What are the concerns? Looking back on 15 years of research in cultural and creative industries

Abstract

This paper surveys the research literature on cultural and creative industries (CCI). Academic discussions on CCI have grown extensively after the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) identified 13 sectors as constituting creative industries in the UK in 1998. The public has also become gradually convinced of the significance of CCI as being important for economic growth. We adopt a systematic and quantitative method to review the academic CCI literature. After collecting data, we first investigate the research fields under which the journals that publish CCI papers are categorized, finding that Business, Economics and Geography are the top three research fields. A second examination on the authors’ nationality indicates that their cultural background induces a different emphasis on their research field. We lastly apply the multiple main paths analysis to uncover the development trajectories of CCI research, with the result showing that the research agenda has changed along with a better understanding of the essential elements of CCI. Based on the literature on the main path, we observe the top five discussed themes: information technology, global cooperation, micro and fragmentary creative activities, remote places, and country/regional characteristics. Monitoring the discussions on these themes may help CCI researchers, creative workers, and policy makers to assess future directions for economic development.

Keywords:

• cultural industry
• creative industry
• main path analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which have greatly improved the accuracy and readability of this article. This work is partially supported by Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology grants NSC 102-2410-H-011-008-MY3 and MOST 104-2410-H-011-027-MY2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The 13 sectors include Advertising, Architecture, Music, Arts and antique markets, Performing arts, Crafts, Publishing, Design, Software and computer services, Designer fashion, Television and radio, Film and video, and Electronic games.

2. We do not include 2013, because we collect our data in July 2013, such that data in that year are incomplete.

3. The summary statistics are provided by the WOS (Web of Science) database. Each paper may involve more than one research area.

4. We take countries in the author address field as the origin of the published paper.

5. The 7 Asian countries are China, India, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand.