Keeping It Small: Scale and Cultural Resistance in Independent Publishing

Independent publishing is frequently celebrated as an intimate and oppositional cultural practice, yet the relationship between small-scale production and cultural resistance is often taken for granted. This article interrogates the role of scale in shaping the possibilities and limits of independent cultural work. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with independent publishers and booksellers in Hong Kong between 2012 and 2022, alongside analysis of independent print materials, the article develops a scalar framework for understanding what smallness affords. I identify three primary organizational affordances of small-scale production – autonomy, responsiveness, and proximity – that emerge from its material and relational conditions. These affordances are not inherent virtues of independent publishing but contingent effects produced through limited resources, reduced visibility, and tightly bounded infrastructures of circulation. Together, these affordances give rise to plurality as an emergent cultural outcome, capturing the uneven diversification of forms, topics, and voices that small-scale publishing can sustain. While smallness can enable editorial discretion, experimental formats, and close reader relations, it also concentrates labour, constrains reach, and requires ongoing management of risk under conditions of political repression and market precarity. By foregrounding scale as an organizing condition rather than a descriptive measure, the article contributes to cultural sociology and media studies by linking organizational forms to cultural outcomes and shifting attention from cultural texts alone to the infrastructures and production logics that make cultural resistance possible. It argues that smallness functions as a situated strategy – simultaneously enabling and limiting the forms of cultural and political expression that independent publishing can sustain.