Imagined audiences: Intuitive and technical knowledge in Hollywood

Many scholars of the mass media highlight how the production of popular culture in contemporary media industries powerfully involves notions of "the audience." That is, media producers draw upon collective assumptions surrounding who audiences are and what sorts of content they prefer as they go about making media content. This study proposes and develops an "evaluation in interaction" approach to examine how moviemakers socially construct American movie audiences within the context of their everyday work in the Hollywood film industry. Specifically, I show how moviemakers construct audiences using two institutionalized discourses of evaluation---both "intuitive" and "technical"---that are prevalent in the Hollywood film industry. This dissertation uses archival data to document the emergence and institutionalization of both intuitive and technical discourses of audience appeal over the latter half of the twentieth century. Then, drawing on organizational ethnographies of both a Hollywood talent firm and an audience research firm, as well as interview data with film industry professionals, I show how intuitive and technical discourses of audience appeal are reproduced within everyday work settings of the Hollywood film industry. Centrally, I argue that both intuitive and technical discourses about American motion picture audiences are embedded within the particular organizational conditions in which they are reproduced.