Academic research and creative industries: a brief and partial genealogy

Academic research and ‘creative industries’

A brief and partial genealogyGraham Jeffery

Complex relationships between ‘academia’ and ‘industry’

• Different types of university• Founded by philanthropists• The 19th C. technical/vocational university• Strathclyde motto ‘useful learning’ vs. Glasgow as

medieval foundation ‘community of scholars’• What’s the function of the university? Vocational?

Social? Technological?• Humboldt – liberal university and social improvement• Where do ideas come from….?

Culture and industry• Different intellectual/theoretical traditions/perspectives• Analysing ‘realities’ – applying critique, analysis, theory• ‘Applied’ or ‘pure’ research – a common but tricky

distinction• Mobility/porosity between academy and industry• the ‘academies’ started life as ‘learned societies’ – places

where knowledge was codified, licensed, validated – eg Royal Academy of Arts (18th C.) _ Renaissance Italy, etc

• Academy confers status on knowledge – academicians etc

Culture and industry (2)

• Evolution of cultural systems – for circulation of cultural commodities – publishing, theatre, the concert hall etc.

• How do musicians/artists/artisans earn a living? Systems of patronage and funding

• Commissioned art• Church, state and private investment

Contemporary cultural norms - shaped by Victorian values?

• Culture as ‘public good’ and means of ‘self improvement’

• Ameliorating the effects of rapid industrialization• Eg Glasgow museums and galleries• Eg Burrell collection – curiosity about world linked to

rapid globalisation/colonisation• Circuits of collections – buying, selling, displaying

cultural goods – private wealth then public endowment

• Display, power, symbolic economy

Public collections

Culture ‘high’ and ‘low’

• Critique of industrialization• William Morris and John Ruskin – the handmade as

antidote to mass produced commodity• The aestheticisation of everyday life – origins of the

modern design industry• Revival of academic interest in folk movements,

popular culture, oral tradition, linked to anthropological exploration of ‘other’ cultures and global encounter/migration – 17th C onwards this accelerates with colonisation/globalisation

Design and the everyday

Marx and Weber

• Capital and labour• Status and symbolic violence – capital confers privileges• Theories of class struggle• Class as basis for cultural affiliations – official culture,

popular culture, everyday culture• Culture as a product of material/economic circumstances• ‘All that is solid melts into air’ – circulation of

capital/market exchange creates dizzying modernity and destroys apparently ‘solid’ beliefs/values

• Commodity fetishism – modern economic theory and theories of value

Antonio Gramsci

• Cultural hegemony – ideology of ‘common sense’ values

• Consented coercion – culture, symbolic power and authority

• Contestation of dominant culture• Why don’t people see the conditions of their

own oppression?

Mass movements – cultural practices1920s/1930s great social unrest

Theodor Adorno

• Critique of ‘mass culture’ and popular music• Culture of domination by capital• Critical theory• Cultural pessimism of 1930s – mass

movements, rise of fascism, authoritarianism, rapid technological innovation

• Key insights into the permeation of musical life by market relations – publishing, recording industries, radio and the effects of this

Mass media

Raymond Williams – culture and society

• Cultural materialism – the processes by which/through which cultural artefacts are produced

• Emphasis on cultural production as a social process• The rise of media and cultural studies – studies of

systems of production and representation• How media produces subjectivities and identities• Complexities of advanced capitalism• Beyond literary criticism to ‘critique’

Pierre Bourdieu

• Sociology of culture• Social, symbolic capital – the cultural value of

social practices• Systems of representation and class distinction• Habitus, capital, field• Aesthetic preferences based on class positions

Counter-cultures (1960s)

Birmingham school – cultural studies

• 1960s/70s – consumption as a creative act? Beyond consumption/production distinctions

• Youth, labour, subcultural theory• Dick Hebdige – subculture as resistance• Paul Willis – popular culture and youth culture –

identifying forms of youth culture as emancipatory• Angela McRobbie – feminist critique, teenage

subcultures, fashion, everyday cultural practices• Applied cultural theory – understanding everyday life

and explaining ‘lived experience’

Difference, hybridity, postmodernity

• Identity politics• Race, class and gender• Stuart Hall – postcolonial studies• Paul Gilroy – the Black atlantic – cultural politics• New forms of cultural enterprise – cultural

industries as enabling transcending of class divides? Thatcherism, markets, choice, channels

• Questions of pleasure, consumption, shopping…?

The ‘cultural economy’

• Cultural goods, cultural services, circulation of cultural commodities

• Stories of Glasgow – representations of place, identity, culture

• Risky industries – bohemia? Particular configurations of class, race, gender, cultural identity

• Places where people want to live – ‘quality of life’ debates. Material and symbolic conditions

Cultural turn in policy

• Spectacle, image, affect• Understanding symbolic representation of

cities - placemaking• From manufacturing goods to a service

economy?• Growth of universities, art schools and the

modern ‘polyversity’

Urban/cultural planning

• Relationship of cultural organisations (organic, grassroots, spontaneous, bottom up..?) with local state/national government and transnational corporations

• Informalisation of work – new forms of cultural labour• Systems of regulation – legal, economic, symbolic etc• The ‘enabling state’ or unfettered ‘free’ markets?• Culture and urban regeneration/economic

development

Network society

• Media, technology, communications• Network cultures – hybridity, working across

organizational boundaries, collaboration, partnership

• Net entrepreneurs – disruptive technologies• Informational capitalism• Leadbeater and the mythologies around

knowledge entrepreneurship – networks of power?

Creative industries studies…

• From ‘cultural’ industry to ‘creative’ industry• Rhetorics of creativity?• Complex objects/fields of study• Theoretical work on identity, representation,

emancipation, politics• Growth of applied work – policy advice,

engagement with government and industry• High stakes research – performativity and

‘impact’

Creativity/ideology/policy

The politics of academia

• What gets to be studied and who gets to study it…

• Systems of representation and how these representations get made

• What counts as research• What spaces are left for critique?• Reproduction of dominant discourses or

reinvention/critique?

Network spaces and academia/industry collaboration…

Further reading…

• O’Connor, J (2007) The cultural and creative industries: a review of the literature, London: Creative Partnerships

• Banaji, S. Burn, A. and Buckingham, D. (2007) The rhetorics of creativity: a review of the literature, London: Creative Partnerships

• Hewison, R. (2010) Creative Britain: Myth or Monument? http://www.tandfonline.com/sda/1175/audioclip-transcript-ccut.pdf

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