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After the creative industriesMark Banks a & Justin O’Connor ba Department of Sociology , Open University , Walton Hall, MiltonKeynes, MK7 6AA, UKb Queensland University of Technology , Brisbane, AustraliaPublished online: 16 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Mark Banks & Justin O’Connor (2009) After the creative industries,International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15:4, 365-373, DOI: 10.1080/10286630902989027

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International Journal of Cultural PolicyVol. 15, No. 4, November 2009, 365–373

ISSN 1028-6632 print/ISSN 1477-2833 online© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/10286630902989027http://www.informaworld.com

INTRODUCTION

After the creative industries

Mark Banksa* and Justin O’Connorb

aDepartment of Sociology, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK; bQueensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Taylor and FrancisGCUL_A_399074.sgm10.1080/10286630902989027International Journal of Cultural Policy1028-6632 (print)/1477-2833 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis1540000002009Dr MarkBankskottbulle71@googlemail.com

In the 1990s, the rise of the ‘creative industries’ as a discourse and instrument of policysignalled a desire amongst governments to harness cultural production to a renewedeconomic agenda. The apparent break with the notion of ‘cultural industries’ – with its prob-lematic connotations of art and politics – precipitated an intensified commodification ofartistic activity, and the purposeful integration of creativity (and ‘useful’ forms of culture)into a variety of economic and social policy initiatives. The promotion of creative industriesin a period of rapid economic restructuring seemed to hold out a coherent forward-lookingvision for those regions looking to reinvent themselves in the face of fast-moving nationaland global forces – and to do so in a way that appeared to articulate a progressive and inclu-sive role for individual creativity and collective forms of symbolic expression. The creativeindustries were therefore promoted by enthusiasts as ‘good for the economy’ and ‘good forculture’ – and while policy makers were eager to establish the ‘hard’ evidence for theseclaims, there were also many observers willing to buy into, and create their own, speculativeand rhetorical claims regarding the virtues of this nascent sector.

Yet, at first glance, the creative industries do appear to have been an economic and polit-ical success. In the UK the revenue and employment statistics indicate steady (if uneven)growth (though as we write the prospect of global recession looms significantly), and theDepartment of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has recently re-launched its creativeindustry strategy with some renewed vigour. At the forefront of the new Creative EconomyProgramme (CEP), the document Creative Britain (DCMS 2008) sets out an ambitiousagenda which once again sought to reiterate the significance of the creative industries to theUK’s economic future. In diverse territories across Western and Northern (and increasinglyEastern and Southern) Europe, in Australasia, China, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea,the rise of creative industries has also been marked (Hartley 2005, Kong et al. 2006,O’Connor and Gu 2006, Primorac 2006). Even in North America, where there has been aless uniform uptake of the creative industries discourse (at least as it is understood in muchof Europe and Australasia) the recognition that arts and culture have become more signifi-cant contributors to economic growth and development has now spread significantly (Caves2000, Americans for the Arts 2005, Cunningham, this issue).

While, in policy terms, the creative industries can be said to have arrived, thereremains, on the ground, some serious disquiet. Firstly, it is contentious whether this looselydefined set of economic activities has generated the full range of commercial, social andcultural benefits so widely claimed or anticipated; and, secondly, at the more conceptual or

*Corresponding author. Email: m.o.banks@open.ac.uk

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theoretical level, there is scepticism regarding the extent to which creative industries havehelped resolve some of the long-standing contradictions between culture and economy.Indeed, in this special issue we contend that the ‘creative industries’ – whether understoodas a distinctive economic grouping, a framework for conjoining certain types of intellectualor artistic labour, or simply a shapeless policy construct – is a concept that has not onlyinherited, but also created, a set of intellectual and practical problems. These problemsinclude (but are by no means restricted to):

● The necessary (but seemingly interminable) debate over how to define, measure andclassify the creative industries. Given the wide variations in definition between (andoften within) nations and territories, we might do better to accept that what counts asa creative industry cannot be imposed from without, according to a set of universaland objectively applied criteria, but tends to be constructed (often in ad hoc fashion)according to local politics, history and geography.

