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The local creative economy in the United States of America
... In many discussions regarding the creative sector, the concept of "ecology" is adopted as a metaphor to capture the dynamic interactions of arts and cultural organizations with other organizations, their local communities, and the supporting infrastructures provided by local arts agencies, professional associations, private foundations, and corporate philanthropy, public policy, supplies and equipment dealers, media, and others upstream and downstream production actors (Wyszomirski, 2008). Using the metaphor of ecology to explain human social phenomena borrows "ecological concepts from biology as a metaphor with which to describe the reciprocity between persons and their environments," and to explain how organisms adapt to their environments (Sands, 2001). ...
... An even larger aggregate conceives of a creative sector that draws on a shared infrastructure of support systems and services that facilitate a multi-industry production system. (Wyszomirski, 2008). And yet other analysts (Anheier & Isar, 2008;Markusen et al., 2008;New England Council, 2000) argue that the most inclusive version of the core concept is the cultural or creative economy-under which all of the above phenomena may be accommodated and interrelated. ...
... Each of these forms of urban cultural policy departs from the traditional justification for funding the arts on grounds of artistic excellence and enhancing access. Instead, these approaches tend to emphasize an economic rationale and assume a broader definition of culture beyond the fine arts to encompass commercial, community, and popular culture (O'Connor and Oakley, 2015;Pratt, 2010;Wyszomirski, 2008). Policy and research has also turned attention toward the role of place in artistic and creative activity (Markusen, 2014). ...
... Alongside this, arts advocates across the US, UK, and Australia began to commission studies focused on the economic impact of the arts (Myerscough, 1988;New York-New Jersey Port Authority, 1983;Perloff, 1979;Throsby and Withers, 1979). These early studies served primarily as advocacy tools and focused on how non-profit arts organizations and their audiences produce jobs, local spending, and tax revenue (Wyszomirski, 2008). Despite criticism that they were merely promotional vehicles and contributed little to a better understanding of artistic impacts (Cwi, 1987;Seaman, 1987), these studies helped to cement the idea that the arts create economic development. ...
... Given this, the term creative industries is employed sparingly in the United States and, despite some variations (both Richard Caves (2000) and William J. Mitchell et al (2003) use it in significant treatises in the field), the broad sector embraced by the UK definition is divided into arts and culture on the one hand and the entertainment/copyright industries on the other. It is from that basis that attempts to bridge these 'heretofore separate domains' (Wyszomirski 2008, p. 200) have occurred -from the arts side. ...
... Arts, AFTA) began gathering information and reporting on the regional and national economic impact of the arts from the late 1970s. By the 1990s, these 'impact' reports began to argue that the three arts sectors (the popular and commercial entertainment industries, traditional subsidised arts, and amateur orcommunity arts) 'were part of a single conceptual entity' (Wyszomirski 2008, p. 203). In 2002, the reports started to use the term creative industries. ...
One of the most wide-ranging and sophisticated critiques of creative industries policy argues that it is a kind of Trojan horse, secreting the intellectual heritage of the information society and its technocratic baggage into the realm of cultural practice, suborning the latter's proper claims on the public purse and self-understanding, and aligning it with inappropriate bedfellows such as business services, telecommunications and calls for increases in generic creativity. Reviewing the broad adoption of the concept in policy discourse around the world, this paper suggests that rather than a Trojan horse, it might be better thought of as a Rorschach blot, being invested in for varying reasons and with varying emphases and outcomes. Based on spatial analysis, then, the critique may need modification. Temporally as well, the critique may have been overtaken by later developments taking policy emphases 'beyond' the creative industries.
... The paradigm shift from public patronage for the arts to creative economy initiative in the New England region was driven by NEFA [62,63], which has sustained the efforts for two decades to frame and reframe the policy image and expand the definition of "the arts" into a more inclusive and diverse set of cultural creative industries, spanning nonprofit and for-profit cultural sectors. ...
Cultural sustainability has become a fourth pillar in sustainable development studies. Different from the research approach to embedding culture into conventional sustainable discourse, this article argues that the sustainability and resilience issues within the arts and cultural sector should be paid more attention to. Putting the arts and cultural sector in urban settings, sustainable cultural development entails dynamic policy framing and changing policy justifications in response to an evolving socioeconomic and political environment. Taking the policy framing of the arts as an analytical lens, this paper aims to investigate this dynamic change and key driving factors through an in-depth case study of Boston’s urban cultural development. This article finds that different definitions of the arts are associated with different arts-based urban development strategies across four stages of cultural development in Boston spanning a period of over 75 years. The working definition moved from art to the arts, then to the creative arts industry, and eventually to cultural assets and creative capital. The policy framing of the arts keeps evolving and layering in pursuit of more legitimacy and resources regarding groups of stakeholders, field industry components, types of industrial structure, and multiple policy goals. This dynamic policy framing has been driven by arts advocacy groups, policy learning process, urban leadership change, and cultural institutional change, allowing Boston to draw on a growing and diversifying set of cultural resources in pursuit of sustainable cultural development.
