Cultural Industry and New Forms of Capitalism

It seems that relative agreement there is among scholars of social sciences that we are in a new period of capitalism, characterized by the rapid expansion of what Adorno and Horkheimer called as "cultural industry". Today this definition has been expanded comprising not only the phenomena linked to the mass media, from the original definition, but also find it more and more interrelated with the production of all kinds of goods and services whose "subjective meaning... to the consumer, is high in comparison with their utilitarian purpose ", as defined by A.J. Scott.

Characterization of the cultural industry is having a central impact on the definition of the new stage of capitalism that some have called cognitive and other informational. Nowadays the cultural industry has become a source of study from different parts of the world. There are research on its participation in the GDP of the countries as well as discussions on the most appropriate way to measure it. At the same time, other research evaluate new forms of inequality that is creating a society where the culture has become a valuable commodity. Bourdieu studies on the different forms of social resources private accumulation, on the "capital" and the enclosure of the groups of cultural producers in "fields" have been one of the most important tools for measuring these changes. The paper seeks to revise these transformations within the framework of a broader investigation into this new phase of capitalism.