Cultural industries defined

Behind the term ‗cultural industries‘ is the assumption that culture is a distinct sphere of human life.

Throsby (2001, pp. 3-4) gives a thorough review of the meanings of the term ‗culture‘. The original meaning of culture is related to the tillage of the soil and later on, culture has referred to the cultivation of the mind and the intellect. Since the early nineteenth century the meaning of culture has shifted from individual to community characteristics. Thus, culture can signify the intellectual and spiritual development of a civilisation as a whole or describe the entire way of life of a people or of a society. Culture can also have a more functional meaning and refer to ―certain activities and their products that have to do with the intellectual, moral and artistic aspects of human life‖. (ibid.) These definitions of culture have a positive feel to them but the same does not go for the ideas behind the emergence of the cultural industries concept.

The term ‗culture industry‘ was first introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer (2008, first published in 1944) in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. In addition to introducing the commercial production of culture as a topic worth studying, the text laid the groundwork for critical theory in social philosophy. Adorno and Horkheimer thus saw the culture industry as a system designed to manipulate the masses. For them, films, radio and magazines operated a monopoly that produced uniformity, manipulation and rubbish that no one was able to escape (pp. 120-167). Similar threats have been discussed by UNESCO (1982, p. 9-10) where emphasis is put on cultural imperialism.

They take the view that the dissemination of cultural products from a few industrialised countries throughout the world is an issue of economic, political and cultural power exercised on the masses in order to gain economic profits or social and political control. A good example of this rhetoric is Przeclawski (1982, p. 68) who warns us of the threat of the imperialism of the mass media and the neo-colonialism through low quality entertainment programmes.

There is also empirical work that concurs with Adorno and Horkheimer. For example, from the European viewpoint de Grazia (1989) discusses the relationship of mass culture and sovereignty in the case of American films brought to Europe between 1920 and 1960. From the Asian viewpoint, Jin (2007) finds that even though Korean popular culture, such as films, TV series and music, has become dominant in the East and South East Asia the power of American cultural imperialism is still strong. Thus, the concern is with the ―diffusion of dominant culture‖ (Throsby 2001, p. 156-7) and dominant means American. On the other hand, Burnett (1996, p. 10) states that it is no longer fruitful to talk about American cultural imperialism as the European and Japanese companies have proven to be at least as imperialistic as the American ones.

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Opposed to the cultural pessimism argument of imperialism and the manipulation of masses is the cultural optimism argument according to which cultural industries give people what they want (see Hesmondhalgh 2002, p. 79). In line with cultural optimism Cowen (2000, p. 1) argues that ―the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of coexisting artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the eclipsed past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it.‖ Thus the market is seen as a vehicle for various cultural visions to reach their audiences. DiMaggio (1977, p. 437) summarises these two views as

―the public will lap up whatever is offered‖ and ―what the public wants, the public will get‖. He finds that both of these views ignore the role of profit-making firms that produce popular culture items like books, films, records and television programmes, and the constraints of the marketplace that the firms need to face. Market structures and organisational environments of specific industries are stronger determinants of the degree of massification of culture than the masses or their masters (DiMaggio 1977, p. 488). According to this view the products of cultural industries are not simply determined by demand or by the powerful, but by the degree of concentration within particular industries and by the decision-making procedures in the firms. Much of the research reviewed in this chapter rests on this assumption. The cultural pessimism view has also been attacked with the inherent characteristics of cultural products. Gottdiener (1985), Blythe (2001) and Aoyama (2007) all argue that consumers take active and creative roles as users of mass-culture and interpret cultural commodities as they please.

In addition to the optimism-pessimism polarity and its middle ground, writing on cultural industries can be classified into four distinct views (Jeffcutt et al. 2000). The Marxist view corresponds closely to the pessimism argument and sees cultural industries as an evil capitalist scheme to organise leisure time in the same way as mass production has organised working life. The economic view sees cultural industries as just another branch of industry and commerce. This includes both the cultural optimism of capitalist markets as well as the industry structure and economic constraints view. The socio-political view sees culture as something that governments should invest in to gain both financial and social returns. Finally, the romantic view holds that culture is an

―inoculation against industrialism‖ and thus cultural industries is a contradiction in terms. These views will be referred to later in the chapter.

