733002

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ECS0010.1177/1367549417733002European Journal of Cultural StudiesBanks and O’Connor

european journal of
Article

European Journal of Cultural Studies

2017, Vol. 20(6) 637­–654
Inside the whale (and how to © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549417733002
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417733002
from two decades of creative journals.sagepub.com/home/ecs

industries research

Mark Banks
University of Leicester, UK

Justin O’Connor
Monash University, Australia

Abstract
In keeping with the spirit of this Special Issue, this article takes a retrospective view
– analysing two decades of research on local, city-based cultural economies in the
dominant context of the ‘creative industries’ policy paradigm. We begin by exploring
our own position in the field – as early arbiters for the cultural industries – and the
political and economic context which informed our own (shared) efforts to further
progressive claims for culture, amidst the transforming post-industrial city of the
1990s. The subsequent rise of a creative industries discourse – in the United Kingdom
and beyond – had a transformative effect on those progressive claims, not least in
bringing to the fore a more economistic, capital-driven model of urban renewal
which served to undermine many of the promises that had been invested in popular
urban culture under social democracy. How this shift was played out in the academic
literature – and its political consequences – is the theme of the remainder of the
article. This article forms part of the Special Issue ‘On the Move’, which marks the 20th
anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. It also heads up a special
online dossier on `Creative Industries in the European Journal of Cultural Studies’.

Keywords
Clusters, creative cities, cultural industries, Manchester, politics

Corresponding author:
Mark Banks, CAMEo – Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, University of
Leicester, 7 Salisbury Road, Leicester LE1 7QR, UK.
Email: mark.banks@leicester.ac.uk
638 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6)

Introduction
In the late 1990s, we worked together on a research project entitled ‘Cultural Industries
and the City’.1 The aim of this project was to investigate the relationships between what
were then emerging as the cultural or newly minted ‘creative’ industries and transform-
ing inner-city areas in the United Kingdom. Particularly, we were concerned with how
these relationships were unfolding in the rapidly changing and regenerating city of
Manchester, a place then emerging from the worst effects of deindustrialisation and start-
ing to tentatively embrace the ‘new’ economy of services and ‘knowledge-led’ produc-
tion. It is worth recalling that at this time there was a tremendous amount of excitement
about the creative industries, following the coming to power of New Labour in 1997 and
the recent formation of a responsible ministry – the Department of Culture, Media and
Sport – with a specific remit to promote this nascent ‘sector’. Influential in this period
was the work of writers such as Charles Landry (2000) and Peter Hall (2000) and in
national government, Chris Smith (1998), who were all keen to promote the social and
economic virtues of the creative industries, the idea of the ‘creative city’ and, in New
Labour’s case, ‘Creative Britain’. This reflected something of a wider (international)
turn towards ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ as vehicles for post-industrial economic restructur-
ing and growth (e.g. see Bianchini and Parkinson, 1993; Montgomery, 1995; Radbourne,
1997). Local authorities and economic development agencies were also enthusiastic to
learn about the benefits that ‘creative’ industries might provide. It was into this context
that our project emerged. After a decade in which the cultural industries had remained a
local concern of municipal and metropolitan Labour-led councils, ours was a renewed
effort, aimed at assessing the impacts of local cultural industries and their emerging con-
tribution to the United Kingdom’s rapidly expanding economy of cultural commodities,
places and symbols.
What first struck us then was a resurgent sense of confidence in Manchester, as well
as in other UK regional cities. This seemed to reflect the mood of optimism following
New Labour’s election, a renewed sense of hope following the damaging recession of the
early 1990s, and some palpable relief after a long period of local authority decline under
national Conservative rule. Culture (and the cultural economy) was at the heart of this
confidence – and a new and active group of cultural apparatchiks, intermediaries and
entrepreneurs were central to its expression and articulation. The story about the city was
changing. In Manchester, as in other UK cities, the idea that activities such as music, arts
and media were economically regenerative and productive (rather than simply a drain on
the public purse) and that cultural production could provide ‘real’ jobs and careers (and
not just hobbies or distractions) seemed a new and irreverent claim. What’s more, these
economic possibilities appeared to be running in parallel with a belief that the city was
becoming culturally more ‘cosmopolitan’ – in terms of being more inclusive, interna-
tionalist and tolerant of different minorities (see Binnie and Skeggs, 2004; Taylor et al.,
1996). In some sense, we shared in this nascent optimism – the research institute in
which we worked had developed its reputation not simply by documenting but by par-
ticipating actively in some of the popular cultural projects and initiatives then being
identified as central to Manchester’s cultural and economic renewal. As much as we
were researching and evaluating change, we were also involved in manifesting it, at least
to some minor degree (see O’Connor and Gu, 2010; Wynne and O’Connor, 1996).
Banks and O’Connor 639

