Cultural engagement and the economic performance of the cultural and creative industries: an occupational critique

This article presents a new critical engagement with the concept of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), focusing on the rationale for grouping occupations and industries under this label. We show how the definition of ‘creativity’ used to demonstrate CCIs’ economic performance remains contested and variable, particularly with regard to the inclusion of specific parts of the IT sector. In demonstrating the importance of IT to the economic narrative regarding CCIs, we then unfold a related critique, exploring patterns in cultural consumption within CCI occupations. We demonstrate how some CCI workers have distinctively high cultural consumption, others reflect their broader social class, and some, including IT workers, show lower than expected consumption. Overall, we question the coherence of the prevailing CCI category, particularly in government policy, and suggest a new mode of ‘cultural’ occupational analysis for the sociology of CCIs

Copyright and cultural work: an exploration

This article first discusses the contemporary debate on cultural “creativity” and the economy. Second, it considers the current state of UK copyright law and how it relates to cultural work. Third, based on empirical research on British dancers and musicians, an analysis of precarious cultural work is presented. A major focus is how those who follow their art by way of “portfolio” work handle their rights in ways that diverge significantly from the current simplistic assumptions of law and cultural policy. Our conclusions underline the distance between present top-down conceptions of what drives production in the cultural field and the actual practice of dancers and musicians

(Digital) tools as professional and generational identity badges in the Chinese creative industries

Animators, architects, designers, and others active in the Chinese creative industries are expert users of tools, both analog and digital. Performances of expert tool use (the wearing of professional identity badges) are strategic ways of signaling creativity understood as sets of skills and character traits essential for attracting work projects but also for professional identity formation. Analogue tools are generally associated with creative openness and fluidity whereas digital tools are discursively constructed as a technological other to the analogue. ‘Older’ creatives (born before 1980) tend to apply some of the media-inflected discourse around the balinghou generation (born 1980–1989) to their younger competitors, including an assumed affinity with digital media and technologies (the pinning on of a generational identity badge). Such generational assumptions can have the effect of reinforcing project hierarchies and denying expert users of digital tools their claims to creativity

What makes for prize-winning television?

We investigate the determinants of success in four international television awards festivals between 1994 and 2012. We find that countries with larger markets and greater expenditure on public broadcasting tend to win more awards, but that the degree of concentration in the market for television and rates of penetration of pay-per-view television are unrelated to success. These findings are consistent with general industrial organisation literature on quality and market size, and with media policy literature on public service broadcasting acting as a force for quality. However, we also find that ‘home countries’ enjoy a strong advantage in these festivals, which is not consistent with festival success acting as a pure proxy for television quality

The statistical laws of popularity: Universal properties of the box office dynamics of motion pictures

Are there general principles governing the process by which certain products or ideas become popular relative to other (often qualitatively similar) competitors? To investigate this question in detail, we have focused on the popularity of movies as measured by their box-office income. We observe that the log-normal distribution describes well the tail (corresponding to the most successful movies) of the empirical distributions for the total income, the income on the opening week, as well as, the weekly income per theater. This observation suggests that popularity may be the outcome of a linear multiplicative stochastic process. In addition, the distributions of the total income and the opening income show a bimodal form, with the majority of movies either performing very well or very poorly in theaters. We also observe that the gross income per theater for a movie at any point during its lifetime is, on average, inversely proportional to the period that has elapsed after its release. We argue that (i) the log-normal nature of the tail, (ii) the bimodal form of the overall gross income distribution, and (iii) the decay of gross income per theater with time as a power law, constitute the fundamental set of {\em stylized facts} (i.e., empirical "laws") that can be used to explain other observations about movie popularity. We show that, in conjunction with an assumption of a fixed lower cut-off for income per theater below which a movie is withdrawn from a cinema, these laws can be used to derive a Weibull distribution for the survival probability of movies which agrees with empirical data. The connection to extreme-value distributions suggests that popularity can be viewed as a process where a product becomes popular by avoiding failure (i.e., being pulled out from circulation) for many successive time periods. We suggest that these results may apply to popularity in general.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Live Reality Television: care structures within the production and reception of talent shows

This article focuses on production and reception practices for live reality television, using critical theory and empirical research to question how producers and audiences co-create and limit live experiences. The concept of care structures is used to make visible hidden labour in the creation of mood, in particular audiences as participants in the management of live experiences. In the case of Got to Dance there was a play off between the value and meaning of the live events as a temporary experience captured by ratings and social media, and the more enduring collective-social experience of this reality series over time

The most creative organization in the world? The BBC, 'creativity' and managerial style

The managerial styles of two BBC directors-general, John Birt and Greg Dyke, have often been contrasted but not so far analysed from the perspective of their different views of 'creative management'. This article first addresses the orthodox reading of 'Birtism'; second, it locates Dyke's 'creative' turn in the wider context of fashionable neo-management theory and UK government creative industries policy; third, it details Dyke's drive to change the BBC's culture; and finally, it concludes with some reflections on the uncertainties inherent in managing a creative organisation

No measure for culture? Value in the new economy

This paper explores articulations of the value of investment in culture and the arts through a critical discourse analysis of policy documents, reports and academic commentary since 1997. It argues that in this period, discourses around the value of culture have moved from a focus on the direct economic contributions of the culture industries to their indirect economic benefits. These indirect benefits are discussed here under three main headings: creativity and innovation, employability, and social inclusion. These are in turn analysed in terms of three forms of capital: human, social and cultural. The paper concludes with an analysis of this discursive shift through the lens of autonomist Marxist concerns with the labour of social reproduction. It is our argument that, in contemporary policy discourses on culture and the arts, the government in the UK is increasingly concerned with the use of culture to form the social in the image of capital. As such, we must turn our attention beyond the walls of the factory in order to understand the contemporary capitalist production of value and resistance to it. </jats:p