Global Creative Industries

Terry Flew

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745670980
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Media Studies

The creative industries are the subject of growing attention among policy-makers, academics, activists, artists and development specialists worldwide. This engaging book provides a global overview of developments in the creative industries, and analyses how these developments relate to wider debates about globalization, cities, culture and the global creative economy. Flew considers creative industries from six angles: industries; production; consumption; markets; places; and policies. Designed for the non-specialist, the text includes insightful and wide-ranging case studies on topics such as: fashion; design thinking; global culture; creative occupations; monopoly and competition; Shanghai and Seoul as creative cities; popular music and urban cultural policy; and the rise of "Nollywood". Global Creative Industries will be of great interest to students and scholars of media and communications, cultural studies, economics, geography, sociology, design, public policy, and the arts. It will also be of value to those working in the creative industries, and involved in their development.

1 Industries

The Growing Significance of Creative Industries

The concept of creative industries has a somewhat unusual genealogy, in that it was first articulated in policy discourse, rather than in academia. The United Kingdom (UK) Labour government led by Tony Blair, first elected in 1997, established a Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) with specific responsibility for defining, mapping and developing a set of industries related to the arts, media, culture and digital technologies, that it termed the creative industries. From this work, the DCMS estimated that these creative industries accounted for 5 per cent of the UK economy in 1997, and were one of the fastest-growing economic segments of contemporary Britain (DCMS, 1998). Such impressive statistics justified an adventurous rebranding of what had previously been the Department of National Heritage, and a rethinking of the arts sector out of a historic association with public subsidy. It promoted a more holistic approach to thinking about the arts, media and design, associating their future with digital technologies, creativity and intellectual capital, and warranting a place at the table in wider debates about the economic future of Great Britain (Leadbeater, 1999; Howkins, 2001).

The UK DCMS study acted as a catalyst to a number of studies internationally that identified the growing size, scope and significance of the creative industries. In the United States, it was estimated that the ‘core’ copyright industries accounted for 6.56 per cent of US gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005, and all copyright-related industries made up 11.12 per cent of US GDP in 2005 (Siwek, 2006). The concept of creative industries has been taken up in many parts of the world, with pioneering studies in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America (for an overview, see Flew, 2012a).

Internationally, it has been estimated that the creative industries account for as much as 7 per cent of world GDP, as well as constituting a growing share of international trade. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) found that exports of creative goods and services were worth US$592 billion in 2008, showing 14 per cent annual growth over the 2000s; this meant that the size of creative goods and services exports in 2008 was double that in 2002 (UNCTAD, 2010: xxiii). Importantly, such exports continued to grow in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008–9, which saw exports more generally contract by 12 per cent.

Such figures have suggested that the creative industries are not only a growing part of the world economy, but that their growth has developed its own dynamics, and is not contingent upon developments in other sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, services or finance. The creative industries can therefore be seen as harbingers of what has been referred to as a creative economy (Howkins, 2001; UNCTAD, 2010). The concept of a creative economy places creativity and knowledge at the core of economic growth and development, identifying the products and services associated with the arts, media and culture as intangible goods embodying unique creative inputs that take the form of tradable intellectual property, and becoming more central to the future of cities, regions, nations, communities and the world.

Jing Wang (2008) observed that the term ‘creative industries’ was itself an effective piece of British marketing, while Andrew Ross noted that ‘few could have predicted that the creative industries model would itself become a successful export’ (Ross, 2007: 18). The economist Richard Caves (2000) identified the creative industries as being central to the dynamics of contemporary organizations, due to the centrality of networks, contracts and project-based work to these sectors. Jeremy Rifkin (2000) identified such developments, associated with what he termed the ‘Hollywood model’ of cultural production, as becoming a feature of twenty-first-century service-based economies more generally. The urban geographer and policy entrepreneur Richard Florida popularized the concept of the ‘creative class’, at whose core were those working in the creative industries, who he proposed were now at the centre of the dynamism of leading global cities (Florida, 2002, 2007, 2008). The evolutionary economist Jason Potts has argued that the creative industries are not only at the forefront of ‘the experimental use of new technologies … developing new content and applications, and in creating new business models’, but that by promoting ‘new lifestyles, new meanings and new ways of being’, they are ‘resetting the definition of normal’ (Potts, 2011: 5).

