NEGUS' MODEL

Negus' Model

Negus' Model

Q1: Assess the main strengths or weaknesses of Negus's model of stars, cash cows, question marks and dogs. Provide examples of artists or genres drawn from a single major label that you feel embody the qualities of each of these categories?

Ans: Much of the creative work of symbolic culture production takes place in the context of for-profit or nonprofit complex organisations. Culture-producing organisations face some particular problems that affect their form and way of doing business. Chief among these is what (Willmott, 1993, 51) terms the “unanalysability” or inability to rationalise the creative aspects of production that characterises expressive symbol production. As a result, culture-producing organisations tend toward an “organic form,” often seen in skilled trades and craft production (Siehl, Martin, 1990, 88).

This is a form where creative personnel must be loosely supervised so that they are given room to create, but, at the same time, they must be closely managed enough to meet organisational requirements for usable products. In culture-producing organisations a typical solution to this challenge is to employ “boundary spanning personnel,” editors, directors, producers, music publishers, artists and repertoire personnel, art dealers, talent agents, and so on, who can mediate between the organisation and the artist (Schumacher, 1995, 25).

Thus, a major theme for those working in the POC perspective is how creative work is organised in various fields as well as how the internal structures and cultures of producing organisations affect what is produced.

Focusing on production in the country music industry, (Negus, 1996, 16) shows how, using an organic “job-shop” structure made up of mostly temporary alliances, work is organised into a “decision chain” linking creative inputs, distributors, and consumers. The system is designed to weed out what is, from those responsible for marketing and distributing output, an inevitable oversupply of creative raw material.

Oversupply is a key ingredient in most culture production because there is so little knowledge about which products will be successful, and yet, innovation is necessary because many cultural products have a comparatively short “shelf life.” Rather than producers having a firm and consistent view of audience taste, the main effort at each stage of production was centered on what (Neale, 1990, 31) terms a “product image.” The product image refers to conceptions of what characteristics a product must have to be acceptable to decision makers at the next stage in the process.

The exact nature of organisational logics and structures can vary across cultural fields and across genres within the same field. So, for example, country music-producing organisations have evolved some relatively stable sets of practices and organisation (Hall, 1996, 60), while rap music has resisted such rationalisation. (Negus, 1996, 17) has shown how the fluid affiliations among rap performers, as well as the creative use of the appropriation of the work of others through sampling noted previously, have strained the organisational logics of ownership that dominate major music companies.

The terminology developed by the Boston Consulting Group in 1970, as a way of categorising business units, is routinely used by senior ...