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.     

'Is he still alive, or long since dead?': Loss, Absence and Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945-1956

This article uses the search for the ‘missing’ Wehrmachtsoldiers in the 1950s as a prism through which to explore theways in which we might insert the notion of trauma into ourunderstanding of West Germany's status as a postwar society.In seeking to point out the connections between the ways inwhich ‘ordinary Germans’ suffered during and afterthe war on the one hand, and the inability of post-war WestGerman society to ‘confront’ the crimes of the paston the other, it argues that the traumatizing impact of warhas to be considered alongside the ideological and politicalnecessities of the Cold War and reconstruction if we are tounderstand why West German society failed to place the Holocaustat the centre of its memorial culture in the immediate post-waryears. Moreover, in pointing to the Lutheran church as a keysite of memorial politics in the post-war era, it argues forthe integration of a study of religious narratives, mentalitiesand discourses into an understanding of the evolution of thecommemorative practices of the 1950s which has hitherto beenshaped by an excessively one-sided focus on secular sites andnarratives.     

Is ‘child placement’ trafficking?: Questioning the validity of an accepted discourse (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Within the discursive‐institutional space occupied by organisations working on child protection, child trafficking is often assumed to represent a direct outgrowth of the socio‐cultural custom of ‘child placement’, whereby parents send their children to live (and work) within other households. In Benin, where research for this paper was conducted, the narrative of ‘placement corrupted’ has become so well established that the country's anti‐trafficking law is in fact a law regulating the movement (including placement) of minors, and has in practice resulted in a de facto criminalisation of the intra‐familial mobility that has long formed a normal component of child‐rearing and socialisation within the region. In this paper, I offer a brief overview of this situation, and attempt to question the validity of the discourse on which the anti‐placement law and its attendant policies are based. I will employ the Foucauldian techniques of discursive archaeology and genealogy to unravel the origins of the discourse, and will draw on my own and related empirical research to problematize its conclusions.