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ABSTRACT
This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.
Acknowledgments
I thank Justin O’Connor and Kristina Karvelyte for their constructive comments on an early version of this paper. The reviewers’ comments were also helpful.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. According to the UK government’s Creative Industries Mapping Documents (Citation1998, Citation2001), creative industries include advertising, architecture, arts, craft, design, fashion, film, leisure, music, performing arts, publishing, software, and TV and radio. Content industries in Korea refer to a wide range of commercial business relying on cultural content: from broadcasting, film, publishing, comics, animation, games to mobile content and character industry.
2. The preferred term at the beginning was ‘cultural content industries’. Chung (Citation2012, 128–129) explains that the choice of this term was a consequence of the competition between the cultural and information ministries for the ownership of policy for the then rising digital (online) media and cultural content. The term was intentionally chosen by cultural bureaucrats, as opposed to ‘software’ preferred by the information ministry. Thanks to the political power of the ‘strong’ cultural minister and the enthusiastic backing of the president, the cultural ministry was bestowed with power and resource to make cultural industries policy. Over time, the term ‘content industries’ has gained currency.
Additional information
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Hye-Kyung Lee
Hye-Kyung Lee is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London, UK. Her publications include Cultural Policies in East Asia (2014), Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge 2018), Asian Cultural Flows: Cultural Policy, Creative Industries and Media Consumers (Springer 2018) and Routledge Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in Asia (2018).
Email: [email protected]