Decision-making and its conditions for production: Talking to a TV crew

Abstract

My aim is to explain the production conditions of a TV crew. My sociological task is to study the practices and artistic decision-making in order to make explicit the social contexts of this activity. I will explain these discursive and pragmatic practices with the thematic content analysis of 20 interviews to participants of a TV production set. Thanks to the ATLAS.ti I defined the social practices that make the reproduction of social distinction possible. Qualitative analysis has made polivalent terms such as habitus and capital (Bourdieu, 1979; 1994; 1998), otherwise too ambiguous to be applied empirically, more specific. The legitimacy of artistic decision-making arises from a type of artistic habitus, which we defined as the “TV habitus”. The interviewees consider the relational and instrumental dimension of the shooting process as secondary. Therefore, contracts of dependency hidden by symbolic violence in everyday life shape their professional identity.