From cultural industries to creative industries and back? Towards clarifying theory and rethinking policy

Abstract

In this paper, I draw attention to the complexities and confusions in the shift in discourse and praxis from “culture industry” to “cultural industries” and then “creative industries.” I examine how this “creative turn” is fraught with challenges, highlighting seven issues in particular: (i) the difficulties in defining and scoping the creative industries; (ii) the challenges in measuring the economic benefits creative industries bring; (iii) the risk that creative industries neglect genuine creativity/culture; (iv) the utopianization of “creative labour”; (v) the risk of valorizing and promoting external expertise over local small- and medium-scale enterprises in the building of “creative industries”; (vi) the danger of overblown expectations for creative industries to serve innovation and the economy, as well as culture and social equity; and (vii) the fallacy that “creative cities” can be designed. I suggest that the move towards creative industries discourse represents a theoretical backslide, and raise the possibility that a return to “cultural industries” would be more beneficial for clarifying our theoretical understanding of the cultural sectors and the creative work that they do, as well as enabling better policymaking.     

Creative industries in “developing” countries: Questioning country classifications in the UNCTAD creative economy reports

The UNCTAD Creative Economy Reports (CERs) are arguably the most influential policy-oriented texts on the global scope and potential of the creative economy. They contain arguments for greater policy attention to the creative economy worldwide and statistical data to illustrate their claims. These reports argue that the creative economy is an area of growth, not only in “developed”, but also in “developing” economies. The central argument of this article is that the way the country classification used in the CERs increases the share of “developing countries” in global creative goods exports in contrast to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) classifications. When singling out China, the share of these countries decreases even further. According to The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in 2010, 41 “developed” countries account for 51.18 per cent and 158 “developing” countries for 48.03 per cent of the global creative economy with 17 economies in transition accounting for 0.79 per cent. This obfuscates reality and obstructs the creation of evidence-based policies relevant to the creative industries. The classification of developed and developing countries is redrawn in accordance with building on data on the export of creative goods, provided by UNCTADstat. This article proposes that a more correct, balanced, and disaggregated outlook on the classification of countries is needed because one single “developing country” (China) is the single biggest exporter of creative goods in the world (25.51 per cent in 2010) yet the 49 “least developed countries” account for merely 0.11 per cent of creative goods exports (in 2010) while they comprise 880 million people (or some 12 per cent of the world's population). In conclusion, it is argued that different kinds of developing countries need different approaches and policies. Reference is made to Burkina Faso to illustrate this point.     

Crafting the local: the lived experience of craft production in the Northern Isles of Scotland

ABSTRACT

National creative and cultural industries policy agendas tend to focus on the economic impact of the sector often favouring scalable digital activities based in global clusters, which underpin notions of growth. There has, however, been a re-emergence of craft, which may not be scalable in the same way, into public debate, with benefits linked to educational, cultural and economic policy agendas. Accordingly, policymakers have begun to view craft as a stimulus to develop local and regional economies, skills and materials in relation to wider networks. Within this push towards craft-driven creative place making and economic growth, it has been argued that more sophisticated understandings of the “local” are needed that go beyond those which are inward and parochial. Based on AHRC-funded empirical research undertaken in the Northern Isles of Scotland with craft practitioners, this article attempts to provide evidence of the place-based nature of craft work highlighting both opportunities as well as constraints linked to contexts that are often referred to as remote and peripheral when contrasted with urban locations. We argue for future investigation into, what we term, fractal growth – growth and development that considers multiple dimensions – as being a valid and valuable outcome of creative practice, and which cannot be easily scaled.     

Regional creative industries policy-making under New Labour

This article analyses creative industries policy in the English regions under New Labour (1997–2010). It examines the ideas behind regional creative industries policies (RCIPs) and their implementation. Focusing on the activities of the English regional development agencies, the primary bodies responsible for the implementation of creative industries policy in the British regions, the article places regional cultural policy during the New Labour period within its broader political, social and economic contexts. It explains and evaluates New Labour's RCIPs, arguing that creative industries policy at the regional level changed over the course of New Labour's three terms of office, becoming increasingly economistic at the expense of a more social democratic vision of regional equality and democracy. We identify three issues that were problematic for New Labour's RCIP: a reliance on the idea of “clusters”, commercialisation and shifting regional governance.     

