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Theorizing the Cultural Industries

Persistent Specificities and Reconsiderations

Bernard Miège (translation by Chloé Salles)

Arguments around the cultural industries, neglected by some but regarded as fundamental by others, have taken on a new importance in recent years as governments in the capitalist west have come to see them as central to an economy moving from a base in traditional industrial sectors to one organized around the production and manipulation of information and symbolic forms. This chapter traces the development of the cultural industries as an idea and area of research within the political economy of communication and explores some of the challenges to established conceptions posed by contemporary developments.

The Origins of “Cultural Industries” Theory

Theoretical approaches to the cultural industries have two main points of origin. The first can be traced back to the Frankfurt School of thought, and particularly to the analysis of “the administration of art” elaborated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer as part of their project of developing a “Critical Theory” of contemporary capitalism. Within this theoretical framework, the industrial production of cultural goods is seen as a decisive factor in the Entkunstung (literally, de-arting) of art. Degrading itself and losing its aura once it is put on the market, the cultural commodity invites consumers to look not for enlightenment or transcendence, but for a utility that will be a source of happiness, and from which would emerge an appropriation, providing them with prestige or satisfying some sort of desired pleasure. This critical conception of the cultural industry exerted a strong pull on participants in the social and cultural movements around 1968, and is still influential today, most notably among artists and dissenting environments, particularly in the performing and plastic arts. It must be added that Adorno, who showed himself to be very critical toward the mass culture of the 1940s and 1950s, saw technical progress and the industrial means of production as the main sources of domination in the cultural industry, leading him to distance himself from the emerging arts such as cinema and jazz. This general denunciation was not, however, shared by all of his contemporaries, some of whom, like Walter Benjamin (himself a member of the Frankfurt School), offered a more nuanced and positive interpretation of art in the era of technical reproducibility.

The second source of work on the cultural industry comes from the North American pioneers of the political economy of communication, and more particularly from Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe, both of whom strove, from the late 1960s onwards (and even earlier in the case of Smythe), to analyze the growing hold of the most dynamic sectors of financial and industrial capital on the communication industries. Their analyses covered a wide field, looking at the expansion and intersections between telecommunications, mass media, mass market, and professional news/general information, and the cultural industries. They paid particular attention to the consequences of corporate concentration, to transnationalization and multimedia coverage, and, last but not least, to the control of information and culture.

Although these two starting points had radically different preoccupations, one centered on the fate of art and aesthetic creativity, the other on the domination of the economy and its consequences for democratic culture, both became influential because the changing conditions of the 1970s invited new questions under new terms. How can that period be characterized? Its main traits are directly linked to the primary object of our reflections here since the strategic reorientation of industrial production then taking place saw the emergence of information processing and cultural production as leading sectors in the new capitalism. This shift was accompanied by decisive cultural changes and the extension of what, from then on, was called “mass culture,” together with the changing political management of cultures and representations of identity. At the same time, terms of trade and exchange between nations were also changing and were marked by the confrontation between antagonistic political and economic systems resulting in the Unesco report on global communications put together by the McBride Commission, and in animated debates and open oppositions to Unesco over the new global order for information and communication. In this context, it is hardly surprising to see new questions raised about the nature and future of the cultural industries, not in an attempt to link irreconcilable theoretical currents – that would have been in vain – but to take into account new observations, whether within national frames or in wider contexts.

The designation that came to be called the “Theory of Cultural Industries” was employed by a diverse group of writers from the 1990s onwards, including Ahmed Silem (1991), Alain Herscovici (1994, 26) and Paul Beaud (Beaud et al. 1997, 33). One could add to this list, while still not being exhaustive, a number of earlier writers working mostly within the political economy of communications, including a group of French authors who started their work in 1973: Huet et al. (1984/1978), Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1977), Patrice Flichy (1991/1980), Nicholas Garnham (1979, 1990), Bernard Miège (1979, 1987, 1989, 2000, Miège et al. 1986), Jean-Guy Lacroix and Gaëtan Tremblay (Lacroix and Levesque 1986, Tremblay 1986, Lacroix 1990, Tremblay 1990, Tremblay et al. 1991, Lacroix and Tremblay 1997), Enrique Bustamante and Ramon Zallo (Bustamante and Zallo 1988, Zallo 1988), and Pierre Moeglin (1998), the first to extend the paradigm to the educational industry. One should also take into account the reflections and work conducted within the framework of international organizations, particularly Unesco (Unesco 1980, 1982).

Defining the “Cultural Industries”: Five Propositions

Within this diverse body of writing, we can identify a series of core elements that underpin “Cultural Industries” theory. These can usefully be presented in the form of five propositions.

First proposition: the diversity of cultural merchandise is grounded in differential relations to industrial production

It is one thing to notice that cultural (and informational) products lead to the consumption of various forms of commodities (devices allowing access to cultural resources, goods like books and disks, tickets to performances, art purchases). It is another to specify what differentiates the various fields (book editing, general public or professional information, phonographic editing, cinematographic and audiovisual industries, the sale of paintings and plastic art in galleries, the production of games) that have appeared during different historical periods. It is yet another to illuminate the relation that they do or do not maintain with the system of industrial production, which is more central than ever in contemporary capitalism. The key question is whether cultural commodities that are produced according to artisanal and small production modalities fall within the orbit of the cultural industries. This issue is correlated with the often-made opposition between mass markets and segmented markets. To address it, typologies were elaborated combining criteria of a technical order (such as the possibility or not to reproduce goods in industrially produced series), an economic order (the serialization allowing a closer relation between market prices and value), and social and cultural orders (do artists and intellectuals participate in the design of products?). This last criterion generated the following distinctions:

Type 1: reproducible products not requiring the involvement of informational workers in their production. We are dealing here essentially with technical devices allowing access to cultural and informational resources whose consumption we know has grown rapidly over the past 30 years;

Type 2: reproducible products which involve cultural (and informational) workers in their production, such as books, disks, films, and television programs. We are here at the heart of industrialized cultural merchandise;

Type 3: semireproducible products requiring the intervention of artists, but whose reproduction is limited by technical or socially distinctive processes: lithographs and limited reproductions of fine art, for example;

Type 4: commodities that fall outside the orbit of the cultural industry such as unique pieces of art.

