Browsing by Subject "Trade associations"

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For the maintenance of the system : institutional and cultural change within the motion picture producers and distributors of America, 1922-1945
(2019-07-16) Monticone, Paul MacLusky; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Staiger, Janet; Frick, Caroline; Keil, Charlie; Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn
This dissertation traces the formation and development of the Hollywood film industry’s trade association between 1922 and 1945. For nearly three decades, an oligopoly of vertically integrated production-distribution firms dominated the American film industry. Throughout this period these Hollywood majors relied on a powerful trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) to coordinate cooperative programs aimed at maintaining this form of industrial organization. In the existing literature, the operations of the MPPDA are taken as coincident with the economic imperatives of the major firms who were its sponsors, but this trade association often struggled to coordinate a membership that viewed its efforts with skepticism and outright resistance. Negotiating the competing member interests and reconciling their divergent views of cooperative action were core functions of the MPPDA that have been largely overlooked. This dissertation asks how the MPPDA created consensus around cooperative actions, what prevented it doing so by the early 1940s, and what the consequences of this failure were for the industry it represented. In order to account for the internal activities of this trade association and their consequences on the development of the film industry, this dissertation integrates a primary archival methodology with conceptual tools from economic sociology and organizational studies. Part One analyzes the trade association’s structure, resources, and activities in relation to changing economic and political contexts between 1922 and 1938. Part Two offers three case studies of the association’s cooperative actions during the 1940s—lobbying, public relations, and intellectual-property registration—in order to demonstrate how changes in the broader political environment, the workforce at member firms, and the production sector of the film industry exacerbated tensions among stakeholders in the MPPDA and undermined its ability to maintain the support of the oligopoly. This dissertation highlights the value in investigating the collision of various stakeholders, interests, and agendas within seemingly unified institutions. The use of overlooked archival resources reveals new sources for primary research, and the use of theoretical frameworks from fields like economic sociology suggests approaches to understanding aspects of institutions that have been largely neglected in film and media history.