Culture and the Scottish Household Survey

In 2007 the Scottish Government introduced an outcomes based approach to culture set within a National Performance Framework. One of the main data sources to measure “culture” in Scotland is the Scottish Household Survey (SHS). In this article, the SHS and its “Culture and Sport” Module are explored to show how useful the data is within the Scottish Government's economic agenda. This way, the paper reflects on the usefulness of the main data source used to understand cultural activity within Scotland. There are general difficulties measuring “culture”, but overall the SHS provides adequate national data for Scotland on cultural participation and attendance. However, the SHS cannot provide in-depth local level information and provides limited data on non-participants. Other surveys in Scotland and England give some example practices that could be incorporated to improve survey outcomes. Overall, the SHS is a useful policy tool but more could be done to utilise the data it can provide on the Scottish cultural sector.     

The role of intercultural competence,in the relationship between intercultural experiences and creativity among students

We studied the interplay of intercultural competence, intercultural experiences, and creativity among Russian students from Moscow (N = 272). We expected the students from culturally diverse groups, attending the courses on cultural issues, to be more creative. We based our expectation on the idea that cultural diversity and cultural learning are associated with a higher level of intercultural competence that might contribute to students’ creativity. We measured the intercultural experiences by cultural diversity of study groups (a number of foreign students in the groups and the intensity of friendly contacts with them) and by cultural learning (a number of culture-related courses that students attended). We measured creativity by the “Many Instances Game” from the Runco Creativity Assessment Battery (rCAB). We measured intercultural competence by the adapted scale of Fantini and Tirmizi. We discovered positive associations of intercultural experiences in the university with students’ creativity. Such components of intercultural competence as attitudes and skills (the adaptability of behavior), played an important role in the students’ creativity. The attitudes were positive and the skills were negative, related to the creativity. We also revealed that these two components of intercultural competence mediated the relationship between the intercultural experiences and creativity of students. Based on the results, we discussed the factors of the educational environment which may enhance or prohibit creativity.     

Arts councils,policy-making and “the local”

ABSTRACT

In the British Isles, national policies for the arts are primarily viewed as the responsibility of arts councils with statutory duties to distribute state funding that meet the requirements of both “arms-length” principles and national strategic frameworks. This paper explores the tensions between policy making for the nation-state and for “the local” through comparative research on the arts councils (and equivalent bodies) in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with senior representatives from these organisations, it explores their notions of, responsibilities to and affiliations with “the local”. Findings suggest that despite their different models and relationships to the nation-state, and the disparities in the scale of investment, these national policy bodies commonly rely on networked governance to facilitate their relationship to “the local” which risks reproducing national interests, limiting the localised agency of place-based approaches and contributing to a culture of competition within cultural policy.     

Effecting cultural change from below? A comparison of Cape Town and Bandung's pathways to urban cultural governance

ABSTRACT

This article compares the cultural governance pathways of two UNESCO “Design Cities” – Bandung and Cape Town – methodologically framing them as “repeated instances” [Robinson, J. (2018). Policy mobilities as comparison: Urbanization processes, repeated instances, topologies. Revista de Administração Pública, 52(2), 221–243] of a globalized drive towards more creative cities. While the value of mobilizing culture for local urban change in rapidly growing cities of the global South is increasingly recognized [Mbaye, J., & Dinardi, C. (2018). Ins and outs of the cultural polis: Informality, culture and governance in the global South. Urban Studies, 56(3), 578–593], postcolonial urban scholars have rightly questioned whether internationally popular cultural policy approaches are able to speak to their complex challenges, underpinned by informality and the after-effects of colonialism [Pieterse, E. (2006). Building with ruins and dreams: Some thoughts on realising integrated urban development in South Africa through crisis. Urban Studies, 43(2), 285–304]. As postcolonial states are slowly shifting away from a centralized cultural institution model linked to symbolic nation building projects [Booyens, I. (2012). Creative industries, inequality and social development: developments, impacts and challenges in Cape Town. Urban Forum, 23(1), 43–60], travelling cultural policies brought in by foreign agencies and adapted by local epistemic communities have inspired a range of responses that can be broadly described as cultural policy innovation from below Cohen, D. (2015). Grounding mobile policies: Ad hoc networks and the creative city in Bandung, Indonesia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 36(2015), 23–37]. In turn, we examine how different cultural policy approaches have been locally mobilized and reworked in Bandung and Cape Town in response to situated realities and in partnerships between cultural, academic, business and local government actors. We argue that comparing the emerging “creative cityness” [Nkula-Wenz, L. (2018a). Worlding Cape Town by design: Encounters with creative cityness. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 1–17] of both cities provides valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges of urban cultural governance in the global South.     