This typology assigns a central position to the notion of reproducibility and presents it as the cultural industry’s defining feature.

Second proposition: the unpredictable (or uncertain) character of cultural (or informational) use values generated by industrialized cultural products is another one of its defining features

For cultural products, but also for informational products that are distributed under the form of merchandise or through media, there is one persistent difficulty: that of turning use value (often strongly symbolically charged, as with popular music or entertainment) into an exchange value that can be realized in the market. This operation needs to be renewed regularly because it isn’t guaranteed. More than in other categories of industrialized products in daily use, a considerable number of cultural or informational goods are unsuccessful and remain unsold, or are distributed only in very small quantities. In an effort to minimize, or even just control, the uncertain character of product value, industrial corporations implement a series of strategies. These include: calculating costs per series or catalogue rather than per product; price fixing with wide margins, beyond usual norms; not paying wages to the creative/design staff (a point we will return to later); “outsourcing” economic risks to smaller subcontractor firms who are called upon to bear the initial artistic risks of innovation; detailed stock management (sometimes charged by the distributors); regular resorting to public state funding justified by the specificity of the products; confinement in protected linguistic or national spaces; and refinement of the target market with the help of various audience studies. These features can be regarded as structural and have justified the separate treatment of cultural and informational industries among other industrial fields, not as a historical sector (as it may have been assumed in the past), but as one irreducible, at least until now, to the traditional forms of industrialization. Recently, however, the emergence of new information and communication technologies which are subject to capitalist production norms has raised the important question of whether historically specific practices will be abandoned or relegated to marginal or minor branches of production.

Third proposition: artistic and intellectual workers think of their products mostly according to artisan modalities that are supposed to guarantee autonomy in creation

It’s important here to note the recurring particularities of the payment modalities for most of those taking part in the creation of cultural products: artists (authors and interpreters), freelance and occasional journalists, and the editorial and design professionals working on books prior to publication. Payment for the majority of these workers escapes the wage system, forcing them to accept other systems of reward such as copyright and freelance payments. There are some permanent workers in newsrooms, as well as in publishing houses and the audiovisual sector, but in most companies half or more of the workforce is made up of precarious and intermittent workers without any secure status. This trait is not a hangover from the past, but a settled characteristic that allows companies to manage a fluid artistic and intellectual workforce and adapt quickly to multiple new demands, genres, forms, and standards, and cope with the risks of failure. This system creates permanent insecurity, and generates a reservoir of workers whose maintenance is only partially at the expense of industrial corporations, and who are always ready to work for minimum pay and conditions. But why do cultural workers agree to work in conditions that have long been rejected in other industries?

Part of the explanation is structural and arises from the increasing generalization of arrangements originally developed to handle relations between writers and book editors under which authors handed in their manuscripts to editors who then dealt with all later operations (such as the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution). Under contemporary conditions, managing rights in the audiovisual industries has become an increasingly complex operation leading to a marked increase in more specialized forms of labor grounded in various branches of law. That the initial simplicity of the system has now given way to increasing complexity and opacity is evidenced by the tendency to replace author rights by copyright that doesn’t recognize the patrimonial rights to the work and by the growing interest taken in intellectual property law (as used in computing companies).

As David Hesmondhalgh and others have pointed out, however, innovations in the management of cultural work is not a sufficient explanation. There is also the persistence of professional ideologies of authorship and creativity as a result of which cultural workers are willing to

trade in financial reward and security for creative autonomy. But a model of power as coercion is insufficient to explain this. There is rarely an authority figure present to tell symbol creators to work so hard for so little reward. In fact, all creative workers … seem to accept poor working conditions (for example, long, difficult hours) for the benefits of being involved in creative projects and the glamour surrounding these worlds. (Hesmondhalgh 2007, 207)

Fourth proposition: the exploitation of industrialized cultural merchandise (from creation to consumption) is based on two fundamental generic models, the editorial model and the flow model

Because the universe of cultural and informational products is extremely diverse, it isn’t surprising that relations between artistic and intellectual workers, on the one hand, and readers, listeners, viewers, and Internet users, on the other, display considerable variations. The development of radio broadcasting after World War I introduced a new relationship, based not on purchasing access to a particular cultural production or service, but on accessing a schedule of news and entertainment programming presented, if not continuously, then over long periods of time, and according to a regular schedule. Henceforth, consumers, who still needed to pay to access a book, newspaper, vinyl record, or movie theater ticket, had access to the entire output of commercial broadcasting in the United States (where the model first appeared) free at the point of use, since the costs were covered by earnings from the sale of advertising.

These considerations and others led scholars (initially in France with Patrice Flichy’s work in the 1980s) to suggest a fundamental distinction between an editorial model (that applied to purchasable cultural goods such as books and disks, and a flow model (for mass radio and television). In the first model the locus of creative decision making lies with the editor (e.g., of a newspaper or publishing house). In the second, it lies with the programmer, who assembles and orchestrates the schedule. Yet there are still at least three essential details to add in order to move beyond a superficial approach:

1  Since the model applies throughout the chain of production, distribution, and consumption, and since the same product can be consumed in a variety of forms (as with the possibility of watching the same movie in a movie theater, on a TV channel, or on a DVD), the main agents may differ in different situations. The editor or producer may make way for a programmer, for example. Thus the characterization of the way cultural and media industries function inside this model’s frame cannot be narrowly considered, as it is just as much socioeconomical as it is sociosymbolical.

