David Hesmondhalgh

Cultural industries and cultural policy

This article analyses and contextualises a variety of relationships between the cultural industries and cultural policy. A principal aim is to examine policies explicitly formulated as cultural (or creative) industries policies. What lies behind such policies? How do they relate to other kinds of cultural policy, including those more oriented towards media, communications, arts and heritage? The first section asks how the cultural industries became such an important idea in cultural policy, when those industries had been largely invisible in traditional (arts‐ and heritage‐based) policy for many decades. What changed and what drove the major changes? In the second section, we look at a number of problems and conceptual tensions arising from the new importance of the cultural industries in contemporary public policy, including problems concerning definition and scope, and the accurate mapping of the sector, but also tensions surrounding the insertion of commercial and industrial culture into cultural policy regimes characterised by legacies of romanticism and idealism. We also look at problems surrounding the academic division of labour in this area of study. We conclude by summarising some of the main contemporary challenges facing cultural policy and cultural policy studies with regard to the cultural industries. The piece also serves to introduce the contributions to a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy on the cultural industries and cultural policy.

Bourdieu, the media and cultural production

This article evaluates Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural production in terms of its effectiveness for understanding contemporary media production. I begin by outlining the main features of Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, with an emphasis on the potential advantages of his historical account over other, competing work. In particular, I stress the importance of his historical account of ‘autonomy’ and of the emphasis on the interconnectedness of the field of cultural production with other social fields. I then draw attention to two major problems in the work of Bourdieu and others who have adopted his ‘field theory’ for the media: first, that he offered only occasional and fragmented analyses of ‘large-scale’, ‘heteronomous’ (to use his terms) commercial media production, in spite of its enormous social and cultural importance in the contemporary world; second, that Bourdieu and his key associates provide only a very limited account of the relationships between cultural production and cultural consumption. In this latter context, I briefly discuss recent debates in cultural studies about cultural intermediaries. I refer to examples from recent media production to provide evidence for my arguments. The article argues that, as practised so far, Bourdieu’s field theory is only of limited value in analysing media production. However I close by discussing the potential fruitfulness of research based on a dialogue between, on the one hand, field theory’s analysis of cultural production and, on the other, Anglo-American media and cultural studies work on media production.

Subcultures, scenes or tribes?: none of the above

The concept of subculture has been criticised a great deal in recent research on youth and popular music. Two concepts have emerged as offering new ways of conceiving musical collectivities, particularly among young people: scenes, and tribes (or neo-tribes). I offer criticisms of the work of advocates of both terms. I also argue, however, that there is no possibility of a return to the concept of subculture in any adequate sociology of popular music, even if the concept may have some residual use in the sociology of youth. I discuss the potential advantages of the concepts of genre and articulation as a way of at least beginning to address some of the problems raised in the literature on subcultures, scenes and tribes, concerning the politics of musical collectivities. The common feature of the three terms under discussion is that they have been discussed by those concerned with the relationship between youth and popular music, and I close by reflecting on the relationship between the study of these two entities. I suggest that the assumption that there is a close relationship between youth and popular music was the result of particular historical circumstances and I argue that, while the study of young peoples relationships with popular music remains a topic of interest, the privileging of youth in studies of music has actually become an obstacle to a more fully developed understanding of music and society.

Looking for work in creative industries policy

In this article, we first outline and account for the utopian description of work in much UK creative industries discourse. We then offer a contrasting assessment that shows how creative workplaces are marked significantly by insecurity, inequality and exploitation (including self‐exploitation). In the third part, we examine recent developments in UK policy discourse, exposing a reluctance to recognize or engage with these manifest problems of creative labour. The article concludes by suggesting that this absence reflects something of the focus and limitations of creative industries policies in the current period, where government initiative appears increasingly driven by a narrowly focused skills and employability agenda, one that seeks to disavow problems of labour markets and bring greater discipline to those (relatively) autonomous institutions that generate creative workers, as part of the wider purpose of producing a more integrated and governable ‘creative economy’.

INDIE: THE INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF A POPULAR MUSIC GENRE

This article is concerned with the complex relations between institutional politics and aesthetics in oppositional forms of popular culture. Indie is a contemporary genre which has its roots in punks institutional and aesthetic challenge to the popular music industry but which, in the 1990s, has become part of the ‘mainstream’ of British pop. Case studies of two important ‘independents’, Creation and One Little Indian, are presented, and the aesthetic and institutional politics of these record companies are analysed in order to explore two related questions. First, what forces lead ‘alternative’ independent record companies towards practices of professionalization and of partnership/collaboration with major corporations? Second, what are the institutional and political-aesthetic consequences of such professionalization and partnership? In response to the first question, the article argues that pressures towards professionalization and partnership should be understood not only as an abandonment of previou...

