The Cultural Economy Moment now in Cultural Science

My paper "The Cultural Economy Moment?", first presented as a keynote at Murdoch University in Perth, is now accessible from the online journal Cultural Science. Thanks to John Hartley, Eli Koger and anonymous referees for feedback on this.

The full paper can be accessed here. The abstract is below:

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.

Creative Suburban Geographies

The Creative Suburban Geographies event was hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation last Thursday (12 November, 2009), and I am pleased to say that the Powerpoint presentations from Alan Davies, Christy Collis and Emma Felton, and Simon Freebody are now available on Slideshare. We will have podcasts available shortly. Thanks to Rebekah Denning, Eli Koger, Courtney O'Connor and Colleen Cook for egetting this together.

I've provided my introductory talk to the session below. Again, a podcast will be available shortly.

Creative Suburban Geographies

Professor Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Introductory presentation to Creative Suburban Geographies: Rethinking the Cultural Geography of Creativity and Creative Cities, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation workshop, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, 12 November 2009.

Today’s event brings together papers and presentations that draw upon the themes of creative cities and creative suburbs, and whether the creative industries develop primarily in one type of urban zone over another. In particular, we are seeking to open up a discussion on whether thinking about creative industries in Australia needs to give more attention to Australia’s outer suburban regions, and what might be the implications of doing so.

Creative industries emerged on the horizon in the late 1990s and early 2000s with an implicitly urban cultural and economic geography. Creative industries were seen as something that were most strongly developed in cities, and particularly in the densely populated inner city areas. In the language of the time, creative industries developed in the parts of creative cities that were attractive to the creative class, who in turn would form creative clusters that would incubate new forms of creative enterprise.

As creative industries were presented as a people-driven, bottom-up alternative to top-down cultural policies driven by nation-states and government arts agencies, this raised the question of how did people form communities, and act collectively to achieve certain types of outcomes? There was a rapid growth of interest in how networks were formed, as a category between that of bureaucratic hierarchies and impersonal markets, and with this was a surge of interest in notions of community, situated knowledge and what Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts have referred to as “organizing for creativity”. 1

The most visible representative of all of this has been the writer Richard Florida, who has given us the term “creative class” and linked growth in the 21st century global economy fundamentally to the attributes of this group and the forms of cultural amenity that they seek from cities. Florida’s work is widely critiqued around the statistics used to measure a creative class and its rise and rise, which can easily sound like most people with a tertiary qualification, but there is no doubt that he has given us a highly influential image of what the 21st century creative worker looks like. Possibly tattooed and lycra-clad, she/he cycles off to new projects, incubating and generating ideas by day and trying out new cultural scenes, small bars or designer drugs by night, keeping a dense network of loose ties, but never becoming too fixed to any one job, place, scene, relationship or set of ideas.

Caricatures aside, Florida’s work draws upon a recognisable and longstanding history of thinking about the modern city. Sometimes termed the “new urbanism”, it draws upon the highly influential visions of cities and their social and cultural role developed by authors such as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. Recalling how central debates about whether the move from the countryside to cities was so central to modern sociology (e.g. Ferdinant Tonnies on gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, Georg Simmel), authors such as Jacobs and Mumford stressed the social and cultural value of cities in the outcomes that arise from proximity, diversity and sociality. The more that people are forced to mix with others who are in some way different to themselves, and the more that the city provides “third spaces” for social interaction outside of work and home, the more dynamic cities will be, and the more conducive they will be to creativity.

Jacobs and Mumford wrote about cities when the issues were not only migration from the countryside, or migration from other parts of the world, but the movement to suburbs. Suburbanisation was a trend of the early 20th century, and accelerated in the period after the Second World War. In his book Suburban Century, which traces 20th century suburbanization and debates about its impact in the United States and England, Clapson identifies Mumford as an exemplary anti-suburbanite:

In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, [a] multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.2

So anti-suburbanism has a long lineage, and when columnists such as The Age’s Catherine Deveny attack the Chadstone Shopping Centre as ‘soul-destroying cathedral to emptiness’, and those who go there as ‘dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul’, it follows a longer and more intellectually respectable tradition.

