Modelling the cultural industries

Alternative definitions of the cultural industries lead to the construction of different models of the cultural production sector of the economy and hence to a different array of specific industries which are contained within the sector. In turn this implies not just differing estimates of the contribution of the cultural industries to output and employment in the economy but also significant differences in the way economic analysis can be applied to the cultural sector as a whole. This paper begins by discussing the way in which an economic approach to interpreting the scope of the creative and cultural industries can lead to a reasonable basis for defining them. It then goes on to examine the content of six distinct models of these industries, asking the question: is it possible to find a common core group of industries on which all of the models agree? The paper then considers the implications of the models for economic analysis of the cultural sector, and finishes with some conclusions for cultural policy.     

EU media policy and/as cultural policy: economic and cultural tensions in MEDIA 2007

This article is an examination of the cultural and economic tensions that arise in the formulation and implementation of media policy in the European Union. Through an analysis of the MEDIA 2007 MEDIA Desk Germany. 2007. Interview with Aviva Silver, head of the MEDIA Programme, European Commission carried out by MEDIA Desk Germany in preparation of the Programme launch at Berlinale 2007 [online] Available from: http://www.mediadesk.co.uk/usr/images/news_images/interview_with_aviva_on_media_2007.doc [Accessed 17 May 2010] [Google Scholar] program, the authors investigate how the priorities of cultural policy and media policy interact and conflict. EU policy goals from the mid‐2000s onwards have emphasized attention to the economic potential of the creative and cultural industries, which complicates the cultural potential of audiovisual media. MEDIA 2007 MEDIA Desk Germany. 2007. Interview with Aviva Silver, head of the MEDIA Programme, European Commission carried out by MEDIA Desk Germany in preparation of the Programme launch at Berlinale 2007 [online] Available from: http://www.mediadesk.co.uk/usr/images/news_images/interview_with_aviva_on_media_2007.doc [Accessed 17 May 2010] [Google Scholar] in particular demonstrates these tensions, as the design of this policy mechanism emphasized audiovisual media’s potential for European economic growth as a precondition for achieving cultural objectives.     

Digital fixation: the law and economics of a fixed e-book price

Fifteen OECD countries, ten of which EU members, have regulation for fixing the price of printed books. At least eight of these have extended such regulation to e-books. This article investigates the cultural and economic arguments as well as the legal context concerning a fixed price for e-books and deals with the question of how the arguments for and against retail price maintenance for e-books should be weighted in the light of the evidence. It concludes that while the evidence in defence of a fixed price for printed books is slim at best, the case for a fixed price for e-books is weaker still while the legal acceptability within EU law is disputable. Against this background, introducing a fixed price for e-books is ill-advised.     

宋代宗室藏书及其文化教育研究

宋代宗室喜好藏书,其藏书家之多、藏书数量之巨,为历代所罕见。宗室藏书渠道丰富,其藏书目的明确,用途广泛,促使其热衷于藏书的原因是多方面的。宋代宗室的藏书活动同时也是一种学习的过程,通过藏书习文,培养了一大批学有专长的宗室文人与学者。     

Designing a socially efficient cultural policy: the case of municipal theaters in Warsaw

While public support for culture has become a less self-evident privilege than in the past, the economic evidence for benefits a society gains from these goods has become essential for both cultural economics and cultural policy. The aim of our study is to investigate socially preferred ways of allocating scarce public resources among municipal theaters in Warsaw. The problem investigated is a current issue for local policy-making, but in a broader sense, it illustrates how state-of-the-art stated preference methods can be employed to support cultural policy. We find that inhabitants of Warsaw assign a positive value to the broader accessibility of the theaters, and their willingness to pay for making them a truly public good (by introducing a program of highly discounted tickets) exceeds the costs of such a policy. However, we also find that the cost-benefit relationship varies across theaters with different types of plays in their repertories. Our results imply a different level of socially efficient support for experimental, drama, children’s and entertainment theaters.     

Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy,policy and institutions in Gramsci

Gramsci’s writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci had been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist–technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the ‘Gramscian tradition’ as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost 20 years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsci’s contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and provide an analysis of Gramsci’s writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of Gramsci’s work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies. In Part I, I question the use of the notion of ‘Gramscian tradition’ made by its critics, and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions. In Parts II and III, I consider Gramsci’s specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part II, I consider Gramsci’s pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active in party organisation and leadership, is fundamental not only for understanding the nature of Gramsci’s early and continued involvement with questions of cultural strategy and institutions, but also as a key for deciphering and interpreting cultural policy themes that he later developed in the prison notebooks, and which originated in earlier debates. Finally, in Part III, I carry out a detailed analysis of Gramsci’s prison notes on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which enrich the theoretical underpinnings for critical frameworks of analysis as well as for radical practices of cultural strategy, cultural policy-making and cultural organisation. I then answer the question of whether Gramsci’s insights amount to a theory of cultural policy.     

