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2004 7: 117International Journal of Cultural StudiesAndy C. Pratt

PerspectivesThe Cultural Economy : A Call for Spatialized 'Production of Culture'

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A R T I C L E

INTERNATIONALjournal of

CULTURAL studies

Copyright 2004 SAGE PublicationsLondon, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

www.sagepublications.comVolume 7(1): 117128

DOI: 10.1177/1367877904040609

The cultural economy

A call for spatialized production of cultureperspectives

Andy C. Pratt

London School of Economics and Political Science, England

A B S T R A C T

This article argues that the analytical pendulum has swungtoo far in prioritizing consumption in analyses of the cultural economy. The

article adopts a version of the production of culture perspective and is

illustrated through discussion of three interrelated fields of the cultural economy:

the new economy, creativity and consumption. The article argues in favour of

studies of the material culture of production (redefined to take in the whole

cycle of the making and shaping of cultural commodities) and recommends this

as a basis of policy development.

K E Y W O R D S consumption creativity cultural industries new

economy space

Introduction

This article argues an unfashionable point: that the analytical pendulum hasswung too far in prioritizing consumption in analyses of the culturaleconomy. Arguably, this swing has effaced the analysis, and appreciation,of production. The objective here is not to simply replace one extreme

position with another, but rather to argue that a more informative perspec-tive should include production and consumption through an analysis oftheir interpenetration. Accordingly, this article argues in favour of amore holistic perspective of the interlinked processes of production and

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consumption. Furthermore, it is argued that an unhelpful conception of thecultureeconomy relationship maps onto, and underpins, this artificialseparation of production and consumption. The article is illustrated

through discussion of three interrelated fields of the cultural economy: thenew economy, creativity and consumption.

Cultural economy

The field of mass communications studies contains within it a substantivetradition of analyses from a political economy perspective that tend to focuson issues of ownership and control and on issues of regulation (for example,Golding and Murdock, 1996; Herman and McChesney, 1997). Likewise,there is a substantial body of work, reception theory, concerned with theanalysis and interpretation of content, its meaning and regulation (see Hayet al., 1996). However, I want to link my argument in this article to theproduction of culture perspective developed by Peterson (1976), which inmany respects mediates between both approaches, suggesting that theorganization of cultural production influences content. The body of workpioneered by Peterson developed a strong institutional trajectory.

The value of this perspective is that it seeks to present cultural outputsas the result of collective innovation by a number of participants whose

participation is various, but linked together by the organization of produc-tion. Thus, it directs our attention to the analysis of complex organizationalforms that constitute particular cultural forms, as well as individualpositioning within them. Production in this sense is not only suggestive ofcreative and innovative ideas, but also of the conditions under which theseideas may be mobilized. The conditions here may be structured by meansof the market, social institutions or individual taste. Not surprisingly, Peter-sonss work owes a debt to the oeuvre of Bourdieu (for example, Bourdieu,1993).

However, a weakness in the production of culture approach would seemto be an appreciation and articulation of the situated nature of this activity.In this respect, it is helpful to draw upon the recent work in economic geog-raphy that has sought to address the issue of the interface between economyand culture and its spatiality. Again, geographers have drawn upon insti-tutional perspectives to fashion an account of the situated nature ofeconomic action and the ways in which this is articulated to place (see Aminand Thrift, 1994; Hodgson, 1988) and to cultural production (see Scott,2000; Storper, 1997).

In this article, I want to offer some sketches of three current fields ofdebate in the area of cultural economy and suggest how a spatializedproduction of culture approach may offer some useful insights.

INTERNATIONAL journal ofCULTURAL studies 7(1)

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most part, accounts that use the term new economy are locked into a fairlycrude form of technological determinism, and one with a short time horizontoo.

The worst cases are to be found in the internet-related industries and theircommentators; a classic example is Kelly (1998), whose book New Rulesfor the New Economy3 neatly sums up the hype of the wired generation.Slightly more circumscribed, yet not immune to the same hype, is RobertReich, ex-Labor Secretary in Clintons administration, who writes in TheFuture of Success (2000) of the age of the terrific deal, where the neweconomy is characterized as the ability to constantly switch products andservices, the organizational consequences of which he explores (in particu-lar, what we now call the work/life balance).

