Understanding the Flow of Symbolic Goods in the Global Cultural Economy*

The media imperialism thesis is the most widespread systemic account of cultural globalization. In this paper, I argue that the media imperialism approach, as a global version of mass culture theory, shares with it many of its analytical and empirical limitations. While ethnographic approaches in global media studies provide a useful perspective from which to correct some of the empirical flaws of the media imperialism paradigm they are unable to produce an alternative account of equal analytic and systemic scope. I attempt to remedy this situation by proposing a ―sociostructural‖ approach to theorizing the process of cultural globalization which is both consistent with recent research in the sociology of taste and in line with the empirical evidence on transnational patterns of cultural flows and culture consumption. This approach takes seriously the changing macro-structural context of cultural recap-tion across developed and developing societies in late modernity as well as the irreducibly relational and sources of the demand for symbolic goods. I close by comparing the theoretical and empirical implications of this approach with competing macro-level perspectives in the anthropology of globalization.