Attached is my Introduction to The Creative Industries, Culture and Policy. The manuscript is now with my publishers Sage, and the book will come out in 2011. Any comments on this are welcome.
In order to understand relations between contemporary cultures and public policy, we need to recognise the significance to two moments since the end of the Second World War in 1945 in the history of thinking about culture. The first involves the rise of cultural studies. From the late 1950s to the present day, cultural studies has developed from its origins as a critique of British intellectual and political culture associated with the work of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and others, to become an international ‘project to democratise our understanding of culture’ (McGuigan, 2009a: 2). Cultural studies provided a point of intersection for what had been a discrete and largely disconnected set of intellectual fields involved with the project of studying culture – from anthropology to literary criticism, and from sociology and mass communications to philosophy, art theory and linguistics – but it also came to constitute the field that it was designed to study.
For cultural studies came with a set of underlying assumptions and priorities in relation to culture that have come to define ways of thinking about culture. These include: the attention given to popular culture and the desire to see such forms as having cultural value; concerns about how more traditional frameworks for analysing culture, such as aesthetics, can act to perpetuate social and cultural hierarchies; aligning the study of culture to a political project that sought the democratisation of knowledge and the challenging of socio-economic inequalities; and the whole idea that the study of culture is in fact political, as questions of power are embedded in systems of cultural production and consumption. We find today that such questions are today raised in arts and humanities courses throughout the world, and are increasingly central to school curriculum in areas such as English literature, in ways that were inconceivable about 20 years ago. Questions associated with cultural studies serve to raise new questions about such issues as national identity, and has given a new dynamic to our expectation that any single cultural artefact or text – a term which itself changes its meaning with the rise of cultural studies – can be open to multiple meanings and interpretations. Indeed, even for those who reject these questions being the focus of the study of culture, as with conservative critics in the ‘culture wars’ (Gibson, 2007), they start from the premise that cultural studies has been winning in the so-called ‘long march’ to politicise the humanities.
If cultural studies has been both a set of concepts and an intellectual formation that have been transforming how we understand, interpret and act upon contemporary culture, this book points to a second such moment, which has its origins in the 1970s but accelerates in significance from the late 1990s onwards, and that is creative industries. Narrowly defined, creative industries was the term used by Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government when it came to power in Britain in 1997 to develop new policies for industries associated with the arts, media, design and digital content, but the uses of the term have always been more ambitious than is suggested by these origins in policy discourse, and the ideas that underpin creative industries have broader and deeper roots than would be suggested by the pragmatic politics of the Blair and Brown governments. While this book begins with an overview of the British experience with creative industries, and how it evolved as a policy discourse, it is a contention of this book that creative industries has captured a set of trends of much wider global provenance than these origins would suggest. Like cultural studies, creative industries is a concept that is reshaping how we think about culture, and particularly about the forms of public policy that are being developed in relation to the areas that come to be within its purview. While it is noted that terminology changes across countries, with come referring to the cultural industries, the copyright industries, the digital content industries, and even – as in China – the cultural creative industries, the underlying questions that have been opened up by creative industries debates are not a genie likely to be put back in the bottle, or even a term that disappears with such erstwhile staples of the 1990s and 2000s as ‘New Labour’, the ‘Third Way’, the ‘new economy’ or ‘Cool Britannia’. Chapter Two discusses the differential international uptake of the concept of creative industries, at the level of nation-states, regional entities such as the European Union, and supranational institutions such as UNCTAD and UNESCO.