Defining the Creative Industries

Behind these impressive statistics and larger claims of significance lie some tricky definitional issues about the creative industries. Indeed, the term ‘creative industries’ coexists with a variety of other broadly cognate terms, including cultural industries, copyright industries, content industries, cultural-products industries, cultural creative industries, cultural economy, creative economy, and even the experience economy. In the course of providing an overview of the field for economic geographers, Jeff Boggs observed that ‘while individual authors are often consistent in the terms that they use … when viewed collectively, these terms appear as an imprecise muddle’ (Boggs, 2009: 1484).

One of the difficulties is that there is no single business or production model that encompasses all of the creative industries sectors; nor are they sectors that typically speak with a common voice. Hesmondhalgh (2007a) has distinguished between ‘publishing’ and ‘broadcasting’ models of the creative industries in terms of the relationship between production and distribution, while Caves (2000) differentiated between what he termed simple cultural goods, which are typically produced by individuals or small groups (e.g., a painter or a rock band), and complex cultural goods, that arise out of complex divisions of labour, such as films, television programmes or video games. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) developed a four-fold differentiation between: (1) creative originals producers (visual arts and crafts, antiques, writing, photography); (2) creative content producers (film, TV and radio, publishing, recorded music, interactive media; (3) creative experience providers (performing arts, museums, galleries and libraries, live concerts, heritage and tourism); and (4) creative service providers (advertising, architecture, graphic design) (NESTA, 2006).

I have discussed these distinctions elsewhere (Flew, 2012a), but it is important to note that it may be possible for one creative industries sector to be defined across several of these taxonomies. Music has elements of simple cultural production, elements of large-scale industrial distribution, and important elements of creative experience through live performances: it also relies heavily upon the providers of creative services, such as agents, venue owners and concert promoters. Very similar points can be made about the multi-dimensional nature of fields such as writing, games design and development, and the performing arts. The creative industries seem by their nature to generate variations and innovations in organization and practice that defy simple definitions and classificatory schemes.

There has been considerable progress over the last decade – at least in official policy discourse – in establishing agreed definitions, shared understandings and transferable measurement techniques for the creative industries, and in assessing their size, scope and significance. The first widely used definition was that of the UK DCMS, which defined the creative industries as engaged in ‘those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (DCMS, 1998). While this definition has been useful, it has also been contentious for three reasons.

First, there is the issue of why creativity is believed to be essential to some industries and not others. Pratt (2005: 33) observed that ‘it would be difficult to identify a non-creative industry or activity’, while Bilton and Leary (2002: 50) pointed out that ‘every industry would surely lay claim to some measure of individual creativity, skill and talent’. Moreover, if ‘creativity inputs’ such as design are becoming more central to value-adding throughout all sectors of the economy, which is one of the propositions behind claims that we are moving towards a creative economy, then the demarcation lines between creative and other industries can appear somewhat arbitrary.

Second, it is not clear why the focus should be on individual creativity, except in terms of a conception of creativity as something that springs from the artist as an individual genius. By contrast, Bilton (2007) argued that the production of commercially successful complex cultural goods – films, television programmes, recorded music, live performances, etc. – was based upon a team-based model of production that mixed together so-called ‘creative’ and ‘non-creative’ activities as the necessary condition of its success.

Third, the focus on intellectual property in the DCMS definition has proven increasingly contentious in an environment where influential arguments have been made that the collaborative use of knowledge through open source models works better in a digital economy increasingly driven through open global networks than in proprietary models of knowledge ‘ownership’ subject to stringent forms of copyright protection (Lessig, 2004; Benkler, 2006). As Ruth Towse has observed in relation to these debates, ‘it is very easy to slip between the use of copyright as a way of defining the creative industries and the idea that their contribution to the economy is caused by the presence of copyright’ (Towse, 2010: 382; emphasis added).