2  The distinction between the two models is based neither on their material nature (the fact that they are distributed using a material base), nor on their immaterial nature, as often thought. The exploitation of cinema in movie theaters that has continued for over a hundred years, for example, is to be considered within the editorial model. At the level of consumption a number of criteria have to be taken into account, the main one being whether individual consumers pay for the right to own an object or good or to take a service or become part of a mass audience who choose such and such programs and enjoy free access, either because the media in question have a public service mission and are subsidized out of taxation or because they are financed by advertising resources.

3  Because particular instances often cannot be considered as belonging solely to one model or the other, editorial and flow models should be considered as ideal types. This is particularly important now since arguably the distinction may be getting less and less obvious. Consequently, it is preferable to consider that such and such product borrows aspects from one model or the other, or stands closer to one or the other. Print news, for example, now integrates an almost complete range of situations involving both editorial and flow models (from political weeklies that receive very little revenue from advertising, to the free daily press). Online documentary products may now combine subscriptions and piece rates, as well as advertising. A club package allows subscribers (such as those to the French channel, Canal Plus, or Videotron in Canada) to access a certain number of services during the length of the subscription. We also see the rise of brokerage, where an intermediary or some kind of a representative negotiates with the distributors as to what products may be of interest to the consumer. Added to which, the online generalist with specialized portals that are currently in development, though they don’t have stabilized payment methods, may yet generate different formulas.

As these examples show, employing these models and their various permutations not only aids the advance of knowledge, but it also helps in interpreting changes.

Fifth proposition: conceptions of internationalization need to take into account both national cultures and regional configurations

At the beginning of the 1970s, we were able to observe two major trends: a growing concentration and internationalization of appliances and objects (Type 1 products), and the significant presence of small and medium companies owned by national capital for semireproducible products (Type 3). As for edited products (Type 2), they showed themselves to be sites of lively competition between national and transnational capitals, more so for recorded music, audiovisual media, and games than for book editing or mass public-oriented news. The challenges were as much industrial as they were political, cultural, or linguistic, yet the transnationalization that was mainly the initiative of major American companies and Japanese conglomerates (although spreading) was encountering strong resistance because of the space left for national and regional companies to develop. This growth was encouraged by the standardization of technical bases, the emergence of communication networks, and the strategic importance of distribution rights.

However, in contrast to the simplistic views that have ignored diversity and complexity, the entry of cultural industries into global markets did not follow a simple course or a peaceful progression, as later confirmed by the negotiations that subsequently took place within regional bodies (like the European Union) and international authorities (such as GATT and the WTO on cultural merchandise, and Unesco on cultural diversity).

To sum up, the five propositions outlined here have shaped the development of Cultural Industries Theory over three decades. As indicated, changes and mutations in the organization of these industries have been continuous to the point that the end of their specificities (or their originality) is regularly announced. The reconsideration of protective regulations, the development of networks, and the erosion of national cultures by transnational standards are all cited as factors incorporating the cultural industries into the ranks of industries in general. If this argument is correct, then their life cycle would be coming to an end, a cycle that would have lasted for approximately a century, if we leave out book and newspaper editing with their roots in the eighteenth century. This conclusion deserves to be looked at more closely, however, before we rush to endorse first impressions or general announcements.

Mutations and Reconsiderations

There are good reasons why the cultural industries have been experiencing important developments since the end of the twentieth century, not least the fact that they are now seen to be particularly representative and emblematic of the general transformations of contemporary capitalism and globalization. The terms employed to describe the major shifts pinpoint the main changes that have attracted attention: financialization, concentration, internationalization, multimediation, medialization, digitization, convergence, new media, deregulation and reregulation, industrialization (of content creation), commodification, rationalization, standardization (of technical norms and uses), individualization of practices. All these define the major forces at work, as well as the fact that we are in the presence of some major issues.

What follows is an attempt to characterize the mutations now taking place in the cultural industries by grouping them into four series.

First series of mutations: those that reveal the economic and financial strategies of capital holders

Concentration

The issue of increasing concentration in the media and cultural industries and the rise of more and more powerful communication groups (themselves often controlled by financial centers and industrial conglomerates), has recently emerged as a central preoccupation. But as Vincent Mosco has argued, despite its growing importance, it remains a mistake to make concentration the sole focus of attention. As he notes:

rethinking political economy includes recognizing that, though important, corporate size and concentration are just starting points for understanding the transformation of the communication business. Global restructuring offers numerous opportunities to expand control from the conglomerate form to the range of flexible alternatives. The chief requirements include controlling central points in the production, distribution and exchange process (outright ownership is one among numerous alternatives) and remaining flexible to respond to changing markets and technologies. (Mosco 1996, 198)

Various authors have tried to analyze the concentration phenomenon using empirical and historical data to trace the strategies adopted by the large communication groups. They include (chronologically): Armand Mattelart (1976), Enrique Bustamante and Ramon Zallo (1988), Ramon Zallo (1992), Gaëtan Tremblay (1990), Edward Herman and Robert McChesney (1997), Bustamante (2002, 2003, Bustamante and Miguel de Bustos 2005), Guillermo Mastrini and Martin Beccera (2003), as well as the research on 19 French communication groups directed by Bernard Miège (see also 2005 Réseaux articles by Philippe Bouquillion and Christian Pradié). This list, though incomplete, illustrates the desire by those working in the field to develop validated knowledge concerning the evolution of major groups and their strategies. Research in this area, however, remains primarily national, and more recently regional, with authors having trouble proposing a worldwide approach.

There is, however, a widespread consensus that concentration is accelerating and that this movement will further intensify. Herman and McChesney, for example, argue that:

The global media market is dominated by ten or so vertically integrated media conglomerates, most of which are based in the United States. Another thirty or forty significant supporting firms round out the meaningful position in the system. These firms operate in oligopolistic markets with substantial barriers to entry. They compete vigorously on a non-price basis, but their competition is softened not only by common interest as oligopolies, but also by a vast array of joint ventures, strategic alliances, and cross-ownership among the leading firms … The market is still in the process of rapid change, and more mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures can be expected before the dust clears. (Herman and McChesney 1997, 104)

Bustamante and Miguel de Bustos conclude their analysis of the situation in Latin America by arguing that: “the concentration seems in every case, and in nearly every country of Latin America, to be an essential characteristic in cultural industries, television and press markets being extremely concentrated, unlike the radio market that sees far more competition” (Bustamante and de Bustos 2005, 61).

Werner Meier, commenting on the Europe situation, notes that:

Concentration in media means the concentration of economical and societal power used by dominating communication firms against their competitors … [it] operates through internal and external growths of communication companies … concentration of property does not only constitute an economic drift, it is also a fundamental problem for democracy because economic power can be turned into political power as well as into power of opinion, therefore being a menace for democracy. The concentration and power of media are phenomena that fundamentally characterize the modern media system based on competition. (Meier 2005, 21, 22, 42)

Philippe Bouquillion, Bernard Miège, and Claire Moriset, observing the recent moves towards further concentration in the French cultural and media industries in 2004 and 2005 argue that “Concentration of financial operations are accelerating … leading to important multi media integration … accentuating in the print industries” (Bouquillion et al. 2006, 151–2).

All of these authors deplore the lack of significant available data. Furthermore, they underline the complexity of the global tendency toward concentration, pointing out that it is constituted by multiple movements (e.g., a rapid concentration in the print press field, but with multimedia synergies yet to come), and embraces phenomena that aren’t as easy to explain as it may first appear.

But beyond the general insistence that concentration of ownership leads to a strengthening of domination and control as well as a weakening of pluralism and quality (in a growing international frame), its specific impacts in particular circumstances often remain difficult to trace. Werner Meier, for example, lists no less than 28 possible consequences of media concentration on media organization and journalism, the media market, and the political power of culture (Meier 2005, 39–40). They certainly cannot be mechanically deduced from control takeovers for a variety of reasons. First, they manifest themselves mostly over long periods of time, rather than immediately as direct consequences to changes made to the composition of corporate capital. Second, capital centralization in financial centers controlling communication groups does not automatically produce changes in firms or synergy attempts between them (they could, for example, be of a multimedia nature). Third, increased pressure on independent production and on national and regional productions, and moves toward their extinction, is not always the case. Fourth, the extension of the market doesn’t necessarily lead to the industrialization of content. Finally, the growing resort to information and communication techniques does not inevitably mean that content becomes more and more serialized.

On the other hand, we need to keep Philippe Bouquillion’s central conclusion in mind: “concentration allows dominant oligopoly actors to develop market power at the expense of consumers as well as economic agents that don’t belong to the oligopoly, particularly small agents that are frequently related to production” (Bouquillion 2008, 278). It has been clear for some time that cultural industry fields (or branches) are generally marked by the coexistence of oligopoly with a competitive fringe (or anthill). In this structural formation, a small number of dominant groups mostly control distribution while a multitude of small independent producers, who have no option but to take artistic risks, are responsible for the majority of creative innovations. Over the last 25 years, although the anthill hasn’t reduced (it has even grown in some branches, sometimes in increasingly precarious conditions), oligopoly has tended to become duopoly, not to say monopoly, as well as internationalizing. This is an essential characteristic which deeply marks the contemporary cultural and media industries. The dominant groups in a monopolistic position do not, however, usually have stakes across the entire chain of production. They prefer to control distribution and dispose of program bases while taking advantage of their privileged position to buy up distribution rights. At the same time, this tendency hides other decisive changes, although they aren’t yet completed, in the sphere of finance.

Financialization

During recent years we have witnessed important shifts in patterns of investment in communication, particularly in the content industries with the growing centrality of financial institutions. In order to analyze these movements, however, we need to distinguish between several different trends:

1 Investments in media and cultural corporations coming from, for example, pension funds with financial efficiency objectives on a scale from 12 to 15 percent (financialization, strictly speaking);

2 The financial operations of financial groups. Philippe Bouquillion insists pertinently on the autonomy of these financial operations, pointing among other cases to the link-ups between AOL and Time Warner, or Disney and ABC, and arguing that speculative financial operations are at the root of some strategies in the information, culture, and communication spheres (Bouquillion 2008, 25–40);

3 The capital operations that are part of an industrial strategy that, in the media and cultural industries, aren’t yet fully analyzed.

Only operations of this third type have direct implications for cultural creation and the quality of information. The other two, however, have the power to rigorously question the value of various activities or editorial projects.

It isn’t easy to find one’s way around the maze of multiple operations and financial coups, and we need to be careful not to mistake firms (such as Canal Plus International), with groups (like Canal Plus), financial conglomerates (like Vivendi Universal), and financial centers (such as the banks or insurance companies that control the conglomerates).

These technical and conceptual difficulties, however, have not prevented new detailed analyses being done. We can cite Scott Fitzgerald’s conclusions (Fitzgerald 2008, 284), that financialization, associated with reregulation and vertical integration movements, has “reinforced the inherently anti-competitive context in which the majority of global media operate.” This clearly appears in the agreements that the seven main media groups operating in Australia have recently concluded, establishing a 50 percent joint venture with a big financial group. This trend needs to be emphasized because it seems to be strengthening in all regions of the world. Even if they are in a situation of strong competition for a share of audiences or the distribution of products, major groups (most often in oligopolistic situation in their respective areas of distribution) agree to establish anticompetition measures, likely to curb the ambitions of new entrants. Nuria Almiron, however, argues that simply studying the relations between the financial sphere and new informational industries is insufficient (Almiron 2008a, 2008b, 287). She attempts to measure the financialization of the six big American media conglomerate groups using six criteria: the corporation’s property holdings, its stock shares, its debts, financial tools, the board of directors, and corporate goals. She is right to insist that to understand the growth of financialization and to evaluate the dominant position of finance at the center of corporate media, one cannot be satisfied with an approach concentrated on property control only, and that other criteria have to be taken into account.

