The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries

Kate Oakley, Justin O'Connor, Kate Oakley, Justin O'Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317533979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries is collection of contemporary scholarship on the cultural industries and seeks to re-assert the importance of cultural production and consumption against the purely economic imperatives of the 'creative industries'.

Across 43 chapters drawn from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary perspectives, this comprehensive volume offers a critical and empirically-informed examination of the contemporary cultural industries.

A range of cultural industries are explored, from videogames to art galleries, all the time focussing on the culture that is being produced and its wider symbolic and socio-cultural meaning. Individual chapters consider their industrial structure, the policy that governs them, their geography, the labour that produces them, and the meaning they offer to consumers and participants.

The collection also explores the historical dimension of cultural industry debates providing context for new readers, as well as critical orientation for those more familiar with the subject. Questions of industry structure, labour, place, international development, consumption and regulation are all explored in terms of their historical trajectory and potential future direction.

By assessing the current challenges facing the cultural industries this collection of contemporary scholarship provides students and researchers with an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates in the field.

Part I PERSPECTIVES ON THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

As we outlined in the introduction, scholarship around the cultural industries – what they are and why they matter – has developed extensively in the last decades. Rather than being outmoded by the creative industries agenda the critical questions they allow have persisted and grown. In this section we introduce a broad range of perspectives on the cultural industries.

Mark Banks addressed a central question of this volume – why do the cultural industries matter? Exploring the complex relationship between ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ value the chapter tries to show how the very intractability or incommensurability of this opposition itself provides a value. The fact that ‘creative industries’ erases this opposition has made it more difficult to address the difficult questions of value, of why the cultural industries matter.

Many versions of the cultural industries agenda join that of the creative industries in marginalising ‘art’ as heritage, or some residual category of 18th century Romanticism. Laikwan Pang’s essay shows us how aspects of the European tradition of art and aesthetics continues to operate within the cultural and creative industries. Pang outlines how autonomy, critical self-reflection, and freedom are still central stakes in current debates around cultural labour. Nevertheless, she takes this further into questions of community and connectivity – key terms of the cultural economy – which are still too tied to the discourse of the individual artist, especially in areas such as intellectual property rights. She ends by suggesting new ways in which communal creativity can be affirmed outside the confines of the ‘creative economy’.

David Throsby has been central to the rise of cultural economics, which has asserted both the relevance of the work of the economist and its proper limits vis-à-vis cultural value. As such it is a welcome corrective to the focus on metrics and universal commensurability under the sign of the ‘efficiency’ that has marked neo-liberalism. Throsby shows how the cultural sector might be accommodated within standard economic national accounting systems in ways that would allow a more productive and open dialogue between questions of economic resources and cultural values.

Scott Fitzgerald’s chapter gives us an overview of one of the key debates in the cultural industries – the relative weight of global corporations and the proliferation of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). This has been central to the claims of the creative industries, that the distributed creativity associated with the Internet and other technologies has side-stepped the debates about corporations, power and control that marked the political economy school. Fitzgerald shows how the large corporations have responded in different ways to these challenges, and that many of the approaches of the cultural industries – such as Miege’s ‘social logics’ – still provide a better explanation than theories of the ‘prosumer’ and so on.

Finally, Chris Gibson, Chantel Carr and Andrew Warren give a critical account of the positioning of the cultural and creative industries as post-industrial. Challenging the inevitability of the off-shoring of manufacture, they suggest this is much more of a deliberate strategy to kill it off. In this process ‘creativity’ as ‘knowledge economy’ played a central role. Challenging the characterisation of manufacture as unskilled, dirty and old-fashioned, they suggest that any future it might still have is not incompatible with the cultural industries. Indeed, its rootedness in craft skills and its connections to the materiality of production holds out the possibility for the re-invention of the cultural economy on more equitable and sustainable lines.

