The conservative revolution revisited: The blending of art and commerce in four Western publishing fields

• Conducts a comparative analysis of contemporary publishing fields in France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. • Reveals the oligopolistic structure of publishing fields in which media corporations monopolize access to the mass market and marginalize independent publishers into niche markets. • Documents the blending of artistic and commercial editorial strategies at the poles of restricted production and mass production. The publishing industry underwent a profound process of commercialization over the last 50 years. Pierre Bourdieu characterized this commercialization process as a conservative revolution that entrenched existing power relations between corporate and independent publishing houses and submitted editorial strategies to an uncompromising economic logic that is incompatible with artistic concerns. In this study, we revisit the conservative revolution thesis to examine its consequences for the reconfiguration of cultural fields and artistic practices. We draw on detailed information on N = 293 publishing houses and class-specific multiple correspondence analysis to examine the structure and editorial strategies of contemporary publishing fields in France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Our findings support but also elaborate upon the conservative revolution thesis. We document oligopolistic field structures in all four countries. A small number of media corporations controls the mass market, monopolizes access to the fields’ economic and symbolic rewards, and marginalizes independent publishers into niche markets. We do not find complete submission to an economic logic but, instead, a strategic blending of art and commerce among corporate and independent publishers. The corporations, in particular, adopted hybrid editorial strategies that combine literary and commercial genres to cement their dominance, revealing how the fields’ transformation ultimately conserved pre-existing hierarchies. These findings have broader implications for theorizing on cultural fields. They suggest that artistic and economic logics are not incompatible and that cultural producers across various field positions successfully combine artistic and commercial strategies.