Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration,digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.     

Politics of the ‘creative industries’ discourse and its variants

The existing academic debate on creative industries can be summarised as ‘Trojan horse or Rorschach blot’: creative industries working as a neoliberal discourse or producing different effects depending on local context. Arguing that these are two sides of the same coin, this article looks closely at the discourse’s depoliticising and encompassing forces and their interplay on the discourse’s intersection to the broader new economy narrative. The article’s focus is South Korean variants of creative industries discourse. First, the country’s ‘content industries’ discourse served as a Trojan horse for the depoliticising narrative of knowledge economy while boosting the cultural sector discursively and financially. Second, ‘creative economy’ has very recently emerged as the current conservative government’s master economic narrative. This discourse allows the government’s neoliberal economic policies to be further justified while making cultural policy unable to persuasively claim that creativity belongs in the culture’s domain.     

Cities,Clusters and Creative Industries: The Case of Film and Television in Scotland

Interest in the creative industries has burgeoned in recent years. They convey many positive images for the development of cities and regions in an increasingly market-driven, globalized economy. The cluster concept has had an important influence on thinking and policy towards the creative industries. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which these ideas help to explain a particular situation. It analyses the various forces affecting the performance of the film and television industries in Scotland. It concludes that these sectors have a more modest economic impact than commonly assumed and that national and transnational organizations and government regulation are more important than localized networks in influencing their scale and durability.     

Making creative industries policy in the real world: differing configurations of the culture-market-state nexus in the UK and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.     

Creating a niche,building a community: a case study of young small-scale creative workers in Daegu,South Korea

The global trend of garnering the innovative potential of creative economy has also accelerated in South Korea where ‘creativity’ has recently become a nationwide buzz word. While economic instrumentality underpins the global proliferation of creativity discourse, it has been argued that the contemporary cultural sector is affected by neoliberal norms and hyper-competitive individualism. Notwithstanding such disciplining of creativity, this paper attempts to look into the complexity of cultural work which cannot be solely explained by the ascendant neoliberal ethos. To this end, the paper draws upon interviews carried out in 2016 with youth cultural workers, particularly who commit to independent, small scale creative work, in the city of Daegu. Based on an exploration of their locally oriented moral motivations and how they describe and practice their own work, the paper aims to discuss the ways in which they contribute to local cultural ecologies through their socially engaged creative work.     

Creative shifts and directions

The availability and “readiness” of culture as a mode of governmental control makes cultural policy a matter of great importance in any contemporary society. This is true not only in liberal democracies with established arts councils or cultural policies, it is also proactively pursued by a technologically advanced yet illiberal regime like Singapore, eager to position itself as the global “Renaissance City” of the twenty‐first century. What this “renaissance” model entails remains highly cryptic, not least because cultural terms and political markers are often elusive, but also because the very concept of “cultural policy” shifts along with the political and economic tides in Singapore. Drawing on a rarely cited essay by Raymond Williams, this article offers an historical look at cultural policy in Singapore – from its first articulation in 1978 to its present standing under the rubric of “creative industries” (2002). It considers some of the problems encountered and the societal changes made to accommodate Singapore’s new creative direction, all for the sake of ensuring Singapore’s continued economic dynamism. This article contends that cultural policy in Singapore now involves extracting creative energies – and economies – out of each loosely termed “creative worker” by heralding the economic potential of the arts, media, culture and the creative sectors, but concomitantly marking boundaries of political exchange. In this regard, culture in Singapore has become more than ever a site for governmentality and control.     

The UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions as a coordination framework to promote regulatory coherence in the creative economy

The present article aims to inquire about business convergence in creative industries from the perspective of cultural diversity. It is based on the premise that the recognition of the creative and innovative component of the so-called ‘creative industries’ or the ‘creative economy’ confirms the need for non-economic factors and particularly cultural concerns to be taken into account in regulatory efforts addressing those industries. It examines the way new technologies and business convergence may affect the ‘trade and culture debate’ vis-à-vis the World Trade Organization (WTO), and how the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE) may respond in a relevant manner to challenges brought therefrom. Despite its weakly binding language, the CDCE contains principles, objectives and rules that set a comprehensive framework for policy ‘related to the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions’ at the national, regional and international levels. A fundamental piece in such an approach is the explicit integration of cultural concerns into the concept of sustainable development. This article argues that the material and economic perspective adopted in the CDCE, based on the production and consumption of cultural goods and services, remains relevant and pertinent in the creative economy, despite business convergence. By prioritizing policy and regulatory coordination, it maintains that the main elements enshrined in the CDCE should be employed to contribute to greater coherence in view of the objective of promoting cultural diversity, including vis-à-vis the WTO and other international organizations, and puts forward potential paths for such coordination.     

Transformation,job creation and subsidies to creative industries: the case of South Africa’s film and television sector

Many governments have tried to stimulate economic growth via policy in the creative industries. South Africa is no different but additionally has an overarching aim of achieving social and labour market ‘transformation’ to move away from the legacy of the apartheid era. The effectiveness of incentives provided to the film and television sector in South Africa are considered in terms of their stated objectives of job creation, skills and knowledge transfer, and the attraction of foreign direct investment. Informed by empirical analysis of incentive scheme data and supplemented by elite interviews with key informants, some specific policy revisions are proposed.     

Shifting meanings in changing contexts: the role of the creative city in Shanghai,Hong Kong and Taipei

Abstract

This paper probes the underlying motives behind the adoption of the ‘creative city’ policies in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei. It argues that while the global appeal of the creative city is commonly attributed to urban entrepreneurialism, this reason alone is insufficient in explaining the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in these three cities, because none of them ascribe to the conventional format of the post-industrial ‘entrepreneurial’ city. In order to identify other major forces driving the adoption of creative city initiatives in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, this work delves into the ways in which the idea of the creative city is reworked within the context of global city making. The study found that in addition to urban entrepreneurialism, the inherited cultural policy agenda, which largely stems from national interests, also plays a significant role in directing (and changing) the ‘global cultural city’ making process. By looking into different roles attached to the ‘imported’ policy discourse of the creative city in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, this study not only contributes to the understanding of urban cultural policies within the Chinese-speaking world and East Asia more generally, but also lends some insights to the developing field of cultural policy mobility.     

Down by the sea: visual arts,artists and coastal regeneration

This paper takes a critical approach to the arts-led regeneration of Margate, south east England. It argues that regeneration policy has effectively utilised local characteristics to recreate Margate as an artful space, and has stimulated a local milieu of artistic and cultural activity. However, though the work of local artists is vital in producing Margate as a creative place, local artists are marginalised by policy interventions focussed on attracting new consumers and investors. Thus, this paper argues that a misplaced policy emphasis is failing to support the labour and social relations on which the interpretation of places as ‘creative’ is built, and arguably undermines the sustainability of an arts-based regeneration. This has implications for culture-led policy, calling for greater attention to be paid to the specific locations in which it is deployed, and to the networks of producers whose labour is critical to its success.     

BOOK REVIEW

This article examines the transition from cultural industries to creative industries policies in the English regions between 1980 and 2010. It argues that audio-visual policy in this period is best understood as a trajectory: the gradual, differentiated, contested, but overall coherent development of a policy discourse and corresponding institutional structure. This trajectory can be mapped onto the wider political economy of the period: the transition from social-democratic reformism to neo-liberalism at the end of the 1970s and up to the present. This process has resulted in audio-visual policy being determined to a large degree by the perceived needs of commercial interests, up to the point where regional cultural policy is virtually indistinguishable from economic policy. The transition from cultural to creative industries reflects the development of the neo-liberal state in which cultural policy has been instrumentalised within the larger project of the privatisation of public assets and the shift of relative power from labour to capital.     

