Cultural Trends

Book Review

Journal: Cultural Trends

Manuscript ID CCUT-2020-0037
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Manuscript Type: Book Review

Keywords: It's, A, Review

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Abstract: N/A
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Page 1 of 5 Cultural Trends

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3 A Research Agenda for Creative Industries. Edited by Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew.
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5 Edward Elgar, 2019 200 pp ISBN: 9781788118576, £72 (hardback) eISBN: 9781788118583
6 £25 (ebook)
7 A research agenda for cultural economics by Samuel Cameron (ed.) published by Edward
8 Elgar, Cheltenham, 2019, 192pp, ISBN: 978 1 78811 230 7, £85.00 (hardback), £30
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(paperback)
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11 Raymond Williams Cultural Analyst, by Jim McGuigan, Bristol, Intellect, 2019, 200 pp.,
12 £22.50 (paperback) ISBN: 9781789380477
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14 The ‘Research Agenda’ is the new ‘Handbook’ or ‘Companion’ – an opportunity to do some
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16 State-of-the-Field, and for publishers to shift copy to students at the same time. Cultural
17 economics, dating back to the mid-1960s, is a fairly well-established field, being an
18 application of (more or less) neo-classical economics to the cultural sector – though usually
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19 more arts than culture. ‘Creative industries’ (as opposed to those activities designated as
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such) is still trying to establish itself as a field. Cultural economics has been squeezed,
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22 between being a poor relation of ‘proper’ economics and a worthy, if not very exciting,
23 relative of cultural policy studies. It took on the task of setting a wayward, spendthrift arts
24 sector on a sound footing, like a pro bono accountant or a semi-retired businessperson
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25 wanting to ‘give something back’ to the arts. Knowing its place, it never questioned the
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value of the arts, just making sure they didn’t splurge all their money in one go or insult the
28 bank manager. Though of course, the arts are not what they were, nor are the governments
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29 that fund them. So cultural economics has stepped out, tentatively, into the howling storm
30 that is the contemporary market for popular culture. ‘Creative industries’ was way ahead of
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it, immediately evicting the arts from their sinecure, happily opening its gates to
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33 entertainment, ‘content’, digitalisation, innovation, and globalisation, a now liberated
34 creativity pervading the whole economy.
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36 The best handbooks have a large number of contributors – 40 or 50 – widely sourced. These
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two books have a quarter of that number. In Cultural Economics, Samuel Cameron writes
39 four out of the eight chapters, and given that these include three substantive agenda setting
40 chapters, it is nearer to a monograph with guest chapters, than a handbook. In Creative
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41 Industries six out of the eleven chapters are written by academics associated with
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Queensland University of Technology, and two from an organisation, NESTA, which is a long-
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44 term collaborator. Given the global claims for the creative industries, this Anglo-Australian,
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45 QUT-dominated selection is extremely restricted. Whilst Cultural Economics acknowledges a

46 changing world – the retreat of both government subsidy and a deference to the arts, and
47 indeed, the rise of the creative industries agenda itself - it rests on a longue durée historical
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narrative, Cameron taking us back to the Enlightenment and Adam Smith. The Creative
50 industries arrived in 1998, fully formed. Cultural economics, with its multiple historical
51 antecedents, is pretty comfortable with its broadly defined object, the economics of culture.
52 The field of ‘creative industries’, closely bound to the Big Bang of a specific policy moment,
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must stand with the validity of that moment or risk falling with it.
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56 For this new field it is not only that the UK government’s signature aggregation of arts,
57 cultural industries, design services and digital technologies should demand our attention – it
58 does – but that they must be spoken of in a particular sort of way, given a particular sort of
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value. Cultural economics encompasses different tendencies and traditions within its broad

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 Cultural Trends Page 2 of 5