But we are reminded in Australia that so much that is seen as our contributions to global culture has suburban roots. Australia’s most famous bands, such as AC/DC, INXS and Midnight Oil, came out of a pub-rock culture that was deeply suburban. Our major television exports, Neighbours and Home and Away present images of suburban life that have had international appeal. Kylie Minogue’s trajectory from a mechanic on Neighbours to a global pop princess is a suburban one. From Barry Humphries and the character of Dame Edna Everage, the housewife superstar from Moonee Ponds, to Kath and Kim, the foxy morns of Fountain Gate, Australian humour has drawn from what Humphries termed “the vast suburban tundra”.3 Even Australian cultural studies has a suburban inflection. To take three early landmark works, Meaghan Morris’s “Things to Do With Shopping Cetnres”, Myths of Oz by John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner, and John Hartley’s Tele-ology: Studies in Television, are all dealing at some level with Australian suburban culture.

So suburbanism and anti-suburbanism have sat cheek by jowl in Australia. The historical Graeme Davison suggests that it may have ever been thus. He notes that when Governor Arthur Philip was preparing the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, he instructed that streets be laid out:

… in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and when the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment, which will be sixty feet in front and one hundred and fifty feet in depth. 4

While Governor Philip never used the words “quarter acre suburban block”, he was nonetheless planning for an urban environment where, as Dame Edna would taunt Michael Parkinson on British television 210 years later, ‘In Australia, our houses aren't all joined together like yours to stop them from falling over’. Davison argues that suburbanization has always found a rich response in early Australian history as ‘Australia may be thought of as the farthest suburb of Britain and ambitions for land, space and independence, frustrated in the crowded cities of the homeland, were often realized on the suburban frontiers of Australia’.5 In contemporary multicultural Australia, the aspiration to a detached suburban dwelling across ethnic groups and class divides remains. To take one example, Terence Lee from Murdoch University has discussed the appeal of Perth to Singaporeans, to the point where the term ‘Singaperth” is used in the Straits Times, in terms of the desire to have the sorts of housing that is simply not available on a small and densely populated island, and where ‘Perth might be seen as a “new frontier” for these Singaporeans to strut their creative stuff’.

The Australian Research Council project that inspires today’s symposium has the title Creative Suburbia: A Critical Evaluation of the Opportunities and Scope for Creative Cultural Development in Australia’s Emergent Suburban Communities. The aims of the project have been to:

1. Map and analyse the experience of the creative industries workforce in outer suburban areas, through grounded case studies in the Australian cities of Brisbane and Melbourne;
2. Better understand creative enterprise work practices in Australia’s emergent suburban communities, and the role played by networks and dynamic clusters, through a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies;
3. Identify qualitative cultural factors affecting the employment and productivity of these workers, and the effectiveness of existing mechanisms of government and other forms of support;
4. Address a potential gap in creative industries research and policy literature arising from a primary focus upon inner-urban areas as sites of creativity, drawing upon the techniques and methodologies of cultural studies and cultural geography.

In developing the project, we were very cognizant of the extensive creative industries mapping project that has been conducted through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, in the project involving Stuart Cunningham, Peter Higgs and Simon Freebody. There has also been a significant amount of research being undertaken in the field of urban infomatics, looking at how the increasing ubiquity of digital technology, internet services and location-aware applications in our everyday lives are changing both the visible and invisible infrastructure of cities, led by Marcus Foth, Greg Hearn and a large range of researchers across disciplines and Faculties. We are also pleased to have Alan Davies and Richard Brecknock with us today, who bring extensive understanding and experience of how such trends are developing in Australian cities and internationally, and who have been engaged with policy-makers at local and state government levels in shaping responses to these trends.

