Abstract
How can we most usefully appropriate the rhetorics of the new economy to advance a contemporary understanding of the production and consumption of creative and informational content? Can the concept of creativity be broadened, but not so much that it becomes everything and nothing – the newest business lit fad and just as ephemeral as the rest – such that claims for its role as a driver of economic growth can be sustained? Can the analytical and research context for ‘experiential’ or ‘cultural’ consumption – core business for cultural, communications and media studies academics – be helpfully developed through new economy models? This piece takes an explicitly policy-orientated line and tendentiously tracks a genealogy and some possible preferred futures for the creative industries beyond their framing within a cultural policy problematic. I track the fate of creative and informational content as it passes across three grids of understanding: ‘culture’, ‘services’ and ‘knowledge’. These grids also serve as historical and/or possible rationales for state intervention in the creative industries as well as industry’s own understandings of their nature and role.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.