Global Cultural Economy

Christiaan De Beukelaer, Kim-Marie Spence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138670082
• eBook ISBN: 9781317209041
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Global Cultural Economy critically interrogates the role cultural and creative industries play in societies. By locating these industries in their broader cultural and economic contexts, Christiaan De Beukelaer and Kim-Marie Spence combine their repertoires of empirical work across four continents to define the 'cultural economy' as the system of production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods and services, as well as the cultural, economic, social, and political contexts in which it operates.

Each chapter introduces and discusses a different theme, such as inclusion, diversity, sustainability, and ownership, highlighting the tensions around them to elicit an active engagement with possible and provisional solutions. The themes are explored through case studies including Bollywood, Ghanaian music, the Korean Wave, Jamaican Reggae, and the UN Creative Economy Reports.

Written with students, researchers, and policy-makers in mind, Global Cultural Economy is ideal for anyone interested in the creative and cultural industries, media and cultural studies, cultural policy, and development studies.

1

CULTURAL ECONOMY

The way we talk about music in Africa is full of clichés. One such cliché is that the continent’s music has potential. Take for example UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Report, which claims that in Africa ‘despite the abundance of creative talents, the creative potential remains highly underutilized’ (UNCTAD and UNDP 2008, iv), or a chapter on the World Bank’s Africa Music Project, that makes the opening claim that ‘African music has significant business potential’ (Penna et al. 2004, 95). We do not contest the existence of such potential throughout Africa. But if music across Africa is primarily characterised by its mere potential, how can we understand the successes of ‘African’ musicians, both locally, across the continent, and throughout the world? We do however contest the strong focus on ‘potential’. First, talking about potential diverts attention from the incredibly rich musical history of the continent. Second, potential suggests we overlook what has already been realised in terms of music industries. And finally, the focus on potential makes assumptions about what is lacking, without asking the question of how the music economy on the continent could or should evolve.

The underlying issue is not what does or doesn’t exist, but what we do and don’t know about what exists. Take urban transport, for example. In Melbourne, public transport is messy but formalised. Different trains, trams, and buses connect residents and visitors throughout a large network. In Nairobi, a similarly messy and largely effective network exists. The major difference between the transport systems in both cities is that most visitors will recognise that Melbourne formally has a public transport network with clearly indicated stops, route maps, timetables, and apps. In contrast, many visitors to Nairobi will see that there are plenty of Matatus (minibuses), but they may be less confident than when they would visit Melbourne to use this form of shared transport as a reliable, cost-effective, and largely efficient manner to move through the city. Stops are not clearly indicated, maps are absent, pricing is not transparent, and timetables are not advertised. But does this mean that Melbourne has a public transport network and Nairobi doesn’t?

Both Melbourne and Nairobi are equipped with a system that transports commuters to work and students to school, like virtually any city in the world. The major difference is transparency about how the system works, and thus what the system actually is. It would be easy (and misleading) to argue that Nairobi has a deficient public transport, just because a formal system with indicated stops, route maps, timetables, and apps needs to be established in order to develop a system that is transparent and functional. Such a proposal would be misleading as it ignores the context, the existing mechanisms, and the real needs. The more probable solution is certainly more difficult, but also more likely to be effective. A team of researchers has explored the routes and stops of Matatus in Nairobi, which resulted in a colour-coded map that provides an effective and user-friendly overview of existing solutions. The same team also explored the possibility of using the resulting data to develop cellphone-based navigation tools (Williams et al. 2015). A similar network of semi-formal Marshrutkas (minibuses) exists in Bishkek. In that context, an app (bus.kg) exists to guide travellers through the opaque transport system.

What these transport systems have in common is that they are reasonably effective, but also perpetually imperfect. Recognising that people in Melbourne and Nairobi, or São Paulo and Bishkek, all complain about the timeliness, comfort, connections, and coverage of their transport systems is crucial in thinking about possibly improving them. What sets apart these different systems is that aspirational approaches to public transport often eclipse agnostic or reflexive approaches, because the former may look more straightforward, easy, and even elegant than the latter options, which will reveal that there is most likely not an easy way to solve the ever-changing challenges of urban transport. Our underlying argument is that the same goes for the music economy.