Before introducing the first speaker, I’ll conclude with two potential pitfalls that can arise in this area. The first is what I would call suburban realism. Suburban realism had something of a high water mark in Australia between the arrival of the MV Tampa in Australian waters in 2001 and the arrival of Work Choices legislation in Australian workplaces in 2006. It became very popular among conservative politicians in Australia, and was responded to by Labor in electing a leader in Mark Latham who was a self-described “suburban warrior”, and who will be the only Australian political leader to ever identify Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell as his all time favourite musical work.

It championed the folk wisdom of suburban Australia, a world of tradies, ute-men and hairdressers, over the “out of touch elites” of the inner city, the “latte set” who thought that republicanism, refugees and Australia’s cultural standing in the world were more important than Bunnings, Officeworks and plasma TVs from Harvey Norman. The Liberal former member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly, captured suburban realism in her infamous statement that the people of her electorate in Western Sydney were not much interested in what happened at the university located in the region, as her electorate was “pram city”, where people were too busy having babies to worry much about higher education. If the stereotype of suburban Australia as brain dead bogans is not accurate, as the work in this project and elsewhere is finding, there is little point in inverting the stereotype and presenting a hitherto perceived lack as some form of vernacular cultural advantage.

The other potential pitfall is what can be termed suburban romanticism. The trope of ‘romancing the suburbs’ arguably goes back to colonial times in Australia and elsewhere, but it can acquire a new tenacity in the age of creative industries. Chris Gibson, Chris Brennan-Horley, Susan Luckman and Julie Willoughby-Smith found elements of this in their study of creative workforce in Darwin, where the ‘serenity’ of parts of the city could equate with having ‘spaces to think’ that were not possible in more concentrated urban zones.7 It is useful to challenge what is often the relentless urbanism of creative industries and creative cities discourse, not least because it frequently conflates attributes of place with consequences of positioning in global circuits of capital and culture, so that the “global city” status of places such as New York, Los Angeles and London is presented as a result of their people and communities rather than their place in the global economy.

But simply romanticizing the suburbs, no less than demonizing them, has the effect of constructing as homogeneous entities places that are highly diverse. This is one reason why the Creative Suburbia project has chosen a qualitative research methodology, as it allows for responses from those actively engaged in developing networks as creative workers in different Australian suburbs to present experiences, and to codify these in ways that don’t force the outcomes back into pre-existing categories. How to better balance positive and negative perceptions of Australian suburbia, and to challenge one-dimensional stereotypes without presenting a patchwork of ineffable and irreducible difference – these are challenges facing those engaged with researching the cultural economic geography of creative workers in Australian suburbs today.

1 Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts, ‘The Resurgence of Community in Economic Thought and Practice’, in A. Amin and J. Roberts (eds.), Community, Economic Creativity and Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2 Lewis Mumford, The City in History, quoted in Mark Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the United States, Oxford: Berg, 2003, p. 5.
3 Sue Turnbull, “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: From Dame Edna to Kath and Kim”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 11(1), 2008, pp. 15-32.
4 Governor Arthur Philip, Letter to Lord Sydney 1788, quoted in Graeme Davison, ‘The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb’, in L. C. Johnson (ed.), Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities, Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1985, p. 100.
5 Davison, ‘The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb’, p. 102.
7 Chris Brennan-Horley, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson and Julie Willoughby-Smith, ‘GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back Into Ethnographic Mapping', The Information Society 26(2), 2010 (forthcoming).

The Cultural Economy Moment?

The draft of my keynote presentation to "Media Technologies, Community and Everyday Life", histed by the Centre for Everyday Life at Murdoch University in Perth, WA on 2 Septmebrt, 2009, can now be accessed from Scribd here.

Please note that this is a draft completed in the hotel room, and without a Bibliography at this stage. A version will appear on the QUT ePrints site shortly.

The Arts versus Creative Industries?

Marcus Westbury has a discussion in The Age about whether the perceived conflict between "arts for art's sake" and "creative industries" is overstated (link to Marcus's blog, as this doesn't appear to be on The Age online site). I include his discussion below.

One point I would make is that the idea that "the industries will take care of themselves" seems odd to me from a policy point of view. It avoids the question of what policy settings enable cultural production to take place in Australia, particularly in the higher risk and more capital-intensive sectors such as film and television.