Towards a critical understanding of music, emotion and self‐identity

The article begins by outlining a dominant conception of these relations in sociologically‐informed analysis of music, which sees music primarily as a positive resource for active self‐making. My argument is that this conception rests on a problematic notion of the self and also on an overly optimistic understanding of music, which implicitly sees music as highly independent of negative social and historical processes. I then attempt to construct a) a more adequately critical conception of personal identity in modern societies; and b) a more balanced appraisal of music‐society relations. I suggest two ways in which relations between self, music and society may not always be quite so positive or as healthy as the dominant conception suggests: 1) Music is now bound up with the incorporation of authenticity and creativity into capitalism, and with intensified consumption habits. 2) Emotional self‐realisation through music is now linked to status competition. Interviews are analysed.

Media and cultural policy as public policy

The British Labour governments media and cultural policies since 1997 are analysed as aspects of public policy. This allows assessment of the media and cultural policies of a supposedly centre‐left government in a conjuncture marked by neo‐liberalism, globalisation and the continuing growth of the cultural industries. An outline of guiding assumptions about public policy is provided, including the importance of the balance between social forces and structured inequality, but also the assumption that public policy operates with a certain amount of autonomy. Labours project is discussed as a particular hybrid of neo‐liberalism, conservatism and social democracy, distinctive from the New Right neo‐liberalism of the 1980s. An important element of this political hybrid is Labours profound ambivalence about the public domain. Developments in media and cultural policy are then analysed in these terms, in particular the performance of the new communications regulator Ofcom (Office of Communications) and its use of the concept of “citizen‐consumer”. Reference is made to Labours strategic alliances with key social institutions, including key cultural‐industry businesses. A final section examines how we might understand centre‐left public policy in the era of neo‐liberalism, and a variety of positions are offered about Labours record in government and the constraints it has faced. While such fundamental political dilemmas are not resolved here, conclusions are drawn regarding the lessons of Labours policies for the analysis of media and cultural policy, and of public policy.

Post-Punk's attempt to democratise the music industry: the success and failure of Rough Trade

Punks widely accepted status as a watershed in British music-making has produced some fine academic and journalistic studies. Greil Marcus has devoted much of the last twenty years to an assessment of the legacy of punk rock (Marcus 1989, 1993). Dave Laings One Chord Wonders provides a multi-layered approach which might serve as a model for any analysis of a particular musical–cultural moment (Laing 1985). The most detailed and thorough account is Jon Savages Englands Dreaming (1991), a paean to the mischievous self-consciousness of punk and a sly put-down of its earnest political wing. Yet there are some important gaps in this literature. Only Laing (1985, pp. 14–21) has addressed the institutional and economic effects of punk in any detail, but his account ends, like that of Savage, with the incorporation of punk imagery and sounds into the mainstream of British cultural life at the end of the 1970s. The symbolic death of punk is marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister in May 1979. Marcus traces the underground simmering of punk in 1980s America, and his vision of post-punk as a lasting source of vitality and rebellion in an increasingly conformist culture is a compelling one. But he is drawn primarily to the situationist and dadaist elements of punk politics. As in Savage (1991), lasting institutional repercussions are sidelined in favour of an exploration of punks cultural impact. What follows, then, is an assessment of punks significance as a long-term intervention in the British music industry. This means tracing the development and mutation of punk initiatives into the 1980s–long after its supposed incorporation.

Were New Labour's cultural policies neo-liberal?

This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a shift in prevailing rationales for cultural policy, away from cultural justifications, and towards economic and social goals. Neo-liberalism is shown to be a significant but rather crude tool for evaluating and explaining New Labour’s cultural policies. At worse, it falsely implies that New Labour did not differ from Conservative approaches to cultural policy, downplays the effect of sociocultural factors on policy-making, and fails to differentiate varying periods and directions of policy. It does, however, usefully draw attention to the public policy environment in which Labour operated, in particular the damaging effects of focusing, to an excessive degree, on economic conceptions of the good in a way that does not recognise the limitations of markets as a way of organising production, circulation and consumption.

Culture, Economy and Politics

1. Culture, Politics and Equality: the Challenge for Social Democracy 2. New Labour, Culture and Creativity 3. The Arts: Access, Excellence and Instrumentalism 4. What Was Creative Industries Policy? Film, Copyright, and the Shift to Creative Economy 5. Cultural Policy and the Regions 6. Policy Innovation: NESTA and Creative Partnerships 7. Heritage 8. How Did New Labour Do On Arts and Culture? And What Happened Next?