The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries is collection of contemporary scholarship that seeks to re-assert the importance of cultural production and consumption against the purely economic imperatives of the 'creative industries'.
Across 43 chapters drawn from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary perspectives, this comprehensive volume offers a critical and empirically informed examination of the contemporary cultural industries.
A range of industries are explored, from video games to art galleries, all the time focussing on the culture that is being produced and its wider symbolic and socio-cultural meaning. Individual chapters consider their industrial structure, the policy that governs them, their geography, the labour that produces them, and the meaning they offer to consumers and participants.
The collection also explores the historical dimension of cultural industry debates, providing context for new readers, as well as critical orientation for those more familiar with the subject. Questions of industry structure, labour, place, international development, consumption, and regulation are all explored in terms of their historical trajectory and potential future direction.
By assessing the current challenges facing the cultural industries, this collection provides students and researchers with an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts, and debates in the field.
About the Author: Kate Oakley is Professor and Head of the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include the politics of cultural policy, labour in the cultural industries, and inequality. Books include Cultural Policy with David Bell (Routledge, 2015) and Culture, Economy and Politics: the case of New Labour, with David Hesmondhalgh, David Lee and Melissa Nisbett (Palgrave, 2015). She is currently researching the role of arts and culture in sustainable prosperity as part of the CUSP Project (http: //www.cusp.ac.uk/) and working on inequality and cultural work with https: //culturalworkersorganize.org.
Justin O'Connor is Professor in the School of Creative Industries, University of South Australia. Until the end of 2018 he was Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy at Monash University, where he headed the Culture Media Economy research unit and was program leader for the Master of Cultural and Creative Industries. He is part of the UNESCO 'Expert Facility', supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity, and is visiting Professor in the School of Media and Design, Shanghai Jiaotong University. He has written cultural policy papers for a number of cities, states, and countries. He is the author of the 2016 Platform Paper After the Creative Industries: Why We Need a Cultural Economy, and is finalising the book Cultural Economy in the New Shanghai. He is co-editor, with Rong Yueming, of Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City (Intellect, 2018).