The good mood was propelled not least by Manchester City Council and other local
authorities, hitherto understood as clay-footed paternalists, now dynamically recast as a
new and nimble breed of ‘civic entrepreneurs’ (see Tickell and Peck, 1996). These were
supported by not just an army of developers, business executives and economic devel-
opment agencies but also local arts institutions and a mixed collection of media, music
and fashion-industry entrepreneurs – members of what one of us came later to refer to
as the ‘post-Rave growth coalition’ (O’Connor in Hatherley, 2011: 120–121). Here was
some kind of collective effort to project Manchester as a liberal and happening city with
a more ‘sophisticated’ cultural outlook – a place that could feel at ease as a European
city of distinction, if not quite the world-power it was in the days of cotton and cloth.2
At this time, a host of new governmental agencies were emerging to help script this
cross-cultural, cross-class (but not yet multicultural or de-masculinised) vision of a new
tomorrow:

Manchester is more than a geographical location or a political entity; it is a state of mind. It is

Manchester United, the birthplace of computers, railways and Rolls-Royce; it is excellence in
education. It is Oasis and the friendliest international airport in the world. (Marketing
Manchester, 1997, cited in Ward, 2000: 1096)

The process reached its zenith in 2004 when Peter Saville, Factory Records’ legend-
ary graphic designer, was appointed Manchester’s first ‘creative director’ (O’Connor,
2007). This emergent desire to ‘market’ Manchester was emblematic of a municipal post-
socialist, New Labour (and what became) ‘Blairite’ approach to urban politics, where a
socially liberal, culturally literate countenance masked what was always understood then
(and much more in retrospect) as a new determination to make culture profit, or at the
very least pay its way. If one vague aim was to inject a bit of commercial savvy into the
‘disinterested’ (and seemingly ‘elitist’ and ‘entitled’) domains of arts and culture, then a
more focussed structural ambition was to take advantage of the re-energised (and increas-
ingly mobile and deregulated) flows of financial capital and to persuade retail, residential
and leisure investors to speculate on some ‘culture-led regeneration’ in run-down urban
cores. Similarly, the boost of resources provided by Europe (in the form of European
Union (EU) Structural Funds), as well as increased injections of national investment into
arts and culture (via the National Lottery, Art Councils and their ilk), helped give cover
and support for a blueprint re-imagining of what a ‘creative’ UK city might look and feel
like (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015; Oakley and O’Connor, 2015a; Ward, 2000; Wynne and
O’Connor, 1998). Yet underpinning this pragmatism was also a more popular narrative
that imagined all boats would rise as Manchester (re)projected itself as a place that
thrived on cultural innovation, newness and its own bullish ‘attitude’ (e.g. ‘Madchester’),
obscuring the fact that while many Manchester people may well have shared a certain
‘state of mind’, they were also conjoined by high levels of relative deprivation, as well
as being quite divided within the city, in both social and economic terms.3
Given the prevailing script about Manchester and its ‘urban renaissance’ (see
Hatherley, 2011; Peck and Ward, 2002), it was perhaps not surprising our interviews with
cultural workers of the late 1990s tended to reveal a sense of optimism and ambition,
both for the city and for themselves within it:
640 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6)

[Manchester’s] changed beyond recognition really. It feels a much more monied city centre
than when I moved here […] it’s the second city really, [and] now that’s been achieved […] the
next step is developing it as a European, international city. (Arts Journalist)

The future of the company is to be a household name in the UK and I really believe it will
achieve that in the next twenty-four months. Our mission statement [is] delivering fast, cost
effective and trusted information technology and support, banishing computer hassle for ever.
(IT Entrepreneur)

[T]his is where my talent lies I suppose, anticipating future need. (Graphics and Web Designer)

More broadly, cities and the cultural economy are no longer part of a millennial economic
upswing