US commentators have become somewhat concerned of late that the vastinvestment in the new economy (i.e. computers and software) has notproduced any noticeable efficiency savings (see, for example, Gordon, 2000;Jorgensen and Stiroh, 2000; Oliner and Sichel, 2000). Allied to thedot.bomb, such a message seems to be used as a means of writing off therole of new technology in economic change. Even if one accepts the premisethat computers = new economy, any analyst conversant with sociology ofscientific knowledge literature would not be surprised at such an outcome although obviously some economists are! Without doubt, part of theproblem with a notion such as the new economy is its vagueness; in this

sense, it is an easy target. I think that if we drop the revolutionary rhetoric,avoid a tendency to universalism and look in more detail, there is an inter-esting story, but, as always, we have to be careful and precise.

We can take as an example the case of new media.4 Of course, the termnew media itself is not exempt from the category of criticisms alreadyoutlined above for new economy. However, I want to simply use it as alabel, specifically to refer to software and services for the internet andcomputer-based delivery of similar products (i.e. CD-ROMs and computergames).5 Within this, I would draw a clear distinction between the internet

and games, as they have quite distinct institutional and market structuresand consumption patterns. Let us only consider new media. If we slip backto the new economy rhetoric, we find a rich vein of literature that wastotally obsessed with the revolutionary capacity of digital reproduction andcommunication to transform economic practice, business models and space,such as the economistas of the business press (Cairncross, 1997; Coyle,1997), whose book titles announced the arrival of The Weightless Worldand The Death of Distance. These were underpinned by the writings ofwell-respected economists such as Quah (1996). My own work seeks to

directly challenge this literature through detailed, theoretically-informedanalyses of new media agglomerations in New York and San Francisco(Pratt, 2000a, 2002b). The findings show that, despite the apparent possi-bility, created by telecommunications, of no longer needing to be present to

Pratt The cultural economy 121



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communicate with others, most still choose to be so. They do so at consider-able cost, so location clearly matters. The cost of flights or premium groundrent is not insignificant. In part, this is due to the lossiness of communi-

cations technologies (it is the final 1 percent of bandwidth/communicationthat can be crucial for the subtleties of communication). The face-to-facemeeting still matters, particularly in the field of knowledge and informationexchange and in hiring and recruitment across firms. In addition, go intoweb designers offices and you see people grouped around screens, touchingand pointing at objects and arguing about them. Thus, my conclusion isthat space and place and the associated sociality possibly matter more,rather than less, for new media companies.6 By extension, if new media isat the core of the new economy, then not only are reports of the death ofdistance premature, but considerably more attention needs to be paid tothe social relations of cultural production rather than technology or trans-port costs.

Consumption

For most of their history, the social sciences have focused more on produc-tion and less on consumption; in extreme cases, treating consumers as dupesor simple utility maximizers. As is well known, the swathe of research that

emerged in the 1980s from cultural studies shifted this agenda in a numberof positive ways. Just as Derrida pointed to the death of the author,economic sociologists and economic geographers might have proclaimedthe death of the producer. The shift to the analysis of audiences in main-stream media/cultural studies and the notion of active viewers haveundoubtedly reinvigorated the analysis of the active consumer (forexample, Fiske, 1989). The idea has also set the scene for an upsurge ofinterest in shopping as a cultural activity. We can welcome the spatial turnin retail literature that has highlighted the situated and occasioned nature

of the shopping experience as well as the performativity of retailers (seeCrang, 1994; Jackson and Thrift, 1995; Jackson et al., 2000; Wrigley andLowe, 2002).

However, while we do need to be reminded that people are discerningconsumers, that price is not the only determining factor in a purchase andthat much else is going on in these social situations in addition to (or some-times instead of) shopping, something has still been passed over. What I thinkwe have left underdeveloped is what we used to call the political economyof retail. Why have retailers suddenly discovered that shopping is fun?

