Reimagining the Creative Industries

Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care

Miranda Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000469691
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book documents the rise in youth creativity, entrepreneurship, and collective strategies to address systemic barriers and discrimination in the creative industries and create an expanded, more diverse, inclusive, equitable, and caring field.

Although the difficulties of entering and making a living in the creative industries—a field which can often perpetuate dominant patterns of social exclusion and economic inequality—are well documented, there is still an absence of guidance on how young creatives can navigate this environment. Foregrounding an intersectional approach, Reimagining the Creative Industries responds to this gap by documenting the work of contemporary youth collectives and organizations that are responding to these systemic barriers and related challenges by creating more caring and community-oriented alternatives. Mobilizing a care ethics framework, Miranda Campbell underscores forms of care that highlight relationality, recognize structural barriers, and propose new visions for the creative industries. This book posits a future where creativity, collaboration, and community are possible through increased avenues for co-creation, teaching and learning, and community engagement.

Anyone interested in thinking critically about the creative industries, youth culture, community work, and creative employment will be drawn to Campbell's incisive work.

1
Creative Industries as Discourse: Changing the Frame

DOI: 10.4324/9781003031338-1

My intention here is not to write a comprehensive history of creative industries as a discourse, but to establish creative industries as a discourse, with a particular set of discursive focuses. The creative industries as a cohesive object or entity has been heralded into being through policy and through academic analysis. In order to investigate creative industries as a discourse, we can turn to Norman Fairclough’s rubric of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Fairclough suggests that power operates opaquely, and his methodology seeks to explore discursive practices, events, and texts, investigating how forms of discourse arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power. He suggests that the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor that secures power and hegemony.¹ Here, I turn to cultural and creative industries policy documents and to academic texts to analyze what is foregrounded or what is most prominent in the assumptions of these document and texts, in order to assess how the creative industries came to be known as a thing. In itself, that the creative industries became known as a thing is an enactment of power, and these definitions inform what registers, what counts or is visible, what is valued and valorized. Following this analysis of creative industries as a discourse, I explore alternative definitions and possibilities, turning to cultural mapping methodology.

Creative Industries as Discourse: Policy Proliferation

To begin, I examine creative industries policy at the national level, to then consider how these national policies diffused globally. Creative industries policy picked up locally through the “creative cities” concept, but here I start with larger, broader strokes, to understand how creative industries became established as a discourse with a particular kind of focus. In 1998, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in the United Kingdom produced the Creative Industries Mapping Documents in the United Kingdom; this mapping exercise was repeated again in 2001. These 1998/2001 documents mark the most crystallized first take ups of the cultural/creative sector and of the creative economy as a driver of the economy.² Prior to these mapping exercises, Australia had also focused on the cultural industries in the 1994 policy document Creative Nation. This Australian document emphasized cultural industries in broad terms, yet the emphasis remained on activities that might be more clearly and more historically defined as “cultural,” including film, radio, and libraries.³ The U.K. mapping exercises were rooted in an industry perspective, separating the creative industries into a variety of fields, with the stated goal of raising awareness about these industries and their overall contribution to the economy. In its toolkit that provides an overview of best practices in creative industries mapping, the British Council Creative Economy Unit defines mapping as “intended especially to give an overview of the industries’ economic value, particularly in places where relatively little is known about them.”⁴ Primary emphasis in the 1998/2001 U.K. mapping documents includes employment indicators, reported in number of jobs and in value of exports, quantified in revenues as well as in percentage of total GDP in the U.K. In the 2001 Mapping Documents, the DCMS represents these indicators pictographically, with images of different types of pens to represent different creative industries sectors. Economic value is represented by the length of these different pens. The total revenues from each creative industries discipline and the total number of jobs in each sector are quantified. These pictures present a visual depiction of economic indicators as a yardstick, a means of comparing the relative impact of various sectors of the creative industries. In their analysis of the proliferation of creative industries mapping documents both in the U.K. and worldwide, Peter Higgs and Stuart Cunningham identify the reoccurrence of four types of mapping metrics, including 1) employment (primarily full-time employment within each discipline); 2) firm activity (primarily the number of firms in each discipline); 3) gross value added to the economy (revenues); and 4) exports.⁵ Higgs and Cunningham’s analysis identifies varied but persistent economic emphasis through various economic indicators for the creative industries as a way to map them.

