The 2014 Berlin Research Symposium on Culture and Creative Industries 23rd October 2014 Justin O’Connor, Monash University.

The 2014 Berlin Research Symposium on Culture and Creative Industries

23rd October 2014

Justin O’Connor, Monash University

Is the idea of creativity the most important concept of the 21st century? Are the jobs of the future to be found in the cultural and creative

sector?

1998: UK New Labour

DCMS 1998

“those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”

Creative Industries

• Rebadging of ‘cultural industries’ by the UK Government for tactical purposes (more money for culture).

• Does not mention culture but parasitical on artistic and cultural sense of the word.

• Linked this to the new world of digital start-ups and information economy.

Creative Industries

Claims to establish links between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’

This done since 1970s in Europe/ North America:

(political economy of communications; urban and regional economic geography; local culture-led development coalitions).

Creative Industries

Also in developing world/ Global South by UNESCO’s ‘Culture and Development’ programme

Creative Industries

refuses to deal with any substantive issues around culture, reducing culture to an input – creativity – into an innovation system defined in exclusively economic terms.

What is distinctive about the ‘creative’ rather than ‘cultural’ industries?

• Intellectual property?

• Commercial?

• Application to ‘functional’ or ‘utilitarian’ products and services?

What distinguishes creative industries from the rest of industry?

• What is not creative?

• What does not generate IP?

• High level of cognitive skills?

Definition of the Creative industries

A statistical and conceptual mess

People only use it because everybody else does

Vicious circle

‘ those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property ’

(Department of Culture, Media and Sports, 1998)

ICT and Cultural Industries

• Are coders creative?

• Have ICT/ digital transformed the cultural industries?

• Does that mean ICT workers are part of the cultural industries?

ICT and Cultural Industries • CIs rely on technologies:

• Guttenberg, Edison etc. and ‘mechanical reproduction’

• Communications and convergence: Code, fibre- optic, satellites, telephony, internet…..

These also important manufacturing sectors which can be included in ‘depth’ models of CIs

ICT and Cultural Industries

• But they have transformed other sectors

• Medicine and health services, education, business organisations – finance!

ICT and Cultural Industries

• In 2008 the DCMS dropped ICT

• NESTA complained – precisely because it cut out 40% of employment.

• When you read of how big the creative sector is: Caveat Emptor!

Advertising, Marketing, PR

• Been linked to Arts and publishing since 18th century.

• Crucial as to how they survive• Crucial to our understanding of how they work• Increased in size and importance (rise of

consumer economies; erosion of public sector broadcasting;)

• Why are these ‘creative’ and not ‘cultural’?

Design

• Wide catch-all term: graphic, communication, fashion, interior, furnishing, crafts, architecture

• These all linked to cultural debates – how modern industrial systems create a new expressive and functional world for mass democratic society. (Bauhaus!)

Design as Planning • Now also ‘design-thinking’ – planning and re-

imagining of a whole range of systems

• Social services, information, transportation, educational services, smart cities, ecological management etc.

• These are huge issues and to which we hope the imaginative resources involved in ‘creativity’ will be applied in some way.

Design as Creative Industry

• What is served by calling this a ‘creative industry’?

• Does a ‘creative input’ define the kind of issues it addressed and the processes involved in their solution?

Design as a creative industry

• When part of the creative industry ‘design’ becomes narrowed to the kind of aesthetic appeal “designers” add to functional goods.

• This one aspect allows link to the wider world of advanced manufacture, user-interfaces, smart cities etc. – they are related but is it conceptual and practical confusion to lump them into one ‘creative’ sector.

NESTA

Not industries but occupations!

• Creatives employed outside the ‘creative industries’.

• Adds 40% to employment

• Financial services?

Creativity as Innovation Machine

Precise mechanism whereby the creativity of the creative sector is transferred to the wider economy.

Presence of creatives proxy for levels of innovation.

Creative occupations the motor of the innovation machine

Creative Industries

Creative Occupations

“Embedded Creatives”

NESTA

But this does not tell us about creativity or innovation – it tells us how many marketers and graphic designers, ICT systems planners there are in manufacturing, or finance, or extraction etc.

NESTA: Creative Workers

“ a role within the creative process that brings cognitive skills to bear about differentiation to yield either novel or significantly enhanced products whose final form is not fully specified in advance”.

NESTA: Creative Intensity

Creative Intensity

• Can define any situated skilled worker in education, finance, science, the legal professions etc.

• Industries not ‘creative’ because of input – could be the most regressive, unimaginative, destructive industries or practices.

• “Lipstick on the pig”

Creative Intensity

Reduction of creativity to the most basic idea of innovation as commercial growth

– only one part of rethinking where we are going in the 21st century – and how…

Creativity and Culture

Creativity does not exclusively define culture

ritual, identity, tradition, meaning, celebration, social bonding etc.

Creativity and Culture

• Creativity as innovation machine takes one aspect of Euro-American modernity’s ‘aesthetic’ art - avant-garde

• and ties it to Schumpeterian notions of creative destruction and ‘disruptive innovation’ - part of the knowledge economy discourse.

UNESCO: Cultural Economy

Culture as Service Sector

With Education and Health - Culture is a key public sector of last two centuries.

Culture as Service Sector

• Provides Jobs• Commercial• Big corporate players• Multiple kinds of state investment• New Technologies• Globalisation• Huge manufacturing links

Cultural as a Service Sector

• Economies set within wider goals

• These wider goals a basis of policy judgements

• What is it we require of the cultural sector?

• Discourse of ‘creative industries’ prevents these kind of judgements being made. Only economic performativity is allowed.

Two Challenges

How do how do we get back to a discussion of the cultural sector or cultural economy:

one that allows the full play of cultural values – of why we need and value culture – within the cultural economic system and its links to other sectors.

Culture and Economy

• Culture traditionally opposed to economy.

• Few would hold to this strictly now.

• But: what grounds for their mutual accommodation?

- or is it “reconciliation under duress” (Adorno)

What kind of economy?

Second problem:

How do we want to organise the cultural economy (and indeed the rest of it)?

Cultural EconomiesBenign economies:

High level of skills and education;Network, trust and communication intensive;Strong role for SMEs;Low barriers to entry;Beneficial externalities for places; Resources of the human renewable;

- All favour more equal forms of growth.

Cultural EconomiesBut it can also be the opposite:

•Exploitation and precarious labour;•monopolies and concentration:•Exclusionary labour practices (class, gender, race)•High levels of geographical concentration (London)•Globally unequal•Narrow focus on high value consumption groups•Narrow policy focus on high-growth, high value companies.

Cultural Economy

Not only what kind of culture do we want but also what kind of economy do we want?

Danke