These striving futurists we regarded not only as involved in a somewhat vanguard

rethinking of organised cultural production, but also as consciously engaged in redefin-
ing their own relation to the city and its social and economic organisation (Banks et al.,
2000; see also O’Connor, 2015; Wynne and O’Connor, 1996). Such people were chal-
lenging notions of what could be commodified (subcultures, knowledges, districts, sym-
bols, moods, styles, atmospheres), by whom and to what end, and establishing patterns
of work that disregarded the time-space conventions of formal business in favour of a
free-rolling and immersive labour that recognised no boundaries between work and life.
Yet as much as they were interested in making a living (and having a good time doing it),
they were also actively and self-consciously invested in contributing to ‘the city’, by
evolving ways of working that demonstrated clear social and political concerns, beyond
commercial profit-making (Banks, 2006; see also Wynne and O’Connor, 1998). Given
the evidence, we felt somewhat confident (if never complacent) that these emerging
industries could provide contexts for new kinds of civic collaboration to emerge, and for
more ‘progressive’ (i.e. more inclusive, non-hierarchical, ethical, just) organisations and
forms of work to establish, in productive worlds that appeared to value cultural pluralism
and be less constrained by capitalist tradition and orthodoxy. Much seemed possible. To
couch our analyses in terms of the social theory of the time, these actors appeared to
represent something like the new ‘tribes’ of ‘postmodern’, ‘self-reflexive’ and ‘de-
traditionalized’ economic subjects that critics saw as projecting forward their own shared
and stylised social futures (Beck et al., 1994; Featherstone, 1991; Maffesoli, 1996).
While our participants may have been living what theorists de jour such as Ulrich Beck
(1992) and Anthony Giddens (1991) were understanding as somewhat more ‘individual-
ized’ lives, amidst ‘risky’ social relations, constantly under threat from the disruptive
energies of ‘time-space compression’, as David Harvey (1989) termed it, they were also
participants in what Beck and writers such as Scott Lash and John Urry (1994) under-
stood as a more ambivalent set of social transformations – since one of the more positive
dimensions of ‘late-’ or ‘post-’ modernity was that it was encouraging people to move
beyond restrictive economic traditions and to shake off inherited social roles.
While Manchester was our case, therefore, it was also symptomatic of broader
national and international trends for culture-led renewal, faith in ‘creativity’ as a source
of post-industrial innovation and a belief that progressive and pragmatic alliances could
Banks and O’Connor 641

be forged to ‘make things happen’. The creative industries ‘moment’ therefore seemed to
offer something of an open horizon – and promised to take the post-industrial city in
some positive new direction. It may not have been clear exactly where we were going,
but that’s the nature of a zeitgeist, or at least, one whose infective optimism resisted
being looked at too closely.

Inside the whale? Researching local cultural small and

medium-sized enterprises
How are we to think of that period, looking back and the kind of research to which it gave
rise? Famously, in Inside the Whale, George Orwell (1940) took to task a group of
authors who had not simply misread the 1930s political zeitgeist – we are well aware of
how easy hindsight can be – but had wilfully ignored its warning signs and sought to go
along with the historical flow from the womb-like comfort of the whale’s belly. Coming
to terms with both the inevitable mistakes of the historical moment and the more wilful
blindness or forgetting of the times is something we think is an urgent necessity and
involves more mea culpa than ‘we told you so’!
There is no space here to explore the full range of creative industries literature that
emerged from this moment – some of which went on to influence work in this journal
(e.g. see Ashton, 2013; Bottà, 2009; Kompatsiaris, 2014; Marshall, 2013; Perry et al.,
2015; Strachan, 2007) – so instead we focus only on research that took as its object the
locally situated (and largely small and medium-sized enterprise (SME)-driven) urban
cultural economy. This is not only because that is where our own particular trajectory
began but also because in many respects this is from where the cultural and creative
industries research and policy agenda drew most of its initial energies. Certainly, from
the late 1970s, in the United Kingdom (and Western Europe beyond), the rise of localised
urban economies of independent artists, creatives and micro-businesses, operating on the
margins of the subsidised arts; the large-scale cultural industries; and, indeed, the socio-
economic structures of the (post)industrial city was a key source of the emancipatory and
evolutionary claims for the cultural sector. Many of these claims drew on new forms of
urban cultural practice and aspiration rooted in the enabling and liberating effects of
post-war social democracies (e.g. see Ahearne, 2002; Banks, 2017; Beck and Cornford,
2012; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Frith and Horne, 1987; Hewison, 1995; Hollands
and Vail, 2012; McGuigan, 2004; Mandel, 2016). Yet, such radical elements were com-
ing into contact with the economic mainstream through new ideologies of ‘enterprise’
and commercial self-creation amidst expanded fields of cultural, service and knowledge-
driven production. That such elements were able to crystallise into a mixed economy of
small firms, organisations and experimental collectives, working in metropolitan com-
munities and ‘fringe’ urban districts, gave political inspiration to writers such as Nicholas
Garnham (1990), who identified opportunities for growing new combinations of eco-
nomic and (popular) cultural production both within and outside the market, as well as to
John Myerscough (1988) who saw in cultural industries the more instrumental possibil-
ity of measuring the economic benefits and values of arts and culture, at both local and
national scale. What ‘our’ creative industries moment then represented was a process of
active combination within a politically diverse cultural and economic habitus, one
642 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6)

focussed primarily on harnessing the emergent powers of place, network and small enter-
prise. Here, cultural studies was helping to shape a new direction, moving into debates
about the role of cultural production in the emergent post-industrial economy – a land-
scape of political uncertainty, for sure, but also one of great promise and possibility.
How, then, was this possibility understood, especially in the kinds of social science and
humanities scholarship that came so quickly to prevail in our corner of the field? Two
strands in particular stand out.

