Cursus Doelstellingen:
1. De belangrijkste concepten uit de culturele economie en sociologie reproduceren
die relevant zijn voor het bestuderen van de culturele en creatieve industrieën.
2. Begrijpen hoe de organisatie van de culturele en creatieve sector mensen
beïnvloedt die betrokken zijn in deze sector, en hoe culturele en creatieve
producten die in de CCI geproduceerd worden consumenten bereiken.
3. Kritisch analyseren van hedendaagse trends en empirische verschijnselen op het
gebied van culturele en creatieve industrieën.
Week 1: introductie: Hesmondhalgh
Leerdoel:
- De belangrijkste kenmerken en definities van de culturele en creatieve
industrieën identificeren
Hesmondhalgh : focus on patterns of change/continuity in the cultural industries
Why do the Cultural Industries matter?
● The cultural industries make and circulate texts
○ That influence our understanding of the world
○ Contribute to our sense of self
● The cultural industries manage creativity and knowledge
○ Concerned with the management and selling of a particular kind of work
○ Since the REN and romanticism: art seen as the higher form of creativity
○ Marxism: art is not different than other work
■ Use symbolic creativity instead of art
■ And symbol creators for artists
○ Creativity has always been around, but its management and circulation
have taken different forms in different societies
■ In Europe 19th century: patronage system, which led to cultural
industries emerging
○ The cultural industries are ambivalent; much inequality
○ More autonomy than in other industries
○ Circulation over production
○ Main interest: how production relates to human experience of culture and
knowledge
● The cultural industries are agents of economic, social and cultural change
○ Digitalisation caused an economy directed to niche markets: small
companies challenge big businesses
Er is veel veranderd sinds de jaren ‘80 (door economische veranderingen):
- Economische veranderingen
- Werk is anders georganiseerd (conglomeraten (Disney) die in verschillende
subsectoren werken) meer invloed op hoe we over de wereld denken
- Technologie
- Globalisering: afname VS dominantie
- Beleid en regulering: meer beslissingen op supranationaal niveau, EU, globale
spelers (facebook), opwaarderen van wijken met de CCI
- Teksten: er is meer overlap, connecties tussen subsectoren, focus op advertising
Dingen die hetzelfde bleven:
- Pre-internet industrieën (tv, uitgeverijen, muziek, beeldende kunst)
- Star system
, - VS is de primaire producent van culturele producten
De CCI bevindt zich tussen creatief/cultureel en commercieel/industrieel
Matters of definition:
1. Culture: the signifying system through which necessarily a social order is
communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored.
a. Institutions involved in the production of social meaning (communicate to
an audience, create texts)
i. Texts: balance between functional and communicative aspects
b. Cultural industries: “deal primarily with the industrial production and
circulation of texts and centrally reliant on the work of symbol creators”
i. Interact with each other (competition for the same resources)
ii. Linked production system
2. Peripheral cultural industries:
a. Reach fewer people and less social and cultural influence
b. Limited reproduction
3. Borderline cases: (share features of the cultural industries, but differ too much)
a. Consumer electronics/cultural industry hardcore
b. Information technology (engineers dominate) (like computer hardware)
c. The internet industries
d. Fashion
e. Sport (improvised, competitive, unlike symbol-making)
4. Google or Apple is not a cultural-industry company
a. Not involved in the production of texts or content
Some objections to the definitions and assumptions employed here
- Symbolic creativity takes place in many industries
- But: in the cultural industries: focus on activities centrally involved with the
production of artefacts that are primarily composed of symbols and other
types of social activity
- Focus on symbolic creativity ignores the technical workers
- But: they are often better off, its only to understand conditions of cultural
work in relation to the particular nature of that work, as the production of
culture
Throsby: ‘concentric circles’ model of cultural industries
- Centre: greatest ratio of creative to commercial goals
- = the core creative arts (music, drama, literature)
- The outside: highest commercial content (fashion, advertising)
- ‘Creative ideas and influences in the core diffuse outwards through the concentric
circles’
- Creativity can only come from outside the commercial industries (hesmondhalgh
does not agree)
Alternative terms:
1. Media industries
2. Information industries
3. The leisure industries
4. Entertainment industries
, 5. Creative industries
Culture industrie draws more attention to the historical importance in affection relations
between culture and economics, texts and industry, meaning and function. And it refers to
a traditional way of thinking.