Widening and refinement of advertising strategies

The next major shift to be taken into account is the widening and refinement of advertising strategies. Advertising and media have been inextricably bound together for a long time, generating a “double market” produced by two related and successive operations:

• the constitution of a regular audience (the first clients), whose loyalty is to be secured and authenticated with measures as precise as possible.
• the evaluation of these audiences by advertisers (the second clients), who are then invited to buy advertising space priced according to audience size, social composition, and attention potential.

This second market puts into motion a logistic, generally hidden from consumers, that was perfected during the second half of the twentieth century with the diversification of media forms and the related intensification of competition for audience time and attention.

Although the links between media and advertising funding are often hidden, or presented as accidental or even contingent, their constant interrelation is suspected by a large number of users. But outside of public service media endowed with sufficient and regular resources, there hasn’t been until now any alternative means of financial support others than those provided by either advertisers or consumers.

This being said, established media (particularly the press and commercial broadcasting) are becoming less and less significant for advertising. In the 1990s, a largely unnoticed transfer of resources occurred in which nonmedia outlets (principally direct marketing) overtook media outlets (such as press, radio, cinema, outside posters, and television). In France nowadays (according to professional estimations), advertising spending on nonmedia promotion is double that spent on media. In financial terms, the total resources going to media are stationary, and growth is mainly happening in areas (such as flyers and coupons) that aim to establish and maintain a personalized relation with consumers. The same is true of the Internet over the past 10 years. Of course, the evolution we have just described should not be overestimated because advertising campaigns know very well how to operate across different bases and combine different platforms, and sociosymbolic impact cannot be equated with the distribution of total spending. From the point of view of the advertiser’s interests, however, dominant media are currently proving relatively inadequate. At the same time, although the formation of new media on the Internet is now well advanced and their growth rapid, their relative importance should not be exaggerated.

It should also be added that the advertising industry is encountering, as John Sinclair noted during an investigation in four Latin America countries, “complex dynamics of the global/local dialectic” generating “an intricate and shifting set of institutional relations between advertising agencies, their clients … and the media,” that “binds the leading nations … into both economic and cultural globalisation” (Sinclair 2008, 284).

Alongside advertising we need to add to our analysis other tools for promoting markets and stimulating expectations and requests. These marketing techniques assume multiple forms and are mainly mobilized in conjunction with product commercialization, but are still only rarely used to stimulate artistic creation. On the other hand, a lot of work is now done on the consumption environment, where corporate promotional discourses are now omnipresent and largely uncontested due to the decline and marginalization of critical rhetorics. The colonization by brand magazines of the spaces usually occupied by specialized journals and critical columns is a prime example.

The rationalization of editorial strategies

Although financialization and the concentration of ownership in media and cultural industrial groups tend not to have immediate and mechanical effects on given content, they are at the center of analysts’ preoccupations for an obvious reason. Acquired economic power easily transforms itself into market power that encourages action on social practices and even on public opinions. The acquisition and control over media and cultural firms may also have connections with the winning or conservation of political power as shown by such cases as Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Rafic Hariri in Lebanon, and the obvious complicities between groups such as Lagardère or Bolloré and the most senior French leaders. The fact is, however, that we shouldn’t assume that linkages between company aims and political objectives operate as a matter of course, firstly because games of power are often very complex, secondly because we also need to develop an “analysis of changing media policy” that sees it as the site of continual conflicts of interest whose outcome cannot always be easily predicted in advance (IAMCR, 2008, 276), and thirdly because focusing solely on the political deployment of corporate power ignores the central role played by profit-maximization strategies in exerting pressure on editors, series editors (in book and music editing), as well as program directors and producers (in cinema and audiovisual media) and authors.

At the same time, recent research on book editing in France offers another perspective. The author Christian Robin, examining long-term developments and drawing on a very complete list of criteria, concludes that:

To the question of whether management tools got in the way of ambitious production projects and limited creativity, the answer is clearly negative. Important studies are still published today, including some on large groups. Creativity has not disappeared – on the contrary. The effect of management tools on content, if it still exists, has more to do with the representations that actors have of it than what they are used for … However, the use of management tools tends to put pressure on the coherence of the project’s internal choices. On these concerns, pushed too far in the framework of bad quality or unproductive relations between managers and editorial directors, these managing methods risk restraining creativity. Indeed, systematically rationalizing can reach irrational and counterproductive decisions, especially in literature. (Robin, 2003)

The author also emphasizes the essential role played by new technical tools in the conception and making of books during the period he considers. The perspective suggested here is very promising, as it shows how an approach focusing solely on cases considered as exemplary risks giving a truncated vision. Added to which, this perspective bases reflections on a long-term period, whereas the social discourses coming from professionals or users are essentially working with a short, or very short, time scale. Of course, we cannot neglect emerging tendencies or what the present turbulent circumstances might portend, but before anything else, we must continue to place current changes and movements in the context of longer term processes or else locate (with methodological precaution) “threshold effects.” We need to remain continuously questioning when coming face to face with emerging logistics, that may not be continued or reinforced or whose effects take time to gather momentum. The digitalization of press news, for example, prompted some initial work in the 1990s, but it is only since 2006 that its full implications have begun to become clear.

