_The Creative Wealth of Nations_

|| Box 2 || Definitions*

# Cultural industries

# Creative industries

“The term “cultural industries” traces its genealogy back to earlier work in the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s, which scathingly decried the commodification of art as providing an ideological legitimization of capitalist societies and the emergence of a popular culture industry. Such pessimistic views of the relation between culture and capitalist enterprise are still held by some. This is notably the case of the Left, and particularly today in the context of the debate on the threat of global cultural homogenization. In these views, culture and the economy are seen as mutually hostile, each driven by logic so incompatible that when the two are made to converge, the integrity of the former always suffers. By the early 1960s, however, many analysts had begun to recognize that the process of commodification does not always or necessarily result in the degeneration of cultural expression. Indeed, often the contrary may be true, for industrially (or digitally) generated goods and services clearly possess many positive equalities. Hence, by the 1980s the term “cultural industries” no longer carried the pejorative connotations of the earlier term and began to be used in academia and policy-making circles as a positive label. This referred to forms of cultural production and consumption that have at their core a symbolic or expressive element. It was also propagated worldwide by UNESCO in the 1980s and has come to encompass a wide range of fields, such as music, art, writing, fashion and design, and media industries, e.g., radio, publishing, film and television production. Its scope is not limited to technology-intensive production as a great deal of cultural production in developing countries is crafts-intensive. Investment in the traditional rural crafts, for example, can benefit female artisans by empowering them to take charge of their lives and generate income for their families, particularly in areas where other income opportunities are limited. All of these productive domains have significant economic value, yet also are vectors of profound social and cultural meanings.” “The term “creative industries” is applied to a much wider productive set, including goods and services produced by the cultural industries and those that depend on innovation, including many types of research and software development. The phrase began to enter policy-making, such as the national cultural policy of Australia in the early1990s, followed by the transition made by the influential Department for Culture, Media and Sport of the United Kingdom from cultural to creative industries at the end of the decade. This usage also stemmed from the linking of creativity to urban economic development and city planning. It was given a first significant boost by the important work carried out by the British consultant Charles Landry on the “creative city”. A second and highly influential force internationally was the work of Richard Florida, an American urban studies theorist, on the “creative class” that cities needed to attract in order to ensure their successful development. This “creative class” is a very capacious grouping of many different kinds of professional, managerial and technical workers (not just creative workers in the cultural and creative industries), producing innovation of various types. Together they form a “class” that Florida took to be the fountainhead of innovative energy and cultural dynamism in present-day urban societies. In this perspective, cultural activities were seen primarily as amenities in the urban infrastructure that would serve to attract a mobile, professional labour force and provide an outlet for their highly focused and purposeful leisure time. After an initial wave of great enthusiasm, notably among mayors of cities in the United States, northern Europe and East Asia, the appeal of the “creative class” paradigm declined markedly. Scholars found that Florida’s thesis was not supported by empirical evidence and did not provide sufficient guidance on the necessary and sufficiently durable conditions under which such skilled and creative individuals would congregate and remain in any given place to become key agents in local and regional development. In addition, Florida himself recently admitted that even in the United States, the rewards of his strategy ‘flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers’ and added that ‘on close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.<sup>2</sup> ’ ” 2 Florida, R. (2013).

# _Cultural Economy_ :

“The perspective that centers on the interplay between culture and economy has also been expressed in the notion of “cultural economy.” This way of seeing is important because it also encompasses the broader way of life— understanding of culture by revealing how identities and life—worlds are intertwined with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. It also recognizes that what we refer to as the “economy” is bound up with processes of social and cultural relations. In this sense it reminds us the economy is part of culture.<sup>7</sup> ...”

> 7See Pollard, J. et al. (2011). | **Source** : UN _Creative Economy Report 2013_

* These definitions are from here: _Creative Economy Report 2013 Special Edition: Widening Local Development Pathways_ , UNESCO and UNDP.

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