Clearly, one issue is declining margins and fierce competition how retail-ers entice people not only to buy from them, but also to buy more. It is truethat these sorts of macroanalyses can be found, for example in Harveys(1989) work. These arguments point to the attempt to spectacularize




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consumption7 to fight the spectre of underconsumption. Thus, it is not onlythe case of one product being set against another, but also one consumptionspace or a whole city8 against another. Of course, this literature links back

to debates about global/local interactions. It also highlights that behind thatthe changing staging of retailing and consumption more generally is a back-space which is itself transforming (indeed, some transformations enable thefront of house changes). Developments in distribution logistics have givenrise to dramatic organizational changes in retailing. For example, novel andinteractive telecommunications enable production, stockholding anddistribution strategies that create new (although usually largely invisible)relationships between producers and consumers.9 Adoption of thiscomputer/communications mediation of retailing (and the whole productionchain) does not happen evenly, nor simply. The new hybridities of retail,production and distribution thus morph into the hybrid bricks and clicksphysically-based internet shopping outfit. The basic point is that if commodi-ties are produced, however much telecommunications infrastructure youinterpolate them with, their atoms still need to be shifted around somehow.

My interest in these interconnections also draws me to work that followsnetworks from the supermarket shelf to the producers (see Acre andMarsden, 1993; Leslie and Reimer, 1999).10 In many cases, the incentivehere is a radical politicized consumer who wishes to exercise their power(for example, by supporting fair trade or the ethical consumption

movement). Researchers have highlighted the webs and networks that arewoven to sustain and support particular styles of consumption, whether itis the exotic foods on supermarket shelves or the producers of the brandname sports and fashion goods (however, even this work has a tendency tofold back on to consumers in the biographies and geographies approach;see Cook et al., 1998).

The message here is clear: there is a link, a relationship, between produc-tion and consumption, one that is articulated through distribution andconsumer consciousness. Moreover, this relationship is manifest in and

across places. We commonly refer to street fashions and learning from thestreet in high fashion production; this is a clear reference to the beneficialco-location of cultural producers and consumers where fashion ideas maybe picked up and tested. A more diffuse version of this is the buzz aroundmany cultural producers that makes it attractive for competitors to be closeto one another and thus participate in this gossip. This approach iscommensurate with the idea of product spaces (see Cawson et al., 1995)which offer the potential to conceptualize a web woven through the socialshaping of technologies, organization, markets, spaces and products (see

Pratt, 2000a, 2002b). Cawson et al. (1995) focus on user engagement withproducts and the feedback to producers; in a broad sense, these analysespush the envelope of production and consumption.

Such information networks are dynamic. For example, the decisions of a




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UK supermarket to change a product specification may make or break alocal economy in the developing world. This is not simply a buy/not buydecision; issues of total quality control imposed by retailers may lead to

producers having to adopt new ways of working or tending for theirproduce if they are to satisfy overseas markets. One can see a quite different,but parallel articulation of this process in the production of moreconventional cultural products such as world music. The logical conclusionpushes us towards the point that production/consumption dualisms areunhelpful; rather, it would be more useful to explore the constitution ofproducts situated in and across places and social networks.

Conclusions

This article has sought to consider how production might be recovered inan analysis of the cultural economy. We have noted how dualisms haveopened up between political economic analyses of the cultural industries aswell as reception and audience studies. The production of culture perspec-tive was offered as a complement to these viewpoints. The notion of theproduction of culture was then applied to three areas of contemporaryconcern: creativity, the new economy and consumption.

The overview of these three areas has led us to a rather iconoclastic point.