Faced with the technical and practical difficulties in following the major developments in different fields in a detailed way, one way forward is to employ a series of indicators that seem to have a strong potential to fill in the most obvious gaps in the analysis of the mutations being experienced by informational and communicational industries. The term “indicator” is used here to designate a synthetic tool of analysis for charting a movement in progress. The most relevant indicators are the following (Miège 2007, pp. 235–238):

• Independent production: maintained, done away with, or in difficulty?
• The “tube and catalogue” dialectic: does the calculation of profitability depend on reliance on the catalogue or series, or title by title?
• The internationalization of norms and standards, resulting in the formatting of products: is this happening?
• The socialization and technical medialization of the products’ conception: is it accelerating?
• The accelerated distribution of art works through various bases and media: is this happening?
• The uniqueness of the art work: is it maintained or inserted into a larger group of products, including derived ones, and with the partial payment of production costs by promotional resources?

Second series of mutations: legal and political shifts

Under this heading, two fundamental movements can be identified: the readjustment of regulatory regimes, and shifts in the copyright system.

Regulatory adjustments

The constant adjustment of the regulations governing radio broadcasting, telecommunications, and content industries, according to a position combining economic liberalization and reregulation, began a quarter of a century ago and is still in process. It has proceeded by way of leaps crossing successive thresholds, and although it isn’t specific to information and communication fields, and has provoked strong critiques and resistance from consumers and professionals, it has introduced into Europe a radically new economic environment. Although results and perceptions differ from one country to another (notably between Britain on the one hand, and the Northern countries and France on the other), similar consequences can be found, as for example, the strong commodification of telecommunications, the multiplication of private television channels, and wider openings in worldwide markets for cultural and informational products. Two essential questions remain, however: first, are we moving toward the definitive weakening of public broadcasting, and more particularly of established political and normative criteria defining what constitutes a public service? And second, in the matter of cultural and artistic content, will government organizations continue to take primary responsibility for making policy (thus promoting cultural and linguistic identities), or will they give way to the private sector?

Both questions need be asked with greater urgency now as it is becoming harder and harder to find the necessary resources for the production of diverse programming and content, whether from private foundations (the 2008 crash didn’t help), or from the consumers’ side with people less inclined to pay for content and more interested in apparently “free” access. The strong rhetorical resistances to culture’s commodification, and its widened transnationalization, hide a continuing, and arguably deepening, problem of resource availability.

Shifts in copyright

The second major movement concerns shifts in the copyright system, and authors’ rights in the whole production–consumption chain. The conclusions arrived at by Vincent Bullich in his study of the evolution of recorded music regulations in the United States from 1877 to 2007, can easily be generalized to the rest of the cultural industries:

Far from being autoregulated, the phonographic market is thus fundamentally the result of a political construction that creates and guarantees an “authority resource” (the exclusive right to use and broadcast a piece of work) and partly organizes the transmutation into “allocation resources” (the definition of economic transaction modalities, related to the users’ license) … This relation results in an organization of political, economic, and legal perspectives, that renew with every media-related innovation; it mobilizes different agents in the music recording world (and namely the biggest pressure groups that exist) who push their interests forward and express their capacity to intervene in the processes of law elaborations and applications. (Bullich 2008, pp. 455–6)

This legal and regulatory framework is no longer limited to the United States, nor to recorded music, and it is likely that its reach will be accentuated, although contested (as it has always been) by consumers, by new agents in the cultural and informational industries (in particular computing companies), and by emerging countries.

More generally, it has to be expected that with globalization, a more or less global regime will emerge, constructed around the interests of the most powerful firms in controlling the cost of artistic and intellectual production and maximizing returns. This process has already been engaged during the various commercial negotiations inside the World Trade Organization aiming to position cultural merchandise on the same level as other goods and services.

Third series of mutations: the individualization, differentiation, and mediatization of practices

Several developments in the organization of consumption practices need to be taken into account here. They are each distinct, although they are interrelated and mutually supportive.

Individualization and differentiation

The plural individualization of cultural and informational practices is confirmed by the available data as well as the convergence of widely observable tendencies around the world, including those in the leading countries. Key features include:

• the growing use and access to personalized cultural goods, tools, and devices, all massively produced (for the past 30 years)
• the underlying connection, that is much more recent, between these tools, communication networks, and contents
• a double polarization: the persistence of inequalities and social distinction effects and the reinforcement of individual strategies of action
• the significant impact of generational and genre effects, on growth of differentiations
• the emphasis placed on the interpenetration and shift in spheres of action, notably between professional and private lives.

But rather than follow the majority of authors, in particular cultural sociologists, who conclude, with only a cursory look at the data, that we are currently witnessing the growing individualization of social practices, we prefer to note the simultaneous pluralization and differentiation of these same practices. The individualization argument makes too many concessions to technodeterminism and underestimates the historical grounding of practices. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as other emerging media technologies, may encourage and support more individualized practices, but they didn’t invent them. Peer-to-peer sharing, for example, belongs to a long tradition of archiving, collecting, exchanging, and copying recorded music, legally allowed or not. It is amplified by, but does not originate in, the use of powerful online systems.

Mediatization

It was observed a long time ago that mediated communication has progressively entered into every aspect of social life and relations. This trend is seen to have accelerated with the growth of ICTs and digital devices. Despite the negative estimations of some intellectuals, what we are witnessing is coexistence and even complementarity, rather than displacement. The time spent in front of computer screens for private activities hasn’t been to the detriment of interindividual exchanges, for example, nor has the rise of home schooling – a possibility that was originally seen as occupying a growing proportion of curriculum time – enjoyed the success that was predicted for it.

