a quick, rough,and semi-historical overview of the relationship between academic research/theory and the development of concepts of creative/cultural industry. Lecture for MA Music, Innovation and Entrepreneurship students at the University of the West of Scotland.

1. Academic research and ‘creative
industries’
A brief and partial genealogy
Graham Jeffery

2. Complex relationships between
‘academia’ and ‘industry’
• Different types of university
• Founded by philanthropists
• The 19th C. technical/vocational university
• Strathclyde motto ‘useful learning’ vs. Glasgow as
medieval foundation ‘community of scholars’
• What’s the function of the university?
Vocational? Social? Technological?
• Humboldt – liberal university and social
improvement
• Where do ideas come from….?

3. Culture and industry
• Different intellectual/theoretical traditions/perspectives
• Analysing ‘realities’ – applying critique, analysis, theory
• ‘Applied’ or ‘pure’ research – a common but tricky
distinction
• Mobility/porosity between academy and industry
• the ‘academies’ started life as ‘learned societies’ – places
where knowledge was codified, licensed, validated – eg
Royal Academy of Arts (18th C.) _ Renaissance Italy, etc
• Academy confers status on knowledge
– academicians etc

4. Culture and industry (2)
• Evolution of cultural systems – for circulation
of cultural commodities – publishing, theatre,
the concert hall etc.
• How do musicians/artists/artisans earn a
living? Systems of patronage and funding
• Commissioned art
• Church, state and
private investment

5. Contemporary cultural norms - shaped
by Victorian values?
• Culture as ‘public good’ and means of ‘self
improvement’
• Ameliorating the effects of rapid industrialization
• Eg Glasgow museums and galleries
• Eg Burrell collection – curiosity about world
linked to rapid globalisation/colonisation
• Circuits of collections – buying, selling, displaying
cultural goods – private wealth then public
endowment
• Display, power, symbolic economy

6. Public collections

7. Culture ‘high’ and ‘low’
• Critique of industrialization
• William Morris and John Ruskin – the handmade
as antidote to mass produced commodity
• The aestheticisation of everyday life – origins of
the modern design industry
• Revival of academic interest in folk movements,
popular culture, oral tradition, linked to
anthropological exploration of ‘other’ cultures
and global encounter/migration – 17th C onwards
this accelerates with colonisation/globalisation

8. Design and the everyday

9. Marx and Weber
• Capital and labour
• Status and symbolic violence – capital confers privileges
• Theories of class struggle
• Class as basis for cultural affiliations – official culture,
popular culture, everyday culture
• Culture as a product of material/economic circumstances
• ‘All that is solid melts into air’ – circulation of
capital/market exchange creates dizzying modernity and
destroys apparently ‘solid’ beliefs/values
• Commodity fetishism – modern economic theory and
theories of value

10. Antonio Gramsci
• Cultural hegemony – ideology of ‘common
sense’ values
• Consented coercion – culture, symbolic power
and authority
• Contestation of dominant culture
• Why don’t people see the conditions of their
own oppression?

11. Mass movements – cultural practices
1920s/1930s great social unrest

12. Theodor Adorno
• Critique of ‘mass culture’ and popular music
• Culture of domination by capital
• Critical theory
• Cultural pessimism of 1930s – mass
movements, rise of fascism, authoritarianism,
rapid technological innovation
• Key insights into the permeation of musical
life by market relations – publishing, recording
industries, radio and the effects of this

13. Mass media

14. Raymond Williams – culture and
society
• Cultural materialism – the processes by
which/through which cultural artefacts are
produced
• Emphasis on cultural production as a social
process
• The rise of media and cultural studies – studies of
systems of production and representation
• How media produces subjectivities and identities
• Complexities of advanced capitalism
• Beyond literary criticism to ‘critique’

15. Pierre Bourdieu
• Sociology of culture
• Social, symbolic capital – the cultural value of
social practices
• Systems of representation and class
distinction
• Habitus, capital, field
• Aesthetic preferences based on class positions

16. Counter-cultures (1960s)

17. Birmingham school – cultural studies
• 1960s/70s – consumption as a creative act? Beyond
consumption/production distinctions
• Youth, labour, subcultural theory
• Dick Hebdige – subculture as resistance
• Paul Willis – popular culture and youth culture –
identifying forms of youth culture as emancipatory
• Angela McRobbie – feminist critique, teenage
subcultures, fashion, everyday cultural practices
• Applied cultural theory – understanding everyday life
and explaining ‘lived experience’

18. Difference, hybridity, postmodernity
• Identity politics
• Race, class and gender
• Stuart Hall – postcolonial studies
• Paul Gilroy – the Black atlantic – cultural politics
• New forms of cultural enterprise – cultural
industries as enabling transcending of class
divides? Thatcherism, markets, choice, channels
• Questions of pleasure, consumption, shopping…?

19. The ‘cultural economy’
• Cultural goods, cultural services, circulation of
cultural commodities
• Stories of Glasgow – representations of place,
identity, culture
• Risky industries – bohemia? Particular
configurations of class, race, gender, cultural
identity
• Places where people want to live – ‘quality of
life’ debates. Material and symbolic conditions

20. Cultural turn in policy
• Spectacle, image, affect
• Understanding symbolic representation of
cities - placemaking
• From manufacturing goods to a service
economy?
• Growth of universities, art schools and the
modern ‘polyversity’

21. Urban/cultural planning
• Relationship of cultural organisations (organic,
grassroots, spontaneous, bottom up..?) with local
state/national government and transnational
corporations
• Informalisation of work – new forms of cultural
labour
• Systems of regulation – legal, economic, symbolic
etc
• The ‘enabling state’ or unfettered ‘free’ markets?
• Culture and urban regeneration/economic
development

23. Network society
• Media, technology, communications
• Network cultures – hybridity, working across
organizational boundaries, collaboration,
partnership
• Net entrepreneurs – disruptive technologies
• Informational capitalism
• Leadbeater and the mythologies around
knowledge entrepreneurship – networks of
power?

25. Creative industries studies…
• From ‘cultural’ industry to ‘creative’ industry
• Rhetorics of creativity?
• Complex objects/fields of study
• Theoretical work on identity, representation,
emancipation, politics
• Growth of applied work – policy advice,
engagement with government and industry
• High stakes research – performativity and
‘impact’

26. Creativity/ideology/policy

27. The politics of academia
• What gets to be studied and who gets to study
it…
• Systems of representation and how these
representations get made
• What counts as research
• What spaces are left for critique?
• Reproduction of dominant discourses or
reinvention/critique?

28. Network spaces and
academia/industry collaboration…

29. Further reading…
• O’Connor, J (2007) The cultural and creative
industries: a review of the literature, London:
Creative Partnerships
• Banaji, S. Burn, A. and Buckingham, D. (2007)
The rhetorics of creativity: a review of the
literature, London: Creative Partnerships
• Hewison, R. (2010) Creative Britain: Myth or
Monument?
http://www.tandfonline.com/sda/1175/audio
clip-transcript-ccut.pdf

30. Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk
generalpraxis.blogspot.com