● The lack of strategic and coherent national and regional policies, an absence thatmakes mockery of the apparent superiority of the creative industries approach and itsalleged ability to solve restructuring crises. We might feel justified in asking; Why hasthere been actually very little done in the way of discrete and distinctive ‘creativeindustry policy’? What are the causes and consequences of this?

● There is an upbeat globalist narrative that implies an international consensus aroundthe meaning of creative industries – one that needs to be more substantively chal-lenged. In the UK (arguably the leading exporter of creative industry policy and think-ing), consultant-driven, DCMS and now BERR (Department for Business, Enterpriseand Regulatory Reform) policy and discourse has both travelled, but also been trans-formed, in the light of pre-existing creative industry initiatives (such Australia’s‘Creative Nation’ for example). The bullish idea that Tony Blair’s New Labour helpedfashion an exportable ‘UK model’ – notwithstanding its problematic imperialistimplications – does not bear close scrutiny given the diverse ways in which creativeindustries are now understood in varied international contexts. Part of the aim of thisissue is to establish what the term ‘creative industry’ actually means in different terri-tories – culturally, socially and politically.

● A suspect utopianisation of ‘creative’ labour. The apparent existence of a workforceof ‘free’, creative and reflexive workers underpinning creative industry activity nowrings somewhat hollow in the face of what appears a highly ‘precarious’ work regime(Gill and Pratt 2008). The progressive agenda of the creative industry project needs tobe further and more critically questioned given the resilience of class, ethnic andgender divisions, inequalities of access and promotion, and the instrumental embrac-ing of a ‘creative class’ promoted by the likes of Richard Florida and other new econ-omy enthusiasts.

● At the more conceptual level, there is a need to engage critically with the simplisticscenario that promotes creative industries as a contradiction-free marriage of cultureand economics. This narrative of benign convergence, so central to the creative indus-tries agenda, appears once again to be in the ascendancy. In this latter regard we areparticularly concerned with the fashionable absorption of creative industries into awider set of innovation policies that now speak of such industries as mere inputswithin a broader mosaic of ‘creative’ commercial activities. This apparent uptake ofthe creative industries into national economic and innovation discourses and policyagendas has significant implications. While it appears to provide recognition and a‘place at the table’ for the artist, it also raises the prospect that we might be entering

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a phase where the special and exceptional claims of the creative industries (as partic-ular exponents and arbiters of art, culture and economic practice) may be coming toan end – in this regard we now consider it necessary to pose the question; are weentering a period ‘after’ the creative industries?

Indeed, it is our contention that now, just over ten years after the concept was first coinedand championed, we are at the point where the creative industries sit on the cusp of a signif-icant transformation – one that threatens to redraw or efface significantly the boundariesbetween creative and non-creative industries, art and commerce and creativity and innova-tion. It is not yet clear to us how far this represents a moment of golden opportunity or incip-ient crisis. What is clear is that the issue of the distinctiveness of the creative industries isnow, once again, very much on the agenda.

The distinctiveness of creative industries

The term ‘cultural industries’ had a fairly broad support base within academia; ‘creativeindustries’ has raised hackles. Technical objections aside, the key anxiety is that it repre-sents an unacceptable shift from cultural to economic priorities. ‘Cultural industries’ stillretained the ‘culture’ root and provided an entry point for critical policy debates aroundcultural values and politics. The new term did accord great value to creativity and, as such,was welcomed by many in the cultural sector happy (finally!) be taken seriously by morepowerful economic actors. But for some academics this was a dangerous shift to the instru-mental, where the theoretical framework, emerging policy goals and indicators of successwere to be based on the logic and methods of economic analysis.

