Evolution Of Global Cultural Industries - Essay Example

Running Head: EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL CULTURAL INDUSTRIES Evolution Of Global Cultural Industries of Institute] Evolution of Global Cultural Industries Since 1985, a purported global cultural economy has progressively mounted to distinction as a spotlight of employment and output development in practically all the main capitalist societies. This global cultural economy is characterised principally by sectors such as high-technology manufacturing, neo-artisanal customer goods and various services, all of which have a propensity to take organisational shape as complex value-added networks. The operating features of these networks rest on their twice-faceted disposition as congeries of numerous small organisations mutually with more constrained associates of large institutions, the latter, more often than not, forming components within even larger commercial conglomerates. (Held, 2000) These systems are much given to high echelons of organisational and technical elasticity, transactions-intensive inter-organisation relations and the production of design-intensive productions at the same moment. One of the most imperative segments of this global cultural economy embraces a collection of industries that can be insecurely notorious as purveyors of cultural products. The brisk expansion and increase of cultural industries in topical decades is a manifestation of the increasing junction that is happening in contemporary society between the economic array on the one hand and systems of cultural look on the other hand. These cultural industries turn out a massive and escalating collection of outputs. The industries that formulate the modern cultural economy are bound as one as an entity of research by three vital familiar attributes. First, they are all anxious in one mode or another with the conception of goods whose worth respites principally on their figurative content and the modes in which it kindles the empirical reactions of costumers. Second, they are in general subject to the effects of Engels Law, which recommends that as disposable proceeds expands so utilization of luxury products will ascend at a inexplicably higher rate. Consequently, the wealthier the nation, the higher expenditure on cultural products will be as a portion of families budgets. Third, organisations in cultural-products industries are focused to spirited competition and organisational force such that they repeatedly agglomerate together in impenetrable specific clusters or industrial regions, whereas their products flow with increasing simplicity on international markets. According to Axford (1995) that it must be frazzled at one moment that there can be no hard and fast line unraveling industries that concentrate in purely cultural products from those whose outputs are purely functional. On the opposing point, there is a more or less uninterrupted continuum of sectors ranging from, motion pictures or recorded music at the one extreme, through an intermediate series of sectors whose outputs are varying composites of the cultural and the utilitarian such as shoes, eye-glasses or cars to cement or petroleum products at the other extreme. At the same moment, one of the idiosyncrasies of modern capitalism is that the cultural industry continues to expand at a rapid pace not only as a function of the growth of discretionary income, but also as an expression of the incursion of sign-value into ever-widening spheres of productive activity at large as organisations seek to intensify the design content, styling and quality of their outputs in the endless search for competitive advantage. Over much of the twentieth century, the leading edges of economic development and growth were largely identifiable with sectors characterized by varying degrees of mass production, as expressed in large-scale machine systems and a persistent drive to product standardization and cost cutting. Throughout the mass-production era, the dominant sectors evolved through a succession of technological and organisational changes focused above all on process routinisation and the search for internal economies of scale. These features are not especially conducive to the injection of high levels of aesthetic and semiotic content into final products. (Pine, 1999) Undeniably, in the 1930s and 1940s many commentators - with adherents of the Frankfurt School being among the most vocal - expressed grave misgivings about the steady incursion of industrial methods into the sphere of the cultural economy and the concomitant tendency for complex social and emotive content to be evacuated from forms of popular cultural production. These misgivings were by no means out of place in a context where much of commercial culture was focused on an extremely narrow approach to entertainment and distraction, and in which the powerful forces of the nation-state and nationalism were bent in significant modes on creating mass proletarian societies. In contrast to mass machinofacture, global cultural economy sectors tend to be composed of relatively disarticulatable production processes, as represented, for example, by various kinds of computerized and digitized technologies. Equally, and nowhere more than in segments of the new cultural economy, production is often quite labor-intensive, for despite the widespread use of electronic technologies, it also tends to make heavy demands on both the brain-power and handiwork of the labor force. Like most other sectors that make up the global cultural economy, cultural-products industries are typically composed of swarms of small producers, complemented by many fewer numbers of large establishments. Small producers in the cultural economy are frequently marked by neo-artisanal forms of production, or, in a more or less equivalent phrase, to flexible specialization, meaning that they concentrate on making particular categories of products such as clothing, films, games, etc. but where the design specifications of each batch of products change repeatedly. Large organisations in the cultural economy occasionally tend toward mass production that would generally signify a diminution of symbolic function in final outputs, but are increasingly prone to organization along the lines of "systems houses". (Caves, 2000) The latter term is used in the world of high-technology industry to signify an establishment whose products are relatively small in number over some fairly extended period of moment, and where each unit of output represents huge inputs of capital and/or labor. The major Hollywood movie studios are classic cases of systems houses. Other examples of the same phenomenon - or close relatives - are large magazine publishers but not printers, electronic games producers, and television network operators and, to a lesser degree, leading fashion houses. These large producers are of particular importance in the cultural economy because they so frequently act as the hubs of wider production networks incorporating many smaller organisations. Equally, and above all in the entertainment industry, they play a critical part in the financing and distribution of much independent production. Further, large producers right across the cultural economy are increasingly subject to incorporation