Creative clusters
The new narrative on urban cultural economy was perhaps best exemplified by the idea of
the ‘creative cluster’, a term given immediate provenance in Michael Porter’s (1998)
paper, which was a pithy condensation of a great deal of work in economic geography
seeking to identify the role of place in industrial location (‘why here and not there’?) and
the ways in which cities or city-regions had managed to constantly adapt over time (or,
indeed, had failed to do so). Drawing on Alfred Marshall’s late 19th-century notion of
‘atmosphere’ to describe the learning effects embedded in industrial districts (Marshall
and Marshall, 1920), Porter moved beyond the neo-classical focus on the individual firm
towards that of the numerous traded and untraded interdependencies between firms and
their embedding in local contexts (Porter, 1998, 2000). However, the cluster was more
than a recognition of geographical focus, but suggested that the nature of industrial pro-
duction was itself changing in a ‘post-Fordist’ age. The picture was no longer one of a
small number of large companies organising a supply chain. It was now more about a
complex network of smaller players mutually benefiting from local skills and learning
effects, along with a range of ‘shared externalities’, which – like Marshall’s ‘atmosphere’
– could sound very much like a local ‘culture’. The idea also picked up the more moral-
economic inflections of the European context (especially the ‘Third Italy’), which, fol-
lowing Piore and Sabel (1984), suggested that the role of ‘industrial districts’ was highly
dependent on local social, political and cultural dimensions. This came loaded with the
normative charge (or perhaps aspiration) that here was a market economy that could sup-
port local culture, and social democratic political values, all within an equitable frame-
work that gave equal value to both competition and co-operation. Likewise, for the
influential Allen Scott, the cultural economy mattered not only because it brought eco-
nomic benefits that were expressible in gross domestic product (GDP) terms, but also
because of the kind of embedded sociability it generated (Gong and Hassink, 2017; Pratt,
2000; Scott, 2000; cf. Oakley and O’Connor, 2015b: 20–24). In Scott’s formulation, firms
were rooted in place, and thus (implicitly) more ethical and resilient, and contributed
‘positive externalities’ to the city, making it more liveable, which in turn increased the
stock of shared cultural knowledge and personnel available for the cultural economy.
This was an approach which we (and many other) cultural industry scholars found
conducive and one that quickly proved influential in the United Kingdom, as well as in
Western Europe (see, for example, Banks et al., 2000; Bathelt, 2004; Bottà, 2009; Drake,
2003; Hitters and Richards, 2003; Mommaas, 2004; Pratt, 2000). The normative claim
that culture and economy were able to ally in productive harmony would also prove
Banks and O’Connor 643

influential, however, beyond the circumscribed limits of the cluster or agglomerated

district.

Creative cities
The notion of a progressive urban cultural economy also gained traction from the more
general re-evaluation of the function of the city in the 1980s and 1990s. From the sym-
bolic low point of 1975, when New York was declared bankrupt, the idea of the city as
the vital crucible of modernity (Berman, 1984) or postmodernity (Harvey, 1989; Raban,
1973) rapidly (re)gained ground. While Manuel Castells (1996) was ambitiously re-
imagining the city as central to the new information economy and emergent ‘network
society’, Peter Hall’s (1998) magnum opus was simultaneously portraying the city as
driver of historical development per se, quite literally positioning the civil as the founda-
tion of civilisation. Hall’s urban historical creativity was multifaceted, with the eco-
nomic, the scientific and the artistic/cultural as different dimensions of the deep
innovative capacity of the city. How best urban planning and thinking could be reframed
to explicitly build on this capacity formed a major part of his book and was directly
linked to the work of Charles Landry (see Landry, 2000; Landry and Bianchini, 1995)
who first coined the term ‘The Creative City’.
Both Hall and Landry drew heavily on a very Western and 19th-century notion of the
city as a semi-autonomous entity at the cutting edge of the new, working against the
inertia of the rural and the heavy hand of the larger state. This was transmuted into
the new discourse of innovation-driven growth that had become highly influential in the
1990s; it was from the cities that innovation would be driven and, like the medieval
stadt luft macht frei, the place where the most creative members of society would be
drawn. Within this, Landry (2000) gave culture a special primacy and creativity an
instrumental purpose:

Cultural resources are the raw materials of the city and its value base; its assets replacing coal,
steel or gold. Creativity is the method of exploiting these resources and helping them grow. (p. 7)