This was not necessarily an attempt to bolster the opposition between ‘culture’ and‘economics’ (though in some cases this may have been so) but more a question of thecorrect articulation between these two ‘moments’ of contemporary cultural production. Theclose theoretical and empirical investigation of the ‘cultural industries’ which began inearnest in the 1960s, and which went on to inform much of the policy field until recently,resulted in an awareness that any intervention into this field would have to be both a culturaland an economic (or ‘industrial’) policy (O’Connor 2007). It was not that economic goalsin this area should be made subservient to broader cultural ones (though many did arguethis) but that a grasp of how symbolic value was created and its production managed withinthe commercial sector demanded an understanding of both the cultural and the economicmoments. It was this double emphasis, what Bill Ryan (1992) termed the ‘art-commercerelation’ that marked the cultural industries off as distinctive, and a ‘special case’.

This question of distinctiveness persists. For example, one of the earliest objections tothe notion of ‘creative industries’ was not its pragmatism (‘let’s avoid the word culture soas not to frighten the economists’) but an over-extended use of ‘creativity’. John Howkins(2001) popularised much of the literature on the ‘knowledge economy’ (see Garnham 2005,Pratt 2009), the term that includes science, business-to-business information, legal andtechnical services, trademarks, patents, copyright and so on in such a way as to make theconcept far too wide to be of much practical use (see Cunningham, Oakley this issue). Ifeverything can be creative – a management model, a kidney dialysis machine, package holi-days – then wherein lies the specific value of the cultural/creative industries? In the UK, arecent document linked to the CEP, The Work Foundation’s Staying Ahead (2007),attempted to identify a boundary between the cultural and creative industries, and the wider‘knowledge economy’. It used the term ‘expressive value’ to identify the specific valueproduced by creative industries. The Work Foundation adapted David Throsby’s (2001)

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concentric circles model that placed ‘the arts’ as the purest form of creativity at the centre,gradually descending in impurity as they mixed with commercial outputs. The StayingAhead model however, was about the increasing mix of ‘expressive value’ with materialfunctionality, not commerciality per se. Companies such as Dyson and Virgin Atlantic wereplaced in the outermost circles, not because they were commercial, but because theirexpressive inputs were part of a wider product mix. Software designers, on the contrary,were at the centre, and while often commercially driven, were seen to focus on ‘expressivevalue’ alone. The Work Foundation document, therefore, wanted to mark the creativeindustries off from other forms of knowledge economy – the branch that dealt in ‘culture’,‘symbols’ or, as they finally defined it, ‘expressive value’ – in order to give it the specificpolicy attention it appeared to warrant.

It is this distinctiveness that has been central to cultural and creative industry debates,and which has been couched in terms of a complex articulation between culture andeconomics. Anxieties over the accelerating emphasis on economic goals were not – asfrequently portrayed – simply worries about ‘the arts’ getting left behind but that the centraldefining characteristics of the creative industries were being ignored. If the creative indus-tries deal in cultural, or symbolic, or expressive value then the specific contexts and dynam-ics within which these are produced need to be recognised as such; they cannot be reducedto the overarching goals of growth and profit on the traditional economic model. Thisproduces many conflicts and confusions, especially at local level, where enthused policymakers confront a sector often sceptical or simply unable to act in the expected manner ofa dynamic, emergent ‘growth sector’. Policy makers, then, need to understand thesecomplex dimensions, though it is generally agreed that this has rarely been the case (Jeffcutand Pratt 2002, Pratt 2005, Oakley 2006, Pratt 2009). There are a number of reasons thatcould be put forward – lack of investment in research, the divided ownership of policy, theparticular public policy configuration in which these initiatives occur. These are crucial; butthey cannot be separated from the wider cultural and political debates within which thecultural and creative industries are situated.

The deeper worry about the creative industries both within ‘cultural’ academia andcultural policy circles is that a lack of concern with the cultural dynamics of these indus-tries does not just inhibit policy development but leads to a focus on the kinds of culturalproduction most amenable to economic rather than cultural returns. That is, not only doesthis exclusive economic focus lead to misguided policy instruments but also to an evictionof all concerns with culture as such. We would suggest these are two sides of the samecoin.