1 Valuing cultural industries

An introduction

Mark Banks

DOI: 10.4324/9781315725437-3

Why do cultural industries matter? I’ll suggest two main reasons. First, they matter because they provide contexts for human beings to discover, disclose and distribute their creativity– in all its diversity and complexity of social and cultural meanings. In this way, cultural industries help make possible the examination of life. Second, they matter because they provide a means of economising, for generating and distributing resources– particularly for those who have a direct interest in processes of production, distribution and consumption. The cultural industries therefore concern us doubly– culturally and economically. Yet this duality begs a further question, one this chapter seeks specifically to address; namely, how should we appropriately value the cultural industries?

To value is to identify the worth of something, its standing or quality in a world of others. In respect of the cultural industries, we are presented with some obvious difficulties in establishing value or worth. For one, it is not immediately apparent what we ought to be evaluating– cultural or economic practices, or something of both? Neither is it obvious what scheme of evaluation we might best adopt– a monetary or aesthetic scheme? Or a measure attuned to ‘cultural value’, providing such a value can adequately be defined? And even if we conceive an effective means of evaluating, we might reasonably ask how extensive or applicable are its measures, across different times and territories? Clearly the problems of establishing value are legion– but few have been discouraged from tackling them. As the cultural industries have come to prominence, so the number of ways and means of evaluating them has proliferated in and between industry, government and academia. There is little doubt that cultural industries have been widely accounted for, appraised and assessed– their worldly worth scrutinised (e.g. DCMS, 2008; Throsby, 2010; UNESCO, 2013; Work Foundation, 2007).

In what follows I wish to outline some problems of value using the framing example of the United Kingdom and its particular efforts to (re)value the cultural industries as the ‘creative industries’. In doing so the first aim is to stress the difficulties involved in valuing and to draw attention to the stakes involved in making an evaluation. It will then be argued that at the heart of valuing the cultural industries lies an intractable difficulty; a problem of incommensurability that precludes settlement on a singular measure of value, whether cultural or economic. Yet, while much energy has been expended in attempting to efface this problem, I will argue that it is a difficulty that has its own value, one that is vital to recognise and sustain, since the consequences of its resolution or disappearance would prevent us from fully understanding the cultural industries, and be less congenial– socially and politically– than we might be inclined to imagine.

Conceptions of value

How have the cultural industries been hitherto valued? The original use of the term ‘culture industry’ was resolutely unequivocal, and largely pejorative, reflecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944/1992) dismay at the expanding commodification of human creativity. Here the cultural industries were largely valueless– at least in the aesthetico-idealist terms favoured by the Frankfurt School. Adorno argued that through industrial standardisation and mediation, all good culture came inevitably to a bad end. What value remained was only that lodged in capital accrued– the tainted profits of vulgarity and destruction.

The subsequent development of the ‘mass’ cultural industries has, of course, seen the concept gradually re-evaluated in more upbeat terms– not least by those industry actors, national governments and policy makers keen to nurture and reap the economic rewards provided by its component activities. Today, the cultural industries are understood somewhat less as manifestations of a corrupted Enlightenment and rather more as vanguard executants of post-industrial economic growth. Now, re-packaged as the ‘creative industries’, the cultural industries are most commonly regarded as hugely valuable contributors to the wider ‘creative economy’ of information, knowledge and symbolic commodities– vital sources of national wealth, as well as social innovation and cohesion (Work Foundation, 2007; DCMS 2008; NESTA, 2013; UNESCO, 2013).

Yet between these poles lies a somewhat turbulent history that reveals another vital and enduring value of the cultural industries– at least from the perspective of critical social science and the humanities, and many practitioners and consumers alike. This is the value of cultural industries as contexts for the cultivation of countervailing forms of political, social and cultural expression, association and critique. During the 20th century, a gradual shift towards understanding cultural industries as means for producing symbolic and expressive life– and not merely commodities– helped moved analysis beyond the petrifying austerity of Frankfurt critical theory, as well as frame the subsequent range of national and popular re-evaluations of the role and value of the commercial media, art and culture of high or late modernity. The re-evaluation of the cultural industries in post-Second World War European and United States contexts was marked by recognition of their increasingly important value economically, in the midst of developing consumer societies, and their role in enhancing the polity in liberal democracies, by helping to effect forms of public debate, popular representation and self-expression (see Miège, 1979; Hesmondhalgh, 2007; O’Connor, 2011).

