Kate Oakley

Not So Cool Britannia The Role of the Creative Industries in Economic Development

This article provides a brief overview of current UK policy and practice in the area of the creative industries and economic development and aims to raise concerns about what I see as the problems arising in the implementation of these policies. It argues that the desire to use ‘creative industries’ as a single weapon with which to turn around economically depressed regions risks creating polarized and unsustainable economic development. Creative industries developments, if they are to succeed, cannot be disconnected from the cultural policies that nurtured them and the social policies that can help to sustain them.

Include Us Out—Economic Development and Social Policy in the Creative Industries

While Government claims about the UK as a ‘global creative hub’ continue to be made (Purnell, 2005), the contradictions and tensions in New Labours policy in the creative industries have become more apparent. These include the tensions between a set of policies for global media businesses versus the support for small firms in local economic development (Gilmore, 2004; Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005), and the tension between citizens and consumers in media and cultural policy (Hesmondhalgh, 2005). Equally apparent are the tensions between economic development of these sectors and social inclusion. In the UK, arguably more than other countries, the rhetoric of Creative Industries has been tied into political ideas about the links between economic competitiveness and social inclusion. The stated aims for creative industry development have thus been twofold—to increase jobs and GDP, while simultaneously ameliorating social exclusion and countering long-standing patterns of uneven economic development. Research, however, suggests that supporting the creative industries is, at best, a problematic way of tackling the issues of economic and social exclusion. The effects of gentrification on creative industry working and living space (Evans & Shaw, 2004); the patterns of informal hiring and career progression in these sectors (Leadbeater & Oakley, 2001) and the concentration of much economic activity in London and the South East, all suggest that the development of these sectors might exacerbate rather than address patterns of economic inequality.

The disappearing arts: creativity and innovation after the creative industries

Since the birth of the ‘creative industries’ a decade ago, there has been a series of attempts to link the cultural sectors with innovation policy and to downplay the connection between them and traditional arts or cultural policy. The theory appears to be that innovation is where the big money is, and that the cultural sectors can only benefit by being rescued from the ‘ghetto’ of arts funding. This paper seeks to query this notion and to draw attention to some of the problems that have resulted and may result from it.

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.

‘The public gets what the public wants’? The uses and abuses of ‘public value’ in contemporary British cultural policy

The aim of this article is to examine the adoption and use of the term ‘public value’ in both the broadcasting and the wider cultural arena. It examines the ideas, tensions and contradictions that exist in such a notion, asking whether it is simply empty rhetoric, or whether it tells us something more. It argues that the term stands as an example of a failed approach to policy‐making, being neither successfully technocratic, offering a clear methodology for assessing value, nor successfully rhetorical in the way that ‘the public good’, or ‘public service broadcasting’ can be deemed to have been. It also explores the means by which certain policy ideas are transmitted, briefly flourish and then dissipate, arguing that this may beat the cost to a longer‐term more sustainable mode of cultural policy‐making.

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?

In its own image: New Labour and the cultural workforce

The argument of this paper is that one way to examine the legacy of New Labours cultural policies, including its development of the creative industries, is through an account of the cultural workforce it has created. The idea of “creative industries” embodied a set of assumptions about the changing nature of work which had been central to New Labours reinvention during its years in the wilderness under Margaret Thatcher. Dubbed “post-Fordist socialism” by Thompson, the premise of many creative industry support initiatives was that the kind of work they provided was inherently progressive, combining demand for high skills with notions of self-expression and determination, in a workplace that was no longer hierarchical, but collaborative, flexible, even fun. Yet empirical evidence from the New Labour period suggests that the assumptions of inherently progressive work are largely unfounded. The cultural labour market remains polarised by gender, ethnicity and social class. Despite high levels of graduates, wages were low, and combined with the practice of unpaid “internships”, and highly informal recruitment practices, class-based exclusion, often reflected in ethnicity, was a defining feature of the sector. The paper thus provides both a historical account of New Labour ideas about work and how they shaped public policy, and a contemporary account of policy initiatives around workforce entry. Its aim is to interrogate the assumptions and limitations of New Labours “creative workforce”, and through this, its wider policies on work, culture and social exclusion.

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)

Good work? Rethinking cultural entrepreneurship

To adapt and horribly mangle Marx’s great lines, cultural workers are entrepreneurial, but not as they please and not under self- selected circumstances (Marx 1852/2005). One of several paradoxes of a group of workers, alternately celebrated (Handy 1995, Florida 2002) and the subject of concern (McRobbie 2002, Ross 2003) is that, like Marx’s revolutionaries, they are sometimes creating something that did not exist before, but in an environment of increasing precariousness and constraint. The entrepreneurialism they display is often of the forced, or at least adaptive, kind. They set up businesses because that is the easiest way to carry out their practice. They get premises because they need to work away from the kitchen table. They take on projects to pay the rent, and other projects on the back of that, because they now have new expertise. They socialise relentlessly to the point where it resembles work more than play. They often articulate social and political concerns about the kind of work they do; but they carry it out while exploiting themselves and others, often with the barest of acknowledgement.

Learning to labour unequally: understanding the relationship between cultural production, cultural consumption and inequality

ABSTRACT Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched. The article considers inequality and cultural value from two points of view: how cultural value is consumed and how it is produced. The paper argues that these two activities are absolutely essential to understanding the relationship between culture and social inequality, but that the two activities have traditionally been considered separately in both academic research and public policy, despite the importance of culture to British and thus international policy agendas. The article uses the example of higher education in the UK to think through the relationship between cultural consumption and production. In doing, so the article maps out a productive possibility for a new research agenda, by sketching where and how research might link cultural consumption and production to better understand inequality.