Supporters of the mediatization of communication as a liberating force, however, ignore the fact that it is supported by a series of organizational modalities that are part of programs conceived by specialists, and implemented by industrial groups who have rapidly acquired a worldwide reach and a quasi-monopolist position. Take, for example, the “Googlization” of information processing, archiving, and formatting that has become a central phenomenon in culture and information industrialization in the last few years. This new communication form is presented by its enthusiasts as open, and favoring personal initiatives, reinterpretations, and diversion by final users. At the same time, it conceals within itself everything that was conceived and preconstructed by the makers, and controlled by the firms, in order to adapt the products to expectations, and thus ensure their commercial distribution.

The process of digitalization, that is now on the way to becoming relatively generalized, isn’t driven by an imperial technological trend but has to be considered as a socioeconomic construction to which powerful actors contribute. In this respect, the issue of “free” access to cultural practices must be raised again. While user-consumers, or at least, a certain number of them, are willing to pay the connection costs and purchase the required tools and appliances and computing services, they show considerable reluctance to pay for cultural and informational services, and try to escape charges by using (or abusing?) various open technological possibilities. This raises a very important quasi-global issue, that will be discussed later.

Fourth series of mutations, the ones specifically affecting cultural and media industries in their functioning modalities

Four issues need to be considered here: convergence, homogenization, the future of editorial and flow models, and relations between the “creative industries” and the cultural industries

Convergence

Under this heading we need to consider the bringing together of the cultural industries with media, and the partial integration of performing arts into the industrial sphere.

The industrialization process, defined earlier on, should not be confused with the marketing movement nor understood in a metaphorical sense (as is often the case in artistic professions), or seen only as the resort to new technical means, such as with ICTs. At the base of its formation is the centrality of reproduction. An original copy can either be inscribed on a material base (paper, vinyl, plastic) or it can assume a virtual or immaterial character (a possibility first introduced by the projection of films in movie theaters). That is why, together with other commentators, we have excluded public cultural institutions (such as museums and historical monuments) from our definition of the cultural industry, together with private organizations responsible for the production and distribution of performance arts, and independent or alternative media. It has always been difficult in the cultural and informational fields to trace a clear border between what belongs to the industrial world and what is to be distinguished from it, because numerous small and medium-sized companies that work in an artisan way are in reality sometimes very profitable subcontractors, and are either industrial companies in their own right or aiming at industrial development. However, the neglect of the core criterion of reproducibility by professionals and experts has led to a series of damaging confusions that arise from the fact that the dominant conception of cultural work is still, as we noted earlier, very much organized according to artisan modalities. The performing arts (essentially theater, dance, and music concerts) present a particular case since, although many remain organized by private entrepreneurs and operate with a degree of durability over time, it is difficult for them to attain a high-scale economy since every evening the artists replay their act in front of various different audiences. This can’t really be considered an industrial activity.

The paradox raised by this theoretical perspective is that if it keeps its relevance by tracing clear lines of separation, its crude application leads to oddities, as for example when the production of small publishers is considered to be industrial although they are hardly economically profitable. At the same time, the relations between the two worlds are steadily becoming stronger. Live concerts have long been a promotional base for recorded music, but now a reversal is happening, due to the technical and promotional means employed, as the economic profitability of international stars and their shows outstrips the returns from record sales. In the sphere of mass market-oriented audiovisual media, the generalized resort to subcontracting for production has led, as noted earlier, to oligopolistic groups that are partially in competition. Although their major resources don’t come from final consumption, they cannot be classified outside of the industrial world. On the other hand, a whole series of artistic expressions are excluded from this category (such as dramatic arts, choreography, poetry), as well as public initiatives or associative organizations (such as public museums, although they use derived products).

Hence, although the reproducibility criterion retains its relevance when it comes to identifying the industrial sphere of culture, and what differentiates it from industry in general, we need to add that this same sphere is not only enlarged, but now also includes organizations and actors that have created stable and complementary relations with actors at the heart of it, or from other industries, such as network industries.

Homogenization

The development of digital ICTs is considered by some authors and observers to be the origin of decisive transformations that have disrupted the established modalities of cultural and media industries, rendering their promotion unpredictable and random, by allowing amateur or independent productions to offer durable competition to major productions.

The available research, however (see Bouquillion and Combès 2007, Bouquillion 2008), doesn’t confirm this conclusion. As we argued earlier, we are also seeing the strengthening of concentration around strongly implanted oligopolies in different fields, as well as the rationalization of editorial choices, both tendencies being facilitated by the constant weakening of public politics. At the same time, we are also seeing polarization in each branch of production between a small number of blockbusters conceived to provide the majority of the sales in terms of profitability (in order to become bestsellers), and a proliferation, a profusion even, of accessible products that work on the margins of economic profit. In brief, we may be witnessing the twilight of the “catalogue and tube dialectic.” The consequence will not be a lack of plurality (on the contrary, there has never been so much accessible cultural merchandise), but rather a reduction in cultural diversity, as precarious economic conditions continue to discourage risk taking among the major players, unless a multitude of very segmented “niches” were likely to form mass markets.

However, the shifts in different cultural and media industries (books, recorded music, cinema, mass public and specialized information, and now video games, online or not), doesn’t seem to be leading to the homogenization of the cultural and media industries, or the horizontal integration that was announced some time ago. Rather, they work according to common or similar logistics, but they keep their own ways of working, and even accentuate them while presenting their products on various common bases (in a multibase frame).