Economic Emphasis in Creative Industries Policy

The nature of these economic indicators for the creative industries raises questions about definitions and disciplines: what is included, meaning what kinds of creative activities, by what is measured? Starting in 1998, the DCMS defined the creative industries to include the following disciplines: advertising; antiques; architecture; crafts; design; fashion; film; leisure software; music; performing arts; publishing; software; and TV and radio. These disciplines that were included have been debated and critiqued. For example, questions have been raised about whether or not software fits within a definition of creative industries, as most software development might stem from traditional business or IT focuses, rather than from “creative” purposes, such as video game development. This question about the IT sector is particularly apt, as it is profiled as the top leader in the creative industries in these Mapping Documents in its revenues, employment figures, and exports, bolstering the claim that the creative industries contribute sizeable impact to the economy. If the creative industries are deemed to be important because of economic impact, which disciplines are included in what counts as “creative industries” matters. Similarly, questions have been raised about antiques as a discipline of the creative industries, given that the trading of used objects does not generate new intellectual property. Given the more modest contribution of the antiques market to a definition of the creative industries, this particular debate has less of a pressing impact on whether or not the creative industries are considered economically important or worthy of support and celebration. Nonetheless, definitions and what is included have implications for the visibility of particular forms of cultural production, and hence different kinds of cultural producers.

This economic emphasis continues through the proliferation of U.K. DCMS Creative Industries policy, shifting from raising the visibility of the creative industries to celebrating their success and their contribution to the economy. The 2010–2015 U.K. Media and Creative Industries Government Policy celebrates and quantifies the economic contribution of the creative industries to the GDP by the minute, declaring, “Our creative industries are a real success story. They are worth more than £36 billion a year; they generate £70,000 every minute for the U.K. economy; and they employ 1.5 million people in the U.K. According to industry figures, the creative industries account for around £1 in every £10 of the U.K.’s exports.”⁶ This excerpt demonstrates a rhetorical instantiation of the common phrase, time is money, and, in other words, money talks.

Beyond the realm of policy documents, the creative industries as a positive source of national identity have also been celebrated in the realm of popular culture. In the U.K., the mid to late 1990s was the era of resurgence of Brit Pop. Bands such as Blur, Elastica, Oasis, Pulp, and The Verve were topping international music charts, and there was hope that this rise of the British music industry would return the U.K. to a world leader in this regard, harkening back to the 1960s moment of Beatlemania. Musicians like Noah Gallagher from the band Oasis were photographed hanging out with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, ushering in what become known as “Cool Britannia” and “cool capitalism,” where national identity, electoral politics, economic advancement, and cultural production via the creative industries could be conceptualized as complementary and mutually beneficial. Recall a different moment 20 years prior, with the mainstreaming of the British punk movement in the late 1970s. On their 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, British punk band the Sex Pistols turned their noses up at the British monarchy, equating it with “a fascist regime.” This moment displayed a different social imaginary, where music ostentatiously professed contempt for national identity, and cultural production and cultural policy were seemingly at odds. Fast forward and contrast this contempt with a 1997 moment when British band the Spice Girls performed their hit song “Who Do You Think You Are” at the Brit Awards. Band member Gerri Halliwell, also known as Ginger Spice, sartorially performed national identity with her “union jack mini dress,” voted as the “most iconic dress of the past 50 years” by online respondents in a survey conducted by a British online fashion retailer in 2010.⁷