The economic view of cultural industries has been adopted in cultural economics, or the economics of the arts, which has become a distinctive and legitimate sub-field of economics. Many writers (e.g. Blaug 2001; Throsby 2001; Towse 2003a) see the origin of cultural economics in Baumol and Bowen‘s (1966) seminal text on the inability of the cultural industries to reach efficiency gains similar to other industries and the inevitable increase in the prices of cultural offerings. This idea is generally known as Baumol‘s cost disease and is still under active debate. Many efficiency improvements, such as technological advances including paper production, printing and Internet in distributing the written word as well as recording and radio in reaching larger audiences for musical acts, have been argued to increase efficiency and help the cultural industries to escape the cost disease (e.g. Cowen 2000, p. 21; Throsby 2001, p. 119). The cost disease has, however, become only one stream of the diverse field of cultural economics.

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It is characteristic of cultural economics that there is no single dominant paradigm. Blaug (2001) classifies cultural economics research into nine different themes:

1. Taste formation 2. Demand and supply 3. Industrial organisation 4. The art market

5. Economic history of the arts 6. Artist‘s labour markets 7. Baumol‘s cost disease 8. Public subsidies for the arts

These themes are all interconnected. For example, Baumol‘s cost disease, industrial organisation and public subsidies all have an effect on the labour market. The field of cultural economics may be diverse and colourful, but two remarks on the whole can be made. Firstly, there has been an overtly active interest on the working of the fine art market (e.g. Chanel 1995; Frey and Eichenberger 1995;

Gerardvaret 1995; Higgs and Worthington 2005). This is because paintings and other collectibles present an extreme case of non-homogeneous commodity, have the characteristics of financial instruments and data is available from auctions (see Throsby 2001, p. 123). Furthermore, cultural economists have directed their attention to highbrow culture such as performing arts at the expense of lowbrow culture offered by pop music and television (Hesmondhalgh 2002, p. 28). Secondly, cultural economists are working mainly with equilibrium models (Tepper 2002). ―They are interested in applying standard neoclassical models to questions about how prices are determined and the extent to which markets for cultural goods are efficient.‖ (p. 161) Thus the interest is seldom in how markets and the organisation of industries change. This limits the applicability of cultural economics to the research task at hand. The concepts and ideas of cultural economics need some development to be useful here.

In the field of sociology cultural industries have been handled under the ‗production of culture‘

rubric. Burnett (1996, pp. 67-68) lists six issues that the production of culture model concentrates on:

1. Technology 2. Law

3. Market

4. Industry structure 5. Organisational structure 6. Occupational careers

These issues are very much overlapping with the themes of cultural economics. However, the two approaches differ due to their parent disciplines. Cultural economics concentrates on equilibrium models and welfare gains or losses, whereas the production of culture perspective concentrates on production processes and the route of the cultural offering from the artist to the consumer. Hirsch

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(1972b) emphasises the division of cultural organisations into producers and distributors. The former include book publishers, theatre companies, record producers and magazines whereas the latter include television, films, radio and newspapers. Peterson and Anand (2004, p. 311) define the focus of the production of culture perspective to be on ―how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved.‖

Such studies include, for example, Denisoff (1975) and Negus (1992) on music and Storper (1989), Aksoy and Robins (1992) as well as Lampel and Shamsie (2003) on film. A more specific interest of the production of culture perspective is the relationship between industry concentration and product diversity (Burnett 1996, p. 69). Such studies have been undertaken mostly concerning the music industry (e.g. Peterson and Berger 1975; Lopes 1992). This stream of research is important for the study of industry dynamics and will be returned to later.