In her study of the shift in the nature of the work object, its impact on social relations among television writers in Los Angeles, and the precarity of their work as writers, television scholar and director Felicia Henderson examines the transformation of the traditional work product, the television season, as a key unit of analysis.20 Specifically, she focuses on the shortening of the television season from twenty-two programs to thirteen, which is made possible by changes in delivery systems, viewing platforms, viewing practices, and contract negotiations.
The virtue of Henderson’s insight is that her analysis of the writer’s room as a site of creative production (like others in this genre) dwells on the structure of creative relationships, industrial settings, and the organizing logic that defines the production and creative processes rather than on individual personalities and attitudes of creative personnel. In terms of the applicability of her approach to a concern with race and diversity, Henderson’s research commends attention to the organizational sites, creative processes, and social relations where the practices of diversity (or impediments to diversity) operate. Such an approach appreciates the fluidity and flexibility of evidence and analysis across time and space so that foundational categories, policy mandates, political stakes, and analytic conceptions can shift with the historical, technological, and political conditions in which they embedded and which they help organize and narrate. In other words, analytically it is useful to look at the conditions that structure and organize some of the foundational assumptions and questions about diversity and television (aims, means of realizing, forms of monitoring and assessing their effectiveness).
Henderson’s approach suggests that the specific conceptions, conditions, and assumptions that produce diversity (or the twenty-two-episode season as a staple unit of network television) as a desirable goal in television are not static, nor is the nexus of institutions, interests, and stakes that support or oppose its actualization. Her approach encourages an analysis of diversity (or impediments to diversity) as a dynamic and flexible set of industrial, legal, cultural, and economic practices that the study of the precarity of creativity and diversity can bring to bear on the question. In other words, the specific conceptions, conditions, and assumptions that produce diversity as a goal and practice within creative media industries like television are not fixed, and neither is the nexus of institutions and logics that organize and express them.
The challenge is moving the research focus from the founding scene of the problem of racial access and image exclusion within television to the shifting conditions that shaped television and discourses of race, including the rise of diversity, since the Kerner Commission Report. What, in other words, are the implications for quotidian practices of inequality and making race that the shorter seasons, new delivery systems, new interactive platforms, new divisions of labor, and new relations of production crystalize? What might the impact of these developments be on the very terms within which we pose the question of inequality in television that diversity glosses? Such reframing moves the issue of diversity some way from the analytic social and political scene in which it initially appeared. It shifts the industry and analytic assumption of equating diversity and social equality with access and representational parity to one where the calculus of cultural, economic, and political difference as a basis of the production of inequality is central to media industry practices.
This approach to research on television and race scrambles foundational binaries that continue to inform industrial practice, academic approaches, and media activism: inside/outside, accuracy/stereotype, author/imitation. With respect to race and difference, the terrain is considerably more complex and urges different questions that creative industry studies might help clarify: 1) How is diversity and difference framed as a labor issue and as a matter of work process and contractual management? 2) In what respect does the international division of creative labor pressure local and national formulations of diversity as matters of representation, reparation, and labor? 3) In what respects do the new international division of cultural labor, the rise of new platforms and delivery systems, and the creative arrangements that drive new projects, genres, talent bear on the question of diversity in new and unforeseen ways, especially within different national formations defined by distinct racial projects and ethnic formations? 4) These conditions could just as well open the way for the media production of diversity as cultural normativity or a technology of power/knowledge deployed to reach lifestyle niches. A critical media industry approach to inequality (rather than merely diversity) would urge that media and ethnic/racial arrangements be located and analyzed within the context of racism, racial projects, and race making nationally and globally.
On this count, John Caldwell’s insights about reflexivity, industrial knowledge, and practices and rituals among cultural producers are exemplary;21 so too are Vicki Mayer’s considerations of the inscription of knowledge in practices at all levels of the production process, as is Sarah Banet Weiser’s work on the role of brands and branding as a mode of crafting and caring for the self in the construction of diversity.22 Finally, Timothy Havens’s explorations of the circulation of television content about blackness in the United States and the role of industry lore about race and diversity in the creative process are especially rich. So too are Darnell Hunt’s studies of African Americans who use new media technologies to write, produce, and perform alternate and nonhegemonic conceptions of complex and intersecting minoritarian identities.23
