Abstract
Despite the lack of a clear definition of the concept, “cultural diversity” has remained a core issue for more than a decade (WTO, UNESCO, etc.). The aim of this paper is to begin to fill this gap. We argue that cultural diversity is a multi-dimensional concept and that accurate metrics must rely on three criteria: variety, balance and disparity. We also stress that supplied and consumed diversity have to be distinguished. We apply this set of multiple measures of diversity to publishing data for France over the period 1990–2003. Our main result is that the situation of the publishing industry in terms of cultural diversity is highly dependent on the dimension considered. Hence, diversity increases when variety is the sole consideration, whereas taking balance or disparity into account leads to the opposite conclusion. This issue raises a series of questions about the use of diversity measures in a policy debate concerned with furthering cultural diversity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The RPM requires that each book be sold at the same price by all retailers, with the right to apply a maximum discount of 5% for a two year period. Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary apply RPM. In the UK, an agreement restricted the level of discount between 1990 and 1997. The majority of the new member states in the European Union do not apply RPM.
The criteria are tempo, size, form, accent, harmonic structure and melody.
Weitzman (1998) makes an analogy between biodiversity and the diversity of libraries in which “books are very roughly analogous to the gene pool of the species itself (p. 1281).”
For UNESCO, the promotion of cultural diversity is essentially a question of preserving language diversity. In the same way, we mainly understand the diversity of origin in terms of the languages in which the books are written and not in terms of the native countries of their authors.
The SNE survey has aggregated “new works” and “new editions” since 2001. This tends to over-inflate publishing diversity somewhat by not treating new works separately.
Source: data gathered by the firm GFK, in Livres Hebdo, 631, 3 February 2006.
The taxonomy of genres and therefore the variety by genre are constrained by the categories used in collecting the available data.
It is impossible to calculate the Herfindhal–Hirschmann index (HHI = Σs 2i , with si the market share of each statistical individual) in this case, because the complete set of data on the distribution of copies sold by title is unavailable.
For our purposes, we prefer to rely on the Herfindhal-Hirschmann index (HHI) rather than others indicators such as the entropy index for two reasons. First of all, the HHI is more widely used. Secondly, the HHI takes much better account of the “market shares “among categories than the number of categories. Given that the number of entities (genres and original languages) is exogeneously given by the available data, we believe it is preferable to work with the HHI.
It should be noted that the HHI is an indicator that simultaneously measures variety and balance. When two firms have equal shares in a market, the HHI is higher than when three firms have equal shares in the same market. However, in our analysis—when the taxonomies of genres and languages are given—the HHI is simply an indicator of balance.
This sample has a certain importance: the sales of these 50 novels represent 19% of total sales of hard-cover books in 2003.
The Indo-European languages taken as reference are: German, English, Danish, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch.
The same separation has been adopted by the European commission in its analysis of relevant markets in the book industry.
Unlike the study of the concentration of sales, this analysis can be carried out for the whole period 1992–2004, insofar as that it only concerns the ranking of successful authors and not the number of copies sold.
A variation of less than 150 points in the HHI is considered by antitrust authorities as insignificant.
The same profile can be seen when we study the number of different countries. It rises from 35 in 1997 to 52 in 1998 before falling back to 49 in 2003.
However, this share is falling, as it was close to 60% in 1997.
The entropy index proposed by Alexander (1996) intends to measure the quantity of disorder in a musical system, where disorder is assimilated to diversity. It is based on a certain number of product characteristics, such as tempo, harmonic structure, melody, etc. However, Peterson and Berger (1996) demonstrate the unsuitability of the characteristics chosen for the assessment of diversity in popular music.
For example, in this article, we simply propose a hypothesis about the relationship between market structure and diversity. We demonstrate that, apart from youth books the increase in variety supplied is accompanied by a fall in the average print run. Two complementary processes are probably at work. Firstly, publishers adopt a strategy of product differentiation as a response to the specific demands expressed by consumers. Secondly, publishers may be engaging in a strategy of variety proliferation. In France, vertical integration in the book industry allows the adoption of a strategy of variety proliferation with the aim of maximising the occupation of retail display space, thereby evicting rival products (Benhamou 2003).
References
Acheson, K., & Maule, C. (2004). Convention on cultural diversity. Journal of Cultural Economics, 28(4), 243–256.
Alexander, P. J. (1996). Entropy and popular culture: product diversity in the popular music recording industry. American Sociological Review, 61(1), 171–174.
Alexander, P. J. (1994). New technology and market structure in the recording industry. Journal of Cultural Economics, 18(2), 113–123.
Basuroy, S., & Ravid, A. S. (2004). Executive objective function, the r-rated puzzle and the production of violent films. Journal of Business, 77(2), 155–192.
Benhamou, F. (2002) L’Economie du Star-system. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Benhamou, F. (2003). Concurrence pour la table du libraire. Esprit, 6, 98–115.
Burnett, R. (1992). The implications of ownership changes on concentration and diversity in the phonogram industry. Communication Research, 19, 749–769.
Canoy, M., Van Ours, J. C., & Van der Ploeg, F. (2006). The Economics of Books. In V. Ginsburgh & D. Throsby (Eds.), Handbook of the economics of art and culture. (pp. 721–761). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Caves, R. E. (2000). Creative industries. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cohendet, P., Llerena, P., & Sorge, A. (1992). Technological diversity and coherence in Europe: An analytical overview. Revue d’Economie Industrielle, 59, 9–26.
Cowen, T. (2002). Creative destruction. How globalization is changing the world’s culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dowd, T. J. (2004). Concentration and diversity revisited: Production logics and the U.S. mainstream recording market, 1940–1990. Social Forces, 82, 1411–1455.