A city’s vibrant culture was an index of its wider creative potential, one that could be
used to signal to footloose capital and draw global talent to the cultural ‘brand’ of a city.
In the form of the creative industries, culture was also to provide new sources of employ-
ment and competitiveness as it moved closer to economic centre-stage. Cities could only
deliver these economic gains, Landry argued, if they adopted the more ‘holistic’ non-
linear, non-instrumental approach associated with art. Earlier, in Soft City (1973),
Jonathan Raban had suggested living in the city was an art rather than a science; Landry’s
manifesto tried to operationalise this. The creative city thesis connected urban embed-
dedness, networked interdependency, the knowledge economy and so on with the idea of
the ‘elective affinity’ between art, artists and the city – a trope that could be traced back
through the metropolitan avant-gardes and modernisms of the pre-and inter-war periods,
with their privileged ‘villages’ and ‘quarters’, through to La Vie Bohème of Baudelaire
and others stretching back to the early 19th century.
644 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6)

While in many ways Landry was responding opportunistically to a process already in

train, it is hard to overestimate how far the idea of the ‘creative city’ came to influence
thought about the creative industries more generally and how it continues directly and
indirectly to shape academic and policy thinking internationally (e.g. see Bodirsky, 2011;
Cooke and Lazzeretti, 2008, Evans and Shaw, 2004; Gong and Hassink, 2017; Lazzeretti
et al., 2016; Mateos-Garcia and Bakhshi, 2016; Pratt, 2008; Zarlenga et al., 2016).
Furthermore, if the amount of public policy commissions, consultancies and concrete
interventions inspired by Landry and his insights are to be taken as effective indicators,
then the creative cities thesis can only be judged a huge success. That it managed to be
so without asking difficult questions about material infrastructures, participations and
inequalities, or by challenging prevailing assumptions about the limits or restrictions to
creative growth, can only be taken as evidence of the disconnect that rapidly emerged
between the desires and understandings of city governments and growth coalitions, and
the more critical readings of the developing cultural sector and its academic supporters.
Landry was, of course, merely the harbinger of a coming trend. Subsequently, Richard
Florida and his ‘creative class’ (2002) thesis stood out as the apotheosis of a kind of pyr-
rhic victory by advocates of culture; getting creativity to the ‘top table’ of policy making
came at the cost of renouncing all arguments outside that of economic growth. The cul-
tural sector stood open-mouthed as the most heinously commercial up-market leisure
and consumption development packages were rolled out in the name of culture.

Limits to the local? Aporias and counter-narratives

While we and many others – widely drawn from cultural studies, geography, sociology
and planning – spent time working alongside (and often within) the kinds of frameworks
then being set by the ‘clusters’ and ‘creative cities’ agendas, it was becoming apparent
just how far the study of local cultural industries was becoming constrained by its limited
instrumental purpose. At his point, we – like those others – began to ask the more diffi-
cult or nagging questions. These took different forms, but tended to query the (persis-
tently sketchy) basis of many of the empirical claims being made for the cultural or
creative sector and to raise concerns about the meaningful definition of culture within a
more (unapologetically) economistic set of rhetorics and framings. Yet, also, of more
overriding concern were those core questions of cultural studies – where were the cul-
tural/creative industries now leading us, socially or politically? Such questions were
mainly explored within four discrete (though often overlapping) fields of enquiry.

Uneven development
First noticed was the highly uneven nature of the urban cultural economy (e.g. see
Oakley, 2006). London (like Paris, New York and Los Angeles) loomed large over lesser
metropolitan centres, which in turn looked out over the flatlands of those small towns
and unfashionable, more peripheral cities which often appeared desperate in their pursuit
of the creative tag. Local clusters and ‘creative ecosystems’ found it difficult to thrive
and sustain, internally or in partnership with the core cities or commercial centres. But
even within the metropolis it was the city centres, repopulated in a warehouse and
Banks and O’Connor 645

apartment boom, that mainly benefitted, and not the decaying inner city or the humdrum
suburbs. The extent to which residual or non-elite resident populations of cities were
gaining from the cultural economy was openly challenged by a set of empirics that
revealed the main beneficiaries of the creative turn to be gentrifiers, property-speculators
and possessors of mobile capital (for some of the initial critiques, see Malanga, 2004;
Markusen, 2006; Peck, 2005) – undermining the claims of all those who saw in culture
not just the possibilities of capitalist harmony but new forms of progressive urban life
driven by Florida’s (2002) ‘Three T’s’ of ‘Technology, Talent and Tolerance’.