Are the creative industries meritocratic? An analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey

ABSTRACT

There is currently widespread concern that Britain’s cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are increasingly dominated by the privileged. This stands in stark contrast to dominant policy narratives of the CCIs as meritocratic. Until now this debate has been clouded by a relative paucity of data on class origins. This paper draws on new social origin data from the 2014 Labour Force Survey to provide the first large-scale, representative study of the class composition of Britain’s creative workforce. The analysis demonstrates that CCIs show significant variation in their individual “openness”, although there is a general under-representation of those from working-class origins across the sector. This under-representation is especially pronounced in publishing and music, in contrast to, for example, craft. Moreover, even when those from working-class backgrounds enter certain CCIs, they face a “class origin pay gap” compared to those from privileged backgrounds. The paper discusses how class inequalities, as well as those related to gender and ethnicity, between individual CCIs point to occupational subcultures that resist aggregation into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s broader category of CCIs. The paper concludes by suggesting the importance of disaggregating CCIs and rethinking the definition and boundaries of CCIs as a meaningful category.     

Creative labor as moral and ethical subjects and its limitation: Creative City Yokohama,Japan

This study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Yokohama, Japan. To shed light on this workforce’s everyday experiences and labor subjectivity, this investigation draws ideas from recent research trends of “creative labor” from the field of media and cultural studies, sociology of work, and political economy of communication. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations, this research focuses on how the ethical and moral dimensions of labor subjectivity in creative work are prominently important in explaining Yokohama workers’ everyday living and working experiences as creative labor. Unexpectedly, this study found that these moral and ethical sentiments and actions, which take on the role of retaining their labor motivation, actually limit the development of political subjects who can resist given precarious working conditions and thereby hinder them from building a collective solidarity as “workers.” Thus this investigation concludes that the creative worker’s subjectivity retreats to solely a moral dimension rather than to a political one. Through this finding, this study explores whether the articulation of moral-political and social values in the course of cultural work can evolve from creative workers’ moral and ethical sensitivities and actions.     

Professional mobilities in the creative industries: The role of “place” for young people aspiring for a creative career

Within creative industries policy, two themes have been situated as central to the needs of the creative economy: the economic importance of place and the role of education in delivering a better-equipped workforce. However, these themes have rarely overlapped in either policy thinking or academic research, and so this article focuses on the relationship between place, education and professional aspirations for young people. Using the findings from qualitative interviews with media studies students within higher education (HE), this article analyses how the perceived attributes of some locations may provide industry credibility and the promise of enhanced professional mobility. It examines the tangible and symbolic value of place within young people's career development in the creative industries. The findings highlight how the links between place and education can influence the professional process, and how place shapes young people's perceptions of and opportunities for work in the creative industries. Finally, this research emphasises how current theories on creative industries policy and HE provision need to be extended to take greater account of the ways in which the attributes of localities can be used as a catalyst for individual professionalism amongst young people, and the ways in which certain places (mainly rural) may be disadvantaged in the current policy trajectory.     

Sameness and diversification: A global quantitative survey on cultural innovation in the visual arts

