Culturalisation and devices: what is culture in cultural economy?

ABSTRACT

Theorisation of culture is often absent from research on production in the creative and cultural sector. Further, cultural production has been largely untouched by the insights of the cultural economy approach. Culturalisation is a means of addressing the question of what constitutes culture and thus a cultural (economy) approach. It is the process by which culture and cultural production combine in the ‘operationalisation of the real.’ Culturalisation underpins much scholarship in this journal by posing the (economic) real as a problem of definition in order to illustrate the operations involved in its temporary resolution. The implications of this position need further addressing. There is a feedback between culture as a problem of definition and a cultural approach. Devices can interrogate the relationship between processes of cultural definition and the conceptual parameters of a cultural economy approach. Workshopping, projects and events are put forward as cultural devices emerging from a 10-month ethnography of literary performance in Bristol, England. This illustration shows firstly, how culturalisation occurs in a designated cultural sector to contingently realise culture; and secondly, the implicit logic of cultural economy as culturalisation, typified by the device as method, so as to open a debate concerning its implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Culturalisation
• cultural and creative industries
• cultural economy
• cultural production
• culture
• devices

Acknowledgements

The empirical research underpinning the paper was collected during an ESRC PhD Studentship. Lizzie is grateful to Mike Crang for his advice during this. Lizzie is grateful to Nicky Gregson for her readings of drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lizzie Richardson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. Much of her current research is examining contemporary technologies of work with a focus on two sites: the office and urban food delivery platforms. She is interested in the historically and geographically specific processes of definition of work and their implications for mobilisations of ‘the economy’ variously as an urban, regional, national and global entity.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this paper was supported by the award of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.