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Cultural Economy
Professor Andy Pratt
Professor of Culture, Media and Economy
Director, Culture, Media and Creative Industries
Email [email protected]
Tel +44 (0)20 7848 1595
Culture, Media and Creative Industries
King’s College London
5C Chesham Building, Strand Campus
London, WC2R 2LS
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Please cite as Pratt, A. C. (2009). Cultural economy. International Encylopedia of Human Geography, Volume 2. R. Kitchen and N. Thrift. Oxford, Elsevier. 2: 407-­‐410. ISBN 0080449115 IMPORTANT: When referring to this paper, please check the page numbers in the journal published version and cite these. Pratt, A. C. (2009). Cultural economy. International Encylopedia of Human Geography, Volume 2. R. Kitchen and N. Thrift. Oxford, Elsevier. 2: 407-­‐410. ISBN 0080449115
An entry (MS 146) for the International encyclopaedia of human geography (ed
Kitchen and Thrift)
October 2007
The cultural economy
Dr Andy C Pratt,
Reader in Urban Cultural Economy,
Department of Geography and Environment/Centre for Urban Research,
London School of Economics
Houghton St
London WC2A 2AE
[email protected]
Keywords
Cultural Economy
Cultural Industries
Creative industries
Economic sociology
Economic geography
Synopsis
Discussion about the cultural economy can be differentiated by how the two terms are
linked: as an adjective (cultural economy), or, as a compound noun (cultural
economy). The notion of a cultural economy refers to the cultural dimensions of
economic activity (the design or marketing of any product or service; or, simply, the
social dimensions of the organisation of production). The term cultural economy is
indicative of a particular subsection of economic activity this is concerned with
cultural products and activities (such as music, film, and fine art such as music, film,
and fine art) as opposed to say transportation or mining. The structure of this essay
reflects this division whilst at the same time cross-cutting, and underpinning, these
distinctions with three further ones: a notion of transition, and the concept of
commodification, and the production-consumption dualism. The problem with the
term ‘cultural’ is that it is used as a general modifier of terms (cultural industries,
cultural communication), and, it could be argued that everything is ‘cultural’ in one
way or another in the sense that it has a cultural dimension. So, we need to proceed
with care in the context of such ambiguous usage.
The cultural mode of economic action: The cultural
economy
Arguably the longest running debate about the cultural economy can be tracked more
precisely to its status as a mode of analysis and to debates about the role of economic
sociology as a sub-discipline and its position vis a vis economics. In the early variants
of classical economics what we now consider the social, cultural and political were an
internal part of economic discourse. After this time neo-classical analyses sought to
concentrate on atomistic, uniquely economic action, and rational calculation. In effect,
this created a ‘boundary dispute’ with respect to the social. In sociologist Talcott
Parsons’ influential formulation of economic sociology this divide was concretised
(and remained so for 40 years or more). In Parson’s view neo-classical economics was
separated from the social: sociology was allocated the task of exploring the social
setting for economic action, economics was left with the ‘pure economics’. Thus the
social (and cultural) dimensions of the economy were allocated to context. For many
years economic sociology, and geography (which drew on the same formulations),
maintained this distinction. It is only relatively recently that writers have sought to
challenge this dualism; in so doing they have opened up the field for a reconsideration
of the explanation of economic action proper and thus challenged neo-classical
economics on its own grounds. This is the key to understanding the current reengagement with the cultural economy.
At least six lines of current debate about the cultural economy can be identified. First,
researchers have sought to show how economics is one rhetoric amongst others; it is a
mode of argumentation rather than revealed truth. Second, others have sought to
demonstrate how truth claims are sustained in economics (and science) via a web of
correspondences. Third, in a quasi- anthropological turn some have sought to examine
the practices by which economic life are carried on. In other words to see how
economic life is ‘done’. We can note the contrast with economists who argue about
how economic life should be done. Fourth, we can point to anthropologists of material
culture who have rendered the economic field into the familiar language of kinship.
Fifth, alongside these has been a Deleuzian influenced debate about performativity
and affect which has on one hand highlighted the role of the ‘passions’ in economic
life (reference to another entry?), and on the other hand, sought to recast the economic
field within a post-representational mode. Whilst these lines of theory are in essence
economic sociology, they have also shaded into economic anthropology, and more
generally come to encompass the cultural turn in the social sciences; hence cultural
analyses of the economy. In so doing, the cultural turn has been strongly articulated as
a methodological critique against quantitative and in favour of qualitative approaches.
Sixth, and finally, we can identify a dimension of debate that has sought to explore the
moral dimension of social and economic life for some writers this has been aligned to
a critical take on the ‘cultural turn’ (reference to another entry?).
Much of the theoretical debate about the ‘cultural turn’ in the discipline of Geography
has been positioned against Marxist structuralism and production. Whilst theoretical
debates about postmodernism and post-structuralism highlighted the play of images.