The future of editorial and flow models

The question of the evolution or future of the models described here cannot be separated from the wider analysis of the cultural industries in contemporary capitalism. We either see these industries as forming the heart of future capitalistic development, which leads us to deny all their originalities and specificities, or else we consider them as remnants or archaisms that are about to disappear. Yet it has to be stressed again that the models that we have defined here are ideal types, and are not restricted to the level of the financing of cultural merchandise. They embrace the whole of the conception- production-consumption chain, and put their stamp on the practices of user-consumers. The present situation is all the more difficult to interpret as it is shaped by the intersection of different disruptive or emerging phenomena. These consist in: (1) the increase or the widening of the industrialized information and cultural products on offer in the different fields, and the development of video games as a new field; (2) the extension of the media field to new media; (3) the increasing competition between artists, designers, producers, and distributors, for the distribution of the resources set aside by consumers for this category of products (against a background of stationary and even falling public funding); (4) the difficulty of raising the prices charged; (5) the continuing diversification of modes of access to products, from the personal acquisition of a concrete product (e.g., a book) to the direct use of content online (watching a commercial television channel talk show), and passing through a whole series of intermediate modes, the most significant being payment per piece, or pay per view, an example of the new rerun of the economy of urban services; and finally (6) the demand by consumers, particularly younger ones, or emerging countries, for free access to content, facilitated by the technical possibilities offered by the tools they have at hand, and reinforced by the means of payment for intellectual production in the computing industries.

We have a complex transitional situation then, characterized by divergent and multiple interests, including major new agents for whom the principal logistics at work can’t yet be specified with any certainty. Being generic, the editorial and flow models are still in a strong position. But a very diversified neoclub model interposes itself between them, as much a result of the rise of subscription television as of new platforms (more or less in relation with Internet access). But it must be added that the editorial model, as with the flow and the club, have hybrid variants, with a rising presence of advertising and sponsoring. This evolution currently leaves very little space for brokerage.

The “Creative Industries” and the Cultural Industries

When approaching the question of the creative industries, and their very recent emergence in cultural politics and in the struggle against deindustrialization in European countries, three aspects need to be distinguished.

Firstly, New Labour’s pioneering, and influential deployment of the idea of the “creative industries” in the UK, confirms, as Philip Schlesinger has pointed out, that this discourse can provide the basis for an industrial political doctrine, and even an ideology:

In the UK, the discourse of creativity has been developed by the government for the past decade, and is currently being bound into a “creative economy” conception. Official thinking is discursive in the sense that it is a self-sustaining outlook increasingly driven towards consistency. It has become a doctrine by virtue of being an object of unceasing advocacy by its proponents. It is now an inevitable starting point for those who wish to enter into dialogue with policymakers. (Schlesinger 2007, 378)

In this way, the author goes on to say: “the doctrine of creativity is now an animating ideology for a so-called digital age … [and] may be seen as the latest attempt to rationalize interdepartmental cooperation, to make the flow of business intelligence effective, to encourage networking, to bring together dispersed creative clusters and to foster talent” (Schlesinger 2007, 387). Although the success of this politics has not yet been demonstrated, the European Union is preparing a Green Book, and other countries are ready to head in the same direction.

Secondly, it is important to ask oneself what the economic foundations of this doctrine are, and to examine the work of liberal economists of culture, like David Throsby, who have acted as its spokespeople. According to them, although creative workers are to be found in all industrial sectors, the creative industries are distinguished by the fact that they are made up of organizations where creativity management is considered central, and that offer strongly symbolically charged products that are capitalized by way of intellectual property rights. That is why they may potentially be considered strong job creators. The fields in which they are to be most obviously operational are: fashion, design, advertising, gastronomy, digital platforms, architecture, arts and crafts (partly), cultural heritage (partly also), fields that have been for the most part included in the industrial politics of culture for the past two decades at least (e.g., in France), but that we didn’t consider until now as decisive for the production of resources.

Thirdly, we need to ask whether the creative industries include the cultural industries (in the way we have defined them here) or whether they are separate, with some overlap on the margins. For most specialists, one cannot confuse creativity, thought of as the capacity to generate original ideas and new practices, with cultural creation. They are often conflated by political leaders who tend to lump them together, which is a very approximate way of seeing things, theoretically and practically. On the one hand, creativity management techniques are incompletely used in cultural and informational industries. On the other hand creative industries conform hardly or not at all to the core criteria that we employed earlier to define the cultural industries: reproducibility; the uncertain character of use values; organization around editorial, flow, and club models; and moderated internationalization. The conception of creative autonomy may be common to both industries, but the organizational modalities differ, related in one case to author rights or to copyright, and in the other to intellectual property rights. As such, their integration into one another is still an issue to be figured out.

Conclusion

The future, even in the short term of the cultural industries, is not easily predictable. We are witnessing the intersection of various mutations, all as decisive as one another. Against this background, it is obvious that current approaches that consider the future as dependent primarily on either technological changes or financial capital strategies are hasty and false. As we have tried to show, many other elements need to be taken into account. The future is thus neither undetermined nor random. Rather it depends on the shifting balance between structural elements forged over the long development of these industries and current potential vectors for innovation. Within this space, it is the conflicting relation between the strategies of the different agents (the “majors” in communication toward user-consumers) that will get to define, probably with strong variations in different regions of the world, what comes to constitute the old industries and the emerging and dominated ones (both of which show a reluctance to accept models that were formed and perfected among the first wave industries).

Furthermore, as Dal Yong Jin observes, if in the last two decades

some developing countries, including Mexico, Singapore and Korea, have increased their role in the cross-deal market, the inequality and imbalance in the communication industry between developed countries and developing countries still exist in the midst of neoliberal transformation. Although the US has lightly lost its power in the global Mergers and Acquisitions market, the gap between a few Western countries and developing countries remains significant. (Yong Jin 2008, 370)

The Old World groups’ capacity to resist change is particularly observable in the media and cultural industrial field where they have battled hard to hang on to their historic competitive advantages.

Finally, we must not forget to add that all these mutations are supported, promoted even, by actions aiming to impose their own preferred social representations of modernity. This project involves everything that goes into the technical medialization and marketing processes (and thus the organization of payment by consumers) and confirms once more that the development of capitalism is accelerated by modifications of an ideological order.

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