Dyen, I., Kruskal J.B., & Black P. (1992). An Indo-European Classification: a Lexicostatistical Experiment, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 82(5), Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
European Commission (2004). Case n° COMP/M.2978, Lagardère/Natexis/VUP, 7 January.
European Commission (2005). Publishing Market Watch. Sectoral Report 2: Book Publishing, Brussels.
Flores, R. J. (2006). The diversity of diversity. Further considerations on the use of the concept in cultural economics. 14th ACEI Meeting, July 2006, Vienna, Austria.
Frank, R. H., & Cook, P. J. (1995). The winner-take-all society. New York: Penguin Books.
Gabszewicz, J., Laussel, D., & Sonnac, N. (2002). Press advertising and the political differentiation of newspapers. Journal of Public Economic Theory, 4(3), 317–334.
Gabszewicz, J., Laussel, D., & Sonnac, N. (2004). Programming and advertising competition in the broadcasting industry. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 13(4), 657–669.
Ginsburgh, V. (2003). Awards, success and aesthetic quality in the arts. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17, 99–111.
Hamlem, W. A. (1994). Variety and superstardom in popular music. Economic Inquiry, 32, 395–406.
Lacy, S. (1989). A Model of demand for news: Impact of competition on newspaper content. Journalism Quarterly, 66, 40–48.
Li, S. C., & Chiang, C. C. (2001). Market competition and programming diversity: a study on the TV market in Taiwan. Journal of Media Economics, 14, 105–120.
Lin, C. A. (1995). Diversity of Network Prime-Time Program Formats during the 1980s. Journal of Media Economics, 8(4), 17–28.
Lopes, P. D. (1992). Innovation and Diversity in the popular music industry, 1969 to 1990. American Sociological Review, 57(1), 56–71.
Moreau, F., & Peltier, S. (2004). Cultural diversity in the movie industry: A cross-national study. Journal of Media Economics, 17(2), 123–143.
Peterson, R. A., & Berger, D. G. (1975). Cycles in symbol production: the case of popular music. American Sociological Review, 40(2), 158–173.
Peterson, R. A., & Berger, D. G. (1996). Measuring industry concentration, diversity, and innovation in popular music. American Sociological Review, 61(1), 175–178.
Saviotti, P. P. (1996). Technological evolution, variety and the economy. Cheltenham & Brookfield: Edward Elgar.
Schiffrin, A. (2004). Le contrôle de la parole. L’édition sans éditeurs, suite. Paris: La Fabrique.
Solow, A., Polasky, S., & Broadus, J. (1993). On the measurement of biological diversity. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 24, 60–68.
Stirling, A. (1999). On the economics and analysis of diversity, SPRU Electronic Working Paper, 28.
Tirole, J. (1993). Théorie de l’organisation industrielle. Paris: Economica.
Van der Ploeg, F. (2004). Beyond the dogma of the fixed book price agreement. Journal of Cultural Economics, 28(1), 1–20.
Van der Wurff, R., & Van Cuilenburg, J. (2001). Impact of moderate and ruinous competition on diversity: The Dutch television market. Journal of Media Economics, 14, 213–229.
Van der Wurff, R. (2004). Supplying and viewing diversity: The role of competition and viewer choice in Dutch broadcasting. European Journal of Communication, 19, 215– 237.
Verdaasdonk, H. (2003). Ranking and Valuing Fiction Titles on Bestseller Lists. Social theory, politics and the arts conference, Columbus, Ohio, October 9–11.
Waterman, D. H. (1990). Diversity and quality of information products in a monopolistically competitive industry. Information Economics and Policy, 4, 291–303.
Weitzman, M. L. (1992). On diversity. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107, 363–406.
Weitzman, M. L. (1993). What to preserve? An application of diversity to crane conservation. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 102, 157–183.
Weitzman, M. L. (1998). The Noah’s ark problem. Econometrica, 66(6), 1279–1298.
Weitzman, M. L. (2000). Economic profitability versus ecological entropy. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109, 237–263.
Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous referees as well as Mark Schuster and Michael Rushton for their relevant comments and suggestions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix 1: Data
Appendix 1: Data
The measures of variety by title and of balance by genre, both supplied and consumed, over the period 1990–2003 are based on the annual survey of the sector’s professional body, the Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE). The data are reliable; they are collected from all publishing firms and represent more than 95% of total turnover.
Analysis of balance supplied by language of origin is made possible thanks to the survey of the foreign rights committee of the SNE. These data have been collected since 1988, but they have only been subject to systematic and reliable processing since 1997. We have therefore chosen only to work with the period 1997–2003 to ensure greater homogeneity and continuity in the data. To evaluate the share of foreign titles purchased as a proportion of the total production of new books and new editions, we make the realistic assumption that all the titles purchased are published, thus ignoring the strategy of buying dormant rights, a strategy that may be practiced by certain publishers. This simplifying assumption does not weaken our analysis, as it tends to overestimate the importance of foreign works in French publishing.
For the assessment of balance by titles, we use the lists of the fifty bestselling “novels” and “essays” drawn up by the magazine Livres Hebdo over the period 1998–2004. Although Livres Hebdo has been publishing bestseller lists every year since 1992, the information has only been based on a unified and certified methodology since 1998.
For the analysis of diversity consumed by language of origin and of disparity by title, we also study the lists of bestselling novels because of the lack of more complete statistics. Thus, we obtain a picture of the attraction of the general public for literature of diverse linguistic origins. This result cannot encapsulate the preference for diversity, but it does illustrate one of its facets.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Benhamou, F., Peltier, S. How should cultural diversity be measured? An application using the French publishing industry. J Cult Econ 31, 85–107 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-007-9037-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-007-9037-8