We wouldn't assume that the existence of a lot of car enthusiasts give you a car industry, so are we being too nonchalant in assuming that the energy of artists gives you an arts industry. I'd agree with his points about the cultural - and economic - signifgicance of "design, architecture, contemporary music, mass media, digital media and video games".

SHOULD governments fund the arts “for art’s sake”, or should they be developing “creative industries”? It may seem like an abstract philosophical argument but at stake in this heated debate are the reasons why, how and even whether governments fund and support art and culture.

The two camps at times have much in common. They can and do form workable alliances but discussions can degenerate into the kind of hostility that student communists reserve for splinter groups that are less ideologically pure.

Historically, governments funded and promoted the arts for reasons that had little to do with money. Governments supported the arts because it was good for us, or a sign of civilisation, or it asserted our Australianness. The arts made it a better world to live in. Today the role that government plays in the arts is constantly being questioned.

The “creatives” who argue that governments should let go of dated ideas of “The Arts” range from frustrated designers or web workers or architects through to economists, bureaucrats and postmodern academics. They’re supported by some in the high art world who figure that any case for subsidies needs a little economic jargon, the odd research report, and some friendly sound bites about how many direct and indirect jobs the sector supports.

Those who advocate supporting art for art’s sake range from staunch defenders of artistic independence to stridently anti-commercial artists, to the opera lovers, the landed gentry and reflexive defenders of the status quo. They’re supported by every artist and community worker who is sick of justifying self-evidently beneficial projects and programs with elaborate pseudo-economic nonsense for Treasury and political press releases.

To the creative industries crew, the capital “A” Art types look like unreconstructed elitists, with an antique view of what is and isn’t proper art. All the subjective talk of “intrinsic value” seems a lot like code for elevating whatever they are personally into, and getting the Government to underwrite it, no questions asked.

To the capital “A” Art types, the creative industries crew look like the bastard children of shallow pop culture and decades of economic rationalism. They dangerously reduce everything to the dollar and miss the central point that culture is about something bigger than making a buck. They seem destined to stuff culture with the same free market that has so spectacularly stuffed up everything else.

I’ve regularly found myself popping up behind enemy lines on both sides. I alternate between finding both sides compelling and hopelessly and frustratingly wrong.

I believe passionately in the principle of art for art’s sake – and yet I also believe that arts policy is desperately behind the times. The traditional art forms of theatre, dance, classical music, opera and the visual arts still dominate government spending and focus while the so-called “commercial” arts touch our lives far more than the traditional ones.

If we want to make this world a better place, then design, architecture, contemporary music, mass media, digital media and video games have a cultural significance that far outstrips the impact of the high arts. They are art forms, not cash cows. They demand to be taken seriously because of their intrinsic worth and impact. It is an insult and not an elevation to talk of them only in terms of industry development and export earnings.

Just as importantly, any cultural policy motivated by picking economic winners is doomed to fail. You can’t pick the next cultural movement. Last year’s trends are next year’s cliches and any attempt to pick them as policy is likely to go horribly wrong.

The paradox of creative industries is that artists rarely behave like industries. Artists can be good business people but for the great ones, money is rarely what drives them. Thinking of them as economically rational players motivated by the desire to maximise their profits is a recipe for failed industries and terrible art.

Policy needs to celebrate the creative imperative in all its forms. It needs to provide fertile ground for creative people and encourage and support them to take risks, experiment and innovate. It shouldn’t matter whether you are a painter, a sculptor, in a rock band, a theatre maker, an architect or a computer-games designer. The industries will take care of themselves.

Britain's Tories take to creative industries?

Hmm. Not sure what to think here. There will be a change of government in Britain in 2010, so knowing where the Tories are on the creative industries is of interest. At the same time, interestign to see where the Britart generation are ending up.

Are the Tories having their Cool Britannia moment?

5 May 2009: The Guardian

Reports that Tracey Emin may declare her support for the Conservatives could finally give them the cultural credibility they crave.

