Abstract
This chapter examines the complex relationship between creative industries policy and creative practice in the UK film industries and the place the Scottish film industry occupies within this relationship. My aims are twofold. The first is to examine how specific conceptualizations of the “creative industries” and “creativity” have functioned as structuring discourses for policy approaches to the creative sector since the mid-1990s. The second is to consider the issues that arise when the rhetoric of creative industries policy meets creative practice within the Scottish film sector, through evidence gained from a number of interviews with practitioners.2 Although my focus here is primarily on the film industries, creative industries policy formation cuts across many areas including substantial aspects of regional economic development and related sectors such as broadcasting and the visual and performing arts. In this chapter, I consider how creative industries policies might be positioned within studies of production cultures and influenced by policy subventions such as tax credits and urban planning. In my analysis, I want to suggest that policy discourses do not simply attempt to coordinate creative processes; they also help to shape, to support, and sometimes to limit ways of thinking about creativity and cultural production.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”1
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Notes
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-glass (Raleigh, NC: Hayes Barton Press, 1872), 72. Emphases in original.
See DCMS, “Creative Industries Mapping Document” (London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 1998); Philip Schlesinger, “Creativity: From Discourse to Doctrine?,” Screen 48, no. 3 (2007): 377–387;
David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2007).
Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini, The Creative City (London: Comedia, 1995);
Charles Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (London: Earthscan, 2000);
Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (London: Penguin, 1999);
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002);
Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005).
DCMS, “Creative Industries Mapping Document.” See also DCMS, Creative Britain, New Talents for the New Economy (London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2008).
Schlesinger, “Creativity: From Discourse to Doctrine?”; Schlesinger, “Creativity and the Experts: New Labour, Think Tanks, and the Policy Process,” International Journal of Press/Politics 14, no. 1 (2009): 3–20. The initial inclusion of IT software and services, for instance, overestimated the size of the core UK creative industries.
Schlesinger, “Creativity: From Discourse to Doctrine?”; Phil Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti, eds, Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters, and Local Economic Development (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007);
Susan Galloway and Stuart Dunlop, “A Critique of Definitions of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Public Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 13, no. 1 (2007): 17–31. For a trenchant critique from a US perspective, see Chuck Kleinhans, “Creative Industries, Neoliberal Fantasies, and the Cold, Hard Facts of Global Recession: Some Basic Lessons,” Jump Cut 53, accessed May 20, 2013, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/kleinhans-creatlndus/.
Landry and Bianchini. The Creative City; Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators; Iain Docherty, Stuart Gulliver, and Philip Drake, “Exploring the Potential Benefits of City Collaboration,” Regional Studies 38, no. 4 (2004): 445–456.
Michael Porter, “Clusters and the New Economics of Competitiveness,” Harvard Business Review 76 (1998): 77–90; Landry and Bianchini, The Creative City; Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators; Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class; Florida, Cities and the Creative Class.
Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510.
Scottish Enterprise, Creativity and Enterprise (Glasgow: Scottish Enterprise, 1999).
David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, “Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 7 (2008): 97–118.
See also Hochschild’s classic formulation of emotional labor in Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
See also essays in Mark Deuze, ed., Managing Media Work (London: Sage, 2010).
Rosalind Gill, “Life Is a Pitch: Managing the Self in New Media Work,” in Managing Media Work, ed. Mark Deuze (London: Sage, 2010), 249–262.
See also David Hesmondhalgh and Andy C. Pratt, “Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy11, no. 1 (2005): 1–13;
Andy C. Pratt, “Cultural Industries and Public Policy: An Oxymoron?,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 1 (2005): 31–44;
Ivan Turok, “Cities, Clusters, and Creative Industries: The Case of Film and TV in Scotland,” European Planning Studies 11, no. 5 (2003): 549–565.
See Helen Blair. “‘You’re Only As Good As Your Last Job’: The Labour Process and Labour Market in the British Film Industry,” Work, Employment, and Society 15, no. 1 (2001): 149–169;
Blair, “Winning and Losing in Flexible Labour Markets: The Formation and Operation of Networks of Interdependence in the UK Film Industry,” Sociology 37, no. 4 (November 2003): 677–694; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, “Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry”; as well as other chapters in this volume.
Maggie Magor and Philip Schlesinger, “‘For This Relief Much Thanks.’ Taxation, Film Policy and the UK Government,” Screen 50, no. 3 (2009): 299–317.
For a range of discussions, see Jonathan Murray, “Scotland,” in The Cinema of Small Nations, eds Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007);
David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009);
Sarah Neely, “Contemporary Scottish Cinema,” in The Media in Scotland, eds Neil Blain and David Hutchison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 151–165.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
Duncan Petrie, “The New Scottish Cinema,” in Cinema and Nation, eds Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 166.
Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: BFI Publishing, 2000).
For more details, see chapters in Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley, and Rod Stoneman, eds, Scottish Cinema Now (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds, Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95 (London: BFI Publishing, 2003).
Mette Hjort, “Affinitive and Milieu-building Transnationalism: The Advance Party Initiative,” in Cinema at the Periphery, eds Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belen Vidal (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 46–66.
David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). For an industry take on this,
Nick Redfern, “Connecting the Regional and the Global in the UK Film Industry,” Transnational Cinemas 1, no. 2 (2010): 145–160.
Stephen Zafirau, “Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry,” Qualitative Sociology 31, no. 2 (2008): 99–127;
Philip Drake, “Reputational Capital, Creative Conflict and Hollywood Independence: The Case of Hal Ashby,” in American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, eds Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis (London: Routledge, 2012), 140–152.
David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London: Routledge, 1992).
Valentin Volosinov/Mikhail Bakhtin, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).
Alastair Gray, “Settlers and Colonists,” in Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence, ed. Scott Hames (Edinburgh: Word Power Books, 2012).
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Drake, P. (2013). Policy or Practice? Deconstructing the Creative Industries. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_14
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