... Therefore, when cultural industries within the cultural districts translate creativity into culture, and culture into valuable economic goods and service (Santagata, 2004), they are demonstrating the engagement and interaction between cultural economy and creative industries. Wyszomirski (2007) describes how local arts interests have taken the lead in pursuing the link between the arts, creative cities, the creative class, the creative economy, and community development. Cooke and Lazzeretti (2008) also recognize that creative cities usually combine the cultural economy and the creative industries even occupying different "quarters". ...
This paper draws policy insights from the first comparative analysis of multiple hotspots of regional cultural and creative activity across Australia. Focussing on the state of Queensland, it provides three interlinked findings relevant to international cultural policy debates. The first – municipal agency – goes to the crux of the value of studying small regions. We examine the degree to which Cairns, an isolated, small regional city, can exercise effective cultural agency in a tripartite system of government, demonstrating that policy ambition and asset management at the local level can deliver outsized cultural infrastructure benefits through a focus on demand from the local community. The second further illuminates the question of demand for cultural infrastructure as a critical enabler, in conjunction with allied infrastructure, in a very remote, distressed community–the Central West region. Cultural tourism’s surprising prominence as support for mainstream tourism on the Gold Coast, an international mecca for surf, sand and sun, is the third example, deepening the significance of allied industry connectivity. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2019, the trend data and analysis offered here will be significantly impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
En el artículo se presenta la reflexión producto de investigación en torno a las industrias creativas y la percepción que de ésta se tiene en el Oriente antioqueño, específicamente en el Municipio de Marinilla y El Carmen de Viboral. Se evidencian campos de tensión en torno a la vocación vs profesión; vaivenes políticos vs interese colectivos; cultura, talento y gestión local vs requerimientos globales; optimismo por la industria musical vs bajo consumo de esta en dicha zona. El paso de la vocación autoexpresiva en la música a un desempeño profesional en el marco de una industria creativa o cultural, demanda un sinnúmero de saberes y prácticas para los que se requiere formación y experiencia.
This article reconsiders the creative industry's role in Turkey's sustainable development using the cultural economic geography approach. Although this is a well-established approach with ongoing popularity in the existing creative industries literature, few studies directly address the role of distinct cultural factors in the sustainable development of emerging countries. Turkey's unique geographical location and relatively younger population has been a primary source of its cultural, historical, social, and economic diversity as well as creativity. Yet, the country faces profound problems in this ecosystem. Arguably, a critical issue is the culture's implicit role in Turkish sustainable development. Moreover, Turkey has been moved away from the realization of ‘cultural policies' under the hegemony of neoliberalism. The present study argues that the ‘sustainable development’ discourse in the dominant political parlance has been failed to be recognized as of cultural policy importance. This is especially true in the inclusion of culture into the development paradigm, and how it can be rediscovered and linked to contemporary socio-economic debates within the creativity and development nexus.
Creative industries are deeply rooted and embedded in their location. This situated character is the main contribution of this policy concept to the trajectory of the book in pursuing an understanding of how arts connect with a place. This chapter begins with an examination of the production of culture by emphasizing its three aspects: industrial system, social context, and location. The following brief history shows the problematic use of the term creative industries and how the conversation about this concept has spread around the world. The key themes emerging from the international literature focus on the characteristics of a location that attract creative firms and workers; the characteristics of creative industries that set them apart from other industries; the prominence of the technology and innovation industries; and an overview of creative workers are. Moving into the American context, this chapter examines how nonprofit advocacy, federal funding disbursed through state agencies, and copyright and contract law are the major forces shaping the debate. I also underscore how at the local level the concept has not been thoroughly used yet. A case study concludes the chapter exploring the embeddedness of economic and symbolic values in Miami, Florida.
