Both cultural factors (signifying practices such as how to tell a "good" story and character development that focuses on individual choice-making) and economic factors (i.e., efficiency, divided labor, trended technological innovations) explain the series of Hollywood modes of production from the camera-person mode, through the director-, director-unit, central-producer, producer-unit, and, finally, the package-unit systems, the last of which remains the major method for contemporary Hollywood financing and labor organization.
She has considered several of the major institutions in Hollywood: the screenwriting profession, the cinematographer associations, the unions, and the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Over the several decades since this landmark work, Staiger also attempted to counter determinist historical thinking that places too much emphasis on over-powering systemic conditions.
The structuralist and materialist critiques of agency do not negate the possibilities of bounded action by individuals; after all, "people also make history."
In her Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema, 1907-1915 (1995), Staiger points out that simply conceptualizing Hollywood films as promoting repressive ideologies is completely inadequate to the dynamics of how entertainment industries work.
By 1984, she began a series of scholarly presentations and published papers culminating in her 1992 book, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema.
Trying to stress contextual factors and social identities (sex, gender, race, sexuality, age), she focused on normal and unusual audience responses (i.e., underground movies being used for community-building, images being collected and preserved for remembering movies, men crying at James Bond films).
Her work did not merely think about what meanings people make in watching film and TV but also what emotions occur and how those matter to audiences and to society.