Cultural Industries

Cultural industries and other aspects of the commodification of culture in the global era are important areas of investigation for global studies. At the outset, however, it is difficult to define the term cultural industries with any precision. Raymond Williams famously remarked that culture was one of the most complex words in the English language. And the term cultural industries has also had a long history, with many twists and turns. Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), used the term culture industry to excoriate what they saw, in mid-20th-century American popular culture, as (in Craig Calhoun's words), “the merger of culture with big business (quintessentially the movie studios) and the abolition of the pleasure and emancipatory impulses that once characterized art in favor of palliating entertainments” (Calhoun, 2002, p. 106).

Not an auspicious start for a term that in the 1970s was resuscitated as a plural—the cultural industries—in recognition of the plurality of dimensions by which industrialized culture can be apprehended (conditions of production, distribution, and consumption) and by the ramified nature of Big Culture. By then, most advanced countries had significant public-sector investment through cultural policy portfolios, public broadcasting, as well as galleries, museums, and libraries, which complicated the blighted vision parlayed by Horkheimer and Adorno of duped masses being force-fed commodified cultural pap. But most importantly, cultural industries as a concept complicates the models of power, influence, and authenticity that the previous model embodied. This was an important period of theoretical, industry, and policy development in postindustrial Britain where theorists such as Nicholas Garnham argued that, for better or worse, most people's cultural needs were being met by the market and that art and the market are not inimical to each other; the market was a relatively efficient way of allocating resources and reflecting choice.

But these 1940s and 1970s ideas of cultural industries have been thrown into the mix with many other terms (the arts, creative industries, entertainment industries, copyright industries, digital content, and more), as theory and analysis tries to contend with the changes that digitization, convergence, globalization, and the rapid embedding of the Internet and web 2.0 have wrought in society, economy, and culture. Not only that, but the fact that the cultural industries exist in widely diverse states globally makes it imperative that a framework for understanding them be supple and dynamic. It is our contention that the best way to make sense of this burgeoning field is to examine the various models of the relation between culture and economy that underpin our understandings of these terms.

This is done in the spirit of Williams, who made a powerful contribution to understanding the relation between culture and economy by offering a basic typology of culture—in his foundational text Culture—as residual, dominant, or emergent. This is simple but powerful and emphasizes the dynamic, overlapping, and contesting nature of culture and its role in industries globally. The value of Williams's typology is that it embeds the insight that culture is always in process, always propagating[Page 331](meanings, experiences, and identities) rather than merely preserving that which is gone.

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