into the organisational structures and spheres of influence of giant multinational conglomerates through which they tap into huge financial resources and marketing capacities. Whereas these giant organisations are absolutely central to the cultural economy, it is also important to note that some aspects of their power and reach may currently be under threat. There is already evidence of this occurring in the music and film industries where many new possibilities for disintermediation and distribution have been brought about by recent technological advances. In reality, one can visualize that at least some fragments of the cultural industry - resting as it does on fluid and impulsive trends and hard-to-protect intellectual property - may be entering into a new stage of development marked by yet more intense competition and reduced levels of oligopolistic power. In United Kingdom, it has similarly been argued that the importance of the "arts industry" is that it employs half a million people and earns about twice as much as the motor industry. Just how reliably these figures are quantified is never very clear, but the thrust of the argument is that straightforward economic models can be applied to the arts world, with the conclusion that "products" that are "demanded" have to be provided at prices buyers are willing to pay. However, to think in this way of the arts as an industry with "workers" producing "desirable goods" is misleading in a number of modes. Research indicates that those employed in the arts are overwhelmingly self-employed, on temporary contracts or part-time and relatively highly educated. What they do is essentially individual, not mass-produced. Art works are not mechanically turned out and sold as if other manufactured goods that can be used however, the purchaser pleases. Arts producers sell potential experiences rather than material "products." Ten people who buy a particular brand of toothpaste all get the same product at the same price; ten people who see a play or a sculpture all receive distinct impressions and respond to them differently. Audiences are active and selective in the way they react to and interpret books, music, and paintings. Art "goods" therefore have no "value" until personal reactions and critical debate confer it. In addition, it is notoriously difficult to predict the demand for any art product or its likely commercial success. Publishers or film and television producers may be anxious to attract the widest possible audience for their "products" but can only explain in retrospect and then often unconvincingly why certain works have sold poorly and others have broken sales records. Economic and artistic success does not necessarily coincide. The business strategies of arts-producing organizations tend to be distinct from those of commercial producers, "emergent" rather than "deliberate." Sales can increase and prices can rise not because of huge marketing efforts but simply because of an artists growing reputation. The imposing quantitative statistics for "growth" in the arts studiously ignore questions of quality. The many surveys of the numbers of people attending theaters or concerts say nothing at all about the merits of what is being seen or heard, or the nature of the response made by individuals to their experiences. If the arts are to be assessed by their quantifiable financial benefits, then it follows that audience and circulation figures become the ultimate arbiters. The theater world is dominated by the frantic quest for blockbuster successes, because theater economics demand all or nothing, with disastrous effects on variety of choice. The recent marketing of classical music has followed the path of the pop music industry of the 1960s, selling images for mass consumption. The growth of the star system has come to mean identifying and publicizing through the media a few major singers, conductors, instrumentalists, whose records are best-sellers and who can command enormous salaries. The subtitle of one recent book on this theme is "Managers, maestros and the corporate murder of classical music." (Lebrecht 1996) From this point of view, the historic shift within industry from creating and manufacturing to promoting and selling is being increasingly reflected in the world of artistic production. One practical consequence is that differences between paperback books, concert programs, or art reproductions come to depend less on style and subject matter than on the way in which consumers are classified statistically in terms of education and income and then supplied with what they "want." Simple enjoyment of "cultural commodities" is replaced by social prestige at different levels: the "need" to have visited the blockbuster exhibition or to have seen the play that "everyone" is talking about. Value shifts from the work itself and the experience of it to its social rating. It is easy to see why such a view of "cultural industry" appeals to businesspersons and entrepreneurs. Conclusion The most development based on cultural industries will in all probability continue to occur in the worlds richest societies, a number of low-and middle-income societies are finding that they too are able to contribute in various modes in the new cultural economy, sometimes on the basis of traditional industries and cultures. Even old and economically depressed industrial regions, can sporadically turn their fortunes around by means of well-planned cultural inventiveness. To conclude, the notion of the cultural economy as a source of economic development is still something of originality, and much additional reflection is required if one is to appreciate and utilize its complete potential while concurrently maintaining a clear grasp of its practical limitations. In any case, an accelerating convergence between the economic and the culture is currently occurring in modern life, and is bringing in its train new kinds of urban and regional outcomes and opening up new opportunities for policy-makers to raise local levels of income, employment and social well-being. (Held, 2000) However, wary of applying commercial business strategies to the world of the arts they may be, managers of theater companies or orchestras know that the requests they make for funding or sponsorship tacitly admit the role of the state or of other bodies, like television companies and advertisers in shaping concepts of "art" by what is chosen to acknowledge and to subsidize. Business sponsors of the arts influence decisions about what artists may do, public relations experts select who and what will be publicized, and simultaneously advertisers help to define the arts by buying pages and air-space in which arts matters are discussed and criticized. What is not subsidized or sponsored (small-scale, experimental, or amateur work) can be left to die. References Axford, B (1995), The Global System: Economics, Politics and Culture. Cambridge, Polity Press. Caves, R. E. (2000) Creative Industries: Contacts between Art and Commerce, Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Held, D. (2000). A globalizing world? Culture, economics and politics. London: Routledge. Lebrecht, Norman. (1996). When the Music Stops, New York: Simon and Schuster. Pine, B. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Read More