Cultural Industries, summary of all the articles
WEEK 1.
Modeling the cultural industries.
Throsby, D (2008).
International Journal of Cultural Policy, 14(3), pp. 217–232.
This paper begins by discussing the way in which an economic approach to interpreting the scope of the creative and
cultural industries can lead to a reasonable basis for defining them. It then goes on to examine the content of six distinct
models of these industries, asking the question: is it possible to find a common core group of industries on which all of the
models agree? The paper then considers the implications of the models for economic analysis of the cultural sector, and
finishes with some conclusions for cultural policy
How to define the cultural industries? Different emphases in defining them have led to the construction of
different models of the cultural production sector of the economy and hence to a different array of specific
industries which are contained within the sector. This implies not just differing estimates of the contribution of
the cultural industries to output and employment in the economy but also significant differences in the way
economic analysis can be applied to the cultural sector as a whole. As a consequence, policy implications also
vary depending on the used model.
First, the cultural industries term appears and later on, the creative industries one.
There are many groups of creative industries and the cultural industries are a subset of them.
Cultural industries:
➢ Those industries that combine the creation, production and commercialisation of contents
which are intangible or cultural in nature (UNESCO)
➢ Typically protected by copyright and they can take the form of goods or services’.
➢ Central in promoting and maintaining cultural diversity and in ensuring democratic access to
culture.
➢ Culture can be interpreted either in an anthropological sense meaning shared values,
customs, ways of life, etc. or in a functional sense meaning activities such as the practice of
the arts. Whichever of these notions of culture is accepted, the concept of cultural products
can be articulated: artworks, music performances, literature, film and television programs,
videogames and so on share the following characteristics:
○ they require some input of human creativity in their production;
○ they are vehicles for symbolic messages to those who consume them, i.e. they are
more than simply utilitarian, they serve some larger communicative purpose;
○ they contain, at least potentially, some intellectual property that is attributable to
the individual or group producing the good or service.
➢ They have cultural value in addition to whatever commercial value they may possess, and
this cultural value may not be fully measurable in monetary terms. That is, they are valued
for social and cultural reasons that complement or transcend purely economic reasons (e.g.
spiritual concerns, aesthetic considerations, community understanding of cultural identity).
Creative industries:
➢ Products that require some reasonably significant level of creativity in their manufacture,
without necessarily satisfying other criteria that would enable them to be labelled ‘cultural’.
1
, ➢ So it also included products like advertising and software, which can be seen as essentially
commercial products, but involve some level of creativity in their production.
Models of the cultural industries, classification system:
➢ UK-DCMS model
○ Creative industries are defined as those requiring creativity, skill and talent, with
potential for wealth and job creation through exploitation of their intellectual
property.
○ It included 13 industries and all of them could be considered cultural, but the UK has
preferred to call them creative to mark a shift in policy away from the arts.
➢ Symbolic texts model
○ It differentiates between high and popular culture on the grounds of their different
power dynamics in regard to social class, gender, and race/ethnicity.
○ Shows the processes by which a society’s culture is formed and transmitted. It
happens via the industrial production, dissemination and consumption of symbolic
texts or messages, which are transmitted by means of various media such as film,
broadcasting and the press.
○ It places greatest emphasis on those industries that define popular culture and that have the strongest
orientation towards industrial modes of production; these industries form the core of this model and
the creative or ‘high’ arts are relegated to peripheral status.
➢ UIS model (unesco institute for statistics)
○ The model identifies five ‘core cultural domains’: cultural and natural heritage /
performance and celebration / visual arts, crafts and design / books and press / and
audiovisual and digital media.
■ It also extends to the ‘related domains’ of tourism, sport and leisure.
➢ Americans for the arts odel
○ This model is based on identifying businesses involved with the production and
distribution of the arts, labelled as ‘arts-centric businesses.
○ The model was developed with the purpose to demonstrate the economic
importance of the arts in the US.
➢ WIPO model
○ This model is based on industries involved directly or indirectly in the creation,
manufacture, production, broadcast and distribution of copyrighted works.
○ It focuses on intellectual property as the embodiment of the creativity used in the
making of the goods and services included in the classification.
○ A distinction is made between industries that actually produce the intellectual
property, and those that are necessary to transmit the goods and services to the
consumer (interdependent).
○ A further group of ‘partial’ copyright industries comprises those where intellectual
property is only a minor part of their operation.
➢ Concentric circles model
○ This model is based on the proposition that it is the cultural value of cultural goods
that gives these industries their most distinguishing characteristic; thus the more
pronounced the cultural content of a particular good or service, the more included
the industry should be (Throsby 2001, 2008).
2
,○ The model says that creative ideas originate in the core creative arts in the form of
sound, text and image. Then, these ideas diffuse outwards through a series of layers
or ‘concentric circles’. The more one moves further outwards from the center, the
more the content goes from cultural to commercial.
○ By contrast to the Symbolic Texts Model, the concentric circles model places the
creative arts at its centre, because it interprets them as producing output of high
cultural content.
3
, Depending on the chosen model, different industries are included in the cultural sector. Then,
estimates of the size and economic contribution of the cultural industry sector to the national
economy will differ significantly between the models.
- e.g. WIPO is the most wide-ranging of the three mentioned models and it implies estimates
of the economic size of the cultural industries that are more than twice as great as those
implied by the most narrowly-defined model, the concentric circles model.
This has an immediate implication for the formulation of cultural policy. The economic importance of
the cultural sector depends according to the model, then:
- If the cultural industries are interpreted primarily in economic terms, the policy spotlight will
clearly fall on those sectors producing the greatest growth rates in employment, value of
output, exports, etc.
- If cultural policy is directed more strongly towards achieving a government’s artistic or
cultural objectives, a different configuration of the cultural industries will be preferred, and a
different group of core activities will be identified.
- A balanced policy mix would be the one in which both economic and cultural value are given
equivalent weighting.
Is it possible to define a common ‘core’ that might enable a universally agreed definition of the
cultural industries? If we examine the symbolic texts, the concentric circles, and the WIPO models,
we see that they include similar industries but when it comes to defining the ‘core’ cultural ones, the
models differ widely and only film, video and music appear in the core of all three models.
6 economic approaches to analyzing the cultural industries
These are some of the ways in which the tools of economic analysis can be applied to the cultural
industries, bearing in mind their different interpretations depending on the discussed models.
1. Industrial organization theory
- The most basic form of economic analysis is simply to measure the standard
economic variables for which data are routinely collected for all industries: gross value
of production, value added, fixed capital formation, levels of employment of different categories of
labour, business concentration and so on.
- structure: characteristics of markets (degree of seller/buyer concentration, product differentiation,
entry/exit conditions).
- conduct: how firms behave in setting prices and output levels, marketing their products and competing.
- performance: how efficient they are adjusting to demand in terms of cost, price and quality.
- These sorts of analyses are likely to be relevant primarily to those cultural industry models
oriented towards the commercial production of cultural goods and services (WIPO) but can
also be useful for not-for-profit arts and areas like that.
2. Value chain analysis
- One of the most straightforward and widely recognised methods for analysing the
structure and function of the creative industries.
- The initial creative ideas are combined with other inputs to produce a creative good
or service which may then pass through further value-adding stages until it enters
marketing and distribution channels, and eventually reaches the final consumer.
- For some cultural goods this apparently simple process can become more complex, as the
creative idea is transformed or reformatted at successive stages. Thus the overall chain can
4