Cultural Economy: Achievements,Divergences, Future Prospects

This paper reflects on two decades' scholarship in geography on cultural economy, assessing strides made against some of the expectations of early proponents. Cultural economy continues to be a polysemic term. In some quarters, it refers to a type of economic geography into which matters of ‘culture’ are absorbed. This work frequently focuses on the empirics of the so‐called ‘cultural and creative industries’. Others see cultural economic research as an opportunity to move beyond the epistemological constraints of ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, questioning their status as foundational categories. This latter approach has been used in a broader set of empirical projects encompassing technology, knowledge, and society. Contrasting threads of cultural economic research have helpfully moved geographical scholarship beyond paradigmatic limitations, but jostle somewhat uncomfortably within existing (and increasingly specialised) disciplinary and subdisciplinary fields. The risk is that by questioning the categorical underpinnings of much specialised research, cultural economy struggles to ‘belong’ in the increasingly coded and compartmentalised university setting. I conclude with a discussion of future prospects. Some measure of vitality could be achieved through incorporation of a cultural economy perspective into the pressing issues of climate change, human sustenance, and urban infrastructure planning. These are issues for which the polysemy of cultural economy could prove constructive, transcending technocentric market ‘fixes’ and bland assumptions about how best to ‘green’ our cities – promoting instead ethnographic interrogations of how humans access, use, exchange, and value financial and material resources as moral and social beings.     

Cultural governance and creative industries in Singapore

Singapore, a leading country in the Asia‐Pacific region, is currently attempting to transform its cultural industry into creative economy. Creative economies capitalise on how knowledge can be marketed by merging arts, technology and business. They ensure a nation's competitiveness within an integrated global economy. This paper critically examines Singapore's recent cultural policy developments in tourism, broadcasting and new media. It argues that new creative industries have produced new consumption patterns and identities that harness the place‐branding of “New Asia” as a form of cultural capital and a strategy of regional dominance. Cybernetics is proposed as an approach to frame creative cultural governance and consumption in Singapore.     

Film distribution as policy: current standards and alternatives

Much recent scholarship has identified an urgent need to address distribution opportunities for Australian cinema in a digital age. In trying to understand why Australian film policy has been beleaguered by complacency for distribution, this paper looks abroad to see what precedents and attitudes exist in distribution-related cultural policy. Why hasn’t support for distribution and exhibition been the touchstone of cultural policy for national cinemas? Why has policy support for the production sector prevailed, when distribution is the film industry’s key zone for profit? This paper surveys international policy examples of what governments are doing beyond the production realm. It examines legal interventions into the distribution realm, including direct state measures such as subsidies, levies, quotas and import restrictions, indirect state aid, and cultural initiatives by film funding bodies that stimulate audience engagement in the distribution and exhibition sectors. The paper combines these primary sources of film policy information with film historians’ accounts to provide a comparative analysis of national film distribution policies. It then examines the politics underlying the various policy frameworks, before mapping out an alternative strategy for the future of policy in Australia that is equipped to deal with the huge changes in digitalisation.     

Whose cultural value? Representation,power and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The debate around ‘cultural value’ has become increasingly central to policy debates on arts and creative industries policy over the past ten years and has mostly focused on the articulation and measurement of ‘economic value’, at the expense of other forms of value—cultural, social, aesthetic. This paper’s goal is to counter this prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts. We know that different social groups enjoy different access to the power to bestow value and legitimise aesthetic and cultural practices; yet, questions of power, of symbolic violence and misrecognition rarely have any prominence in cultural policy discourse. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to creative industry scholarship by tackling this neglected question head on: it calls for a commitment to addressing cultural policy’s blind spot over power and misrecognition, and for what McGuigan (2006: 138) refers to as ‘critique in the public interest’. To achieve this, the article discusses findings of an AHRC-funded project that considered questions of cultural value, power, media representation and misrecognition in relation to a participatory arts project involving the Gypsy and Traveller community in Lincolnshire, England.     

