The Cultural Economy Moment?

Abstract

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.

Building Political Economic Literacy in an Unexpected Place

“…10 See Flew (2009) for a useful overview of strands of this work from a cognate cultural studies perspective. 11 See Thrift (2008, pp.…”

Re-making a place-of-memory: The competition between representativeness and place-making knowledge in Gwangju, South Korea

“…Working on wounded places is critical in examinations of the politics of memory because they are ‘both a communal reminder of loss and a personal reserve for “constructive forgetting”’ (Till, 2008). Culture-led urban regeneration plans for places of collective memory, such as that focused on Gwangju (see below) become battlegrounds among victims, the government and experts for engaging in culture (Du Gay and Pryke, 2002; Flew, 2009; Shin and Stevens, 2013; Yúdice, 2003).…”

Young Canadians’ Apprenticeship Labour in User-Generated Content

“…While Bourdieu's framework admittedly reflects a specific historical context (1960s France), his characterization of the new cultural intermediaries remains useful for conceptualizing culturalized working practices as part of a larger, structured field of cultural production based mainly upon class origins. This broad "culturalization" of the economy forms the basis for the organizing concept of "cultural economy" (Flew, 2009) and is described by Paul du Gay (1997) in terms of how culture (language, meaning, and representation) is increasingly central to understanding economic life and identities. Du Gay defines the culturalization thesis according to its three main postulates: 1) that the global power of the culture industries (i.e., media conglomerates) has steadily grown; 2) that an increased production of cultural goods and aestheticization of banal products corresponds with increased influence of advertising and design, in concert with the development of flexible specialization in manufacturing; and 3) that rising notions of business culture or workers' identification with the firm serve to improve corporate functioning.…”