Summary of interventions and round table on the theme:
Cultural or creative industries: field and characteristics
Xavier Greffe, Professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
Defining the part played by culture in the concert of economic activities has always been a challenge. Perhaps the first problem is to know whether we are dealing with a sector, or with a dimension of the economy;
Three alternative approaches to the place of culture
There are three approaches to the analysis of the link between culture and the economy, as Stuart Cunningham explained in his preface to The Cultural Economy[1].
The first and most traditional approach is to consider culture as a real sector of the economy, yet a particularly fragile one. A number of arguments can be advanced along these lines, in particular the problems of insufficient productivity gains relative to changing production costs, which means that this fragile sector has to seek reasons to justify fund transfer to it for its benefit. To do this, emphasis is often laid on the fact that culture produces social values. But to demonstrate this is an exercise fraught with difficulty.[2]
The second approach is to affirm that culture is, as always, a sector of the economy, but not fragile and on the contrary, highly promising. Why? According to this idea, very much in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s, the sector is labour-intensive, and as such it potentially affords people a number of quality, stable employment opportunities on good pay. In a number of European countries, rather than conceive of a sector-based approach (theatre, opera), the notion of cultural industry has on occasion become the dominant thinking. This concept is also linked to the theme of the creative industries. This approach has more particularly become the paradigm whereby culture is analysed within European institutions, and according to which creativity represents the innovative aspect of the cultural industries.
The third approach is entirely different, and consists of saying that culture is not a sector of the economy, but makes up a dimension of the economy, being fertile soil for creativity, for the creative economy, and that culture needs to be seen through the prism of that creative economy. But what exactly is the creative economy? What is this dimension creative of the economy?
Social networks as a criterion of the creative economy
Today, when we seek to identify the creative economy, among the numerous existing criteria available, the one that tends to be most widely adopted by the economists is that of the complex social network, which informs the economists’ approach to the users or consumers, and makes sense from the point of view of the producers and workers in that economy, including the creative artists themselves. The criterion of complex social network refers to the fact that no actor bases his/her activity, nor makes choices, in a manner which independent of a number of other actors, in both the early and later stages of the productive process. This brings into play different theories, in sociology, the theory of the weak link, and, according to the economists, of contemporary evolutionary theory. If we accept the criterion of the complex social network, a dichotomy can to a degree be seen to exist, between that part of economic life where choices may be risky but are reliant on a number of mechanisms relatively easily identifiable and controllable by an isolated and independent actor, in contradistinction to that whole other portion of the economy, where there is no identifiable mechanism to coordinate and orient choices.
The second question is to determine the reason why culture occupies the place it does. Culture remains the major producer of signs and values; it defines the standards of creation. Culture is also a workshop for processes involving recognising needs and identifying standards. Culture can be used for analytical purposes, and in this respect, it is valuable for all activities. This is the third possible link between culture and the economy.
Is culture an early stage or late stage process in the creative economy?
The question that arises now is the value of exploring the concept of the creative industries, as an extension of culture, particularly from the point of view of the machinery of government and statistical analysis. On the other hand, what is the value of considering culture as a projection of the creative economy? The relative merits of the two approaches depend on cost benefit analysis.
The first approach is to consider that the inner core of the creative industries is made up of the industries of culture, reliant on artistic talent as their foundation, and that this inner core is capable of extension. John Hopkins –over and above being an author, was also a defender and so to speak, the father of the definition of the creative industries, adopted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the United Kingdom in 1998– believed that the rights of artistic and intellectual property were the foundation of contemporary society, or the currency of the creative cultural industries. The approach however does present us with three difficulties:
– the first is the difficulty of limiting the field itself, once creativity becomes the criterion of definition of creative industry. For example, some Australian studies currently talk about ‘creative’ employment and ‘creativity’ in hospitals.
–the second difficulty relates to rights of intellectual property, which subtend all of the debate on the creative industries: what limits should be fixed on the recognition and application of rights of intellectual property? This second is a particularly delicate point. In France, for example, the handicraft and specialist craft businesses in the artistic field come under the Secretary of State for Trade, and not the Minister of Culture. Hence the 110,000 persons working in the specialist manual art trades and handicraft industries (with a few exceptions) have no rights to intellectual property in their output, and cannot protect their creative work by copyrighting. In statistical terms, are not even in the field of culture. But today the frontier between an artist and a craftsman working in the art field is difficult to lay down, to say the least
–the third difficulty is in the nature of the jobs involved. The greater the number of creative industries accepted as being in more sectors of the economy, the more the notion of artistic talent is attenuated. The policies that are supportive of the creative industries are of course the launch of small and medium sized companies (SMEs), policies for their "sustainability", nurturing the viability of newly founded SMEs etc. But these are not necessarily policies attuned to the training or even the protection of the revenues of the artistic talents of those working in these companies, in some cases at least.
The alternative is to make an epistemological leap. This would mean revising a number of approaches and notions applied to culture, from the point of view of the concept of creativity. Here culture would be situated in the world of creativity, alongside other activities, but with actors moving from one field of activity to another. A number of international studies go along these lines, in England, with the NESTA reports published in February 2008, in New Zealand and in Australia – that is in the Anglo-Saxon world. In France, we will need to identify somewhat more precisely the question of culture, looking at it through the prism of creative cultural employment, making abstraction of the sectors of the economy where these jobs are performed.
The first interest of such an approach is that it makes it possible, as Walter Santagata reminded us, to merge social creativity and economic creativity. In this way, the whole of the process is analysed against the yardstick of creativity: being socially creative is the process, not the end point of artistic production, which is furthermore a distributive process. The social and the economic dimensions are additionally complementary.
The second interest of this approach is to lay emphasis on the means whereby a new meaning can be given to the artistic condition, a condition which extends well beyond the traditional boundaries of the so called artistic sectors. In 2004, in the economic valuation of the artistic heritage, we showed that there were five times more people employed in connection with highlighting the value of cultural heritage, in the general world of business and private enterprise, than were employed for the same purposes in monuments, museums and archives in France. However, although the condition of the ‘artist’ has always been economically fragile, it is even more so in the so-called non-cultural enterprises. In order to consolidate the condition of the artist, perspectives should be broadened, and culture be presented not just as a minor sector of the economy, albeit a fast expanding one. It should be demonstrated that creativity is the fundamental dimension of European economies adapting to a world in which competition is necessarily increasingly a matter of product quality, although cost is always a factor.
Finally, an analysis along these lines throws light on the discussions in the Ministries of Culture on how artistic activity is organised, and the relevant statistics. These Ministries all too frequently tend to consider themselves as to be points of contact for artistic lobbyists, instead of being the contact point for the mobilisation of economic talent.
In conclusion, it must be emphasized that these questions are not so new. In recent research on the archives of Émile Gallet, and more broadly into the entrepreneurs who worked with the Art Nouveau school in the late XIXth and early XXth century in Europe, we were able to demonstrate that at this time, a number of business leaders already dreamed of making art the central focus of day-to-day life – designing things in such a way that the artist was more valued, and such a way that the working classes contributed to artistic creation, and hence became more valued in themselves (Artists and markets, 2007). Today the social challenge is every bit as important as the economic challenge.
1
[1] X Sage, The Cultural Economy, éditions Sage, 2008
[2] In the meaning given to the term today in a number of studies, in particular in the remarkable study from the RAND Corporation.