Cultural policies and cultural policy-making are closely associated with creativity and cultural innovation. While the festivals, large-scale art exhibitions and literary conferences supported by such policies play a vital part in the cultural landscape, in recent years they have been increasingly criticised as actually preventing creativity and innovativeness. The claim is that they foster a limited number of creative individuals while rejecting others, and that they are dominated by Western cultural norms that erase cultural diversity. A lack of wide-ranging empirical data with which to substantiate such claims, particularly from an historical perspective, has led to the creation of a 15,000-entry database with the names, nationalities and other details of the artists participating in perennial exhibitions, such as documenta, the Havana Biennial, Istanbul Biennial and Gwangju Biennale. These biennials and perennial exhibitions are widely regarded as vital to the definition of artistic standards and innovations in the visual arts, as exerting an important influence both in their home countries and abroad, and as encouraging the participation of artists from around the world. The first part of this paper considers which artists have appeared in regularly occurring exhibitions, determining whether the majority of them are, indeed, the same and whether there is any bias towards a particular cultural region. The second part inquires whether biennials and other regularly occurring exhibitions in the Western hemisphere “ignore” artists from other regions, or whether they, in fact, represent a global perspective. In short, this paper explores the cultural diversity of these perennial exhibitions and determines whether they favour artists from particular regions, while excluding others. The findings reveal that the data do not support these assumptions and that international exhibitions do, in fact, contribute to creativity, diversity and multiculturalism.     

Review of Scottish Arts Council's Quality Framework – guidelines for arts organisations (2nd ed.), 2009

The Scottish Arts Council's “Quality Framework” was launched in 2007 as a continuous improvement toolkit. It provides a flexible framework for arts organizations to evaluate the impact of funding decisions. Developing tools that allow organizations to demonstrate their impact provides robust information to further build the evidence base for the cultural sector. The second edition (2009) has been revised after evaluation and consultation with arts organizations and Scottish Arts Council staff. Taking this approach and gathering further evidence is an important step in the lead up to Creative Scotland (which is the newly established creative arts funding body within Scotland). Continuous improvement tools not only gather evidence but can improve work practices. The Quality Framework should be viewed in the context of the National Performance Framework, as gathering outcome evidence will also assist in the production of Local Authority Single Outcome Agreements. This review also looks at the Unified Quality Improvement Framework, an over-arching tool that will assist local authorities and other service providers to evaluate the quality of their culture and sport provision. Evidencing sector information such as arts activity will be an important part of this process. The Quality Framework is a tool to gather outcome-based evidence that will show how culture can contribute to a variety of policy objectives.     

The audiovisual action plan: a new audiovisual policy for Ireland

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the recent plan for the audiovisual industries introduced (after some delay) by the Irish Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. The Audiovisual Action Plan (“the Plan”) sets out the Department’s approach to the audiovisual industries and is, it is contended, evidence of a marketization of culture consistent with a creative industries perspective. The analysis of the Plan in a wider policy context identifies key issues shaping audiovisual production in Ireland. Using a thematic analysis approach from Braun and Clark (2005, 2019) a number of themes are developed from analysis of the relevant policy documents, broadly conceived around the increasing instrumentalism of culture. Taking a political economy perspective allows for development of themes around the commodification of the nation-state through the provision of policies that actively encourage a certain type of audiovisual production. Building on Mosco’s work on political economy (Mosco, 2009) the concept of spatialization from Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1991) is used to interrogate the production of and commodification of space through Specifically, this article interrogates the policy norms underpinning the Audiovisual Action Plan introduced by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in Ireland in 2018 as part of Culture 2025, the national cultural policy framework. It identifies the key proposals which affect the audiovisual industries. It is concluded that the Plan (and other relevant policy documents) support a spatialized, commodified view of the audiovisual industries as primarily industrial in nature, paying scant attention to the consideration of such industries as cultural forces.     

The art of the good life: culture and sustainable prosperity

ABSTRACT

The creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and re-thought, but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in particular, how it might encourage a kind of “sustainable prosperity” wherein human flourishing is not linked to high levels of material consumption but rather the capabilities to engage with cultural and creative practices and communities. We critically explore these ideas in three locations: a London borough, a deindustrialised city in England’s midlands and a rural town on the Welsh/English border. Across these diverse landscapes and socio-economic contexts, we look at different versions of the good life and at the possibilities and constraints of cultural activity as a way of achieving kinds of sustainable prosperity.     

