The cultural economy moment?

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’. While work undertaken in cultural studies has contributed to these developments, the development of neo-liberalism as a meta-concept in critical theory constitutes a substantive barrier to more sustained engagement between cultural studies and economics, as it rests upon a caricature of economic discourse. The paper draws upon Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism to indicate that there are significant problems with the neo-Marxist account hat became hegemonic over the 2000s. The paper concludes by identifying areas such as the value of information, the value of networks, motivations for participation in online social networks, and the impact of business cycles on cultural sectors as areas of potentially fruitful inter-disciplinary engagement around the nature of cultural economy

A citizen journalism primer

Citizen journalism is a hot topic at present, but there remains a degree of conceptual wooliness about its definition and meaning, with everything from lifestyle blogs to live footage of freak weather events being included in this category. This paper will identify factors underpinning the emergence of citizen journalism, including the rise of Web 2.0, rethinking journalism as a professional ideology, the decline of ‘high modernist’ journalism, divergence between elite and popular opinion, changing revenue bases for news production, and the decline of deference in democratic societies. It will consider case studies such as the Korean OhMyNews web site, and connect these issues to wider debates about the implications of journalism and news production increasingly going into the Internet environment

Culture, technology and the city

The 21st century has been described as the “century of cities”. By 2030, 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities, with the most rapid urbanization occurring in the developing world. This paper will draw up geographer Ed Soja’s concept of the “spatial turn” in social theory to consider how the culture of cities can act as a catalyst to innovation and the development of new technologies. In doing so, the paper will develop a three-layered approach to culture as: the arts; the way of life of people and communities; and the embedded structure underpinning socio-economic relations. It will also consider technology at a three-layered element, including devices, practices and ‘logics’ of technology, or what the Greeks termed techne. The paper will consider recent approaches to urban cultural policy, including cluster development and creative cities, and suggest some alternatives, noting that a problem with current approaches is that they focus excessively upon production (clusters) or consumption (creative cities). It will also consider the development of digital creative industries such as games, and the strategies of different cities to develop an innovation culture

Michel Foucault's the Birth of Biopolitics and contemporary neo-liberalism debates

Neo-liberalism has become one of the boom concepts of our time. From its original reference point as a descriptor of the economics of the ‘Chicago School’ or authors such as Friedrich von Hayek, neo-liberalism has become an all-purpose concept, explanatory device and basis for social critique. This presentation evaluates Michel Foucault’s 1978–79 lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, to consider how he used the term neo-liberalism, and how this equates with its current uses in critical social and cultural theory. It will be argued that Foucault did not understand neo-liberalism as a dominant ideology in these lectures, but rather as marking a point of inflection in the historical evolution of liberal political philosophies of government. It will also be argued that his interpretation of neo-liberalism was more nuanced and more comparative than more recent contributions. The article points towards an attempt to theorize comparative historical models of liberal capitalism

"If they come they will build it" : managing and building e-democracy from the ground up

The possibilities for using online media to promote deliberative democracy and enhance civic participation have been identified by many. At the same time, the ‘e-democracy score card’ is decidedly mixed, with the tendency of established institutions in both government and the mainstream media to promote a ‘push’ model of communication and information provision, which fails to adapt to the decentralized, networked, interactive and many-to-many forms of communication enabled by the Internet. This paper will discuss the experience of the National Forum, which is building an Australian e-Democracy site of which is the first stage. It aims to be a combination of town-square, shopping centre of ideas, and producers’ co-operative which will allow citizens, talkers, agitators, researchers and legislators to interact with each other individually and through their organisations. Its aim will be to facilitate conversations, and where required, action. This project can be understood from a myriad of angles. At one level it is an open source journalism project, at another it deals with knowledge management. It can also be approached as a forum, an archive, an internet arketing initiative and an eCommerce resource for civil society. Central to the project is the development of feedback mechanisms so that participants can better understand the debates and where they stand in them as well as gauging the mood, desires and interests of the nation on a continuous basis. This paper deals with the practice, theories and economic models underlying the project, and considers the contribution of such sites to community formation and the development of social capital

Copyright and creativity: An ongoing debate in the creative industries

This paper critically analyzes the divergent perspectives on how copyright and intellectual property laws impact creativity, innovation, and the creative industries. One perspective defines the creative industries based on copyright as the means by which revenues are generated from innovation and the dissemination of new ideas. At the same time, it has been argued that copyright and intellectual property regimes fetter creativity and innovation, and that this has become even more marked in the context of digital media convergence and the networked global creative economy. These issues have resonated in debates around the creative industries, particularly since the initial DCMS mapping study in the UK in 1998 defined creative industries as combining individual creativity and exploitable forms of intellectual property. The issue of competing claims for the relationship between copyright and the creative industries has also arisen in Australia, with a report by the Australian Law Reform Commission entitled Copyright and the Digital Economy. This paper will consider the competing claims surrounding copyright and the creative industries, and the implications for policy-makers internationally

Creative Industries after a Decade: An Australian Perspective

This presentation was given to staff and doctoral students at the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, May 2, 2008. It uses recent studies on the creative industries workforce in Australia to consider how the debate over creative industries has evolved over a decade since it first emerged in Britain in 1998

Creativity, innovation and the ‘New’ MBA : China and the 21st century knowledge economy

This paper discusses the development of new models of business education in contemporary China. It describes the rise of the Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree in the context of the growth of a new professional-managerial class in China, as a corollary of modernisation and economic reform. While the Masters of Business Administration (MBA) has its origins in the United States, it has grown into a globally recognized qualification for business status, particularly when acquired from ‘elite’ institutions in a highly competitive and extensively ranked global system. Its growth in Asia is reflective of the significant shortages of managerial expertise as economic success throws traditional family-based or state capitalist models of business organization into question. In China, the rise of the MBA has been more recent, although the original idea was introduced in the late 1970s, not long after the directive of Deng Xiaoping to modernise the economy. We consider the role played by new MBA programs, such as the Executive MBA (EMBA) and the International MBA (IMBA) as new educational products designed, not so much for the re-engineering of management practices in SOEs along more effective commercial lines, but rather upon developing an internationally networked business elite better able to engage with the new challenges of the global knowledge economy

Nesta and the Evolving Creative Industries Policy Agenda in the UK and Australia

This is the edited transcript of a public interview that took place between Dr. Hasan Bakhshi, Executive Director, Creative Economy and Data Analytics at Nesta, and Terry Flew, with questions from Greg Hearn, Cori Stewart and other participants. The interview took place at the Creative Industries Precinct, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, on 13 September 2017. The interview covers the history of Nesta, its role in shaping UK creative industries policies, and lessons for other countries around arts funding, education and skills, and the relationship to research policy

WILLINGNESS TO PAY: NEWS MEDIA

There has been much attention in recent years to the future sustainability of news production, and the implications of a decline in professionally produced and locally based journalism for civic engagement, democratic participation and the public sphere. There has been a long-term drift of audiences and advertisers away from the dominant mass media formats of the 20th century, such as newspapers, magazines and broadcast radio and television, towards a wider range of digital options, including social media, subscription video-on-demand services, podcasts and blogs. There has also been growing questioning of the role of digital platforms in the transformation of media markets, and how equitable the relationships are between the many creators of news content and the small number of digital platforms, which have near-monopoly power in key digital sectors such as search and social media, as well as dominance in digital advertising. These concerns about industry transformation and market power are overlaid by concern about the consequences of a changing news media ecology, particularly the impact of misinformation and “fake news” distributed through social media platforms by politically and ideologically motivated “bad actors”, which in turn feeds into a wider distrust of not only the media, but all social institutions