In essence, then, we have three discrete values for cultural industries– three different, seemingly incommensurable, conceptions of their worth. Cultural industries as valueless, or as economically or culturally valued. These continue to be publicly rehearsed, in ways that solidify their enduring and singular status. But here I want to explore the intersections between them– or rather the latter two– by drawing attention to the durability of an interstitial order of value located between economic rationality and cultural critique.

This might seem curious given the current primacy afforded ‘creative economy’ policy and rhetoric. Indeed, it has become common to claim that the kind of rationality underpinning creative economy thinking has fatally damaged any other competing value, including those long-established components of culture and critique (McRobbie, 2002; Miller, 2009). I would suggest, however, that this is not entirely the case, and that while cultural value might well be degraded, it is far from destroyed. Indeed, I’ll argue it would be hard for this to occur, since part of what defines cultural industries is the existence of an intrinsic space of possibility at the interface of culture and economy, foundationally generative of both commodification and forms of cultural representation, meaning and critique. As we’ll see, while the economic and the cultural might exist as relatively discrete and free-standing values, in the cultural industries their production (and destruction) relies necessarily on their dialectical dependency.

Economic value– creating the creatives

The UK creative industries appeared as a specific instrument of government, expediently fashioned to help manage a given set of productive activities at a particular historical moment. They arose as a solution to an emergent problem of value– how to value appropriately a set of discrete but interwoven activities, interests and compulsions, sufficient that they might serve the purposes imagined for them.

Let us consider the issues in play at the time of their formation. Why were the creative industries regarded as a vital and necessary innovation and what value were they imagined to provide? Firstly, as Nicholas Garnham (2005) has convincingly argued, the emergence of the creative industries idea in the mid-1990s was linked to state and commercial desires to develop more fully post-industrial ‘informational’ or ‘knowledge’ economies based on the production and consumption of immaterial commodities and services, including the kinds of expressive, symbolic or meaning-laden goods usually associated with cultural industries. In the UK the drive to reap the benefits of knowledge and symbol production, and (especially) the intellectual properties that pertained to them demanded a means of classifying and evaluating the kinds of activities likely to generate the commodities identified as crucial to growth. The term ‘creative industries’ thereby emerged, providing a frame and context for manifesting and managing a set of objects that could be harnessed to deliver some demonstrable (new) economic outcomes. By the admission of some the principal architects and proponents this was an exercise in uncertainty, something of a tentative step into ‘unchartered territory’ (Newbigin, 2011: 232). In some ways, then, in the contingency of its genesis, ‘creative industries’ offered nothing more than a working grammar for codifying a set of existing and emergent objects that appeared to possess some kind of family resemblance– a means for a willing and responsive government to adjust itself to the contours of a rapidly shifting economic terrain.

Yet the choices made were not accidental. The primacy given to intellectual property exploitation was reflected in the chosen composition of the creative sector– which rather oddly included advertising and software production (hitherto not widely regarded as cultural industries per se)– inclusions that allowed the sector to be presented as more economically significant and more substantially geared to the ‘new’ economy than might have otherwise been assumed. For Garnham, the creative industries entailed the value ascribed to the cultural industries becoming more or less solely re-calculated in terms of the priority accorded to new, intellectual property driven media and technology businesses– where beefed-up estimates of productive activity could act as a magnet for UK Treasury support and also demonstrate the seriousness with which the UK was able to meet the kind of new economy challenges being identified internationally by the EU, UNESCO, the World Bank and other development agencies.

Garnham’s analysis serves to explain some of the desire to bring cultural industries into the new economy fold. Clearly, however, other factors were in play, helping to usher in the particular idea of creative industries. While it might be suggested that the creative industries concept appeared as something of a speculative gambit, much was revealed in the deliberate (and value-laden) shift from the ‘cultural’ to the ‘creative’.

