Wei, Junhow
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Publication Good Character: Reality Television Production as Dirty Work(2016-01-01) Wei, JunhowAudiences, critics, and academics have raised significant moral concerns about reality television. The genre is commonly criticized for being exploitative, harmful, and fake. By extension, reality TV workers are morally tainted, seen as dirty workers of questionable character. This dissertation describes the sources of moral taint in reality television production and how production workers dispel this taint—making their work acceptable and even glorious to themselves and others—through everyday micro-level interaction. The data for this study comes from approximately 2 years of ethnographic observation at 2 reality TV production companies, attendance at 2 reality TV industry conferences, and interviews with 83 respondents, including reality TV production workers, television network executives, and people who auditioned to be on reality shows. Findings focus on the development process, during which production companies generate ideas for new television shows and pitch those ideas to television networks. First, I describe the development process and three significant moral dilemmas that workers face at this initial stage of production: creating negative representations (e.g. stereotypes), falsifying reality, and exploiting workers. Second, I discuss how even though some reality TV workers aspire to create “authentic” television and portray cast in a dignified manner, commercial demands sometimes pressure them into compromising their values. I find that workers justify making such creative compromises by distancing themselves from their actions or tweaking their standards of quality in their everyday shop floor talk. Third, I describe the significant creative contributions unpaid interns made at one production company and propose that supervisors dispel the moral taint of exploitation by framing their relationships with unpaid interns in terms of mentorship and friendship. Finally, I describe how people who audition for reality shows in development are concerned about workers’ professional legitimacy and moral character, and how workers craft their credentials and manage their affective styles of self presentation to convince prospective cast of their good reputation. I discuss implications of these findings for research on work and labor in cultural industries and for understanding stigmatized workers’ selves and identities in any occupation.Publication Dealing With Reality: Market Demands, Artistic Integrity, and Identity Work in Reality Television Production(2012-10-01) Wei, JunhowCultural industry workers at times compromise the values and tastes that are important parts of their artistic identities to accommodate commercial demands. I argue that workers resolve frustrations that arise from such compromises through identity work, individuals’ active construction of their identities in social contexts. Using ethnographic data from fieldwork at a reality television production company, I describe two identity work strategies, distancing and evaluative tweaking, that workers use to maintain their artistic integrity despite producing work that does not meet their standards of quality. The manner through which these strategies emerged during micro social interaction differed between managers and non-managers. Managers used distancing and evaluative tweaking to simultaneously do identity work and regulate their employees’ identities when justifying decisions that threatened shared values and tastes. On the other hand, employees distanced themselves from managers while venting to colleagues about managers’ decisions that conflicted with their idiosyncratic values and tastes. These dynamics are illustrated through a setting that has received insufficient ethnographic attention, reality television production. Some reality television workers prefer to portray “real” and “authentic” situations. These workers employ identity work strategies to maintain artistic integrity when distorting reality to create the drama and conflict they consider marketable.Publication Mass Media and the Localization of Emotional Display: The Case of China’s Next Top Model(2014-06-01) Wei, JunhowFew studies have explored the relationship between globalization and emotional expression. One prominent means through which physical forms of emotional display circulate globally is through the mass media, and specifically through the reality television format trade. Whether local people can successfully perform globally circulating forms of emotional display depends, in part, on how local audiences receive their performances. Globally circulating forms might convey meanings that conflict with local public values or media regulators’ ideologies. Audience approval is facilitated through textual framing strategies that reflect producers’ directorial and editorial choices. I describe three strategies that frame emotional displays in ways that align their meanings with local ideologies and cultural values: (1) define what caused the feelings that led to the emotional display as culturally appropriate, (2) portray the emotional display as not reflecting the performers’ true feelings, and (3) ensure that the performers’ feelings are resolved within the show’s narrative in an appropriate manner. Framing strategies are mechanisms through which global formats and local culture jointly shape mass mediated emotional performances.