In the practice of advertising, filmmaking and similar forms, it was used to frame the
consumption experience. Although not a necessary consequence of such an approach,
more often than not the object of interest has been consumption. There are a lack of
new cultural studies, economic geographies or cultural geographies that apply their
attention to production, let alone production and consumption. In economic
geography the ‘cultural turn’ was in part figured as a reaction to the economically
reductivist, or productivist, focus.
Such a shift can be evidenced by the renewed
interest in business organisation; some researchers have examined the unusual forms
of economic organisation, namely ‘project working’ (reference to another entry?), that
are commonly found in the cultural economy. In parallel, there has been a growth in
management literatures concerning the cultures of management, and the particular
innovative practices that constitute the creative/cultural industries. The instrumental
focus of this knowledge seeks to achieve competitive advantages through innovation
or product design.
A common dualistic couplet deployed in the analysis of the cultural economy is that
of culturalisation –economistation. As a dualism this is, on one hand, presented as
economic activities being increasingly inflected with cultural topes and performance
etc. rather than simple differentiation of value. This has been taken as an account for
the deployment of culture to increase market segmentation and develop niche markets
in a circumstance of oversupply, or market saturation. Some writers make a link with
flexible specialisation and what they term a reflexive turn, that is indexed to growing
demand from consumers for an ever differentiated product market (by design) and the
organisational and productive means to satisfy it (flexible specialisation). Hence, it is
argued, culturalisation is endemic in late capitalism.
Economisation is commonly overlain with a moral sentiment. This is the classic
formulation of Adorno writing in the late 1930s
that rejected commodification as
separating art from its aura. It is from this perspective that Adorno labelled (and
defined) the culture industries in such negative terms. At one and the same time he
sought to legislate what was culture, and to equate this with the market. Thus creating
an unhelpful market/non market equation with art and commerce. Later work by
political economists – common in Media and Communications studies- has carried on
the Adorno’s moral baggage and added its own critique of power and control.
Returning to the foundational provision of cultural goods, cultural policy, has been
based upon market failure associated by inadequate price signals. Thus ‘creeping
economisation’ is feared to morally ‘devalue’ culture; hence, the necessity of public
intervention to counter these ‘incorrect’ market signals. Other binaries such as highlow culture, or public-private, for profit-not for profit have served to reinforce the
notion that commercial/ mass culture/private/for profit are aesthetically inferior,
despite the fact that the arguments (on one hand Adorno’s Aura, and on the other,
market failure) are different.
The Cultural Studies tradition has also argued that the high-low culture distinction is a
false, but from a different discursive point of view. It is argued that there is a case,
albeit not in such clear terms, to promote forms of culture that are non-, and not,
commercial in order to promote diversity or representation. There is a long history of
the analytical elision of high culture with higher social classes. Against this the value
of the Cultural Studies tradition has been to recognise that culture is ‘classed’ (and
‘spaced’); that is, it is associated with, and the product of, particular class fractions.
Thus, the insight that in favouring one particular aesthetic, one serves to support and
legitimate that particular class (or regional) position and worldview.
Increasingly culture is being used in instrumental ways to promote cities – for
example, by creating distinctive modern art galleries. The argument here is that
cultural differentiation is a way of marking place-rooted uniqueness (inherent or
created). A line of argument in continental Europe has been the discussion of local
food cultures, or food products that differentiate place and markets, and are supported
by ‘regional branding’. A different, commercial, articulation is the increasing use of
the ‘experience economy’ to promote a ‘feel good experience’ that helps to sell
(otherwise similar) goods and places: from people dressing up and performing
service, to street theatre and animateurs. Ethnographic research has highlighted the
‘hidden’ or emotional labour in such practices.. The latest version of this is the use of
cities to attract what has been termed the ‘creative class’ because this group of
workers whom work in hit-tech are attractive to new high tech companies whom are
draw to labour pools. The key point that detracts from this work, for the purposes of
this essay, is that it is focused on cultural consumption, not production; and, that
culture is being deployed in an instrumental manner.
The economy of cultural products and service: the
cultural economy
If we turn our attention to the part of the economy dealing with the production of
cultural goods and services, the cultural economy, then we are immediately faced with
two problems. First, what are its boundaries and definitions; and second, why has it
grown? Empirically, these two problems are inter-linked as the taxonomies used for
empirical data collection on economic activities are based upon historically
determined conceptions of the economy which re themselves constructed around
concepts of a normal (old) industrial economy and are intrinsically ill-prepared to
identify ‘newness’. This is a problem associated not only with culture, but one with
new technology based industries, and the service sector more generally.
