The 2014 Berlin Research Symposium
on Culture and Creative Industries
23rd October 2014
Justin O’Connor, Monash University
Is the idea of creativity the most important
concept of the 21st century? Are the jobs of the
future to be found in the cultural and creative
sector?
1998: UK New Labour
DCMS 1998
“those industries which have their origin in
individual creativity, skill and talent and which
have a potential for wealth and job creation
through the generation and exploitation of
intellectual property”
Creative Industries
• Rebadging of ‘cultural industries’ by the UK
Government for tactical purposes (more money
for culture).
• Does not mention culture but parasitical on
artistic and cultural sense of the word.
• Linked this to the new world of digital start-ups
and information economy.
Creative Industries
Claims to establish links between ‘culture’ and
‘economy’
This done since 1970s in Europe/ North America:
(political economy of communications; urban and
regional economic geography; local culture-led
development coalitions).
Creative Industries
Also in developing world/ Global South by
UNESCO’s ‘Culture and Development’ programme
Creative Industries
refuses to deal with any substantive issues around
culture, reducing culture to an input – creativity –
into an innovation system defined in exclusively
economic terms.
What is distinctive about the ‘creative’
rather than ‘cultural’ industries?
• Intellectual property?
• Commercial?
• Application to ‘functional’ or ‘utilitarian’
products and services?
What distinguishes creative industries
from the rest of industry?
• What is not creative?
• What does not generate IP?
• High level of cognitive skills?
Definition of the Creative industries
A statistical and conceptual mess
People only use it because everybody else does
Vicious circle
‘ those industries which
have their origin in
individual creativity, skill
and talent and which
have a potential for
wealth and job creation
through the generation
and exploitation of
intellectual property ’
(Department of Culture,
Media and Sports, 1998)
ICT and Cultural Industries
• Are coders creative?
• Have ICT/ digital transformed the cultural
industries?
• Does that mean ICT workers are part of the
cultural industries?
ICT and Cultural Industries
• CIs rely on technologies:
• Guttenberg, Edison etc. and ‘mechanical
reproduction’
• Communications and convergence: Code, fibreoptic, satellites, telephony, internet…..
These also important manufacturing sectors which can
be included in ‘depth’ models of CIs
ICT and Cultural Industries
• But they have transformed other sectors
• Medicine and health services, education,
business organisations – finance!
ICT and Cultural Industries
• In 2008 the DCMS dropped ICT
• NESTA complained – precisely because it cut out
40% of employment.
• When you read of how big the creative sector is:
Caveat Emptor!
Advertising, Marketing, PR
• Been linked to Arts and publishing since 18th
century.
• Crucial as to how they survive
• Crucial to our understanding of how they work
• Increased in size and importance (rise of
consumer economies; erosion of public sector
broadcasting;)
• Why are these ‘creative’ and not ‘cultural’?
Design
• Wide catch-all term: graphic, communication,
fashion, interior, furnishing, crafts, architecture
• These all linked to cultural debates – how
modern industrial systems create a new
expressive and functional world for mass
democratic society. (Bauhaus!)
Design as Planning
• Now also ‘design-thinking’ – planning and reimagining of a whole range of systems
• Social services, information, transportation,
educational services, smart cities, ecological
management etc.
• These are huge issues and to which we hope the
imaginative resources involved in ‘creativity’ will be
applied in some way.
Design as Creative Industry
• What is served by calling this a ‘creative
industry’?
• Does a ‘creative input’ define the kind of issues
it addressed and the processes involved in their
solution?
Design as a creative industry
• When part of the creative industry ‘design’ becomes
narrowed to the kind of aesthetic appeal “designers”
add to functional goods.
• This one aspect allows link to the wider world of
advanced manufacture, user-interfaces, smart cities
etc. – they are related but is it conceptual and
practical confusion to lump them into one ‘creative’
sector.
NESTA
Not industries but occupations!
• Creatives employed outside the ‘creative
industries’.
• Adds 40% to employment
• Financial services?
Creativity as Innovation Machine
Precise mechanism whereby the creativity of the
creative sector is transferred to the wider economy.
Presence of creatives proxy for levels of innovation.
Creative occupations the motor of the innovation
machine
Creative Industries
Creative Occupations
“Embedded Creatives”
NESTA
But this does not tell us about creativity or
innovation – it tells us how many marketers and
graphic designers, ICT systems planners there are
in manufacturing, or finance, or extraction etc.
NESTA: Creative Workers
“ a role within the creative process that brings
cognitive skills to bear about differentiation to
yield either novel or significantly enhanced
products whose final form is not fully specified in
advance”.
NESTA: Creative Intensity
Creative Intensity
• Can define any situated skilled worker in
education, finance, science, the legal
professions etc.
• Industries not ‘creative’ because of input – could
be the most regressive, unimaginative,
destructive industries or practices.
• “Lipstick on the pig”
Creative Intensity
Reduction of creativity to the most basic idea of
innovation as commercial growth
– only one part of rethinking where we are going
in the 21st century – and how…
Creativity and Culture
Creativity does not exclusively define culture
ritual, identity, tradition, meaning, celebration,
social bonding etc.
Creativity and Culture
• Creativity as innovation machine takes one
aspect of Euro-American modernity’s ‘aesthetic’
art - avant-garde
• and ties it to Schumpeterian notions of creative
destruction and ‘disruptive innovation’ - part of
the knowledge economy discourse.
UNESCO: Cultural Economy
Culture as Service Sector
With Education and Health - Culture is a key
public sector of last two centuries.
Culture as Service Sector
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Provides Jobs
Commercial
Big corporate players
Multiple kinds of state investment
New Technologies
Globalisation
Huge manufacturing links
Cultural as a Service Sector
• Economies set within wider goals
• These wider goals a basis of policy judgements
• What is it we require of the cultural sector?
• Discourse of ‘creative industries’ prevents these kind
of judgements being made. Only economic
performativity is allowed.
Two Challenges
How do how do we get back to a discussion of the
cultural sector or cultural economy:
one that allows the full play of cultural values – of
why we need and value culture – within the
cultural economic system and its links to other
sectors.
Culture and Economy
• Culture traditionally opposed to economy.
• Few would hold to this strictly now.
• But: what grounds for their mutual
accommodation?
- or is it “reconciliation under duress” (Adorno)
What kind of economy?
Second problem:
How do we want to organise the cultural economy
(and indeed the rest of it)?
Cultural Economies
Benign economies:
High level of skills and education;
Network, trust and communication intensive;
Strong role for SMEs;
Low barriers to entry;
Beneficial externalities for places;
Resources of the human renewable;
- All favour more equal forms of growth.
Cultural Economies
But it can also be the opposite:
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Exploitation and precarious labour;
monopolies and concentration:
Exclusionary labour practices (class, gender, race)
High levels of geographical concentration (London)
Globally unequal
Narrow focus on high value consumption groups
Narrow policy focus on high-growth, high value
companies.
Cultural Economy
Not only what kind of culture do we want
but also what kind of economy do we want?
Danke