With the rise of the concept of “culture”, numerous attempts were made to integrate it into state policy, but failed. “Culture” then required a clear and unambiguous definition. A new effort, known as the “debate about cultural and creative industries”, was undertaken in a new historical context at the beginning of this century. This article tries to clarify the main arguments and positions in these recent debates, and to analyze the attempt of a new operationalization of culture by means of economic discourse in the critical perspective. This attempt was carried out under the new academic slogan of “creative industries”, with which politicians, international and national functionaries, as well as representatives of the academic community pinned their hopes on the invention of a new model of economic growth. One of the principal theses of the article is that this kind of operationalization is not realistic because “creativity”, like “culture”, is not amenable to any mathematization, commodification, or unambiguous interpretation. The policy of “creative industries” is considered through a tendency to a total commercialization of cultural production and its global standardization. The article analyzes different national models of its implementation, as well as the results. One of the most important outcomes of this policy is a growing distrust of the “archaic” forms of cultural knowledge that have been formed in and by national states: the statistical approach as well as its instruments are inappropriate and inadequate as state-of-the-art when the corporate sector almost completely defines rules and standards of a cultural production. This raises the question of whether the state needs a holistic view of culture and the exercising of control functions in this sector of production. In this perspective, the article raises the problem of whether the policy of creative industries is adequate and appropriate for the Russian Federation.
This article addresses the societal repositioning of the creative sector by the international policy community from an exclusively cultural resource to an economic engine. We analyze the relationship between the increased production and use of data and reports and the change in positioning regarding the power and effectiveness of the creative sector by policymakers from 2008 to 2015.
It took more than 50 years for the concept of “creative industries” to evolve from “culture industry”, through “cultural industries” to “creative industries” (O’connor 2007). In contrast to this comparatively long conceptual evolution history, the time for creative industries to gain its global promotion is much shorter, only around 15 years since its coinage in the 1990s. The underlying policy rationale, as Foord (2008) concludes, is urban policy makers’ high expectation of urban growth and innovation. The wide cultivation of creative industries in urban development scheme, inevitably, presents urban government the issue of how to arrange land space to accommodate creative industries in an efficient and adaptive way. This question cannot be easily solved without a comprehensive and insightful understanding of creative industries and the dynamics of their interactions with urban land use. This chapter aims to revisit existent theoretical discussions on this aspect.
The rise of creative industries requires new thinking in communication, media and cultural studies, media and cultural policy, and the arts and information sectors. The Creative Industries sets the agenda for these debates, providing a richer understanding of the dynamics of cultural markets, creative labor, finance and risk, and how culture is distributed, marketed and creatively reused through new media technologies. This book develops a global perspective on the creative industries and creative economy; draws insights from media and cultural studies, innovation economics, cultural policy studies, and economic and cultural geography; explores what it means for policy-makers when culture and creativity move from the margins to the center of economic dynamics; makes extensive use of case studies in ways that are relevant not only to researchers and policy-makers, but also to the generation of students who will increasingly be establishing a ‘portfolio career’ in the creative industriesInternational in coverage, The Creative Industries traces the historical and contemporary ideas that make the cultural economy more relevant that it has ever been. It is essential reading for students and academics in media, communication and cultural studies.
During the last decades the concept of creative industries (CI) has received increasing attention in policy as well as in theoretical discourse. Many of these discussions are underlined by the keyword ‘change’ : (re)defining the relations between economy and culture and creativity and the place, etc. The shifting role and position of the cities in this context has been especially emphasized. The efforts of trying to get CI to be taken seriously in economic terms led to policy responses that influenced the approach to cultural policy. Besides that we may also notice CI influence in economic, innovation and education policies. All these shifts call for explanation of the changes happening on the policy level. In this article the authors aim at explaining and conceptualising the changes related to CI policies. The authors raise the question about the nature of an intended change which is tried to achieve via CI policies. This means exploring the policy focus and scope, agents to whom the policy is addressed, the organisational structure of support and the measures developed. This article explores Tallinn CI policy in comparison of the CI policies of 11 European metropoles. Tallinn serves a good case for the study as it is a Central and Eastern-European city and thus, a ‘newcomer’ in terms of CI development and has got much less attention. Tallinn presents also a case where the development of CI policy has taken place on top-down principle which raises the question of acceptance of CI policy. As the theoretical framework the authors follow the concept of social innovation that is concerned with explaining the nature of a complex social change and the processes and mechanisms which facilitate the process of adoption of a change. Regarding the empirical data the authors relay on the results of the international study “Creative Metropoles” (2010) where the public policies of CI in eleven European metropoles, including Tallinn, were analysed.