For more see here.

The Coming Crisis of the Creative Class: Charles Leadbeater on Digital Britain

Would a book on Australian media seem odd if it made no reference to News Corporation, Australia's most globally significant media company?

I mention this because of a recently conversation with Graham Meikle from Stirling University, where he pointed out that a recent collection of essays on The Media in Scotland made no reference to Scotland's most globally significant media company. That company is the Edinburgh-based Rockstar Games, the people behind the wildly successful Grand Theft Auto series.

This continuing aversion to thinking of new media as part of The Media (films, newspapers, TV networks etc. - the 20th century mass media) comes at some cost. Charles Leadbeater indicates this in his recent critique of the Digital Britain policy document released by the UK Government.

According to Leadbeater, Digital Britain works off the premise that wider access to faster broadband will boost demand for the products of Britain's established media and creative industries. But what we know about what people do with faster broadband suggests that this is far from the case - it may in fact accelerate the decline of 20th century Big Media, as more and more people adopt a more do-it-yourself to the media tools and materials available to them.

Far from being a win-win policy, the push to accelerate the spread of the web
through broadband puts political leaders in a painful bind they are keen to overlook.

They want to tell us about a brave new future full of opportunity that broadband will open up. Yet the investment in broadband will only make sense if more consumers use the web to access, create and share media content and services in new ways, exploiting the web’s capacity for interactivity and collaboration.

If more people do that, more intensively, however, it will just accelerate the painful disruption of established media and cultural industries – newspapers, film, television, music recording, books – which rely on a mass market advertising, physical distribution and copyright protection. The incumbents in these industries were already fearful that the web was eating away at their business models. The steep decline in advertising revenues brought on by the recession has only made things more perilous, especially for the weakest players such as Channel 4 and those dependent entirely on advertising revenue such as ITV. Most commercial old media groups are in the midst of painful redundancy programmes. The remaining staff will be asked to do much more with and for less.

Accelerating the spread of broadband will not save these industries but make their
predicaments more difficult. Here’s the truth: plans to invest more in digital
technologies will only pay off if they bring further disruption to economies that are
already in turmoil. We will know when politicians are really serious about the coming digital revolution when they start to admit that it will have to cause significant disruption to established business models if it is to pay off.

This is particularly tricky in the UK. The implosion of financial services, long the
flagship of the services economy, means the cultural and media industries, in which
Britain has a strong position, will take on an even more important role. Many
established businesses in these industries were already alarmed by the impact of the
web on their business models. Now they face the steepest recession in modern history, certainly since the start of commercial television and the rise of the tabloid press. Public spending on arts and culture is likely to further constrained due to the
recession. The creative class which breezed its way through the 1990s is about to hit
the wall. The crisis will not be as sudden and shocking as the one that has hit banking but it could be as profound.

For more read here.

Valuing Australian copyright industries

A report released last month by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Australian Copyright Council, titled Making the Intangible Tangible, the Economic Contribution of Australia’s Copyright Industries, found that Australia’s copyright industries in 2007:

• employed more than 837,000 people (8 percent of the nation’s workforce) – up 21 percent since 1996;
• generated $97.7 billion in economic activity (10.3 percent of GDP) – up 66 percent since 1996; and
• accounted for $6.8 billion in exports (4.1 percent of all exports) – up 6.3 percent since 1996.

According to Ms Libby Baulch, Executive Officer, Australian Copyright Council, copyright was vital for innovative businesses looking to develop new products for the Australian market and for export and that “research has shown that intangible assets, such as intellectual property, represent an increasingly significant proportion of most companies’ value ... The facts are that copyright industries have increased their share of GDP and employment over the past decade while other industries such as agriculture, forestry and fishing have gone backwards.”

These figures would place the copyright industries in Australia slightly below the United States in terms of overall economic contribution (10.3% of GDP as compared to 11.1%).

For more read here.

New UNCTAD database on global cultural trade

UNCTAD has just announced the launch of a global Database on Global Trade in Creative Products. This should provide vital empirical data on longstanding debates about globalization, culture and trade. UNCTAD describes it in these terms.

