Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia

An Introduction

Brian Moeran

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417036
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Commerce
• Sous-sujet: Industrie des médias et des communications

This book presents an introductory overview of the socio-economic organization of creative industries, focusing on the East Asian context.

Establishing a theoretical framework founded on the work of Richard Caves, Howard Becker, and Pierre Bourdieu, this textbook is an accessible introduction to creative and cultural industries. Drawing on examples from Japan, South Korea, and China, it both examines what is unique about cultural production in these countries and places them in a global and intercultural context. Building on themes of uncertainty and networks of cooperation, Brian Moeran looks at the role of social ties in defining notions of quality. He then analyses the positioning of individual actors, organisations, and commodities in each field of cultural production and the exchanges of economic and symbolic capital that take place between them. Examples are taken from a range of cultural and creative industries, including film, music and fashion.

Overall, Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia serves as a foundational introduction to the study of creative and cultural production in East Asia.

Part I

Theoretical approaches

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-2

Now that I have outlined the terms used by policy makers to discuss different forms of cultural production, and shown how the contents of creative and cultural industries vary according to government and cultural preferences, I want to examine how the CCI and cultural production have been studied by particular scholars.

Part I of this book, therefore, will look at three different theoretical approaches to the study of social processes involved in cultural production. The first is that of an American economist, Richard Caves, who in 2000 published what has come to be seen as the definitive book on creative industries. In it he outlined seven properties which, he argued, make creative industries different from all other industries. I will discuss these economic properties in Chapter 1.

The remaining two theoretical approaches are sociological. Back in 1982 – when some scholars were interested in cultural production, but not in creative or cultural industries per se – the American sociologist Howard Becker, who is also a practising jazz pianist, published Art Worlds. In this book he took issue with art historians’ approach to art and argued that art was not the work of the individual ‘genius’, but the result of ‘networks of people cooperating’. These networks involved different people doing all the different jobs that enabled ‘art’ to be created for, exhibited to, and sold by members of what Becker called an ‘art world’. I will discuss and illustrate this approach in Chapter 2.

In Chapter 3, I will examine the third theoretical approach – that of a French anthropologist-cum-sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. Working independently, but more or less at the same time as Howard Becker, Bourdieu put forward the idea that cultural production takes place in a ‘field’ of ideologies and practices where interested individuals and organisations compete for power. It was in his attention to power that, although in some ways developing a theoretical outlook that was similar to Becker’s ‘art world’ theory, Bourdieu added an inimitable French touch to the study of cultural production and the formation of taste. The idea of a field of cultural production enables us to consider additional theories – like those of a creative class and creative clusters – which have been developed in other disciplines and which have a bearing on our own interest in creative and cultural industries.

The task ahead of us is simple: to ascertain how far the theories put forward by Richard Caves, Howard Becker, and Pierre Bourdieu are applicable to East Asian forms of cultural production. As we shall see, although not perfect, they work pretty well.

1 Economic properties

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-3

In his book Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce, the Harvard University economist Richard Caves outlined a theory of contracts which, in his opinion, differentiated creative industries from other industries that economists were used to studying (Caves, 2000). As he pointed out, economists had in the past studied different industry sectors in order to tease out their special and distinctive features. Thus, they had examined the pharmaceutical and computer-chip industries for their capacity to innovate; and food-processing industries for the ways in which they established product differentiation and promoted dominant brands. One sector that they had overlooked, however, was that of creative industries: in other words, those industries supplying goods and services that, in Caves’s own words, ‘we broadly associate with cultural, artistic, or simply entertainment value’ (Caves, 2000: 1).

The question that economists had ignored, but which Caves wished to address, was this: why are activities in the creative industries organised in the ways that they are? There are relatively few large corporations, for example, and the bulk of cultural production is carried out by small firms; people working in the creative industry sector tend not to have full-time employment, but are employed as and when their services and talents are needed. Creative industries, therefore, are marked by a proliferation of personal networks which are activated and renewed with every new project (a film, a record album, a fashion collection, and so on).