In its work on the creative economy, UNCTAD (2010: 8) offered an extended definition of the creative industries, proposing that they:

• are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs;

• constitute a set of knowledge-based activities, focused on but not limited to the arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights;

• comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives;

• are at the crossroads among the artistic, services and industrial sectors.

The UNCTAD model pointed to nine sectors across the domains of arts, media and design, as well as heritage and what they term functional creations. These sectors, and the interconnected relationships between them, are shown in figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. UNCTAD model of creative industries

Source: UNCTAD, 2010: 8.

A similar set of industries has been identified by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in its revised Framework for Cultural Statistics (UNESCO, 2009). In developing a revised Framework that recognized the expanded economic and social significance of culture and would allow for international comparative assessments, UNESCO has understood the cultural and creative industries as operating across six direct domains and two related domains (UNESCO, 2009: 22–32). The direct domains were:

1. Cultural and natural heritage: museums; archaeological and historical places; cultural landscapes; natural heritage;

2. Performance and celebration: performing arts; music; festivals, fairs and feasts;

3. Visual arts and crafts: fine arts; photography; crafts;

4. Books and print media: books; newspapers and magazines; other printed matter; virtual publishing; libraries; book fairs;

5. Audiovisual and interactive media: film and video; television and radio; Internet TV and podcasting; video games;

6. Design and creative services: fashion design; graphic design; interior design; landscape design; architectural services; advertising services.

In addition, there were two related domains:

7. Tourism, hospitality and accommodation;

8. Sports and recreation, including amusement parks, and theme parks and gambling.

The UNESCO and UNCTAD models have the advantage of having been developed from various national cultural statistics frameworks for the purpose of empirical data gathering to serve public policy purposes. The definition of creative industries used in this book works broadly with such frameworks, as they have evolved out of over a decade of debates, and have the potential to overcome the problem of ‘competing definitions [which] make it difficult to evaluate the claims of individual scholars and to provide well-founded policy recommendations’ (Boggs, 2009: 1484). At the same time, we need to recognize that the definition of an industry can never be set in stone. As the cultural economist David Throsby has observed, ‘the difficulties in defining an industry … [include] whether the concept can be delineated according to groupings of producers, product classifications, factors of production, types of consumers, location etc.’ (Throsby, 2001: 112).

Culture and Creativity

Defining the creative industries can be difficult as it brings forth two important yet contested terms: culture and creativity. David Throsby (2008b: 219) has argued that there cannot be a hard and fast line drawn between cultural and other goods and services, but rather there is a continuum over the full range of goods and services. This is partly because the concept of culture moves between a generalized anthropological understanding of the term as the way of life of a nation, people, community, etc., and a more specific association of the term with the creative and performing arts and some elements of the media (for competing definitions of culture, see Hartley et al., 2012: 73–7). Throsby proposed that cultural goods and services generally shared three characteristics:

1. Their production required some input of human creativity.

2. They were vehicles for symbolic messages to those who consume them, i.e. they serve a larger communicative purpose and their uses are not simply utilitarian.

3. They contained, at least potentially, some intellectual property that is attributable to the individual or group producing the good or service.

The concept of creativity was clarified by Mitchell et al. (2003), who made the point that the application of creativity rarely emerged by pure chance. Creative activity typically arises in the context of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996) referred to as a domain of application (e.g., mathematics, music and cognitive science are domains, but humanity, culture and the human condition are not), as well as into a field into which new ideas are received, interpreted, critiqued and applied. Such fields are populated by people who can be understood as being creative individuals, who in the course of ‘using the symbols of a given domain … have a new idea or see a new pattern’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996: 28). Using this concept of creative domains, Mitchell et al. identified creative practices as being...