Justin O'Connor

Consumption and the Postmodern City

Probes into the consumer culture in the postmodern city through a survey of a population that recently moved into refurbished homes in downtown Manchester, England. Attraction to the middle class of culturally based urban regeneration; Cultural consumption and lifestyle; Sociology of contemporary cultural change.

A new modernity?: The arrival of ‘creative industries’ in China

This article looks at the arrival of ‘creative industries’ within mainstream policy discourse in China. It attempts to situate this ‘modernising’ discourse within the wider historical conflicts around modernity and modernization in China, suggesting that the progressive function of the ‘creative industries’ discourse frequently claimed by its supporters cannot be taken for granted. The article ends by asking some pointed questions about the immediate future of this agenda in China, with particular reference to the large eastern cities.

After the creative industries

In the 1990s, the rise of the ‘creative industries’ as a discourse and instrument of policy signalled a desire amongst governments to harness cultural production to a renewed economic agenda. The apparent break with the notion of ‘cultural industries’ – with its problematic connotations of art and politics – precipitated an intensified commodification of artistic activity, and the purposeful integration of creativity (and ‘useful’ forms of culture) into a variety of economic and social policy initiatives. The promotion of creative industries in a period of rapid economic restructuring seemed to hold out a coherent forward-looking vision for those regions looking to reinvent themselves in the face of fast-moving national and global forces – and to do so in a way that appeared to articulate a progressive and inclusive role for individual creativity and collective forms of symbolic expression. The creative industries were therefore promoted by enthusiasts as ‘good for the economy’ and ‘good for culture’ – and while policy makers were eager to establish the ‘hard’ evidence for these claims, there were also many observers willing to buy into, and create their own, speculative and rhetorical claims regarding the virtues of this nascent sector. Yet, at first glance, the creative industries do appear to have been an economic and political success. In the UK the revenue and employment statistics indicate steady (if uneven) growth (though as we write the prospect of global recession looms significantly), and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has recently re-launched its creative industry strategy with some renewed vigour. At the forefront of the new Creative Economy Programme (CEP), the document Creative Britain (DCMS 2008) sets out an ambitious agenda which once again sought to reiterate the significance of the creative industries to the UK’s economic future. In diverse territories across Western and Northern (and increasingly Eastern and Southern) Europe, in Australasia, China, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, the rise of creative industries has also been marked (Hartley 2005, Kong et al. 2006, O’Connor and Gu 2006, Primorac 2006). Even in North America, where there has been a less uniform uptake of the creative industries discourse (at least as it is understood in much of Europe and Australasia) the recognition that arts and culture have become more significant contributors to economic growth and development has now spread significantly (Caves 2000, Americans for the Arts 2005, Cunningham, this issue). While, in policy terms, the creative industries can be said to have arrived, there remains, on the ground, some serious disquiet. Firstly, it is contentious whether this loosely defined set of economic activities has generated the full range of commercial, social and cultural benefits so widely claimed or anticipated; and, secondly, at the more conceptual or

Attitudes to Formal Business Training and Learning amongst Entrepreneurs in the Cultural Industries: Situated business learning through 'doing with others'

The article provides qualitative empirical evidence of why entrepreneurs in the cultural industries-a fast developing small and medium enterprise (SME) sector in the UK and one that is illustrative of new working practices within a post-industrial economyrarely take up formal business training and support. The main argument of the article is that business learning for entrepreneurs in this sector is situated within the social, cultural and economic contexts of the real world in which they operate and that the cultural capital developed through embedded activities in those environments provides the stimulus for that learning. Our article concludes by providing a tentative and alternative approach to business training in the sector that advocates a more dialogic and discursive environment for trainee support.

Developing a Creative Cluster in a Postindustrial City: CIDS and Manchester

This article takes the establishment and demise of Manchesters Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS) as an exemplary case study for the ways in which creative industry policy has intersected with urban economic policy over the last decade. The authors argue that the creative industries required specific kinds of economic development agencies that would be able to act as “intermediaries” between the distinct languages of policymakers and “creatives.” They discuss the tensions inherent in such an approach and how CIDS attempted to manage them and suggest that the main reason for the demise of the CIDS was the domination of the “economic” over the “cultural” logic, both of which are present within the creative industries policy discourse.

