The politics of regional audio-visual policy in England: or, how we learnt to stop worrying and get 'creative' (original) (raw)

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.

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,

A cultural shock doctrine? Austerity, the neoliberal state and the creative industries discourse

Media, Culture and Society

A number of writers have made the argument that the development creative industries policy discourse in the United Kingdom and elsewhere represents the articulation of a politics that is neoliberal in character. The marginalisation of Blairism in the United Kingdom, and the Liberal Democrat-Conservative Coalition Government’s adoption of an ever more explicit neoliberal dogma in its radical restructuring/dismantling of the welfare state, provides the opportunity to evaluate this argument. This article summarises the creative industries policy discourse and the main research paradigms that have been used to interrogate it. From there, it explores a number of discursive positions that have placed pressure on policy actors and explores their institutionalisation in policy structures since 2008. It is argued that the major institutional policy frameworks of the creative industries discourse have proved remarkably durable through the current phase of neoliberal restructuring of the state. At the same time, discursive pressure is being exerted from a reactionary cultural conservatism that seeks to further undermine and delegitimate the socially and politically progressive elements of the creative industries discourse.

Creative Industries or National Cinema? Policy in Transition

In 2002, 'film' consolidated a position within municipal governance as part of the Brisbane City Council's economic development program based on the 'new economy' understanding of the role of the city as the physical location of commercial and cultural activity. This positioning of film within the notion of industry clustering, and the acknowledgment that production technologies of film and television share a common ground with games development, and other forms of leisure software, represent a fundamental departure from the precepts of the traditional national cinema model. Are creative industries discourse and cluster logic opening up a new field of governance for film policy? How does this translate to the state and federal levels if policy is to become more accommodating to the structures and dynamics of specific regional locations? This paper examines two Queensland approaches to creative industries discourse and cluster logic as a way of understanding the impact this move to a 'global knowledge-based economy' will have on the traditional policy framework.

Creative industries and the politics of New Labour

2010

This thesis examines the development of policy towards the creative industries in the UK in the period 1997-2008. It argues that this can be seen in the light of New Labour's understanding of the knowledge economy, an understanding that influenced its development of education and social policy, as well as economic policy. It thus provides a unique insight into New Labour politics in general. The thesis asserts that New Labour's account of the knowledge economy was a deterministic one, which took its cue from what it believed to be long-term social and economic trends. In this, it is consistent with other critiques of New Labour politics, which argue that it can be seen as a development of prevailing neoliberal ideas (Hay 1999; Thompson 2002; Finlayson 2003; Clarke 2004); but in this case, I argue, it is a variety of neoliberalism that is heavily influenced by institutionalism (Bevir 2005). The importance of institutionalist ideas can be seen in the emphasis in creative indus...

Film Policy and England: The Politics of Creativity

Routledge eBooks, 2016

This essay offers a discussion of policy and its relationship to film culture in Britain focusing primarily on the last twenty-five years, and concentrating exclusively on England. Necessarily a foreshortened overview, it nevertheless seeks to cover the recurring, general reference points in policy analysis, such as the opposition between commerce and culture; the relationship between state and 'nation'; the wider cultural policy discourses within which film has taken its place, particularly that of the 'creative industries' model (CI), and, lastly the constraining and enabling socioeconomic contexts within which film and cultural policy acquire their complexion in specific eras. This last emphasis, on social democratic and the neoliberal contexts, is designed to keep the political and cultural issues raised by policy developments foremost and to avoid the de-politicising lure of pragmatic 'realism' or critical timidity in assessing these developments.

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.

The'Cultural Burden': Regional Film Policy and Practice In England

Journal of Media Practice, 2009

This article looks at the development of film policy and practice in the English regions. It asks: how has the ‘territorialization’ of film policy and funding affected regional modes of film production? And further, how is film as a cultural practice manifested in contemporary regional film production? The article is divided into two sections. The first outlines the development of regional film policy and practice from the 1970s, paying particular attention to the model of regional filmmaking that emerged from the film workshop movement and the changes in regional film policy instituted by the New Labour government since 1997. After this broad historical framework has been established, the second section analyzes regional film policy and practice through a case study of the East Midlands region. It is argued that, while ideas concerning cinema as a cultural practice are still present at a rhetorical level, commercial interests have become ascendant in regional film funding policy, restricting the space for creative autonomy that once defined regional production sectors.