Developing Democratic and Negotiated Quality Re-articulating Discourses of Quality Through Democratic and Participatory Media Practices
Developing Democratic and Negotiated Quality Re-articulating Discourses of Quality Through Democratic and Participatory Media Practices

Summary/Abstract: Quality is a pervasive notion that can be found in a wide variety of societal domains. Within the cultural domain its intrinsic articulation with aesthetics, beauty, civilisation and culture as such has produced a Gordian knot that is virtually impossible to untie. But at the same time the quality concept, however complex and multi-layered it might be, unavoidably incorporates and invigorates processes of distinction, hierarchisation and judgement. Without stepping into the trap of the nihilist forms of cultural relativism, this text wants to investigate the possibilities of opening-up the quality concept to more political-democratic discourses, which show, on the one hand, its potential for an articulation of quality within a democratic framework, but which also allow for the deconstruction of the quality concept’s rigidity. The starting point of this investigation is an overview of more traditional perspectives of, or discourses on, quality, which articulate quality as aesthetic/artistic, professional or technological. Also a number of (slightly) less conventional discourses on quality, which have evolved out of the discussions on (mainly) aesthetic and professional quality are discussed here. They have been termed audience-based and social quality. In the second part of this text, especially the notion of social quality is used as a starting point to expand into the realm of political-democratic. Here, the concept of democratic quality is elaborated, which values a set of specific attributes of media practices, processes and outputs, by revisiting an earlier developed typology on democratic and journalistic practices (Carpentier, 2007). The third part of this text uses a small group of interviews with community media producers in Austria and Switzerland to argue that through the participatory cultures of these radio stations, another quality concept can be observed and theoretised. The producers do deploy a democratic quality discourse and a re-articulated (de-professionalised) professional quality discourse, but they also use a discourse on quality which can be termed negotiated quality, as it is not longer defined as fixed and given, but seen as part of the negotiation(s) between different actors at the radio stations, including staff members, board members, programme makers and members of the audience. These radio producers show that the universalised quality concept can be deconstructed without destroying it, opening up the way for rethinking the quality concept.

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