The databank is intended for use by governments, businesses, academia, the media, international institutions, and members of the creative community, including independent artists and creators. It comprises factual data by country or region on some 235 products in the categories of arts and crafts, the visual arts, audiovisuals and media, and design and creative services.

The statistics are a starting point for improving market transparency and supporting governments in policy-making. They will also facilitate better understanding of the interface between culture, trade and technology as drivers of the creative economy.

Users may view, analyse and browse the data by choosing from tabular reports, country profiles, selected products, key players in major markets, and a variety of tables and charts.

Creative Suburbia?

We are about to commence an Australian Research Council - Discovery grant on Creative Suburbia. The question we are asking is whether more of Australia's creative workforce is located in the outer suburbs of Australia's cities than is commonly assumed in the creative industries literature, which has tended to emphasise the unique powers of inner-city 'buzz'. And if they are, how do they network and organise their professional relationships?

The team involved includes myself, Professor Phil Graham (QUT), Dr. Christy Collis (QUT) and Dr. Mark Gibson (Monash). Dr. Emma Felton will also be working with us on the project. Intended research sites at this stage include the Redcliffe and Springfield areas of South-East Queensland, and the City of Casey in South-East Melbourne.

I'll keep you posted on developments via this blog among other places, but a piece by Shaun Carney in today's The Age gives a sense of some of the issues, althoguh his focus is on petrol prices and politics.

Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor

Shaun Carney
August 13, 2008 - 12:00AM

Last week in this space I argued that cleaner, greener cars should be a more important part of Australia's effort to reduce carbon emissions than an increase in public transport. In making the point, I suggested that people in the inner suburbs who found this shocking could benefit by taking the nearest train to the end of the line to see how hard it is for people in the outer suburbs to do without their cars.

This was a mistake because it implied that Melbourne's outer suburban belt was accessible by rail. In fact, it extends way beyond the metropolitan train system.

Recently, for family reasons, I've been spending time in Carrum Downs. For those who don't know, Carrum Downs is a suburb of about 18,000 people north-east of Frankston. When I knew it back in the 1970s, it was made up of paddocks and a mushroom farm. Now it's so substantial that it has its own secondary school and its retail hub calls itself the Carrum Downs Regional Shopping Centre.

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

There are those who will say that places such as Carrum Downs should never have been developed, that urban sprawl is overloading our resources and making not just Melbourne but Sydney, and probably several other capitals, unworkable. There might be something to that argument but the question is: what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people who already live in Carrum Downs and Caroline Springs and Berwick and Roxburgh Park?

If you live within 15 kilometres of the city and have a tramline running right past your door, or a station nearby, as did many of those readers who were offended by last week's column, you could say it's not your problem. To be a car user is, one letter-writer observed, a planet-destroying "lifestyle choice".

Indeed, you could adopt a position that finds its way into letters to the editor and even the occasional opinion piece: the sneer. This assumes that outer suburbanites are less intelligent, less engaged and generally less enlightened than those of us who are closer to, you know, where it's all happening. From what I can see, it comes more often from the broader leftist end of the political spectrum than from the right.

Aside from being a betrayal of a genuine progressive perspective and just plain wrong, it represents a misreading of where electoral power lies in our society. Governments are made and broken in the outer suburbs. For decades now, the major political parties have relied on their traditional bases of support in the inner and middle suburbs — the older residential belts established up to the Second World War — to act as their electoral bedrock.

...

In Melbourne particularly, some parts of the inner suburbs are becoming very slippery territory for the ALP as the Greens become ever more popular. How does Rudd satisfy inner urban Labor sympathisers who want radical action on climate change while also holding on to shaky Labor voters in the outer suburbs who want something done but aren't so keen on the radical option and don't enjoy being lectured by people who have many more facilities than they have? Increasingly, Rudd presides over two tribes. Come the next election, they might just go to war.

