Coproducing Sesame Street Around the World: Culture, Politics, and Transnational Organizational Partnerships

(Book Manuscript under advance contract, completed and currently under review)

The ubiquity and success of Sesame Street around the world during the last 50 years, particularly given the extraordinary politicization of culture in an era of globalization, presents three interrelated puzzles that this book addresses: First, how does an iconic U.S. cultural innovation move through transnational channels over time and gain acceptance and legitimacy as a local product? How do people decide whether to accept, reject, or transform foreign cultural products? And finally, what elements of relationship-building between U.S. NGOs and their partners allow them to navigate cultural differences, manage conflicts, and generate successful project outcomes? Sesame Street Travels the World answers these questions using data gathered from seven years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and 200 in-depth interviews from seventeen countries within four regions around the world: Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico); the Middle East (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and among the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council); Africa (Nigeria and South Africa), and; South Asia (India and Bangladesh).

Kay, Tamara. 2022. “Culture in Transnational Interaction: How Organizational Partners Coproduce Sesame Street.” Theory and Society. Published online July 22, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09484-2

• Given the extraordinary politicization of culture in an era of globalization, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries during the last five decades. Sesame Street’s ubiquity around the world presents us with the question I address in this article: how do partner organizations work together, on the ground, to locally adapt a hybrid cultural product? Using data from real-time interactions between NY staff and partners, I show how teams from different cultures who do not share collective representations are able to create them through transnational interaction by: (1) constructing value to align their interests (2) exchanging complex cultural knowledge to customize and build alliances together. The Sesame Street case, then, allows us to grapple with “culture in interaction” at the transnational level, shedding light on culture in transnational interaction.