The creative economy: invention of a global orthodoxy (original) (raw)
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2016
This essay considers how policy thinking about culture has been steadily transformed into an overwhelmingly economic subject matter whose central trope is the "creative economy". The development of current ideas and their background are discussed. Policy ideas first fully developed in the UK have had a global resonance: the illustrative examples of the European Union and the United Nations are discussed. The embedding of creative economy thinking in British cultural institutions such as the BBC and cultural support bodies is illustrated. The impact of current orthodoxy on academic institutions and research is also considered. Countervailing trends are weak. New thinking is now required.
Creative industries as policy and discourse outside the United Kingdom
Global Media and Communication, 2007
Media, cultural and communication studies' critique of the concept of creative industries as policy discourse has been as consistent as it has been negative. It runs from critical US academics' reflex anti-statist suspicion of 'talking to the ISAs' (in Bennett's (1998) inimitable words), to in-principle opposition to allowance of 'creativity' (for which read bourgeois individualism and essentialism) to displace 'culture' (in the classic British cultural studies tradition, code for solidarity and Broadening media discourses 345 collectivity). It runs from predictable demurs about top-down policy from central government, to grounded worries about the types of work and work cultures encouraged by such discourse (McRobbie, 2002) and further to total-explanatory schema placing creative industries inter alia as the running-dog of the new international division of cultural labour (Miller, 2002). The position is captured in gestalt form in reviews by, for example, Calabrese (2006) and McGuigan (2006) of the volume Creative Industries (Hartley, 2005) and arguably reaches its apogee in the wideranging and sophisticated critique of the creative industries policy problematic by Garnham (2005). The gap between the remarkable enthusiasm with which it has been taken up in policy circles across many parts of the world and at many levels (national, state, regional, supranational), and the depth of opposition to it academically, marks it out as a major contemporary instance of the gap between policy and critique (Cunningham, 1992). Interestingly, though, almost all of this critique has been focused on the British policy environment, and as such betrays a remarkably metropolitanist bias. This brief overview of policy situations elsewhere in the world offers an interesting case study in internationalizing media studies, comparing their 'problematics' with those identified by Garnham as foundational to the creative industries discourse. The centrepiece of Garnham's paper is an extensive commentary on the core intellectual lineage of the information society: Daniel Bell and post-industrialism, Schumpeterian theories of innovation, information economics, services and post-Fordism, and the 'technologies of freedom' argument. Creative industries ideas are a kind of Trojan Horse, secreting such a heritage into the realm of cultural practice, suborning the latter's proper claims on the public purse and self-understanding, and aligning it with inappropriate bedfellows such as business services, telecommunications and calls for increases in generic creativity. There are glimpses of a potentially progressive opportunity allowed by Garnham, but basically he finds no real advances and rests his case on the normative imperative to return to the 'cultural industries' policy focus on distribution (critique of multimedia conglomeration) and consumption (smoothing of the popular market for culture for access and equity) of which he was a main proponent in the 1980s (e.g. Garnham,
The Creative Industries after Cultural Policy
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2004
How can we most usefully appropriate the rhetorics of the new economy to advance a contemporary understanding of the production and consumption of creative and informational content? Can the concept of creativity be broadened, but not so much that it becomes everything and nothing – the newest business lit fad and just as ephemeral as the rest – such that claims for its role as a driver of economic growth can be sustained? Can the analytical and research context for ‘experiential’ or ‘cultural’ consumption – core business for cultural, communications and media studies academics – be helpfully developed through new economy models? This piece takes an explicitly policy-orientated line and tendentiously tracks a genealogy and some possible preferred futures for the creative industries beyond their framing within a cultural policy problematic. I track the fate of creative and informational content as it passes across three grids of understanding: ‘culture’, ‘services’ and ‘knowledge’. T...
After the Creative Industries: Cultural Policy in Crisis
This paper unifies and articulates a series of debates that brought together the Global Cultural Economy Network (GCEN), an informal group of policy experts currently attempting to re-frame international policies on culture and economy. Directed by the author, the Network is critical of the rhetoric on the creative industry/ economy agenda as routinely used by policy makers and public officials, at local, national and international levels (by UNCTAD, WIPO and UNESCO, among others). Subjecting key terms in this rhetoric to scrutiny, this article considers the historical evolution of the 'culture-economy' nexus, and observes that even where the arts and culture have evidently benefitted from their cooption into mainstream public policy agendas, the current dominant and now popular discourse of 'creative economy' is problematic. The article sets out the dilemma by considering the various policy trends involved in this cooption-from creative industries to creative cities-and how advocates for the arts and culture have all too easily accommodated the reorientation of culture for the production of economic value. The article argues that dominant policy trends have marginalised the social character of culture and so its unique forms of productivity, and have generated an obfuscation of the broader political imaginary that has divested cultural policies of their facility for inspiration and alternative futures.