The literature on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) tends to concentrate on the politics of arts funding or on micro-policy development through individual programs. This article aims to reveal the evolution of agency-wide macro-policy that was undertaken by NEA Chairs acting strategically as policy entrepreneurs in adapting policy goals in response to changes in the political and socio-economic context. This process of policy evolution gradually shaped and institutionalized a triple-bottom line for its organizational grantees – financial sustainability, artistic vitality, and recognized public value. Through legitimation processes in which the agency and the arts community cooperated, these values became field standards and best practices, a meta-policy that influenced all nonprofit arts organizations in the USA. Using policy documents, research reports, the memoirs of NEA chairmen, and journalistic coverage, this article investigates how cultural policy at the micro-, macro-, and meta-levels interacted to shape the triple-bottom line through the policy entrepreneurship of NEA chairs.
This article outlines the contribution the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation has made to the project to improve statistical parameters for defining the “creative” workforce. This is one approach which addresses the imprecision of official statistics in grasping the emergent nature of the creative industries. The article discusses the policy implications of the differences between emphasizing industry and occupation or workforce. It provides qualitative case studies that provide further perspectives on quantitative analysis of the creative workforce. It also outlines debates about the implications for the cultural disciplines of an evidence-based account of creative labour. The “creative trident” methodology is summarized: it is the total of creative occupations within the core creative industries (specialists), plus the creative occupations employed in other industries (embedded) plus the business and support occupations employed in creative industries who are often responsible for managing, accounting for and technically supporting creative activity (support). The method is applied to the arts workforce in Australia. An industry-facing spin-off from the centre's mapping work, Creative Business Benchmarker, is discussed. The implications of this approach to the creative workforce is raised and exemplified in case studies of design and of the health industry.
It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain through the Creative Industries Mapping Documents developed by the Blair Labour government in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America, as well as through international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO. A review of the policy literature reveals that while questions and issues remain around definitional coherence, there is some degree of consensus emerging about the size, scope and significance of the sectors in question in both advanced and developing economies. At the same time, debate about the concept remains highly animated in media, communication and cultural studies, with its critics dismissing the concept outright as a harbinger of neo-liberal ideology in the cultural sphere. This paper couches such critiques in light of recent debates surrounding the intellectual coherence of the concept of neo-liberalism, arguing that this term itself possesses problems when taken outside of the Anglo-American context in which it originated. It is argued that issues surrounding the nature of participatory media culture, the relationship between cultural production and economic innovation, and the future role of public cultural institutions can be developed from within a creative industries framework, and that writing off such arguments as a priori ideological and flawed does little to advance debates about 21st century information and media culture.
Both creative industries and innovation are slippery fish to handle conceptually, to say nothing of their relationship.
This paper faces, first, the problems of definitions and data that can bedevil clear analysis of the creative industries. It then presents a method of data generation and analysis that has been developed to address these problems while providing an evidence pathway supporting the movement in policy thinking from creative output (through industry sectors) to creative input to the broader economy (through a focus on occupations/activity).
Facing the test of policy relevance, this work has assisted in moving the ongoing debates about the creative industries toward innovation thinking by developing the concept of creative occupations as input value. Creative inputs as 'enablers' arguably has parallels with the way ICTs have been shown to be broad enablers of economic growth. We conclude with two short instantiations of the policy relevance of this concept: design as a creative input; and creative human capital and education.
The development of the creative industries “proposition” has caused a great deal of controversy. Even as it has been examined and adopted in several, quite diverse, jurisdictions as a policy language seeking to respond to both creative production and consumption in new economic conditions, it is subject to at times withering critique from within academic media, cultural and communication studies. It is held to promote a simplistic narrative of the merging of culture and economics and represents incoherent policy; the data sources are suspect and underdeveloped; there is a utopianization of “creative” labor; and a benign globalist narrative of the adoption of the idea. This article looks at some of these critiques of creative industries idea and argues against them.
Attempts to measure the bundle of activities termed the creative industries commenced with the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) release in 1998 of its Creative Industries Mapping Study. Like many earlier
attempts to study the size and impact of the cultural industries, these focused on the employment and business activities (within selected industrial classifications)
of either census of industry employment or surveys of businesses within industries. Since then, there have been mapping exercises in several countries, based to a greater or lesser extent on the 1998 UK exercise. This paper proposes that there have been three iterations of creative industries mapping to date. It outlines the issues faced, the methodologies applied and the findings produced
by representative projects in each iteration.
Research on which this article is based was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage-Project grant administered by Queensland University of Technology in partnership with the Australian Government Department of
Communications, Information Technology and the Arts and the Australian Film Commission.
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