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3 cross-over parameters of economics and cultural policy. ‘Creative industries’ has multiple
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5 enemies, but the core beliefs of the field need to be unitary. Fellow-travellers are welcome
6 – Roberta Comunian’s interesting chapter on complexity theory or the solitary non-Anglo
7 Paul Stepan’s on film policy - but those seeking to critique the creative industries must be
8 dealt with quickly and firmly. This version of ‘creative industries’ as a field involves a double
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positivism: not just its extensive reliance on quantitative empirical evidence, but its
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11 requirement to defend the absolute positivity of its object. To work in the field of creative
12 industries is to commit, a priori, to their fundamental desirability. This gives a particular
13 quality to the argumentation, which seeks to deflect and dismantle the critics rather than
14 engage with them.
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17 Two examples will suffice. The charge of neoliberalism is anathema to ‘creative industries’,
18 for it is a ‘bad thing’ and can’t be allowed to stick. Neoliberalism is thus rejected as an
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19 incoherent concept, or alternatively as a ‘universalising’ abstract one which can’t capture

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the diversity of global creative industries, or account for the recent shift into neo-
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22 protectionism, or why non-neoliberal countries might adopt creative industries agenda.

23 That the policy concept of ‘creative industries’ does have some relationship to the complex
24 assemblage of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is, to anyone outside the territory, pretty
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25 obvious. What that relationship is, whether direct or oblique, or whether creative industries
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might transcend or mitigate this relationship, is a question never asked. So the vast flood of
28 literature on creative industries, creative cities, or creative class which posits such a
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29 relationship to neoliberalism is not viewed as a rival school or tendency but cast out from
30 the territory, as a foreign object. Similarly with economic metrics. These have been central
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to the creative industries idea, springing directly from the statistical taxonomy of the DCMS’
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33 1998 Mapping Document. GDP/ GVA, rates of growth, complex employment ‘tridents’ –
34 these establish its privileged access to the empirical real and its rhetorical claims on
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35 government. ‘7.9% of GDP’, ‘4 x faster than the rest of the economy’ – such figures
36 represent its indisputable right to attention. Again, the vast critical literature on the
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problems of GDP, on the reduction of public policy rationale to economic metrics, on the
39 different between judgement and measurement – all are escorted from the territory.1
40 Critiques of cultural metrics such as Culture Counts are brusquely dismissed, because if you
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41 cannot measure it, it has no empirical reality and thus cannot form part of public policy.
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Economic metrics give ‘culture its social license to operate’, Terry Flew tells us, thus
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44 definitively refuting those who say culture’s license to operate has been reduced to
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45 economic metrics.2
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47 The work of policing borders is done mainly by Terry Flew. He engages usefully with cultural
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economics - they share some basic premises but remain fixed on the arts rather than
50 popular culture, can’t deal with networks and groups (methodological individualism), and
51 have difficulty with the digital economy. They are Old Testament, writing before the pivotal
52 revelation of 1998. Both share a particularly a-historical notion of ‘the economy’ as a
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separate ontological plane. Cultural economics is happy to deal with this ‘economy’ and
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55 leave culture free to have its own values; creative industries must tear down the wall
56 between them, the ‘culturalization of the economy’ ultimately reducing the former to the
57 logic of the latter, though inflecting its orbit a little, like a minor moon to a gas giant.
58 Consequently, the really fraught border is with cultural studies which (unlike geography, for
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example) wilfully refuses any connection between culture and economy, fails to grasp the

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Page 3 of 5 Cultural Trends

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3 rich diversity that is economics, and distrusts all collaboration with ‘industry’. Critics from
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5 cultural studies wish only to return to ‘traditional’ cultural policy and so must, inevitably, be
6 excluded from the field. The disciplinary – in the more literal sense – task is clear in Ruth
7 Bridgstock’s chapter on higher education. The creative industries are a growing employment
8 sector and it is the job of universities to train people for it. It is true that the arts and
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cultural sector are growing more slowly, and with lower wages, than the ‘creative services’
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11 sector – digital media, advertising, PR – and so universities must start teaching these latter.
12 The problem is that – despite the marketing hype - those who ought to be teaching them
13 are not doing so, or at least not properly, because they have a traditional mind-set and,
14 sadly, tenure. Something really ought to be done about them. That these educators might
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16 have legitimate reasons for resisting the reduction of higher education to job training is not
17 considered. Neither is the vast literature on creative labour, self-exploitation,
18 entrepreneurship of the self, the social factory and so on; the positive core – protean career
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19 identities – can be usefully extracted but the rest of it, being critical, must be dumped over
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the border.
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23 It is important that the creative industries sector be seen to be expanding, for if they
24 contract, the field contracts too. If cultural employment slows, then we add ‘creative
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25 services’ and ‘embedded creatives’; if the ‘industries’ slow then we morph into ‘economy’; if
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economic impact stalls then we have ‘innovation spillovers’. In this double positivism the
28 very fact that policy makers adopt the term ‘creative industries’ is an argument in their
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29 favour. Stuart Cunningham updates his 2009 article on their global uptake to show how this
30 onward march continues, reaching hitherto unimagined places, and especially the global
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behemoth that is China. This in itself refutes the critics (such as me) confounding them by
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33 the pure force of the real. This global take-up across such a range of countries and systems
34 shows, for Cunningham, that it can’t possibly be neoliberal. It also shows a complete
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35 indifference to politics per se. That the creative industries agenda has been adopted is all we
36 need know, not the politics it may be serving.
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39 The one black spot, oddly, is Australia, which despite all best efforts seems reluctant to go
40 creative industries. The contrast with the UK is interesting. The 1998 moment emerged
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41 within a broadly favourable arts and cultural sector, buoyed by a government supportive of
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them after 18 long years in the cold. New Labour actually increased its arts funding, with the
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44 creative industries being put somewhat on the back burner in the second and third Blair
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45 administrations. Academics tended to stay away, drawn more to ‘social impacts’, something
46 accelerated by David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ initiative, which arm-twisted the AHRC into
47 funding a separate initiative in its name. ‘Community’ and ‘participation’ were the
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watchwords, leading to much work on representations of class, gender and ethnicity within
50 the creative industries. It was Brexit, and Theresa May’s search for global markets,
51 especially China, which really ramped up the UK’s academic funding for creative industries
52 research. Cue images of young people in VR headsets.
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55 In Australia, despite nods to Paul Keating’s 1994 Creative Nation, it began as an academic
56 project, an aspect of Cultural Studies’ ongoing civil war over Marxism, the autonomy of
57 culture and whether or not one should speak to government.3 In Australia the creative
58 industries agenda weaponised popular culture against ‘art’, commerce against subsidy, and
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talking to government against the autonomous pretentions of culture and academy.

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 Cultural Trends Page 4 of 5

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3 Creative industries, we were told, would replace the humanities just as they would replace
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5 the arts. This was hardly likely to build a coalition, leaving this particular version of ‘creative
6 industries’ isolated from the cultural sector and creative arts teaching, its primary influence
7 being around metrics. A closer attention to neoliberalism might have alerted it to the way it
8 played out in resource rich countries. The end of manufacture did not lead to post-industrial
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creative industries but to an explosion of financialization and resource extraction, as in
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11 Brazil4. The capacity for creative industries policy making in Australia – of any variety - is
12 amongst the lowest in the OECD countries, and apart from QUT metrics, has no profile even
13 across the Asia Pacific.
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16 A highlight of Creative Industries is the chapter by John Newbigin, appearing not as fellow
17 traveller but founding father, having more or less invented the term in 1998, and currently
18 Chair of Creative England. As aging patriarch he’s allowed to go off message, like Brian Cox
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19 in Succession. Creative industries, he suggests with a sparkle, is pretty incoherent because it