The answer Caves gave in his book centred, as I said, on a theory of contracts. People in the creative industries, he argued, deal with one another in the ways that they do because of certain ‘bedrock properties’. It is these properties which underpin the kinds of contracts entered into in the film, publishing, music, and other industries, and which explain why creative activities are organised as they are. In short, he said, they give rise to similar organisational patterns in different forms of cultural production in which substantial creative activities take place.

Nobody knows

The first property of creative industries that Richard Caves mentioned is that, whether you are making a film, designing clothes for a fashion collection, putting together a pop album, or publishing a novel, you never know if what you are making is going to be successful or not. In other words, consumer demand for creative products is uncertain. It is only when a film reaches the cinema, a fashion collection is displayed in department-store outlets, a CD or book appears on the shelves of a record or book store that you learn whether it is going to be a failure or a success. This Caves referred to as the nobody knows property of cultural production.

Why should this matter? Well, apart from the obvious reason that anyone producing anything wants to make a profit, creative industries suffer from the problem of what economists like to call ‘sunk costs’. In other words, all forms of cultural production tend to require a lot of financial investment up front and it is only when a product reaches the market – months, occasionally years, later – that there is a return on that investment.

Take fashion, for example. As we will see later in this book, most fashion designers who wish to be recognised for their work participate in the biannual fashion weeks in one of the fashion capitals of the world. Putting on a show in New York can cost US$50,000 just to rent space, with a further investment of US$100,000 for production costs (including hair styling, make-up, dressers, set design, lighting, and music). Several thousand more dollars are required to pay the models who wear the designer’s clothes on the catwalk.

None of these sunk costs usually generates any immediate return. Rather, each fashion show is a PR stunt designed to attract media attention, but also, importantly, buyers from department stores and other retail outlets. If impressed by a particular item of clothing, the latter will work with the designer to make it ‘consumer friendly’ and appropriate for the market. This takes time, and the designer is rewarded financially only several months after an order is made, filled, and delivered.

Models, too, have their own start-up sunk costs, including photos, composite cards, plane tickets, and visa sponsorship (paid in advance by their agencies). They also have to pay for agency PR, portfolios, and a chauffeur-driven car service (taking them from one fashion show or casting to the next). Casting itself is extremely time consuming, but unpaid unless a model is hired for the job in question. Even so, she is paid for her services only after the client pays her agency – in theory, thirty days after completion of the modelling job. If a client fails to pay the agency, the agency refuses to pay the model. Here is an example of the kind of exploitation in CCI which I mentioned as being possible in the Introduction.

Another industry we might consider in the context of sunk costs is that of academic publishing, of which this book is an example. A book can take anything from six months to several years to write. During this time the author is unlikely to receive any money from her publisher, unless she is famous or the publisher is particularly keen to acquire rights to the manuscript – in which case, an advance may be paid.

Once an author completes her manuscript, the publisher has to send it out for review to – usually – three reviewers, who receive a small fee or equivalent in kind (a choice of other books published by that publisher). If accepted, the manuscript usually needs to be revised in accordance with reviewers’ suggestions before then being edited by a freelance copy-editor contracted by the publisher. A designer has to be employed to design the cover of the book, and an in-house production manager oversees the layout (as well as everything else to do with the lead-up to printing). Then a printer is contracted to print the book, and some advance advertising and marketing is often carried out. Someone is employed, too, to provide an index (although the author herself may choose to do this time-consuming task). Occasionally, a publisher will pay for a manuscript by a foreign author to be translated and, if that manuscript has already been published in its original language, for translation rights, too. In addition, it will pay a lot of money in distribution costs to ensure that the book reaches retail outlets around the country where it is displayed for sale.

So, before a potential reader ever lays eyes on a particular book in a book store or online, the author has spent a massive amount of unpaid time writing it, while the publisher has invested anything up to US$10,000 to produce and market it. An academic book in Europe and the United States tends to spend between six months and a year in production before it is ready to be sold. The first return on this investment of time and money will come between three and six months after the book has been published, when retailers pay the publisher monies owed from sales (a small percentage of which goes to the author at the end of the year in the form of royalties). This means that the publisher needs to cover its costs for anywhere between a year and eighteen months before seeing a return on the money it has invested in publication of a particular manuscript. If only a few people buy it, the publisher stands to lose money because none of the up-front costs – copy-editing, book design, layout, printing, distribution, and so on – can be reused towards publication of another title. The costs, then, are well and truly irretrievable, or ‘sunk’.