The original ‘culture industry’ critique suggested that culture had become subservientto an economic logic in the sense that it served the external goal of entertaining the massesso they would reproduce and turn up for work (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979). The subse-quent cultural industries (or ‘political economy’) critique suggested instead that culturewas a commodity and thus subject to the laws of commodity production (Miège 1979,Garnham 1990). But these commodities were rather distinctive, and so too the ‘industries’which emerged to produce them. On the one hand there was an overarching search by bigcorporations to maximise profit by mass sales and lowering production costs; on the othera clear need for these cultural products to have some distinctive ‘use value’ (entertainment,authenticity, identity, novelty) otherwise people would not buy them. The political econo-mists did not assume a passive consumer (though they did say that only certain productsgot made and distributed and that this had its consequences); on the contrary they stressedthe radical unpredictability of the consumption of cultural goods and the implications thishad for the maximisation of profit.

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Whether understood as a fundamental contradiction of capitalism (Ryan 1992) or a diffi-cult business model (Caves 2000), this complex play between production and consumption,between cultural values and commodity logic, gave the cultural and creative industries theirdistinctive shape. It is this particularity that is now being challenged by a new set of policydiscourses and instruments, ones that seek to finesse the possibility of differences betweenthe representational or redemptive functions of cultural production and its commercialimperative. Here, creatives may be in danger of being reduced to component cogs in thewider system of innovation and commercially oriented production, where traditional artisticclaims for ‘special status’ are suppressed or disavowed if they divert from, or appear toundermine, economic priority. It is our contention that this, potentially, not only leads to amisguided set of policy instruments, but fundamentally misunderstands (or fails to accept)the double articulation of creative industries we outlined earlier.

Thus, while the first aim of this issue is to provide some review of how creative indus-tries discourse and policy has evolved in the UK and other national contexts since the 1990s,its second aim is to offer some speculative projections regarding the ways the creativeindustries could (or indeed should) now develop as an instrument of national and interna-tional cultural and economic policy. This comes at a time when creative industries appearincreasingly to be viewed less as distinctive industry sectors requiring help to support anddevelop, and more as sources of innovation and creativity that input into other sectors andthe economy at large. What are the implications of this shift?

The contributions

We open with a paper by Stuart Cunningham which takes issue with an earlier interventionmade by Nicholas Garnham (2005) in the pages of this journal. In his paper, Garnhamsuggested that the creative industries discourse had acted as a kind of ‘Trojan horse’ forsmuggling in technocratic, knowledge-economy thinking into the hitherto (relatively auton-omous) realms of arts and cultural practice. The special attention garnered by the creativeindustries in the light of the shift to the knowledge economy represented not some long over-due enlightenment on the part of policy makers with respect to the appreciation of the civicvirtues of arts and cultural production, but an attempt to glean creative and intellectual prop-erty revenues at a time of radical restructuring of national economic priorities. WhileGarnham envisaged the strong, technocratic hand of government, guiding and shapingcreative industries policy and practice, Cunningham’s (more liberal) view is that the creativeindustries are a complex and varied constituency, subject to a diversity of policy objectivesand initiatives, the outcomes of which ‘should not be presumed in advance’. In order todevelop and illustrate this point, Cunningham offers a global overview of the ways in whichthe creative industries have been differentially conceived and theorised across continentsand within specific nation states; a policy travelogue that identifies significant variation inthe extent to which technocratic (as well as other cultural and economic rationales) underpinthe meaning and use of creative industries. Yet, in conclusion, Cunningham reveals his ownpreferences for a more general model of creative industries for policy development, one tiedto innovation discourse, and that can (at least on the surface) begin to unite the priorities ofthe developed world for creativity and innovation-led economies, with the emerging desiresof the global South and so-called BRIC nations to ‘leap-frog’ into the knowledge economy.