Music creation is widespread and wildly popular across the world. But the business of producing, distributing, and consuming music is very diverse in different parts of the world. This is why ethnomusicologist Alex Perullo argues that there’s too much of an attempt to see the particular music business of Tanzania (and those across Africa) as part of a single Western paradigm with global validity. Looking for formal bodies dealing with recording music, administering performing rights, supplying record stores, and drawing up sales ranks is a bit like looking for a formal bus stop on a Matatu line. There are mechanisms in place, much like Matatus having their regular stopping points, but if you don’t know where they are, you’re unlikely to recognise them. This is partly because what may sound like a neatly organised system (‘music industry’) is in fact ‘characterised by disorganisation, fragmentation, unevenness, and variability’, as Chris Gibson and Lily Kong remark about the cultural economy in general (Gibson and Kong 2005, 553).

The significant difference between public transport and the global cultural economy, which includes music, is that the former remains thoroughly embedded in the physical fabric of the city, whereas the latter is simultaneously global (for music and other cultural expressions circulate around the world) and local (in that its production, circulation, and consumption relies on both central nodes such as New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo, as well as regional hubs such as Johannesburg, Seoul, Miami, Abidjan, Lisbon, Nairobi, and Cairo).

Alex Perullo further argues that some of the formal components that do exist in the UK, France, Japan, the US, or smaller countries like Sweden may be lacking in Tanzania (and by extension in most countries outside the ‘West’). But there are still many people who work in the music economy and try to make a living in every corner of the world. This is why he prefers to use the term ‘music economy, [which] usefully captures this commercialization of music without relying on preconceptions and customs associated with a music industry’ (Perullo 2011, xv, emphasis in original). It is the same engagement with the interplay between the economic and the cultural beyond fixed preconceptions that informs our approach here.

The cultural economy exists through the ways in which we discuss it. Rather than being a thing that exists independently from the discourse that aims to describe it, it is in fact discourse that makes it. The recent ‘discovery’ of the cultural and ‘creative industries’ is a great illustration of this: these activities have existed well before we started calling them ‘industries’, and what we try to do in this book is both critically analyse and reframe what we are in fact looking at.

The key way through which the discursive formation of the cultural economy emerged beyond the handful of countries with a very active research agenda on the subject are the United Nations’ Creative Economy Reports. These reports helped frame global debates, national policies, and local meanings, by synthesising initiatives, studies, and advocacy into an optimistic narrative. Though rather than taking this narrative at face value, we aim to expose the dynamics and tensions between global, national, and local levels of governance, which differ significantly across countries.

The remainder of this chapter first explores whether the cultural economy is a drain on, or a contributor to, the economy as a whole. We then continue exploring two different institutional perspectives of UNCTAD and UNESCO to the cultural economy, that of UNESCO and UNCTAD. UNESCO advocates for the formalisation of informal practices while UNCTAD focuses on measurement and advocacy. After discussing these intergovernmental approaches, we discuss why it matters that different countries continue to use different terms to describe the cultural economy, often without realising the implications of their discursive choices. In conclusion, we argue that the cultural economy – much like culture itself – has globalised, but it has not become homogeneous in the process.

CULTURAL ECONOMY: DRAIN OR CONTRIBUTOR?

The success of the cultural economy hinges on a key premise: that it drives economic growth (at a higher rate than other parts of the economy), it creates jobs, increases exports, and improves well-being (UNCTAD and UNDP 2008, 2010). Moreover, the creativity at the core of the cultural economy is said to be the ‘true wealth of nations in the 21st century’ (UNESCO and UNDP 2013, 15). In sum: it is a contributor to the economy. And yet, a major issue for artistic and cultural activities has long been that they do not generate sufficient revenue (‘earned income’) from sales to cover the costs, let alone make a profit. How can we understand this paradox?

