The cultural industries: creative definitions, quantifications and practice

This submission is in five sections and includes my analysis of the New Labour Creative Industries Policy, including a discussion of definitional and data issues, followed by a summary of my contribution to the field through the cited public works and a conclusion. The body of knowledge represented in the selected studies and published works contributes to two major activities: vocational learning and the cultural and creative industries. On first reading, these seem incompatible; however, vocational learning is a key component of creative industries development and to understand the issues in vocational learning, an industrial context - in my case, the creative industries - is helpful. However, this submission relies on my works in the creative and cultural industries, with supplementary references to my public contribution in the vocational learning arena. The particular focus of the earlier published works surrounds a groundbreaking project, the Artist in Industry scheme. This scheme was the first of its kind in the United Kingdom, and took public funding of the arts into uncharted territory by connecting artists, companies and employees in a structured and organised manner. It is the interaction between the artist as worker in the workplace and employees in the company that made the scheme important and thus provides a logical starting point for this submission. Consequently, there are few references to my work before 1980. The overall contribution to professional practice in this submission can be summarised as breaking new ground in the relationship between the arts and industry, significantly influencing vocational education and training in the cultural field (particularly higher education) with a recognised contribution to a reappraisal of the creative industries' definitional frameworks, development of primary baseline methodology and provision of new data on the sector. This has required an understanding and critiquing of the concepts employed by government and related agencies, the suggestion of alternatives, and the development of work-based projects built around consultancy activities to test methodologies and provide new intelligence to inform practice

Urban semiosis: Creative industries and the clash of systems

© The Author(s) 2014. This article has two aims. The first is to make the case that the ‘universe of the mind’ imagined by Yuri Lotman may be considered as a foundational model for cultural evolution (population-wide, dynamic, autopoietic, self-organising adaptation to changing environments). The second aim is to take forward a model of culture derived from Lotman’s work – a model I call ‘the clash of systems’ – in order to apply it to creative industries research. Such a move has the salutary effect of putting the ‘universe of the mind’ literally in its place. That place, now, predominantly, is in the city. Thus, the article uses Lotman’s model of the semiosphere to link different complex systems, principally the semiosphere with that of the city, in order to explore the productive potential of encounters – clashes – between different systems. Applying these insights to the field of creative industries research, the article proposes that creative culture in the globalised, urban and web-connected era can be characterised as ‘urban semiosis’

The Core Apoptotic Executioner Proteins CED-3 and CED-4 Promote Initiation of Neuronal Regeneration in Caenorhabditis elegans

Laser severing of individual axons in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans revealed that the apoptotic executioner caspase CED-3 and its regulator CED-4/Apaf-1 play an unexpected beneficial role in promoting axonal regeneration

Universities and the Creative Industries

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the United Kingdom are in an era of change with an increasing focus on employer engagement. This article explores the employability issues and then specifically considers the creative industries. It focuses on the spaces and resources of cultural quarters (CQs) as an example of a specific domain in which HEN engage to realize the potential of their nonscientific creative knowledge. The author argues that employer engagement is not new; therefore, supporting creative practitioners in universities and the creative industries through vehicles such as CQs is a natural extension of an old mission

The creative industries definitional discourse

Successive United Kingdom (UK) national governments and their agencies have defined and redrawn boundaries. This has resulted in continuous public cultural policy and practice turbulence since 1945, commencing with the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain (Pick and Anderton, 1999). The pragmatic determination of these boundries - that is definitions with no obvious rationale for inclusion or exclusion- lends itself to an interpretation of a public sector domain engaged in restrictive cultural practice, wherein boundaries are constrained enough to match the level of available resources at any given time. It is the government administrative machinery responding to national policy by providing manageable and controllable categories, classifications and frameworks for the allocation of public funds, rather than a rational, inclusive and empirically informed (and hence measurable) system that conforms to the requirements of evidence-based policy (Solesbury, 200.1). Urban regeneration (Roodhouse and Roodhouse, 1997) and the creative industries policy (Roodhouse, 2003c) by the New Labour administration exemplify this practice