Adorno & Horkheimer from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory: The Culture Industry
- Later: the culture industries
- Pessimistic view on the industrialisation of culture
Miege: cultural industries are innovative
- Complex, ambivalent, contested
Industries that make texts: The distinctive features
1. Problems:
a. Risky business
i. Because audiences use it in unpredictable ways
b. Creativity vs commerce
i. Relative autonomy: people need to be paid for their work, needed
to understand the distinctive nature of cultural production
c. High production costs and low reproduction costs
i. High fixed costs and low variable costs (even stronger through
digitalisation)
ii. High ratio of fixed to variable costs: big hits are very profitable
1. Strong oriëntation towards ‘audience maximisation’
d. Semi-public goods (non-rival); need to create scarcity,
i. Limit access
2. Responses:
a. Misses are offset against hits by building a repertoire
i. overproduction
b. Concentration, integration and co-opting publicity, all leading to bigger
companies with more power. Cultural companies have a high failure rate,
because they can’t spread risk
i. Horizontal integration
ii. Vertical integration
iii. Internationalisation
iv. Multisector and multimedia integration (cross-promotion)
v. Co-opt
c. Artificial scarcity
i. Vertical integration
ii. Advertising, limiting the relative importance for profits of the sale of
cultural products
iii. Copyright, prevent people from copying
iv. Limiting access to reproduction, making copying not easy
d. Formatting: stars, genres and serials (to limit risk)
i. Star system: associating names with texts
ii. Genre: what the audience can expect
iii. Serial: where authorship and genre are less significant
e. Loose control of symbol creators: tight control of distribution and marketing
, i. Symbol creators have considerable autonomy in the production
process, more than in other industries
ii. Independent companies do the production
iii. Tighter control over circulation (reproduction, distribution,
marketing) than over production
1. Achieved by vertical integration
The collective nature of these characteristics is important to distinguish cultural industries.
This helps to understand the production and consumption of culture. Cultural industry
companies respond in particular ways to perceived difficulties of making profits. (important
for change and continuity)
Lecture 1: Wat zijn de CCI?
Vroeg was creativiteit iets goddelijks. Vanaf 1900 betekende het iets maken, kunst. En
sinds eind jaren ‘80 werd creativiteit gezien als bron van een groeiende economie.
Hierdoor werd het erg interessant voor beleidsmakers.
1. Culture industry: sociologen Adorno en Horkheimer leverden kritiek op de VS waar
de kunst werd geïndustrialiseerd waardoor het haar waarde verloor. De
cultuurindustrie werd door hen gezien als iets negatiefs.
2. Cultuur industrieën: in de jaren ‘60 en ‘70 zeiden Franse sociologen dat er niet
slechts een industrie is, maar dat het complexer is dan dat. Miège vond dat
Adorno en Horkheimer te negatief waren over de cultuurindustrie, want er zijn dus
verschillende industrieën met elk hun eigen logica. Je kan niet iets zeggen over de
hele culturele sector, alle verschillende industrieën hebben een andere vorm van
werken.
3. Creatieve industrieën: is nu een van de topsectoren in Nederland om de
kenniseconomie verder te brengen. Volgens Hesmondhalgh komt dit door de
politiek-historische context van de jaren ‘80. In Nederland was toen het kabinet-
Lubbers. Marktgeoriënteerde context. Invsteringen in cultuur moest iets opleveren.
Cultuur werd gelinkt aan subsidieslurpers, terwijl creativiteit kon leiden tot groei en
innovatie.
Definities van de CCI
Hesmondhalgh vind dat je naar het primaire doel van een ding van de CCI moet kijken,
wat sociale betekenis communiceren is. ‘Texten’ zijn culturele artefacten.
Volgens Hesmondhalgh horen de volgende sectoren bij de CCI:
- Broadcasting
- Film
- Music
- Print+ electronic publishing
- Video+ computer games
- Advertising
- Web design
Dit zijn de kernindustrieën,, de belangrijkste want ze produceren teksten met als
primair doel het overdragen van sociale betekenis, maar ook het industriële aspect
hebben dat het doel reproductie is.