Partly, the use of the creative industries was about avoiding accusations of ‘elitism’ and separating out public support for the creative industries from traditional patronage of the arts and culture– this was resolutely not about supporting ‘market failure’ but about encouraging returnable ‘investment’. Indeed, as commercial success emerged as the principal arbiter of value– what sold was what mattered– the market’s apparently liberating tendencies helped push aside other (non-economic) concerns and expressions of democracy. This included the idea of cultural industries that had reappeared in the UK in the early 1980s as an organising frame to describe the small, local, popular culture industries that were springing up in post-industrial inner cities. In this context, Garnham’s own key position paper (see Garnham, 1990), written for the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC), articulated a vision of cultural industries as both commercial and popular, ideally geared towards providing ordinary people with the kinds of texts and experiences they valued. This assumed an important role for the market and the (local) state in enabling such culture to be made, relatively distinct from big business and the kinds of ostensibly ‘elitist’ or non-commercial ‘high’ culture conventionally supported by national government. Here culture was tied to economy, but mainly in the interests of enhancing the democratic polity. While the proposed cultural industry policies for the GLC were never fully implemented, there was enough piecemeal activity in London, and more concrete policy and self-organised developments in regional (predominantly ‘Old’ Labour) cities such as Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester, to show that popular culture was becoming increasingly linked to both employment creation and forms of social cohesion, representation and renewal, linked often to a prog...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• The cultural industries: An introduction
• PART 1 Perspectives on the cultural industries Beyond the binary of manufacturing and creativity
• 1 Valuing cultural industries An introduction
• 2 Art and cultural industries Autonomy and community
• 3 The cultural industries as a sector of the economy Autonomy and community
• 4 The structure of the cultural industries Global corporations to SMEs
• 5 Making things Beyond the binary of manufacturing and creativity
• PART 2 Core cultural industries Beyond the binary of manufacturing and creativity
• 6 The literary as a cultural industry Sarah Brouillette and Christopher Doody
• 7 Multi-platform Media How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 8 The Resilience of TV and Its Implications for Media Policy How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 9 The globalization of TV formats How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 10 The popular music industries How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 11 Between Triple-A, Indie, Casual, and DIY Sites of tension in the videogames cultural industries
• 12 ‘This Sporting Life is Going to Be the Death of Me' Sport as a cultural industry
• 13 Advertising as a Cultural Industry
• 14 A Cultural Economy of Audio and Radio Technologies
• PART 3 Space and Place
• 15 Culture and the City
• 16 Consumption and Place
• 17 Cottage Economy The ‘ruralness' of rural cultural industries
• 18 Producing “India” as Location
• 19 Cultural Economy and Urban Development in Shanghai
• 20 Cultural Industries in Transition Economies
• 21 Turning the Post-Industrial Ccity into the Ccultural City The case of Toronto's waterfront
• PART 4 Cultural industries and labour How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 22 Management in the Cultural Industries How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 23 The popular music industries How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 24 Emerging Labour Politics in Creative Industries How newspapers are adapting to the digital era
• 25 Hollywood Cognitarians
• 26 Class and Exclusion at Work The case of UK film and television
• PART 5 Audiences, intermediaries and markets
• 27 Imagining the Cultural Consumer Class, cool and connoisseurship
• 28 Challenging Boundaries Fans and cultural industries
• 29 Understanding Public Relations as a Cultural Industry An introduction
• 30 Is Data Culture? Autonomy and community
• 31 Social Liabilities of Digitizing Cultural Institutions Environment, labour, waste
• 32 Popular Music Making and Promotional Work Inside the ‘New' Music Industry Autonomy and community
• 33 Sport, Media and Audiences Autonomy and community
• PART 6 Policy and the Cultural Industries Autonomy and community
• 34 A Framework for Cultural Labour1 Shoring up the good jobs, well done
• 35 Constructing Creativities Higher education and the cultural industries workforce
• 36 Business as Usual Creative industries and the specificity of the British state
• 37 The Creation and Destruction of the UK Film Council Philip Schlesinger
• 38 Widening Local Development Pathways Transformative visions of cultural economy
• PART 7 The politics of the cultural industries Autonomy and community
• 39 Between cultural confidence and ideological insecurity China's soft power strategy for the cultural industries
• 40 Gender and the Cultural Industries
• 41 The Marketing of Race in Cultural Production
• 42 Cultural Industries and a Mass Communication Research A cultivation analysis view
• 43 Culture, Politics and the Cultural Industries Reviving a critical agenda
• Index