Justin O’Connor’s paper offers a contrasting analysis that questions the extent to whichthis innovation-led policy offers a solution to long-established contradictions that underpinthe creative industries. Identifying the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries andInnovation (CCI) based at the Queensland University of Technology (where both he and

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Cunningham are located) as the primary source of this turn to creative industries as compo-nents of ‘innovation systems’ rather than discrete industry sectors, O’Connor questions thebasis of this shift. In particular, he is concerned that any model of creative industry activitythat seeks to promote the primary role of creative industries as servicing other areas ofproductive activity (providing the source and flow of knowledge and ideas), and down-grading traditional claims to intrinsic artistry and aesthetic value, risks undermining thevery distinctiveness through which this value can be generated and legitimised. O’Connorthen goes on to discuss CCI claims that the concept of ‘social network markets’ provides anew analytical framework for understanding the generation of value in the creative indus-tries. He argues that this derives from a long-term project associated with the work of JohnHartley. This suggests that the ‘active consumer’ of popular culture – long portrayed aspassive, ‘low’ and politically manipulated – has taken a step towards enhanced democraticinvolvement in the production of culture through ‘user generated content’ and other inter-net-driven possibilities, all of which are transforming the field of creative industries.O’Connor, whilst disagreeing with this analysis, accepts that claims for the liberatingpotential of the creative industries need to be taken seriously rather than summarilydismissed as mere ‘populism’ or ‘economism’.

In similar vein, Kate Oakley then seeks to address the issue of the ‘disappearing’ arts inemerging (UK) creativity and innovation policy. Like O’Connor, Oakley is critical of the‘innovation regime’ which seeks to harness the creative industries more tightly to nationaleconomic priority. Within this, she notes, the tenor of the debate regarding the usefulnessof arts to the economy has shifted. While earlier rounds of UK creative industry policy wereconcerned primarily with generating growth and employment within arts and media sectorsthemselves, the issue is now one of the arts’ linkages to broader innovation policy, and thepotential threat now is the disappearance of culture and the arts into a ‘host of knowledge-based activities’. As she observes, the innovation regime does not necessarily mean the artsbecome invisible, just that their meaning is reformulated in a distinctive but limited way. Ifthe role of the creative industries is to provide only inputs in the form of new ideas, novel-ties and innovations for the wider economy, then the value of art is being recognised, butserious violence is being done to its scope and breadth of purpose. Irrespective of this,Oakley also finds weak evidence to support the idea that non-creative sector firms that havelinks or supplier relationships with the creative industries are more innovative than thosewithout. Thus the prevailing idea that the creative industries provide models or templatesfor creativity and innovation in the economy at large has, for her, yet to be convincinglydemonstrated.

Retaining the UK focus, Mark Banks and David Hesmondhalgh concentrate on creativelabour, first contrasting the popular validation of creative work with critical social sciencereadings which stress the insecurity, inequality and exploitation that can be found in creativeindustry occupations. They then examine the ways in which UK policy has tended to drawa veil over some of these deleterious conditions of creative industry work. Recent publica-tions and initiatives undertaken in the context of the CEP are analysed and reveal only asuperficial consideration by government of the structural problems of creative labourmarkets, and a tendency to cast these as problems as rooted in individual failure, or definedas rectifiable only within a prevailing skills-based, ‘human capital’ framework – one thathas proven highly effective in eliding notions of access, inequality and power. Recognisingthe increasing influence of the UK Treasury and BERR in shaping creative industry policy(and therefore the diminishing role of the more ‘arts-centred’ DCMS), Banks andHesmondhalgh unpick the influence of the Cox and Leitch reports on the CEP agenda. Here,ongoing efforts to ‘discipline’ sources of creative industry labour (such as the arts and

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humanities, schools and colleges) to the skills and innovation agenda are identified as offer-ing significant threats to the relative autonomy traditionally enjoyed by workers in creativeindustry occupations.

Michael Keane then offers an account of the uptake and impact of creative industriesdiscourse in the fast-developing economy of China. He offers four discrete ‘propositions’that attempt to forecast the possible medium to long-term impacts of creative industries inChinese policy-making. These range from a ‘no change’ scenario, given the popular (butoften inaccurate) perception of China as ‘resistant to change’ and the fact that the creativeindustries concept is based on a peculiarly Western notion of creativity, to a more open-ended scenario where a thousand blooms emerge in amidst the transition to a market econ-omy characterised by pockets of regional growth managed by more strongly enfranchisedmanagers and forms of local government. Between these extremes Keane envisages acreative industries policy harnessed to cultural traditionalism (and thus in stark contrast tothe ‘innovation’-led agendas found elsewhere), and the possibility that the kinds of liberalfreedoms conventionally understood as prerequisites for the formation of (Western) creativeindustry clusters (think of Richard Florida’s gay and bohemian-friendly utopias) may bedifficult to establish in a nation that retains strongly controlled by conservative partyofficials. For Keane, at this stage, however, all scenarios seem possible.