Econometrics and the ‘cultural case’

Second, the nature of the argument for cultural investments was being differently made
at local and national levels. While the local level could build in image, pride of place, the
‘embedding’ of economic activity in culture, community cohesion and other comforting
(and desirable) ambitions, these would not cut the same at national level, where a more
assuredly ‘hard’ economic case had to be made. Indeed, the core raison d’etre of the
neologism ‘creative industries’ was almost entirely state-economic – designed to make a
link to the software and computing industries that (in almost all territories) provided the
lion’s share of total ‘creative’ employment, and which allowed the sector to be taken seri-
ously by finance ministries and government accountants (Garnham, 2005; Oakley and
O’Connor, 2015b). But of course the emerging dominance of neo-liberal thinking meant
that any cultural rationale – however much it was woven into a strategic economic argu-
ment – was radically reduced in scope to those of Gross Value Added (GVA) (and thus
tax), employment and export (see Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015; McGuigan, 2005;
Schlesinger, 2007). The rest was simply public relations (PR) (or ‘soft power’). Hence,
we witnessed two decades of relentless econometrics in which ‘creativity’ was held to be
the defining characteristic of culture and the key conduit whereby its economic benefits
could feed into the wider national economy (e.g. Department for Digital, Culture, Media
& Sport (DCMS), 2008; Nesta, 2012, 2013). The paucity of this argument is now widely
accepted, even by its former supporters (Bakhshi and Cunningham, 2016).

Culture and civic value

Somewhere along the way, maybe just as they were arriving at the ‘front door’ of govern-
ment (Hartley, 2005: 19), the idea that the creative industries might serve some (non-
economic) civic or public good got somewhat lost (Turner, 2012). For sure, we saw that
many of those engaged in popular (and local) cultural production had been able to chal-
lenge regressive social structures and the assumptions that held them together. Certainly,
many inside (and outside) of government saw value in the potential for local culture (and
its flotilla of enterprises) to ‘solve’ problems of social and economic exclusion and to
support political engagement. Yet, on the other hand, we were learning from a new kind
of cultural studies which had re-written the history of public policy away from liberal
and universalist notions of the (Habermasian) public sphere and citizenship, towards a
more pragmatic but disenchanted understanding informed by Foucault and governmen-
tality (see Bennett, 1998; Lewis and Miller, 2002; McGuigan, 2004; Miller and Yudice,
646 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6)

2002). At the forefront, writers such as Tony Bennett and Toby Miller were beginning to
suggest that culture was primarily a means of government getting subjects to act in
accordance with the wishes of government. Furthermore, such approaches overlapped
with various streams of postmodern and poststructuralist interpretation which tended to
regard cultural value as inherently suspect since it could always be shown to be ‘partial’
(and thus ‘exclusionary’) or else premised on the concealment of a strategic interest (see
Bourdieu, 1984; also Banks, 2017; Keat, 2000). This scepticism took particular form in
the arguments that were being made by John Hartley, Stuart Cunningham and others,
where, given the absence of agreed standards for judging cultural value and the dethron-
ing of artistic critique, the market was seen to provide at least as good a way as any other
for offering more reasonably efficient and democratic forms of adjudication between the
tastes and goods of culture, and so could be a presumptive basis of a cultural or creative
industries policy (e.g. see Cunningham, 2009; Hartley, 2005; O’Connor, 2009). Applied
at the local level, cities and cultural districts were simply another amalgam of market
actors, hustling and competing for footholds in a global economy that writers such as
Cunningham, Potts et al. (2008) and Flew (2012) understood as a variegated and com-
plex landscape (a ‘Rorschach blot’ in Cunningham’s terms) that could no longer sustain
what was presumed to be a ‘false’ opposition between economic and cultural motives
and intentions.
Many of these writers wanted, in different ways, to take down the pretentions of cul-
tural activists (and cultural studies) to some inherently emancipatory narrative of culture.
But perhaps in retrospect, they need not have bothered; once New Labour (and other
Centre Left parties) disappeared into the shadows and austerity was enthroned, the new
settings of governance were more distinctly revealed. Government no longer seemed to
need culture to govern but could now position the national citizen as primarily homo
economicus. As William Davies has recently charted (2015), it was the sovereign, choice-
driven, efficiency-maximising subject of the market around which government services,
including culture, came to be organised – regardless of what was happening in cultural
policy and cultural industry studies. Some of the consequences of this are now being felt
in a resurgence of culture – sometimes deeply regressive – in direct opposition to such
‘common-sense’ economic rationality.

Cultural work
It became apparent that the value of cultural or creative work was easily reducible to crude
headline estimates of revenues, rising employment and gross value added (GVA) – a con-
testable set of statistics that rarely convinced either the governments that produced them
or the critics. But neither, contrary to earlier promises, were the anticipated benefits of
such work made to materialise for the wider community. Outside major cities, and the
executive ranks, the generalised picture became one of limited opportunity and low pay,
long hours and self-sacrifice amidst an entrenched and relentless precariousness that
demanded nothing other than a total commitment to work (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Ross,
2000). Indeed, after two decades of promotion and investment in creative clusters, quar-
ters, hubs and partnerships; in flexible contracts, non-hierarchical working and portfolio
careers; in arts education, employability, work placements and internships; in diversity
Banks and O’Connor 647

and equality; in managed workspaces and unmanaged workspaces; in innovation toolkits

