and get things done that is always rooted in and dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources that the agent or organization has at its disposal.

So what kinds of resources or capital are important in publishing fields? We can see, I think, that five types of resources are particularly important in publishing fields: what I shall call ‘economic capital’, ‘human capital’, ‘social capital’, ‘intellectual capital’ and ‘symbolic capital’ (figure 1).² Economic capital is the accumulated financial resources, including stock and plant as well as capital reserves, to which publishers have access, either directly (in their own accounts) or indirectly (through their ability to draw on the resources of a parent company or raise finance from banks or other institutions). Human capital is the