Creative exports: Taking cultural industries to St Petersburg

The article draws on research and policy experience surrounding the development of a cultural industries agenda for St. Petersburg. It tries to explain the reason for some of the resistance to the “internationalization” of the cultural industries agenda. It suggests, first, that this agenda is implicated in tensions around “modernization”; second, that the United Kingdoms “independents‐led” ’ approach might have real limitations in other contexts; and third, that the idea that cities are able to compete within an ever more global cultural market might ignore some very real problems faced by the “losers” or “outsiders” in this process.

The Routledge companion to the cultural industries

The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

Shanghai Moderne: Creative Economy in a Creative City?

How are we to approach the question of creative industries in China? Understanding the narrative framework within which the creative industries are embedded seems to me critical for any coherent approach to the issue. This becomes all the more pressing when we address the specific question of the city – in this case Shanghai – as one of the privileged sites for the development of a creative industries policy narrative. That the creative industries are produced discursively as an object to be acted on by policy has been discussed by many commentators (Cunningham 2001; O’Connor 2004; Pratt 2005), as has its transposition or ‘export’ from the West (or even the UK) to East Asia (Wang 2004; O’Connor and Gu 2005; Kong et al. 2006; Keane 2007). In this chapter I want to expand the time frame slightly within which this narrative is positioned. The issue of creative industries is part of the question of China’s future – its relationship of difference from and similarity to the West – as it is also a question of China’s past – what influence will that past have on its future trajectory, is it a resource for, or burden on, this future? Shanghai embodies these difficult issues in a particularly heightened form. It is China’s historic ‘modern’ city, now freed to pursue a new round of economic expansion, its past re-activated as resource for a new global market. It is Beijing’s only rival for the position of China’s creative capital. How then do these questions play themselves out within the specific context of Shanghai? Let us try and look then at what is at stake in these narratives of past and future around creative industries and creative cities in China. I want to use Will Hutton’s The Writing on the Wall (2007) as a particularly useful exemplar of the sort of narrative framework we should avoid; useful because it is a particularly cogent ‘New Labour’ argument for the historical Chapter 12 Shanghai Moderne: Creative Economy in a Creative City?

Modernist 16-19 Business Education in a Postmodern World: critical evidence of business practice and business education in the cultural industries

Abstract This article examines the continued relevance of the 16‐19 business education curriculum in the UK, stimulated by doubts expressed by Thomas (1996), over its continued relevance. We express a concern that business education needs, but is struggling, to respond to significant societal shifts in consumption and production strategies that do not sit easily within traditional theories of business practice currently underpinning 16‐19 business education. We examine firstly, the extent to which a formal body of knowledge couched in a modernist discourse of facts and objectivity can cope with the changing and fluid developments in much current business practice that is rooted in the cultural and symbolic. Secondly, the extent to which both academic and vocational competences provide the means for students to develop a framework of critical understanding that can respond effectively to rapidly changing business environments. Findings are based on research conducted jointly by the University of Manchester...

The Uses and Abuses of Popular Culture: Cultural Policy and Popular Culture

Abstract This paper is concerned with a crisis in European cultural policy and the serious choices with which this crisis confronts us. Beginning with a brief overview of the history of cultural policy, it examines the way in which a particular definition of “culture” both promoted and was promoted by such a cultural policy. The paper argues that this traditional cultural policy has repeatedly set itself against and denigrated a notion of “pure” and “high” culture in opposition to that culture supposedly driven by money and the appeal to the “lowest common denominator”. However, this distinction was elaborated across more “mundane” political, legal and economic levels. This paper argues that on all the levels traditional cultural policy has reached a crisis, and that unless it confronts its own past distinctions and constructions, it will be unable to meet the challenge of the new commercialism. The paper ends with a description of what a democratic cultural policy could be.