The definition of the 'cultural industries (original) (raw)

Cultural industries and cultural policy

International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2005

This article analyses and contextualises a variety of relationships between the cultural industries and cultural policy. A principal aim is to examine policies explicitly formulated as cultural (or creative) industries policies. What lies behind such policies? How do they relate to other kinds of cultural policy, including those more oriented towards media, communications, arts and heritage? The first section asks how the cultural industries became such an important idea in cultural policy, when those industries had been largely invisible in traditional (arts‐ and heritage‐based) policy for many decades. What changed and what drove the major changes? In the second section, we look at a number of problems and conceptual tensions arising from the new importance of the cultural industries in contemporary public policy, including problems concerning definition and scope, and the accurate mapping of the sector, but also tensions surrounding the insertion of commercial and industrial culture into cultural policy regimes characterised by legacies of romanticism and idealism. We also look at problems surrounding the academic division of labour in this area of study. We conclude by summarising some of the main contemporary challenges facing cultural policy and cultural policy studies with regard to the cultural industries. The piece also serves to introduce the contributions to a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy on the cultural industries and cultural policy.

Cultural industries and cultural policy Article (Accepted version) (Refereed

This article analyses and contextualises a variety of relationships between the cultural industries and cultural policy. A principal aim is to examine policies which are explicitly formulated as cultural (or creative) industries policies. It seeks to address questions such as: what lies behind such policies? How do they relate to other kinds of cultural policy, including those more oriented towards media, communications, arts and heritage? The first section asks how the cultural industries became such an important idea in cultural policy, when those industries had been largely invisible in traditional (arts and heritage-based) policy for many decades. What changed and what drove the major changes? In the second section, we look at a number of problems and conceptual tensions which arise from the new importance of the cultural industries in contemporary public policy, including problems concerning definition and scope, and the accurate mapping of the sector, but also tensions surrounding the insertion of commercial and industrial culture into cultural policy regimes characterised by legacies of romanticism and idealism. We also look at problems surrounding the academic division of labour in this area of study. In the final section, we conclude by summarising some of the main contemporary challenges facing cultural policy and cultural policy studies with regard to the cultural industries. The piece also serves to introduce the contributions to a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy on 'The Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy'.

CULTURAL INDUSTRIES AND PUBLIC POLICY: AN OXYMORON?

This paper re-imagines the space of the cultural industries and their governance. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first questions of definition are reviewed. In the second part the paper examines cultural policies (and by default cultural industries policies) in order to disclose the key concepts of culture that they are based upon. The final section, on governance, develops an argument that seeks to open up a space where the hybrid nature of cultural production can be addressed by policy.

'Mis-match or Convergence?: Cultural Policy and the Cultural Industries'

The Cultural Industries as a Policy Problem Cultural policy has historically manifested a 'structural' fear of economic and industry arguments and analyses except where, as in economic benefits of the arts' arguments, agencies are able to demonstrate the economic potential of cultural activities in addition to their intrinsic merits.

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