Introduction: cultural policies in Ibero-America at the beginning of the XXI century

ABSTRACT

This editorial introduction presents the aims and contents of a special issue devoted to cultural policies in Ibero-America. The issue provides a wide-ranging overview about the subject. In addition to papers focused on the development of cultural policy in specific countries, it also includes articles analyzing particular cultural policies in a transnational perspective, paying attention to their multiple programmatic transferences. It also includes articles centred on the development of cultural diplomacy and institutional networks within this area. In this way, it intends to highlight the commonalities among countries and the relations between them, so offering a new and deeper vision of the development of cultural policies in the Ibero American region. In this introduction we offer some theoretical keys for analyzing this development, in particular the notion of family of nations proposed by Castle (1993) and we evaluate its applicability to the case and beyond.     

Researchers,bureaucrats and the lifeworlds of cultural policy

This paper reflects on the value of cultural policy research, particularly when such research forms part of projects that seek to produce insights or ‘outcomes’ that are useful to non-university research partners. The paper draws from the author’s involvement in a project examining cultural diversity in the arts that was funded as part of the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Project scheme. It addresses Eleonora Belfiore’s provocation that this kind of instrumental cultural policy research routinely amounts to ‘bullshit.’ However, in order to understand the critical function of such research, there needs to be greater attention to the lifeworlds of cultural policy and the multiplicity of the policy-making process. This multiplicity both complicates the possibilities for usefulness in policy research, at the same time that it enables such research to be generative in unpredictable ways.     

Rhetoric of unity and cultural diversity in the making of European cultural identity

The fundamental aim of the cultural policy of the European Union (EU) is to emphasize the obvious cultural diversity of Europe, while looking for some underlying common elements which unify the various cultures in Europe. Through these common elements, the EU policy produces ‘an imagined cultural community’ of Europe which is ‘united in diversity’, as one of the slogans of the Union states. This discourse characterizes various documents which are essential to the EU cultural policy, such as the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Agenda for Culture and the EU’s decision on the European Capital of Culture program. In addition, the discourse is applied to the production of cultural events in European Capitals of Culture in practice. On all levels of the EU’s cultural policy, the rhetoric of European cultural identity and its ‘unitedness in diversity’ is related with the ideas and practices of fostering common cultural heritage.     

How Australian industry policy shaped cultural policy

Public policies that aim to facilitate cultural activities to serve effectively as industries are often regarded as a new phenomenon. This article argues that arts and cultural policies in Australia have reflected and complemented Commonwealth industry policy for most of their history. The significant change that has happened in the past twenty years is not so much a change to cultural policy, but rather a change in the notion of industries and their role in the national economy.     

Contemporary cultural diplomacy in South Korea: explicit and implicit approaches

This paper argues that in the case of Korea, cultural diplomacy (CD) has been explicitly implemented in a top-down and unilateral approach by government to enhance national prestige abroad, underpinned by the institutional legacy of a ‘developmental state’ model of governance. Yet, an implicit approach has also emerged, associated with capacity building of the domestic cultural industries through promoting ‘international cultural exchange’. Whilst the top-down unilateral approach has persisted, a disarray of policy rhetoric and institutional fragmentation surrounding CD, as well as the blurring of cultural industries development policy with the CD agenda has led to gradual convergence of both explicit and implicit approaches.     

Interwoven Ottoman and British cultural policies in the case of the Crimea Memorial Church

Accepted as a constitutional principle after the establishment of the republic in Turkey, secularism has been a widely discussed subject on the Turkish political and intellectual agendas, especially over the last two decades. This paper enquires into the earliest steps of secularism taken in the early nineteenth-century Ottoman era, during which a large number of domestic socio-economic incidents blended with the international ones, in the case of the Crimea Memorial Church, an Anglican church in Istanbul, which points to radical shifts of the Ottoman cultural policies.     

On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research: notes from the British case

In 2005, Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired professor of moral philosophy at Princeton University, made it into the best‐sellers chart with his book On Bullshit. Taking his essay as its starting point, this article explores the analysis of bullshit and the prevalence of bullshitting in the contemporary public sphere. Frankfurt’s short essay indeed provides an intellectual framework to interpret and understand contemporary rhetoric and practice in the cultural policy field, as well as recent trends in cultural policy research. Through a discussion of selected New Labour’s cultural policy documents in Britain, the article aims to show that many of the key actors in the cultural policy debate indeed display the ‘indifference to how things really are’ and the cultivation of vested interests which Frankfurt attributes to the activity of bullshitting. The final part of the text discusses the implications of the present status quo for ‘critical’ cultural policy research.     