Here, I both interrogate and put aside dichotomies of authenticity and incorporation that have long been associated with in particular counter-cultural, youth-led, and grassroots forms of cultural production. I raise these examples of the Sex Pistols and the Spice Girls not to pit one against the other. Both bands were top-selling, popular artists; these examples illustrate a large shift in expression of the social imaginary of national identity and creative industries within a 20-year period in the U.K. In the late 1990s in the U.K., creative industries were seen as good, creative industries were seen as British, creative industries were seen as profitable, and creative industries were seen as a thing. Creative industries were seen as a good thing because they were seen as profitable. If we move forward another 20 years, we can take note of a further shift in the social imaginary, with questions of diversity, access, and inclusion coming to the foreground of the conversation about the creative industries. For example, in 2016, Black British actor Idris Elba delivered an impassioned speech to the U.K. Parliament about the need for greater diversity in representation in film and media, noting the “disconnect between the real world and the TV world. People in the TV world often aren’t the same as people in the real world. And there’s an even bigger gap between people who make TV, and people who watch TV.” Elba notes that media shapes reality, and “the creative industries are the foundation of Britain’s future economy,” yet opportunities to enter into the creative industries are lacking for people from underrepresented groups.⁸ These questions of equity and access to economic opportunity move beyond earlier celebratory rhetoric and economic indicators.

Creative Industries Development Model

The “creative industries” as an area of policy emphasis emerged in this late 1990s U.K. policy moment, but the creative industries as a discursive and policy entity has proliferated worldwide. Kate Oakley and Justin O’Connor trace the migration of the creative industries to East Asia in particular, including Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China.⁹ Nancy Duxbury, Anita Kangas, and Christiaan De Beukelaer provide an overview of the rationales and deployments of culture and cultural policy through the lens of the United Nations. The authors note the shifting and at times limited take up of culture in international development, for example noting the limited role of culture in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, the authors note the instrumentalization of culture in the creative industries moment in the “‘neoliberal tide’ of the 1990s,” when “a new policy discourse of ‘creative industries’ and a policy practice, known as the ‘creative industries model’ in the U.K. and Australia, became successful exports to other parts of the world, linking together a seemingly heterogeneous set of sub-sectors as the ‘creative industries.’”¹⁰ Surveying conceptual models of globalization and the rise of “creative cities,” Terry Flew calls for nuanced analysis about how global trends play out in local contexts like cities, highlighting the “institutional contexts and constraints” that present themselves to multinational corporations.¹¹ Despite this call for nuanced attention to local take ups and context, “creative industries” has often been mobilized in simplified terms. Surveying the adoption of creative industries through policy emphasis, Oakley and O’Conner note “creativity as an input (rather than culture as an output) allowed the imaginative, dynamic, transformative and glamorous aspects of culture to be pressed into the service of an innovation machine. Questions of value other than innovation and other economic impacts were dropped.”¹² Oakley and O’Connor note the widening discourse of “creativity” to include disciplines not traditionally thought of as “cultural.” This widened discourse also reveals a narrowed focus on the economic, which then gets exported worldwide as “the creative industries.”

This creative industries-as-export model also reached the developing world through the United Nations, via the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).¹³ Within UNCTAD creative industries policy documents, there is not necessarily an attempt to export a British or Australian model of the creative industries wholesale. Conversely, culture and creativity are seen as bottom-up resources for local development, and mapping exercises survey existing creative sectors in each country, rather than suggesting the need to import the DCMS definition of which creative disciplines count as creative industries. For example, in the UNCTAD document titled Strengthening the Creative Industries for Development in Mozambique, policy emphasis includes attention to microfinancing and skills development and paying attention to local context. But these UNCTAD documents also suggest that the creative industries are a means to foster social development and sustainability alongside economic development, suggesting that the creative industries promote gender equality, social cohesion, and are compatible with environmental protection. Creative industries are seen as a good thing because they are seen as profitable, but here the primacy of economic concerns assumes that social and environmental development will also necessarily follow. Returning to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Creative Industries as Discourse: Changing the Frame
• 2 Care Ethics for the Creative Industries
• 3 The “Diversity” Response
• 4 From Margins to Centre: Building Inclusion through Pedagogical Encounter
• 5 Youth Creative Work and Community Arts
• 6 Collaborative Production, Communities of Practice, and Communities of Care
• 7 Inclusive Spaces for Small-Scale Cultural Production
• Conclusion: Towards a Collaborative Future
• Index