Cultural economy: a critical review

By Chrissie Gibson, Lily Kong. 2005

368 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reviews work on `cultural economy', particularly from within geography, and from other disciplines, where there are links to overtly geographical debates. We seek to clarify different interpretations of the term and to steer a course through this multivalency to suggest productive new research agendas. We review and critique work on cultural economy that represents a relatively straightforward economic geography, based on empirical observation while theoretically informed and driven by debates about Fordism and post-Fordism, agglomeration and cluster theory. Some of these ideas about cultural economy have proven attractive to policy-makers and we map a normative script of cultural economy, with its prescriptive recommendations for economic development, which we then critique. Turning from this normative cultural economy, we move to a more theoretical discussion which reinterprets the cultural economy in light of debates on the culturization of `the economic' in research praxis. We conclude that better acknowledgement is needed of the contradictory uses of `cultural economy', but point nevertheless value of this multivalency as long as we reflect on the multiple contradictions and interpretations. With many current absences in work on cultural economy, we suggest various agendas waiting to be addressed.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a2aa97d53d4847529ca68c10f7274e18f2b5926

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. C. Grodach
2. G. Waitt
3. E. Stam
4. Chrissie Gibson
5. G. Marlet
6. Lily Kong
7. Philip McCann
8. Jeroen de Jong

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Chrissie Gibson
2. C. Grodach
3. G. Waitt
4. Lily Kong
5. A. Semple
6. L. Khoo
7. Philip McCann
8. Jeroen de Jong

In Urban Studies

1. Chrissie Gibson
2. C. Grodach
3. Lily Kong
4. G. Waitt
5. E. Stam
6. Philip McCann
7. Sierdjan Koster
8. Fikri Zul Fahmi

Citations in the corpus

• Placing the Creative Economy: Scale, Politics, and the Material (2006, background): “They also indicate the need to understand the local impact of economic development policies that emanate from beyond the localized urban cluster (Gibson and Kong, 2005).”
• Cultural-economy and cities (2007, background): “They are marked by very different theorizations of the economy (see Gibson and Kong, 2005, for a review).”
• Creative Small Cities: Rethinking the Creative Economy in Place (2009, background): “A normative ‘model’ of sorts has subsequently stemmed from this idea in planning and policy circles, where creativity becomes a catalyst for regeneration in deindustrialising cities (Gibson and Kong, 2005).”
• Art Spaces in Community and Economic Development: Connections to Neighborhoods, Artists, and the Cultural Economy (2011, background): “Broadly speaking, the cultural economy is defined by those products, services, and establishments that relate to education and entertainment and are of high symbolic value (Gibson and Kong 2005; Scott 2000).”
• Creative industries in the netherlands: structure, development, innovativeness and effects on urban growth (2008, background): “As an alternative, many policy and empirical studies focus on creative industries rather than on people in specific professions (Caves 2000; Turok 2003; Gibson and Kong 2005; Jayne 2005).”
• Creative economy policy in developing countries: The case of Indonesia (2017, background): “This finding is consistent with other cases in Asia where the discourse is similarly used only normatively to strengthen the local economy image (Gibson and Kong, 2005; Kong et al., 2006).”
• Knowledges of the creative economy: Towards a relational geography of diffusion and adaptation in Asia (2006, background): “…particular initiatives: encourage creative industry clusters, incubate learning and knowledge economies, maximize networks with other successful places and companies, value and reward innovation, and aggressively campaign to attract the ‘creative class’ as residents (Gibson and Kong, 2005).”