It can be seen that academic publishing, like most other forms of cultural production, is a risky business. As a result, cultural producers will try to find ways to lessen or offset those risks. Academic publishers, for example, develop ties with, and rely upon, educational establishments such as university libraries which, in the days when governments thought it right to provide as much funding as possible to their school and university systems, almost always bought new titles in those areas of research and study in which their university staff specialised. With financial cutbacks in education, however, publishers have found it much harder to sell individual titles (unless they are textbooks).

In Europe and the United States, then, academic publishers are almost totally reliant on university library budgets to cover their sunk costs. This is not – or not yet – the same in a country like China or Japan, even though, in the latter, publishers have to pay additional up-front costs in the form of author royalties, which are paid at the time of a title’s publication (on the basis of the total print run), rather than one year down the line (when royalty payments are based on actual sales).

There are three main reasons why East Asian publishers can keep their costs down. The first is the overall cost of production. Both employees’ salaries and printing costs are much lower than in Europe and the United States, so a publisher’s sunk costs are not as high. A second reason concerns the relationship between publishers and universities. No university in China, Japan, or any other East Asian country is willing to buy an academic book at the price level charged by European and American publishers. East Asian publishers therefore have no alternative but to keep their prices down. However, this also allows them to sell their titles outside the higher education market to individual readers, and so keep the overall market comparatively buoyant. The third reason is related to distribution. Books in Asian languages – Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and so on – are sold only in those countries where those languages are spoken and read. This means that, unlike books in English (or Spanish), they are distributed locally rather than worldwide. This saves immensely on overall production costs since global distribution is very expensive. (It also explains, incidentally, why books published by UK imprints are more expensive than those published in the United States. UK publishers have to distribute all their books throughout the United States since that is where over 80 per cent of their sales are made.)

Art for art's sake

The general assumption among economists is that workers do not care much about the work that they do. This explains their alienation – in the sense that they do not put more than minimal effort into what they are paid to do. They care primarily about their pay and working conditions, and that’s it. They are not really interested in the (part of a) product they are assigned to make.

Caves argues that creative workers, however, do care about their work. Indeed, they are often far more concerned with how a film or fashion collection is going to turn out than with how much they are paid and how many hours a week they have to work. A film actor or fashion designer cares a lot about the originality of the work in which she is investing her time and energy, as well as the technical skills that go into it, and how creativity is harmoniously achieved without upsetting others involved. This attitude is known as the art for art’s sake property.

This is not to say that everyone working in different forms of cultural production feels the same way and believes in art for art’s sake. In every activity – making an advertising campaign, publishing a book, designing a fashion collection – some people are doing creative work, while others are not. A film producer, for example, is mainly concerned with procuring finance and overall management of production; an account executive in an ad agency is there to liaise with the client and oversee the work of others in his team, like the copywriter and art director, who are creative. Every cultural or creative industry, therefore, employs a mix of creative and what Caves called ‘humdrum’ personnel. The latter do not care too much about the finished creative work. Rather, they are in their job mainly for the money.

As we will soon see when we come to discuss how people working in cultural production are continuously engaged in creating, sustaining, and managing their individual reputations, creative workers display some of their skills to impress their audiences. But they also make use of less obvious aspects of their craft to impress their fellow workers, since it is often only fellow professionals who recognise and applaud, or criticise, the use of specialist techniques. Whatever others’ reactions, creative workers will do their utmost to show – through talent, skills, techniques, and occasional inspired deeds or words that fall outside the expected script of activities – that they care about their work.

In the Western world, precisely because creative people see themselves as ‘artists’ rather than ‘craftsmen’, they may think rather too highly of their individual abilities and be reluctant – or even refuse – to compromise in the...