Creative Industries after a decade

This is a presentation I will be giving to QUT students in the Creative Industries: Theory and Policy unit on Thursday 14 August. It draws upon a presentation that I gave to staff and students at Indiana University in the US in May. It aims to outline the complex labour market dynamics of the creative industries, both in term of how they differ from other economic sectors, and how they differ from one another. It draws upon both Australian and UK data, and upon the work undertaken by Stuart Cunningham and Peter Higgs at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Ci Theory And Policy Guest Lecture 14 Aug 08

View SlideShare presentation (tags: states united australia workforce)

SlideShare Link

Creative Industries, Culture and Policy

My reason for being on leave from QUT at present is to complete a book for Sage. The book will be called Creative Industries, Culture and Policy, and is to be published in 2009.

In order to solicit feedback in advance of publication, I am making draft chapters available for comment. These are not to be reproduced, and only to be quoted with permission. I would, however, welcome comment on the blog.

Chapter One deals with the development of creative industries policy in Britain from the mid 1990s to the present. I argue that it has its origin in the 'local socialism' initiatives of various UK local councils in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the question of what may constitute a 'post-industrial' Britain after the economic changes of the Thatcher-Major years.

The chapter look at the original Department of Culture, Media and Sport 'list-based' approach to the creative industries and the criticisms of it. It look at further issues arising, such as regionalisation, the role of the arts, and the significance attached to design in the 2006 Cox Report.

It concludes with a consideration of the approaches taken by NESTA and The Work foundation to capacity building in the creative industries sectors.

If you are interested in downloading the draft chapter, it can be found here.

I would welcome feedback on the chapter. In particular, it does not at this stage have a conclusion, as I am thinking through the relationship of creative industries policy to the current, and seemingly terminal, electoral malaise of Gordon Brown's Labour government, and the question of whether this would continue to be a priority policy area under a future Conservative government.

Forthcoming events

I have now returned to U. Indiana - Bloomington after the International Communications Association conference in Montreal.

Forthcoming events that I will be attending include:

• Creating Value- Between Commerce and Commons - 25-27 June 2008, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Brisbane, Australia. This conference is being hosted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.
• Power and Place, the Australia and New Zealand Communications Association Conference - 9-11 July 2008, being held at the Duxton Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand, and being hosted by Massey University.
  

For those planning ahead for 2009, a series of important event will be happening in Australia in July. I will be organising the 2009 ANZCA Conference in Brisbane, which provisionally has the dates of 8-11 July and will be at the Creative Industries Precinct, QUT Kelvin Grove. The working title is "Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship".

This will coincide with:

• 2009 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program to be held at QUT in Brisbane from 5-18 July. The contact for OII 2009 (which will be in Winter rather than summer in the Southern Hemisphere) is Dr. Marcus Foth.
  
• 2009 ICA Regional Conference to be held in Melbourne from July 16-17. The conference will be titled Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalization and National Identity, and the contact is Professor Ingrid Volkmer. A call for abstracts will be issued shortly.
  

The combination of events should lead to an attractive group of speakers coming from outside of Australia and New Zealand in July of next year.

Creative Economy 2008 - New UNCTAD Report

A new report by the United Nations Commission on Trade, Aid and Development has come out called Creative Economy 2008. It provides the useful compendium yet of both thinking around this topic and statistical evidence from countries throughout the world. It also points to the next stage in the debate around creative industries, which is its implications for developing countries.

Creative Industries presentation in Bloomington, Indiana

I am currently on leave from Q.U.T., and based at Indiana University, in the Department of Telecommunication.

On Friday May 2 I did a presentation to staff and doctoral student in the Department on creative industries a decade after the concept first emerged in Britain through the Blair Government's Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

I made extensive use of the statistical data developed by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, by Peter Higgs and Stuart Cunningham.

A copy of the powerpoints of this presentation can be found here.

The presentation was timely, as the Department is considering a renaming in light of its shifting priorities, towards the games and digital content industries. Creative industries is one of the alternative names being considered.

My thanks to Mark Deuze for organising this event for me. Good news for Mark as he had a personal promotion confirmed that day