Beyond cultural intermediaries? A socio-technical perspective on the market for social interventions

Marketing has long been considered part of cultural intermediary activity, but still sits a little oddly alongside the ‘cultural’ TV producers and ‘quality’ journalists and critics originally used to typify the category. This article argues that such a tension is productive, and uses an underexplored aspect of marketing – social marketing – to pursue some more conceptual questions about the nature and usefulness of the term ‘cultural intermediaries’. It employs a framework loosely derived from actor-network theory to describe the emergence of social marketing in Britain, paying particular attention to the efforts to construct a market for such services, the need to consider material and non-human forms of agency in cultural intermediary activity, and the value of understanding cultural intermediary work in terms of ‘culturalisation’ – that is, as a process by which some areas of life are designated as belonging to the problem of culture, and others not.