and creative consultants; and in all that is ‘free’, ‘gifted’ and ‘open’, we find that work in
the creative economy remains deeply unequal and profoundly unjust (Banks, 2017; Conor
et al., 2015; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; McRobbie, 2016; Oakley and O’Brien,
2016; Ross, 2013). In the United Kingdom, the dominance of London as a source of cul-
tural jobs, and the stagnancy of ‘growth’ in regional cities, has further disadvantaged those
poorer and more geographically marginal populations who might wish to pursue careers
in cultural work – a core–periphery relation common to a range of European states (e.g.
see Bayliss, 2007; Vivant, 2013) and increasingly a trope in ‘populist’ attacks on metro-
politan elites.
The bitter irony, of course, is that while the ‘creative economy’ was developing within
an economic discourse that aggressively promoted the virtues of free markets, entrepre-
neurship and competitive individualism, it was also presented as an idealised productive
space where people with talents and imagination were at liberty to pursue their interests
in benign, inclusive environments marked by openness and equal opportunity. In this
way, creativity became a key ‘doctrine’ (Schlesinger, 2007) of the conjuncture. But we
would also add that while this doctrine has failed to generate a fair distribution of cultural
and creative work, it also served to obscure (or discredit) some of the more pluralistic
and politically informed understandings of ‘culture’ (and ‘cultural industries’) hitherto
associated with the much longer history of symbolic production: understandings that
have often been motivated by a strong sense of critique of the kinds of assumptions and
conditions that now routinely underpin creative economy hype.

And so . . .
… where are we now? Certainly, looking back, we can see that the initial ‘fast policy’
success of the creative industries might have made it easy (for us and others) to overlook
or underestimate some of the less appealing innovations that were emerging as equally
central to the zeitgeist. These included the gradual colonisation of our everyday language
(and institutional behaviour) by economic reasoning, the (re)privatisation of the media-
tised public sphere under the rubric of ‘de-regulation’ and choice, the restructuring of
cultural policy around the consumer rather than the citizen, the deepening socio-cultural
shift from collective to individual identities and values, and a pervasive (and global)
drive to strip out the costs (and power) of labour. ‘Neo-liberalism’, as it became known,
offered a very different sense of ‘reflexive modernization’ to the one we (and so many
others) first imagined to be progressively transforming the city of Manchester and other
cities and cultures beyond.
For sure, while many of the contradictions and problems of the creative economy were
quite quickly recognised (e.g. see Hesmondhalgh and Pratt, 2005; McRobbie, 1998, 2002;
Ross, 2000), too often these concerns were then side-lined (especially in government, in
industry and in the academic mainstream), with the overall effect of helping to obscure (as
well as set real limits upon) any discussion as to how far the creative industries and their
cities could help in the making of a better, more just and inclusive kind of economy and
society (Oakley, 2006). Instead, the creative industries became instituted as an exemplary
manifestation of the wider ideology of contemporary capitalism – offering cities and
648 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6)

cultural workers the seductive promise of meaningful work in harmonious spatial settings
(such as the ‘cluster’), but in service of an economic system where the primary aim was
not to socialise the products of culture for equalitarian gains but to orient the majority of
individuals to flexible, perpetual and minimally paid employment in the interests of profit.
What was also overlooked here by advocates and planners were the connections between
these local SME ecologies and the large, global corporations upon whose dynamics much
of the fortune of these local clusters depended. Yet as political economy (and some of
cultural studies) always argued, it was perhaps these big players who were really (and
increasingly) assuming control of our local creative fates (Fitzgerald, 2015; Miller et al.,
2003; Mosco, 1996; O’Connor, 2004; Wayne, 2003).
Today, then, among the most urgent questions is how might we recover some sense of
progressive purpose and value in contexts where local cultural economies have been
exposed as, at best, unable to deliver on anything like the promises invested in them and,
at worst, expressions of the bankruptcy of an idea that has long since lost any sense of
energy and direction? What could – and should – our urban cultural economies do or
aspire to be? These are not easy questions to answer. There is certainly no simple reboot
or recovery position. And while the crisis has put cultural values right back on the table,
this is into a very fraught and complex situation – where even the erstwhile poachers may
be perceived to have turned into gamekeepers, as one ex-Labor prime minister wrote
recently in the Australian context:

Australian politics has become a parallel universe. The insiders (representing no more than 10
per cent of society) are mainly cultural producers, working in the media, advertising, design,
arts and education industries – as well as politics. Among the other 90 per cent there’s genuine
rancour about this elite domination of information and culture … Make no mistake: the revolt
of the outsiders in Australia is a revolt against the cultural producers. (Latham, 2017)