One way of looking at this is by presenting a teleological reading of the cultural economy. Jason Potts and Stuart Cunningham present such an approach by outlining four different models of the ‘creative industries’ (Potts and Cunningham 2008). First, the ‘welfare model’ presumes market failure (where market prices do not cover cost). Second, the ‘competition model’ assumes that the sector is not really different from others (some businesses will succeed, and others won’t, but this is not down to a structural deficiency of the sector). Third, the ‘growth model’ means that the cultural economy outperforms the rest of the economy. Fourth, the ‘innovation model’ results in significant economic gains too, but they derive from the influence innovation has on the economy as a whole (now often called ‘disruption’), rather than on the immediate products and services of the sector.

While their celebratory approach that presumes the cultural economy can shift from being a drain to being a contributor may look appealing, we think it does not hold up. A key issue is that it does not sufficiently distinguish between different kinds of cultural and creative expressions across the cultural economy. While they argue a shift to a normative endpoint (the authors herald models three and four as the best options), we question this underlying idea of teleological progression, because such an approach favours the function the cultural economy serves, rather than building an understanding of how it came to be. We therefore argue that all four models will continue to exist simultaneously. Potts and Cunningham’s celebratory thinking results in conceptual and political confusion, which makes policy for the cultural economy difficult. This is because the cultural economy consists of vastly different activities, but their argument fails to reflect the parallel existence of different industries that each have components of several of the models.

We’ll try to move beyond this teleological approach because it takes the social democratic political economy of Western countries as the starting point of the discussion. To a certain extent this makes sense because this is the context where public support for the arts emerged – most notably in the UK and France (Upchurch 2016; Urfalino 2011). But it does raise the question of how this normative view on change in the cultural economy maps onto the rest of the world. Nollywood, for example, emerged as a significant centre for movie production on the African continent – or rather, it emerged through multiple centres across Nigeria (Larkin 2008; Witt 2017). In this context, there was initially no active support, including no enforcement of regulation in terms of copyright (Lobato 2010).

But rather than providing a definitive answer to the question of whether the cultural economy is a drain or a contributor, we argue that this deliberation greatly depends on the way we frame and interpret data, how to balance formal and informal activities, and how the language we use may further challenge the size and shape of the cultural economy. These three ways of looking at the cultural economy in turn raise questions about what we want to use as a measure of ‘contribution’: what do we value?

UNCTAD: MEASUREMENT AND ADVOCACY

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published the first two Creative Economy Reports, under the leadership of Edna Dos Santos-Duisenberg, in 2008 and 2010. These reports articulate explicit policy recommendations concerning the ‘creative industries’ in societies around the world, and provide a statistical overview of international trade in creative goods and services – the full datasets that UNCTAD compiles are updated annually and available on their website.¹ In order to provide these data, UNCTAD needed to come up with a definition of the ‘creative economy’ that would allow them to compile data on the industries that together form this economy (see Figure 1.1).

While this classification, and the data they have compiled, provide a useful and necessary quantitative understanding of the cultural economy, we take issue with how UNCTAD present the data at three levels.

First, the large scope of the ‘creative’ economy inflates the economic importance of the sector. This inflation is not unique to UNCTAD, as the UK Department of Media Culture and Sport (DCMS) also included sectors in their initial mapping document (DCMS 1998) that were both economically very sizable and not previously considered to be ‘cultural industries’, most notably computer software and design. Garnham (2005) argues that this expansion of scope ties in with the increased importance of information science in the 1990s. Though through this expansion, the political significance of the ‘cultural industries’ as a way of critically looking at the cultural, social, and political sides of the cultural economy greatly diminished (Turner 2015), particularly in the ‘celebratory’ approach we outlin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Cultural economy
• 2 Inclusion
• 3 Diversity
• 4 Public/private
• 5 Ownership
• 6 Human development
• 7 Sustainability
• Index