The cultural industries: an introduction
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2015
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Oakley, K.
O'Connor, J.
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Book chapter
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Source details - Title: The Routledge companion to the cultural industries, 2015, Ch.1, pp.1-32
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Twenty years ago publishing a book on the cultural industries would first, no doubt, demand some kind of reckoning with Adorno’s monolithic Culture Industry. One might point to their pluralisation and fragmentation – into the cultural industries – alongside continuing processes of agglomeration and concentration. It would involve recognition of their more contradictory and ambiguous relationship to those wider processes of power and control articulated within and through their structures and products. This work of retrieval and complication, done under the broad rubric of the political economy of culture, communications and/or media, had been under way in North America, France and the United Kingdom (UK) since the 1970s (Mosco, 1996). Unlike other approaches – notably that of cultural studies – the political economy approach was less concerned with the high/low, art/commerce distinction than it was with the role of media and communications systems in the reproduction of a complex modern (capitalist) society. It wanted to know how, and on what grounds, might the modern democratic state organise or regulate such a system, and what complex social, economic and political considerations needed to be made in the light of this. It was very much engaged – not implacably opposed but engaged – in the heated debates about the de-or re-regulation of the broadcast media and new kinds of commercial and public sector channels coming into being across the 1990s (Hesmondhalgh, 2013a). Elsewhere the reckoning with the Culture Industry took a local turn. A book on the cultural industries in the mid-1990s might evoke an eclectic new set of producers and intermediaries who mixed art, popular culture, technology and a kind of streetwise entrepreneurialism quite tangential to the formal structures of the arts funding system (Wynne and O’Connor, 1996; Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999). Community arts and new social movements combined with a contemporary popular culture (animated by the spirit of cultural studies) to embrace an urbanism re-emerging from under the rusted hulks of the Fordist city (Bianchini and Parkinson, 1993). These announced a new potential for local re-invention. By the mid-1990s consultancy and local government reports in the UK were identifying this new breed of cultural producers as being in possession of the kind of qualities required for a transformed city – a city with the potential to take its future in its own hands, no longer determined by the accidents of geography and geology. Autopoesis rather than autonomy was the watchword, as endogenous growth based on re-inventing and mobilising existing strengths became an alternative to the disempowering script of attracting mobile global capital.
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Copyright 2015 Kate Oakley and Justin O’Connor for selection and editorial matter; individual contributions the contributors