‘The Market for Symbolic Goods’

Encompassing the spheres of aesthetic quality and economic viability, market goods in the creative industries raise the contentious issue of the nature of value, and the inter-relationship between the symbolic and the economic. This article uses Bourdieu’s identification of different capitals (the economic, social, cultural, and symbolic) to addresses the relationship between economic and symbolic value, and to challenge conventional dichotomised readings that pit the cultural or symbolic against the economic. Following Bourdieu’s analysis of the market for symbolic goods, his work is used to illustrate how the relationship between the aesthetic realm and monetary value is intimately and inseparably related, with economic and symbolic capitals being played out within specific fields of cultural production, each informed by their own spheres of practice. The article concludes by illustrating how an attempt to capitalize on the upsurge of interest in Scottish writing was thwarted by misunderstanding the relationship between economic and symbolic capital that characterizes the publishing industry.