Museums and cultural sustainability: stakeholders,forces, and cultural policies

This paper explores the relationship between museums, cultural sustainability, and cultural policies. Specifically, it offers a theoretical model for the sustainable development of museums and a process for designing appropriate cultural policies for museums with cultural sustainability in mind. The case of Cyprus is used to demonstrate how strengths and gaps in cultural sustainability can be identified within a broader museum environment. The study examines the main stakeholders (the state, municipalities/ communities, and individuals), types of museums (archaeological, art, ethnographic, etc.) they establish and the forces influencing their decisions (such as politics, a sense of national identity, cultural tourism, economic revitalization, and personal agendas) in order to map the Cypriot museum environment and identify the emphasis placed on different parameters of cultural sustainability. By identifying cultural sustainability strengths and gaps on a national level, it becomes easier for cultural policy-makers to design appropriate cultural policies for museums.     

From liberal to conservative: shifting cultural policy regimes in post-Soviet Russia

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of Russian cultural policy from the end of the Soviet era through the current against the framework of welfare state regimes. The end of the Soviet Union 25 years ago ushered in a decade of liberalization marked by a withdrawal of the state from cultural responsibility and hopes that market demand and private support would emerge to fill in the void. With the latter hampered by the economic hardships of the transition and the loss of philanthropic traditions after more than 70 years of communism, a liberal policy regime did not take firmly hold and has gradually been replaced by a new cultural policy consensus more akin to a conservative welfare regime, marked by a return of the state to a more dominant role with the support of core cultural policy constituencies.     

The governance of national cultural organisations: comparative study of performance contracts with the main cultural organisations in England,France and Catalonia (Spain)

In some European countries, performance contracts have become an instrument for the governance and control of major cultural organisations by the public administration. The negotiation and signing of a performance contract are mainly aimed at developing the goals of cultural policies by means of large organisations in order to achieve the traditional objectives of cultural democratisation and other instrumental objectives (economic development, urban regeneration or social inclusion). Nevertheless, the development level of performance contracts varies when we compare England, France and Catalonia (Spain). Each particular level of development is conditioned by the overall administrative and institutional context and the development level of results-based management and an accountability culture. The level of public funding and the degree of autonomy of management within each organisation can also explain why in some cases governance has been contractualised whereas in other cases either progress is more rhetorical than real.     

New perspectives on instrumentalism: an empirical study of cultural diplomacy

Museums are increasingly recognised as having a role to play within international relations, to facilitate cultural exchange, assert national identity and foster mutual understanding. Whilst international work is perceived to be politically motivated and diplomatically advantageous, it can be highly beneficial to cultural institutions. In this paper, ‘cultural diplomacy' is shown to be a strategy used by museums to enable organisational development and economic growth. This paper demonstrates how national museums adopted a political rhetoric and used strategic lobbying to formulate a new cultural policy, which expanded the scale and scope of their international work. By defining the parameters and principles of this policy, the institutions wield power, thus challenging the conventional perceptions of policy-making and contradicting commentators who accuse museums of political subservience. Throwing the notion of instrumentalism into disarray, this paper calls for a theoretical and conceptual rethinking, to revamp understanding and bring it in line with practice.     

Cultural diversity as a multilevel and multifaceted legal notion operating in the law on cultural policies

The objective of the present article is to highlight the obscured links between the multilevel and multifaceted legal concept of cultural diversity and its political uses. It intends to provide a clear appraisal of the concepts of cultural diversity within the legal framework in which cultural policies are immersed. It seeks to focus on the uses of cultural diversity as a legal concept that reflect intense disagreements on cultural policies, that helps legitimatize very different and variable political ideas and that emerges from very different backgrounds. After identifying the exact legal scope of the notion, the article analyses the narratives and discourses that lead to the consolidation and use of cultural diversity as a multilevel legal notion.     

Tracing British cultural policy domains: contexts,collaborations and constituencies

This paper draws on a larger research project that investigates the networks and institutions shaping cultural policy across national, international and supranational contexts. Taking Britain as its touchstone, it identifies and maps some of the operational relations between culture, governance and nation shaping the development and orientation of contemporary cultural policy. It thus highlights key formal and informal domestic relationships and contexts within which Britain's local, regional and national cultural policy initiatives are situated. The British context – in which England figures strongly for historical, political and demographic reasons, and so draws a corresponding resistance across other constituents of nation – is shown to be both internally differentiated along various lines, and also embedded in the larger sphere of the European Union that redraws the boundaries of cultural policy and governance. In tracing the contours and interrogating the constitutive elements of Britain's domains of cultural policy, we seek to provide a foundation for understanding the intersections and influences that exist between fields of cultural governance, and their interdependence and fluidity.