The first section of this essay has already differentiated the ‘cultural economy’ from
the ‘cultural economy’, the latter would include the cultural dimensions of the whole
economy. Adorno, when he coined the term ‘culture industry’, was seeking to point to
those parts of the economy that were mass producing what he identified as inferior
culture. A radical transposition of the notion was developed by French media and
communications scholars in the 1980s; they sought to take this economy seriously,
and to recognise that the culture industry was legitimate expression of culture and that
its production was ‘plural’ and various: the cultural industries. This notion has been
discussed in the UK (and much copied elsewhere), and underpins the policies of the
1980s for cultural regeneration pursued by UK metropolitan authorities. Conceptually
two lines of emphasis have emerged from this root: first those that stress the textuality
of the cultural industries and have a closer theoretical lineage to media and
communications studies; and, those that stress the production system of cultural
products and services that have a closer alliance with economic geography. Yet
another term has recently become popular with policy makers: the creative industries,
although there are critical differences in the interpretation of this term in practice
usage overlaps.
The cultural production system approach has been proven important for policy
makers; it seeks to join both questions of the ‘breath’ of culture (which activities
should be included: film, television, books computer games, theatre, music, etc.), and
the ‘depth’ of cultural production (which activities are required to produce cultural
outputs: manufacturing, distribution and consumption). Some analyses have
concentrated on the former and operationalised this through counting numbers
involved in artistic occupations, other analyses have explored cultural trade. The
cultural production system approach argues that occupation – as used by Florida –
offers partial analyses, as well as failing to capture the social reproduction of labour
and knowledge in the cultural industries. Andy Pratt has developed a statistical
framework that seeks to both define and operationalise both the breath and depth
definitions which focus on ‘industry’ rather than ‘occupation’ as a fundamental unit of
analysis; it is an approach that has been subsequently taken up by national
governments and UNESCO in the production of so-called ‘mapping documents’. One
outcome of such studies has been the fact that the creative/cultural industries/
economy constitute around 10% of some economies; indeed they are the 3rd major
industry in London. Overlain on this political driven discourse has been a further
confusion concerning the terms the creative industries, or the cultural industries;
moreover the cultural economy and creative economy.
Alongside enumerating and defining the cultural economy has been a debate
concerning its spatiality. The cultural economy has a distinctive geography, one that is
strongly, although not exclusively, articulated to urban areas in the developed world.
A particular policy driven debate has concerned the agglomeration of cultural
industries, so called ‘clusters’. Whilst policy makers have, as with other industries,
sought to promote clusters; these is currently a poor understanding of the process of
interaction at the local scale, empirical work on the cultural economy points to the
role of knowledge, reputation and un-traded dependencies; moreover, that these are
both localised and face-to face, and internationalised through in such nodes. This
articulation of place and globalisation in the cultural economy is taken up in the
debate about cultural industry commodity chains.
Once we have accepted that the cultural economy does exist, and that it has grown
very rapidly from a relatively insignificant economic and cultural low point, we must
consider the question ‘why?’ This is an area of ongoing research. There are two lines
of debate. First, without doubt, arguments concerning the growth of income, leisure
time and the proportion of disposable income spent on culture account for one part of
the ‘demand’. However, to this we need to add the creation of demand through the
development of various means of persuasion (advertising) and the social
transformation wrought by the extension of full time education, and increase
participation in tertiary education. This latter process is linked to the creation of a
cohort of young people with few responsibilities and a considerable amount of money
and time. Added to this economic potential is the creation, from the mid-1950s
onwards, of the social identity of ‘teenager’ that has been heavily inflected with
advertising. Finally, the cultural explosion and liberal forms of artistic expression that
developed in the 1960s. There is not space to explore these linkages, although it goes
without saying that their inter-relationships need care in interpretation.
A second theme of accounts of the emergence and growth of the cultural economy is
via an extension of the work on the post-industrial/ modernisation of society (ref to
post industrial society entry?). Researchers have proposed that there are the
information, knowledge, and creative sectors of the economy constitute the ‘quinary
sector’, succeeding the service sector as the ‘highest stage’ of growth. This line of
argument has been criticised arguing that the linkage to production is empirically
evident (and important) rather than absent, as implied in the post-industrial
conceptualisation.
Beyond these disputes about the long term development of economies and the role of
the cultural economy in such a transformation are a number of important empirical
changes that research is highlighting. First, as noted above, the realisation that the
cultural economy is becoming an important aspect of some developed economies, in
terms of turnover, employment, exports, as well as meaning. Second, as also noted
above, is the fact that the cultural economy does seem to have some particular
patterns and processes of location, practice and organisation. Third, that the nature of
work and employment in these industries is distinctive. Whilst there has been much
discussion about the rise of flexible work and self-employment, the concentration of
freelancing, and casualisation of labour, plus the degree of serial contracting and
project working, found in the cultural economy is distinctive. Researchers are
increasingly exploring these processes, and their variance across both the creative
economy, plus the extent to which they are found in the rest of the economy. Finally,
work on production and commodity chains has highlighted the importance of the
recursive linkages between production and consumption processes and places.
If we add this increasing fragmentation of production processes with the other
characteristic highlighted by traditional media and communications scholars, namely
the degree of media (structural) concentration, and mix in the diverse and unique
spatial clusters explored by geographers, it is clear that the cultural economy will keep
researchers busy for many years to come.
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