Kate Oakley

Mark Banks

This volume critiques the current model of the creative economy, and considers alternative models that may point to greener, cleaner, more sustainable and socially just cultural and creative industries. Aimed at the nexus of cultural and environmental concerns, the book assesses the ways in which arts and cultural activities can help develop ideas of the ‘good life’ beyond excessive and unsustainable material consumption, and explores the complex interactions between cultural prosperity, place and the quality (and availability) of employment, leisure and the rights to self-expression. Adopting a deliberately wide and inclusive interdisciplinary and international perspective, contributors to this volume showcase current and future ways of ‘doing’ creative economy, ecologically, otherwise and differently. In 11 chapters, the book outlines some of the most relevant arguments from among the growing literature that critically analyzes the current creative economy, with a focus on issues of gentrification, inequality and environment. This volume is timely, as it emerges into a political and economic context that is seeking desperately to ‘reboot’ the economy, re-establish ‘business as usual’ and to do so partly through significant investment and expansion in the creative economy. The book will be suitable for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying a wide range of topics, including: cultural and creative industries, media and communications, cultural studies, cultural policy, human geography, environmental humanities and environmental policy, and will be of further interest to arts professionals, creative economy researchers and policymakers. The chapter “Towards a New Paradigm of the Creative City or the Same Devil in Disguise? Culture-led Urban (Re)development and Sustainability” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

New Approaches for Policy

Cultural Industries and the Environmental Crisis

Micks Family: The Fight For Respect And Control - Volume 2

Micks Family: The Fight For Respect And Control - Volume 1

Rosalind Gill

Stephanie Taylor

In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this ‘turn to cultural work’ has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to ‘self-exploitation’. While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. Theorizing Cultural Work instead views cultural work through a specifically historicized and temporal lens, to ask: what novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent? The contributors to this volume also explore current transformations and future(s) of work within the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future. This book challenges more affirmative and proselytising industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them, to locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and industrial relations, as well as management and business studies, cultural and economic policy and development, government and planning.

Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries

Theorizing Cultural Work

Mark Banks

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