Cultural industries and public policy

Abstract

This article re‐imagines the space of the cultural industries and their governance. It is divided into three parts. In the first, questions of definition are reviewed. In the second part, cultural policies (and by default cultural industries policies) are examined in order to disclose the key concepts of culture that they are based upon. The final section, on governance, develops an argument that seeks to open up a space where the hybrid nature of cultural production can be addressed by policy.

Keywords:

• cultural industries
• cultural industries policy
• governance

Notes

This is the source of the viewpoint that public policy and the cultural industries are an oxymoron; it also echoes a comment by Adorno (1991) regarding the tension between culture and bureaucracy.

An industrial regeneration strategy was informed by the Alternative Economic Strategy, which positioned metropolitan councils as policy laboratories that sought to exemplify opposition and a future beyond the, then, ruling Conservative national administration.

In an era of output‐indicator‐driven managerialism, the deployment of indicators such as employment, output and export earnings were very potent.

Accordingly, there are problems in exporting this concept to other political and institutional contexts.

The CITF did define the creative industries, listing 13 industries in all.

The debates about popular culture and its value articulated within the discipline of Cultural Studies sought to destabilise the old hierarchies. However, it is notable that this has always been a sensitive issue within government. There is a commonly expressed unease among politicians and policy makers about the Department of Culture, Media and Sport being viewed as the “Department of Fun”.

The paper subsumes the cultural industries within cultural policy.

This is the justification for culture to reside outside of economic calculation.

Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, notes that it was the first institution in Britain to bear the name “British”; it was established by the Crown to be a showcase for the history of the world. The funding arrangements were through a blind trust; thus establishing the “arms length principle” that characterises many national art policies. A potent example in the of the linkage between art, culture and identity in the United Kingdom can be found in Leonard (1997).

Recent World Trade Organisation debates have led to France seeking to deploy the “cultural exceptionalist” clause to defend its subsidy of the French film industry. This exceptionalist case need not apply to new art forms; in fact it is often deployed to defend “old” cultures or “folk” cultural products.

There is not space here to discuss the multiple issues such as Raphael's non‐British identity and the construction of a “national” art gallery.

Esping‐Andersen allocates similar state and policy forms to “families of states’”: hence, his three worlds (families) of welfare capitalism.

Both of these are informed and exacerbated by the flows of migration (short‐term and long‐term) of peoples with different cultural heritages. This incipient cosmopolitanism creates a tension between mono‐cultural policy and democracy. This is the mainspring of many debates about culture in a globalising world, and the tensions between homogeneity and heterogeneity.