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was always ad hoc, the idea being to bring together a number of developments felt to be,
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22 somehow, of importance for the future. It was a not a definition but a ‘brand’, constantly
23 evolving, growing into its ambitious vision as it was picked up across the globe. For
24 Newbigin, as their ‘ambassador’, the global spread of creative industries is not a vindication
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25 of a heavy investment of academic capital, but an expression of hope. Newbigin returns us

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to the utopian impulse of the creative imaginary, where the grimness of Thatcher’s enforced
28 de-industrialisation becomes the transformational possibilities of the post-industrial.
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29 Twenty years on it is about preserving a human economy in the face of machines,

30 distinctiveness in the face of globalisation, and social and cultural value in the face of
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profitability metrics. It is about the doing of something for the pure pleasure of doing it,
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33 learning the value of ‘wasting time’. He certainly would not be employed in one of Ruth
34 Bridgstock’s classrooms. 1998 was a moment but it also had a history; a country trying to re-
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35 invent work in the light of ‘culture’, to redeem its promises for a more human future. It is to
36 the passing of this utopian moment that critics have addressed themselves, these
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aspirations no longer seeming viable in the frame of the creative industries.
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40 All fields need to establish borders and doing so can be productive. Think Emile Durkheim’s
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41 Suicide, or Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics. But Creative industries makes it feel
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less like the foundation of a field and more that of a cult. Cultural Economics tries to engage
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44 with the limits to which its critics point – moving beyond the arts, questioning the public
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45 policy settings for culture, attempting, like Jen Snowball’s chapter, to grapple with the
46 challenge creative industries has presented to their field. Creative Industries is content to
47 assert its own existence, barely referring to work that might be adjacent – Andy Pratt or
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Allen Scott – or congruent but dissenting, such as that of the ‘political economy’ of culture.
50 The narrowing scope of such a potentially broad field is very much a case of ‘fog in the
51 channel, continent cut off’. So it is a real pleasure to read Jim McGuigan’s book on Raymond
52 Williams. It does not purport to open up new conceptual vistas but to recount the full arc of
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Williams’ work, situating it within the landscape that has unfolded since his death in 1983.
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55 Channel fog dissipated, a whole continent of thought looms. The book takes us back to the
56 social and historical context from whence cultural studies took flight, when cultural
57 materialism meant engaging with the complex determinants of the moment not reducing
58 them to economic metrics. Not all Williams’ conclusions still stand, though many do. His
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questions about what a democratic culture might be in an age of expanded aspirations to

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Page 5 of 5 Cultural Trends

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3 participate in production and consumption, torn between the commercial and the
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5 patronising, and facing the first rumblings of a neoliberal ‘Plan X’ for the hollowing out of
6 the (imperfect) institutional bases of that democratic culture – these questions are our
7 questions still. They will not be answered by a return to the status quo ante but require us
8 to look – as Williams did – to the horizon, and to retrieve that utopian aspiration, those
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resources of hope, that the creative industries eventually extinguished. To do this we must
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11 light out for territories new.
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16 References
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20 1 Amongst many: Marianna Mazzucato (2018) The Value of Everything. Making and Taking in the Global
21 Economy. London: Penguin; Kate Raworth (2017) Doughnut Economics. & ways to think like a 21st Century
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22 Economist. Hartford, Vermont: Chelsea green Publishing; Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett
23 (2018) What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture. Melbourne: Monash University Press.
24 2 For the critique of Culture Counts cf. Robert Phiddian, Julian Meyrick, Tully Barnett and Richard Maltby (2017)
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25 ‘Counting Culture to Death. An Australian Perspective on culture counts and Quality Metrics’, Cultural Trends
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26:2: 174-80
27 3 Commonwealth of Australia (2004) Creative Nation. Canberra: AGPS
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https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/16860085?q&versionId=45295913
29 4 Cf. Perry Anderson (2019) Brazil Apart. 1964-2019. London: Verso.
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