Finally, Dominic Power attempts to weave together the complex history and legacy ofcreative industry policies in the context of Scandinavian – or more properly Nordic –nations. Tracing a long history of the interlacing of cultural and economic policy, Powershows how any attempt to map the so-called ‘UK model’ onto the Nordic context is fraughtwith difficulty. Not only have there been significant national differences in approach, butthe tradition of strong regional government has led to a complex patchwork of creativeindustry initiatives, in marked contrast to the more homogenous, centralised approachfavoured in the UK and elsewhere. While the term ‘creative industries’ has now achieved acertain currency and cachet, prompted in no small part by its uptake into the policy anddiscourse of EU structural funding regimes, and (for non-EU members such as Norway andIceland) other forms of national and inter-regional co-operation, Power notes how the ideahas perhaps been less successful than other, complementary but differently purposed locu-tions such as Pine and Gilmore’s (1999) ‘experience economy’. He concludes by outliningthe potential benefits to be gained from a pan-national, Nordic creative industries policy,one that attempts to overcome problems of geographical isolation by linking clusters andactivities internally, in an attempt to enhance both internal and international trade. Whilerecognising the difficulties in reconciling differing historical approaches, as well as internalvariations at regional level, Power remains optimistic that there is sufficient institutional andcultural common ground in order to effect the growth and development of distinctly Nordiccreative sectors.

In producing these papers we asked authors to keep in mind some specific questions,most prominently: What is the legacy or impact of the notion of ‘creative industries’conceived in the mid-1990s? What kinds of futures does it point to in terms of cultural,social and economic policy? For more than a decade the notion of cultural and creativeindustries managed to link with a ‘progressive’ restructuring and modernising agenda, onethat claimed it could bring benefits to both culture and economy. The success of the creativeindustries discourse has brought with it a critical re-examination of this progressive agendaand its claims. However we might stand in relation to this issue, the narrative of ‘benignconvergence’ is no longer uncontested. While there are those in various policy quarters(and certainly in academia) who have ignored the issue, or consistently opposed any posi-tive interpretation of the cultural and creative industries, others, more sympathetic, feel

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nevertheless that the agenda has been ‘high-jacked’ in the instrumental, economistic waysidentified by many of the authors in this issue. Yet, and despite our own critical concerns,we would say that simply iterating ‘we told you so’ is not an adequate response to thecurrent situation. There is, we feel, no reason to suppose that support for the cultural/creative industries cannot form part of a democratic, equitable and progressive culturalpolicy, and one that also has beneficial economic consequences. But, clearly, the values thatunderlie this policy, and the consequences of implementation, need to be made moreexplicit and clearly justified. We cannot retreat to ‘pure’ critique; nor need we accept the‘logic’ of economics as a God-given law.

The current financial crisis gives a perfect opportunity to re-assess the role and positionof the market – or more accurately ‘markets’ – and their governance in our collective livesand how they might be used to deliver real cultural choice and opportunities for individualsand communities. We must once again re-examine the relationship between ‘cultural goods’and the ‘limits’ of markets, as Russell Keat (2000) so eloquently urged. More recently,Geoff Mulgan (2009) has written about the need for a ‘servant capitalism’, where marketsare taken back under control and made to do our bidding, not vice versa. This, we mightremind ourselves, is where we started in the 1970s, as the waning of the Soviet modelopened up new social democratic vistas and new kinds of post-1968 local economic strate-gies (O’Connor 2007). We have come a long way since those past times; but this presentcrisis too is a ‘moment of danger’ (Benjamin 1969) which recalls these earlier conflicts.Taking cognisance of the accelerating spread of the ‘creative industries’ and their growingcritique we need to be clear about what is at stake in this conflict and look towards the newkinds of dangers and opportunities that confront us.

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