Cultural policy and creative industries
This chapter offers examines the complex and often fraught policy and scholarly relationship between cultural policy and the emergence of what has come to be identified as the creative industries. It charts the ascendency of creative industries agendas out of the academy and into national policy, especially via the high profile and highly influential British creative industries model championed in the early 2000s by the Blair government's Department for Media, Culture and Sport, which was itself a further development of the short-lived Australian Creative Nation framework. It will explore how creative industries approaches have settled down through the lens of two key sites for action and concern. Firstly the rise creative place making including, following Florida, the policy fetish for urban redevelopment focused upon attracting creative workers. Secondly, drilling down to the employment coalface of creative industries, it draws attention to the exclusions of the contemporary creative workforce (particularly those of gender) as but one means to examine what has been lost in the shift from cultural policy to creative industries, namely the focus on socio-cultural inclusion. It argues that the ready take-up within UK-style creative industries approaches of the US urban policy-driven 'creative class' ideas of economist Richard Florida represents an important de-coupling moment for cultural policy and creative industries, consolidating the increasingly more commercially-focussed mobilisation of ideas and funding structures around entrepreneurial creativity. From 'Cultural' to 'Creative' Industries In keeping with the global focus of this collection, the shift from cultural policy/cultural industries to creative industries has itself been something of a highly mobile feast, albeit one heavily though not exclusively concentrated until recently within the English-speaking world. As is well documented the transition is not a benign one with much being, and remaining, at stake. It has also never been a clean break but rather is the result of a confluence of scholarly and policy ideas around, and institutional responses to, multiple global pressures. Key among them are the economic restructurings of the 1970s onwards that saw manufacturing shift from the Global North to cheaper labour cultures elsewhere, leading to a concurrent pressure on governments to find jobs through the development of new knowledge-intensive sectors. Within universities too business
The article critiques official notions of creative industries with reference to definitions of both culture and creativity. The knowledge economy-based concept of creative industries, it is maintained, has no specific cultural content and ignores the distinctive attributes of both cultural creativity and cultural products. As such it overrides important public good arguments for state support of culture, subsuming the cultural sector and cultural objectives within an economic agenda to which it is illsuited. We argue against this turn in public policy and for a cultural policy that views its object as all forms of cultural production, both industrial and artisan. Finally we question the longer term motives and consequences for cultural policy of the creative industries agenda.
Since the early 2000s, several intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have advanced the idea that the creative economy could be a ‘feasible development option’. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) took the lead by preparing the 2008 and 2010 Creative Economy Reports, whereas the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and UNDP executed the 2013 report. The article – based on an actor-centred institutionalism – explores the role IGOs have played in the promulgation of the ‘creative economy’ policy agenda. Through a socio-political analysis, we reveal how IGOs act and interact with each other vis-à-vis ‘creative economy’ policy agenda making. On one hand, the article seeks to highlight why and how IGOs include the creative economy within their priorities and use the concept, influence or challenge its orientations. On the other hand, it aims to examine their ability to act in common in order to globalize the ‘creative economy’ policy agenda and create new forms of cultural industries governance.
European cultural policies and the ‘creative industries’ turn
This chapter sketches the evolution of the cultural policies in Europe after WWII as a four phase move towards what has been emerging as the central dual content of the current public cultural policy: preserving and promoting heritage, and bringing the creative industries at the core of the so-called knowledge society. The general evolutionary trend which I will expound upon shows four distinct phases: 1) the creation of a systematic cultural supply policy based on two principles – excellence and democratization – and a limited definition of culture suitable for public financing; 2) the gradual decentralization of public action, which leads to an increasing disparity in its aims and functions, and which challenges the initial universalist and unanimist model; 3) a revision of the legitimate scope of public action, that opens the borders of cultural policy to entertainment culture governed by the laws of the industrial economy; 4) an increasing tendency to justify cultural policy on the basis of its contribution to economic growth and to the balance of national social diversity, which legitimises the regulatory power of public action as well encouraging the expansion of the “creative industries” and the demands for the evaluation of procedures and results.. I conclude by suggesting that a city-centered approach to creative generativity challenges the state-centered doctrine of cultural policy.
Whither the creative economy? Some reflections on the European case
Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Creative Industries
The culture sector suffers from a lack of strategic support and financial investment. The challenge is, thus, to promote and strengthen the contribution of the culture sector to the benefit of the European economy. 1 1 European Commission, 'Culture: supporting Europe's cultural and creative sectors' http://ec.europa.eu/culture/tools/culture-2000\_en.htm accessed 20 August 2015 (original emphasis). 2 See, for instance, E Bustamante (ed.), Industrias creativas: amenazas sobre la cultura digital (Gedisa Editorial 2011); P Bouquillion, B Miège and P Moeglin, L'industrialisation des biens symboliques: les industries créatives en regard des industries culturelles (