Customer Reviews

The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value

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This book is a great work in cultural sociology and addresses one of the key questions of the field, how different works and authors are consecrated and furthermore what consecration means. In addition to a very thorough discussion of the mechanics of awards (including the widely underestimated labor that goes into judging them) and his history of cultural awards -- from their 18th and 19th century academie precursors, through the Nobels, and into the 1970s explosion of televised awards spectacles -- English hammers away at the connection between awards and the romantic ideology of artistic charisma and argues convincingly that awards reinforce this ideology through providing an antagonist for awards bashers and awards refusers. In addition to all that, it's entertaining (for an academic book) as when, for instance he shows how the various greater and lesser awards for pornography precisely ape and parallel the greater and lesser awards for legitimate film.
There is a fair amount of theory in the book, but it's not the sort of nihilistic and excessively abstract theory we've come to associate with the humanities since the 1980s. This may still be distracting to lay readers who simply want to read about how awards work, but as an academic (whose biases tend towards empiricism) I found that it not only helped draw connections between awards and broader social trends but the theory is beautifully exposited and much more accessible than in many of the works English is drawing upon. For instance, if you contrast this book with Bourdieu's (excellent but moderately dense) The Field of Cultural Production, you'll appreciate that English is actually making these ideas about as clear and accessible as is possible. Seen in this light the book not only describes and theoretically situates awards, but parts of it could serve as a solid introduction to theories like new class, post-industrial society, or cultural capital.
Also of possible interest is that similar themes are addressed in Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)

This exceptional book about the culture of prizes is a box of surprises. What appears a limited and straight forward subject at first glance unfolds, under English's subtle and skillfull ministrations, to have far reaching and complex implications on how we use, confer value on and even think about cultural products in our global society. Written with wit, precision and clarity, this book makes one think about the dissemination and propagation of cultural prestige in original and relevant ways. Best of all, it is continually entertaining. Now if there were only a prize for books about prizes...

There's a lot of good dish here, especially on the Booker Prize and Toni Morrison. English is a smart guy, and he writes with great fluency and brio. He has read everything there is on the world of prizes, and he draws many interesting connections.

I have to admit, though, that in places I found the extensive theoretical scaffolding of the book to be tedious and somewhat overdone. At the end of the day this book is best suited for those with an academic interest in "cultural criticism."