Exploring the intellectual structure of creative economy research and local economic development: a co-citation analysis

The aim of the present research is to investigate the intellectual structure of creative economy research (CER) with a bibliometric analysis based on co-citation. Firstly, we try to reconstruct the evolution of academic research on creative economy with particular attention to the themes of regional and local economic development. Secondly, we investigate the community of contributions/actors that contributed to its generation throughout social network analysis. We analyse publications collected from ISI Web of Science, which includes all academic works starting from the seminal contribution of Department of Culture Media and Sport in 1998. Through the analysis of 941 publications produced over 16 years, we investigate the evolution of CER. Then we apply a relational analysis exploring co-citations of ‘disseminators’ and founders’ work’ of CER. Results underline that creative economy may be considered as a successful multidisciplinary paradigm born and developed in English-speaking countries, developed even on a global level, and still in a developmental phase. The internal structure of research appears fragmented in many sub-communities concentrated around some key concepts. Whereas creative class and creative city contribute to the foundation of the field, cultural and creative industries are the most important and recent topic.     

‘Queen’s Day – TV’s Day’: the British monarchy and the media industries

In contemporary British history, Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 is typically imagined and narrated as the moment where television was anchored as a national cultural form. In addition, it is well documented by commentators and scholars that during preparation for the coronation, politicians and the palace had reservations that live television might fracture the carefully constructed mystique of monarchy. This article revisits the coronation to consider why and how television was perceived as a watershed moment for both monarchy and television, and what difference this has made to royal representations since. Using the work of Michael Warner, it argues that the mediated intimacies facilitated by television as a new cultural form encouraged viewers to enact participatory and active processes of spectatorship as royal ‘publics’, who are brought into being through being addressed. That is, it was the act of emphasising the centrality of television’s role in the coronation, and in reinforcing the apparent distance between monarchy and (popular) media, that these ‘meanings’ of the coronation were constructed in the public and historical imaginary.     

Film policy in Japan – an isolated species on the verge of extinction?

This article examines changes of the place that film has occupied in the public policy of the Japanese government, including not only cultural policy per se, but also industrial and economic policy. After describing some of the distinctive features of the Japanese film market, this paper discusses the inadequate basis of the government’s cultural policy for film. Film in recent years has received some attention as an industry with export potential, particularly with the rise of ‘Cool Japan’, the policy of promoting Japanese culture abroad as a tool for economic and diplomatic aims. In the chequered history of economic growth strategies and nation branding of recent years, the film industry has had some good news but received no serious attention either as a sector with economic significance or as a form of national culture.     

SOVEREIGNTY AND SOFTWARE

This article will critically appraise two approaches to cultural policy. The first focuses upon the need for a national cultural policy in order to establish a national “common culture” among its citizens, through measures to promote the arts and popular media sectors, and set limits to the flow of imported materials into the nation. This is what has been termed the “sovereignty” model, and has historically been the driver of cultural policy debates. The second approach, which is called the “software” approach, aims to create cultural infrastructure and other environmental factors to promote a creative economy, whether at local, regional, national or supra‐national levels. It questions the historical divides between “culture” and “industry”, and between “creativity” and “innovation”, and is focused upon the development of future ideas and creative concepts. It draws upon the very different conditions associated with the development of software to those of established arts and media sectors, and aims to extend the “software” model more widely into cultural and creative industries policy.     

Cultural democracy: an ecological and capabilities approach

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been sustained critique of the conceptual and normative foundations of UK cultural policy – the paternalism of ‘excellence and access’ and the neoliberal logic of ‘creative industries’. Whilst these critiques are well established, there is little work offering alternative foundations. This paper makes a contribution to this task. It does so in three ways. Firstly, by identifying ‘cultural democracy’ as a key discourse offering a counter-formulation of what the aims of cultural policy could and should be, and analysing uses of this term, it highlights the need to more effectively conceptualize cultural opportunity. Secondly, drawing on research with one UK-based initiative, Get Creative, the paper identifies a particularly consequential aspect of cultural opportunity: its ecological nature. Thirdly, it shows that the capabilities approach to human development provides ideas with the potential to help build new conceptual and normative foundations for cultural policy. Proposing a distinctive account of cultural democracy characterized by systemic support for cultural capabilities, the paper concludes by indicating the implications this may have for research, policy and practice.