Let us not try to unpick the nonsense of this claim, but simply note that it suggests that
the focus on the ‘cultural case’ may no longer wash in contexts where concerns about
‘liberal elites’ and their ‘bubbles’ seem to diminish any kind of progressive or collective
understanding of what culture (and cultural industry) is or what it can be or do. But, as
we now also know, neither will the old economic arguments wash since the market has
proven unable to deliver on its ‘democratic’ promises. Indeed, the reliance on market
efficiency as the founding value of a polity is now clearly unravelling, and not least
because the economy is so badly faltering. Embedded in the Brexit scenario, and the
resurgence of the Right in Europe (and the United States beyond), has been the unwill-
ingness of large sections of the population either to recognise economic ‘reasonableness’
or to make their choices based primarily upon it. However ‘regressive’ this rejection
might be in metropolitan eyes, it reflects a large deficit in public value, one easily filled
by less progressive cultural narratives oriented around national sovereignty (‘taking back
control’), ‘protecting our way of life’ and various forms of cultural scapegoating and
exclusion. Where this leaves an emancipatory, progressive vision of cultural value – and
the cultural industries within it – is a question cultural studies must once again address.
More broadly, cities and the cultural economy are no longer part of a millennial eco-
nomic upswing in which ‘ideas make money’ (Howkins, 2001) but are in a situation where
Banks and O’Connor 649

the confrontation with a catastrophic ecological crisis coincides with a new technological
revolution (virtual reality (VR), Internet of Things (IoT), all-pervasive robots, computers
and communications) in which an abundance of cultural experiences, material goods and
leisure time seems feasible (but also unsettling) in ways not witnessed since the early
1970s (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014; Frase, 2016; Mason, 2015). Yet, there is abso-
lutely no evidence to suggest that either the crisis or these socio-technological possibili-
ties will be realised in ways that accord with a democratic or egalitarian human future–quite
the contrary (Frase, 2016). Rather, the question should now be how cultural industries will
contribute to – or try to challenge or mitigate – these emerging realities? Researchers on
cities, cultural participation and cultural work are perhaps closest to such issues, raising
issues of sustainability, social justice, the organisation of labour, and the relationship
between work, leisure and collective and individual fulfilment. These and those many
others seeking to uncouple the cultural economy from a narrow agenda based on the
unbridled virtues of the market and capitalistic growth – coming out of feminist, ecologi-
cal and development economics – are going to have to exert more impact on the kinds of
‘no-growth’ ‘free production’ that is now beginning to characterise the cultural sector
(Gibson-Graham, 2006; Mason, 2015).
But there are some even older, perhaps archaic, questions, back on the table. The cul-
tural industries have long been concerned with the productive aspects of culture – poiesis
– creativity, the entrepreneur, innovation, the bringing into being of the new. They have
thrived, as Marshall Berman (1984) knew, as part of our modern, Faustian bargain. But
alongside poiesis was always Kant’s aesthesis – the audience, the democratic universal,
the possibilities of a unified ‘sense’ which makes society possible. We need poiesis, and
in some respects, we have had a lot of it – though perhaps, for some, a little too much and
a little too fast. Perhaps it is time for more aesthesis? The question might now be on what
grounds we might seek a culture in common – not the hard billiard ball cultural sphere of
the nation-state, but a space in which we can both be open and state our belonging? And
what kind of system of local (and global) cultural production, participation and distribu-
tion could underpin such an inclusive commons – what would that even look like?
Perhaps to try and imagine this ought now to be the focus of our collective energies,
whether we find ourselves outside – or inside – the whale.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. ‘Cultural Industries and the City’ (1998–2000) funded under the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) Cities: Competitiveness and Cohesion Research Programme
(ESRC L130251048).
2. Manchester expanded enormously from the late 18th century, at the forefront of the industrial
revolution, building its wealth and fame (mainly) on organised textile production. Such was
the speed and scale of industrial development in Manchester, and so rapid was the growth
of populations to support it, it provided the blueprint for what the modern industrial city
would look like for the next 150 years. Manchester was the ‘shock city of the age’ – as Asa
650 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6)

Briggs (1963) famously termed it – and its radical embrace of unbridled commerce provided
much of the empirical case for Marx and Engels in developing their revolutionary critique of
capitalism.
3. A comprehensive account of the wider regional strategy around Manchester’s regenerated
central business distrcit (CBD) can be found in the Centre for Research on Folkman et al.,
2016.

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Biographical notes
Mark Banks is director of CAMEo – Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, and
a Professor in the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester,
UK. He is the author of Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (2017), The
Politics of Cultural Work (2007) and, with Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor, the co-edited col-
lection Theorizing Cultural Work (2012). He has written widely about cultural industries, work
and cultural policy.
Justin O’Connor is director of Culture Media Economy and professor of Cultural Economy in
the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Australia. He is visiting chair in
the School of Media and Design, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and a member of the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 2005 Convention Expert
Facility. He co-edited (with Kate Oakley) The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries
(2015).