Afro-Asian solidarity and the “capital” question: looking beyond the last frontier

The argument in this paper is a continuation of an argument that I have been making for some time, which questions the universal history of capital, crucial to which are assumptions regarding its historical necessity. Capital is not only understood to be a historically unavoidable condition but one that has already colonized the world such that there is no outside to it. In developing my argument regarding the “outside” to capital, where I find Kalyan Sanyal's work very useful and significant, I claim that much of the problem with theorizing capital today has to do not with the beast itself but with the inherited paraphernalia of western theory and philosophy. After a survey of the passive revolution debate in India, which I read as a sign of the actual impossibility of “capitalist” development across different parts of the world, I move on to argue that both “capital/ism” and the “logic of capital” (accumulation) are misleading concepts concealing an essential “emptiness,” which I work out through the idea of “dependent arising” taken from Buddhist philosophy.     

Include Us Out—Economic Development and Social Policy in the Creative Industries

While Government claims about the UK as a ‘global creative hub’ continue to be made (Purnell, 2005), the contradictions and tensions in New Labour's policy in the creative industries have become more apparent. These include the tensions between a set of policies for global media businesses versus the support for small firms in local economic development (Gilmore, 2004; Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005), and the tension between citizens and consumers in media and cultural policy (Hesmondhalgh, 2005). Equally apparent are the tensions between economic development of these sectors and social inclusion. In the UK, arguably more than other countries, the rhetoric of Creative Industries has been tied into political ideas about the links between economic competitiveness and social inclusion. The stated aims for creative industry development have thus been twofold—to increase jobs and GDP, while simultaneously ameliorating social exclusion and countering long-standing patterns of uneven economic development. Research, however, suggests that supporting the creative industries is, at best, a problematic way of tackling the issues of economic and social exclusion. The effects of gentrification on creative industry working and living space (Evans & Shaw, 2004); the patterns of informal hiring and career progression in these sectors (Leadbeater & Oakley, 2001) and the concentration of much economic activity in London and the South East, all suggest that the development of these sectors might exacerbate rather than address patterns of economic inequality.     

Transformation and job creation in the cultural and creative industries in South Africa

The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have been hailed as offering great potential to create jobs and to be socially inclusive. Since artistic success is defined by individual talent, or merit, the CCIs should be one sector that is especially open to, and appreciative of, social diversity in terms of race, class, cultural group and gender. However, as expected, recent studies in both the UK and the US have revealed that employment in the CCIs is heavily dominated by the middle classes, and is not as diverse in terms of other characteristics. Since the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994, transformation of firm ownership, previously dominated by white people, to include more black, coloured and Indian/Asian-origin South Africans, has been an important part of achieving greater economic equality and social cohesion, as well as being more representative of the cultures of the majority of the population. Using data from a survey of 2400 CCIs firms in South Africa, this paper examines the extent to which the CCIs in South Africa have transformed in terms of ownership and employment. Comparisons are also made across the six UNESCO [(2009). Framework for cultural statistics. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.uis.unesco.org/culture/Pages/framework-cultural-statistics.aspx] “Cultural Domains” in terms of ownership, average monthly turnover and the number of full-time, part-time and contract employees. Results show some diversity in the industry, but significant differences between the Domains. Statistical analysis demonstrates that CCI funding policy in South Africa is sensitive to advancing the transformation agenda in that more transformed firms were shown to be more likely to have received some form of government grant as part of their income.     

Cultural clusters and cultural industries in China

Through examining the development and the nature of the new cultural districts in China, namely, “clusters of Beijing,” this paper attempts to identify the characteristics of, and critically evaluate, the existing models of culture clusters in China. Obviously, these cultural clusters are seen as a united and state effort to assist, develop and boost the so-called cultural industries, including game, animation, comic, software, science and technology and so forth. However, with the clusters of Beijing as a case study, in this paper we argue that in the course of development, the state interests and the authorities' local (e.g. district) interest are often prioritized over the culture or the local interest. There are also tensions and contradictions among various interest groups on different levels of operations of these cultural clusters. In sum, apart from enhancing the private creative industries, developing the national cultural economy, or revitalizing the old industries as in the cluster models of many western countries, economic interests, political powers of the districts and soft power of the nation can be the overriding interests behind the booming cultural clusters in China.     

Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud,London, and the importance of place

While recent debate has often focused on a reified “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage. Through ethnographic research in London's electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip hop), it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality. London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago. Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network. This finding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music. While there are reasons for the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy. That London should appear so supremely privileged reflects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UK's cultural economy.