Cultural Economic Geography:
A New Paradigm for Global Media Studies?
Professor Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty,
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL
CHANGE
PRE-CONFERENCE EVENT
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS
ASSOCIATION
5 9 THC O N F E R E N C E , K E Y W O R D S I N
COMMUNICATION
CHICAGO, IL, USA, 21-25 MAY, 2009

Issues for Global Media Studies
2
1. Is the influence of “Global Hollywood” increasing
or decreasing in the early 21st century?
2. Are the number of significant “media capitals”
increasing or decreasing? What makes for a
sustainable media capital?
3. Is there a tendency towards policy convergence
between national media systems?

Cultural Economic Geography
3
 “Cultural turn” in economic geography
 Regulation School
 Consumption as a socio-economic driver
 Cultural economy
 Discursive construction of economic categories
 Rethinking spatial dimensions of social power
 “Culture” as an economic variable

Three “big ideas” of cultural economic geography
(MericGertler)
4
 Flexible global production networks - changing
significance of geographical proximity
 Shift in innovation models from ideas-push to
geographical clusters and sustained interaction –
why do some regions develop path-dependent
untraded interdependencies?
 Cumulative advantage of path-dependent
innovation and increasing returns to scale

Rise of creative industries
5
 Rise of the CI sectors: 7-9% of US GDP, and 3-5% for
other OECD economies
 Shifting of lines between „symbolic‟ and „material‟
goods
 Design-intensity of products
 Sign-value and competitive advantage
 “Engel‟s Law”: consumer affluence and symbolic consumption
 Clustering in CIs:
 Tacit knowledge of specialist labour inputs
 Networked organisation of production (SMEs)
 Project-based employment and transaction costs
 Matching individual creativity to market opportunity
 Associated services, infrastructure and policy environment

Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest
Audience (UC Press, 2007)
6
• Rise of “Greater China” as a centre of media
production and consumption
• Is this developing an independent dynamism
in a fast-growing market?
•Hollywood today is nevertheless very much
like Detroit forty years ago, a factory town
that produces big bloated vehicles with plenty
of chrome. As production budgets mushroom,
quality declines in large part as a result of
institutional inertia and a lack of competition.
Like Detroit, Hollywood has dominated for so
long that many of its executives have difficulty
envisioning the transformations now on the
horizon. Because of this myopia, the global
future is commonly imagined as a world
brought together by homogeneous cultural
products produced and circulated by American
media (Curtin, 2007: 4).

Variables shaping the spatial dimensions of
media/media capitals
7
 Logic of accumulation: centripedal forces of
production/centrifugal tendencies of distribution
 Trajectories of creative migration
 Forces of socio-cultural variation
 Role of national media policies

Issues arising
8
 Are Chinese media industries really on a
“Hollywood” trajectory?
 Regionalization rather than globalization –
inclusions (Singapore?) and exclusions (Japan,
Korea?)
 Issue of lack of policy coherence in media policies
across East Asia