Cultural and communications policy and the stateless nation

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The SNP, cultural policy and the idea of the "creative economy"

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Creativity: from discourse to doctrine

This is a short report on work in progress. It centres on the idea of ‘creativity’, which is of presently of key importance for current UK government thinking about the ‘creative economy’. ‘Creativity’, I shall argue, has established itself as a hegemonic term in an increasingly elaborated framework of policy ideas. Although my focus is on the UK, we are addressing a body of thought that is now increasingly international in scope. The ideas in question are influential and set the terms for thought and action across a number of policy fields. Not for nothing has David Puttnam, a key ‘New’ Labour figure, said that ‘the importance of the creative industries was quickly enshrined as an article of faith’. An analysis of New Labour discourse reveals an underlying credo – itself a fit subject for the critique of ideology. A concerted effort is under way to shape a wide range of working practices by invoking creativity and innovation. These attributes are supposed to make our societies and economies grow in a fiercely competitive world. At present, official thinking circulates in a dominant culture of largely uncritical acceptance. Alongside the elaboration of the doctrine of creativity by the government policy apparatus is a specialist discourse of academic analysis. If it is now fashionable to see the creative economy as pivotal to the wider economy, this view is certainly not limited to policy makers. As creativity has moved centre stage, it has also become extraordinarily banal. The mark of its present hegemony is that it is also increasingly ubiquitous. ‘British creativity’, for instance, ensures market success for Thornton’s, the chocolate manufacturers, so their advertising tells us. Not on its own, to be sure: cocoa and sugar are added ingredients. In a district nearby to mine in Glasgow, there is a ‘creative hairdresser’. We who stay without must ponder what wondrous transformations occur under the stylists’ hands. My inbox is regularly assaulted by spam offering courses to explore my creativity (and temptingly, to develop my ludic qualities) in New York City and various European locations. So far I have managed to resist. Such examples could easily be multiplied

Creativity and the experts: New Labour, think tanks, and the policy process

This article explores the role of expertise in public debate on creative industries policy in the United Kingdom. The first section gives an overview of the emergence of expertise in government and the rise of think tanks, locating this within a wider sociology of the intellectuals. It discusses the development of New Labour expertise in response to that of Thatcherite Conservatism in the battle to dominate public policy agendas. The second section illustrates the growth of the New Labour "policy generation" and the emergence of a cohort of experts in the fields of media, communications, and culture and discusses routes taken by them into government. The final section, based on interviews, discusses the power plays behind New Labour policy making in the creative industries field. It considers the impact of ministerial changes on the policy process, illustrates how interdepartmental rivalries introduce complexity and demonstrates how civil service expertise may be mobilised to neutralise that of outside experts. The conclusion addresses the implications of this analysis

Intellectuals and cultural policies

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The politics of media and cultural policy

This paper considers the role of academics in current debates on media and cultural policy in the UK. Although theories of the intellectuals differ widely as to what such a role might be, they point to a more general issue: the struggle for social recognition by contending forms of expertise. The policy field is one arena in which such contention occurs. Although the digital revolution is beginning to erode distinct policy regimes, broadcasting policy debate still conserves some long-standing features. Dominated by a few protagonists occupying positions of institutional power and critical, academic influence is at best marginal. For its part, cultural policy is being increasingly displaced by creative economy policy. This has been a New Labour project, initiated and from time to time sustained by a policy generation rooted in think tanks, consultancy and advising, with its academic critics largely unheard. Despite its shaky foundations, creativity policy has achieved a hegemonic position in British debate and is influential internationally. Nearer home, it has been uncritically adopted in Scotland – an illuminating case of policy dependency. The paper concludes with some reflections on policymakers’ resistance to academic arguments

A lesson from robotics: Modeling infants as autonomous agents

While computational models are playing an increasingly important role in developmental psychology, at least one lesson from robotics is still being learned: modeling epigenetic processes often requires simulating an embodied, autonomous organism. This paper first contrasts prevailing models of infant cognition with an agent-based approach. A series of infant studies by Baillargeon (1986; Baillargeon & DeVos, 1991) is described, and an eye-movement model is then used to simulate infants' visual activity in this study. I conclude by describing three behavioral predictions of the eyemovement model, and discussing the implications of this work for infant cognition research

In celebration of critical encounters

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Expertise, the academy and the governance of cultural policy

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