It used to be fashionable to criticize old Marxists as productivist. Perhapsit is now time to lay a similar, but opposite charge at the door of the newconsumptionists. I think that there is much to be gained from a finer-grained anthropological sense of the making and shaping of things througha long life cycle that necessarily incorporates both production andconsumption. It might be expected that the new sub-/interdisciplinary fieldof material cultural studies would fit the bill. However, in practice, if onescans the contents lists of such journals, one finds study after study ofconsumption. Thus, while I would not argue for a return to a political

economy perspective per se, I think that it is a study of the material cultureof production (in fact, one redefined to take in the whole cycle of themaking and shaping of cultural commodities) that should be on our agenda.Of course, such a perspective is not monodimensional; there are numerouspoints of articulation and rearticulation along a chain/network/cycle.

This issue of the articulation and rearticulation of the production ofculture does, I think, signal another opening for research that goes beyondthe focus on regulation. Governance is a term that has been used by politicalscientists in recent years to express the broader means by which activities

are coordinated beyond simple state regulation and control. Following thisusage, there are two potential research agendas that might be explored.First, the role of the state and government as normally defined in relationto culture: what role should the state have and for what reasons should it




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intervene? This is a massive topic that I will leave aside for now. Moreclosely related to the aims of this article is the second of these two agendas:to understand both within and across organizations, institutions and

networks the modes and means of coordination and control. Both thesethemes are, in my mind, linked to the issue of hybridization the way inwhich, in empirical terms, cultural practices take place both in theeconomic, state and civil society and in the personal realm and how theyare, at one and the same moment, public and private, social and economic,and so on. The challenge for anyone seeking to understand the productionof culture is not to box off culture, but to follow its making. Related tothis is the question of policy making. The foundation of policy must besound information collection and analysis: an evidential base. However, theconceptual position outlined in this article is highly suggestive of the factthat policy and governance debates may not currently be founded on eitheran adequate understanding or conceptualization of the objects that theyseek to address.

Notes

1 The term creative industries seems to have been adopted for two reasons:

first, to distance itself from the old labour and Marxian overtones of the

cultural industries; and, second, to embrace an agenda that sought to offerthe role that culture (now creativity) could add when harnessed to the

traditional economy. Thus, the instrumental use of culture or creativity

to secure economic ends.

2 This concept, initially called the cultural industries production system (see

Pratt, 1997), now modified to cultural industries production network, has

been deployed in several UK regional planning documents and now forms

a central core of the DCMSs Regional Cultural Data Framework (2003).

The approach has many similarities to frameworks produced by Australia,

New Zealand and Canada.3 The subtitle 10 Ways that the Network Economy Is Changing Everything

signals a resonance with Castellss The Rise of the Network Society (1996).

His story is also moved on by a strong strain of the techno-economic

paradigm of the institutional school.

4 Here, we can refer back to the production of culture perspective that

would underline the institutional variety, and thus the need for distinctive

analyses, of the cultural and creative economy.

5 The argument for the use of the term is that developers use this term to

describe their own activities. Importantly, as I note in Pratt (2000a), devel-opers deploy the term strategically to position themselves against other

activities; this is a process of constructing an industry and a market.

6 The other point that I would mention is that the new economy evangelists,




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while stressing near zero reproduction and distribution costs, conveniently

forget that production still does cost, and costs a lot. Moreover, production

involves people, they have to work, eat and sleep somewhere and they need to

be in an organized form of production that involves interaction with others.7 In Harveys case, he is talking, on the one hand, more generally about

consumption and, on the other hand, about cities, the consumption of their

image, and cities as sites or crucibles for consumption.

8 This is played out in the realm of place marketing, notably articulated with

major sports (World Cup football or the Olympic Games) or cultural instal-

lations (Guggenheim art galleries). See Pratt (2002a).

9 For example, just-in-time production, zero warehousing stock strategies and

satellite tracking of logistics.

10 This work also draws upon more general work on value chains, such as

Gereffi and Kaplinsky (2001).

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ANDY C. PRATT is a senior lecturer in human geography in the

department of geography and environment at the LSE. He is also amember of media@lse. His work concerns the comparative analysis of

the cultural industries, their measurement, and analysis of their

organization of locational forms. His interests also concern urbanization,

globalization and cultural industries policies. Address: Department of

Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, Houghton

Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. [email: [email protected]]


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