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2008, The Cultural Economy. Los Angeles: Sage
AI
This chapter explores the dynamics of cultural exchange and production within the global cultural economy, emphasizing the role of agency and voice in the context of globalization. It analyzes four sectors of cultural production and their political economy, emphasizes the unequal dynamics of global cultural flows, and links these flows to the rise of political dissent driven by new communications technologies. The chapter articulates how the international market for cultural goods exceeds traditional sectors and raises questions about the institutional pressures influencing global dissent.
2014
This chapter examines the complex dynamics of cultural exchange and production. While the narrative of financial globalization privilege system and structure, that of cultural globalization emphasizes the centrality of agency and voice. The first section maps the contours and boundaries of the global cultural economy. The second briefly analyzes four industrial sectors in order to illustrate the political economy of cultural production. The third section examines the inherently unequal dynamics of global cultural flows. Finally, we will link the global cultural economy to the growth of political dissent. Dissent is the consequence of power being reallocated downwards and the ‘Innisian ’ and ‘Habermasian ’ power dynamics involved are central to our understanding of the role of agency and voice in the global cultural economy.
Routledge eBooks, 2018
the many ways in which culture itself is understood as a focus of study. Britain's 2016 Brexit referendum to exit the European Union notwithstanding, concepts such as national identity and national culture, for example, are no longer regarded as unitary, and likely never could be. Despite the fact that cultural products are circulated by powerful corporations, the symbolic creativity they organize, produce, and distribute is not immune from the inequalities of class, gender, and ethnicity present in the industries of contemporary capitalist societies; in addition, cultural products are increasingly significant sources of wealth and employment in many economies. Because cultural production as an industrial system encompasses "outputs [that] are marked by high levels of aesthetic and semiotic content in relation to their purely practical uses" (Scott 2000:2), and symbolic content plays an increasingly important role in how countries, nations, regions, and cultures interconnect on organizational levels, this chapter addresses what sociologists understand about globalization and cultural production, that is, the transnational institutional arrangements that are associated with creation or execution, reproduction, circulation, and exhibition of cultural products. I focus especially on meso-level analyses of cultural production because of their ability to reveal the mechanisms by which culture shapes and is shaped by structural forces and local action.
Réseaux, 2021
This article seeks to provide the reader with a theoretical model to understand the cultural dimensions of globalization linked to the circulation of global cultural goods. To do so, we shall first contextualize the main analytical tools developed since the early 1990s. In examining culture’s global turn, researchers have highlighted three main sources of friction at work in the transformation of cultural identities: the tensions between the drive towards homogeneity and heterogeneity; between American-Western cultural imperialism and ethno-national resistance; and between local promotion and hybridization. Drawing on this literature, we shall propose a four-vector model to analyze the globalization of cultural products: aesthetic capitalism, the battle for cultural hegemony, the role of ntermediaries, and work of reception done by amateurs. During this investigation, Arjun Appadurai’s sociological observation that “the global cultural economy” can only be understood by looking at “the fundamental disjuncture between economy, culture, and politics” will serve as our compass (1996, p. 33). The dynamic interplay between global cultural systems — governed by the complex relationships between the flows or “scapes” of people (“ethnoscapes”), technologies (“technoscapes”), capital (“financescapes”), information (“mediascapes”), and ideologies (“ideoscapes”) — is in fact what allows us to “see cultural material [move across] national boundaries” (p. 46).
Journal of Consumer Culture, 2008
Global Media and China, 2017
Culture industries of Asia" is the immediate topic that comes to our mind when we are invited to do this Special Issue of Global Media and China. It is indeed the most distinctive yet problematic topic in this region. It also happens that this Special Issue was prepared at a time when we were participating in the Digital Media Studies Conference organized by Beijing Normal University on the topic "Perspectives and Approaches of Creative/Culture Industries." While Kim serves as a keynote speaker of the conference, Fung is the convener of it. Then, naturally, as it turned out as well, the keynote presentations and papers become the core set of manuscripts for this Special Issue. Together with other submissions to the issue, we were able to harvest seven papers which are gathering under the banner of culture industries with relevance, quality, and innovation. Media globalization is a notion easily paired with cultural globalization as both are inseparable in most cases. The discourse on cultural globalization has to certain extent replaced that of cultural imperialism thesis in the last couple of decades (Mirriees, 2013). But, in reality, the rising new technology and dying old cold politics probably could not force the cultural imperialism thesis out of stage if the thesis was simply true. The discourse of cultural globalization, as we critically understand it, can just be a camouflage of cultural imperialism. Admittedly, the weakest point of the cultural imperialism thesis was within itself, and it was an over-confidence in the power of media and untested belief in the brainwash effect of media contents. It still narrates the assumption that the more you watch Donald Duck, the more you believe the United States is right. But as the global cultural order and hence its cultural flow become so much complicated with the advance of communication technology, transforming global politics, and a rising China, a simple interpretation of the global effect of culture and media based on cultural imperialism seems too simple. Yet the cultural imperialism thesis has provided many valuable insights and opened critical viewpoints for the balanced interpretation on the ideological preferences and distortions. In Fung's (2013) Asian Popular Culture, it clearly points out that in many of the Asian states, its popular culture is still dependent on Western capitals and multinational corporations (MNCs), although some of them have successfully and consciously discontinued its connection. That is why we could understand that the discourse of cultural imperialism is still conserved in the media authority of 705917G CH0010.
2013
What is the role of culture in an era of globalization? This is one of the questions that animates the work of Imre Szeman, founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Szeman's thinking combines a strong appreciation of the critical potential of cultural studies work with an under standing of the importance of Marxist theory, especially at this critical moment in human history. With the end of national cul ture as a framework for progress in the arts, culture becomes in creasingly tied to the new master narrative, he says, of the trau mas of globalization. As culture's agenda is increasingly set by the operations of global capital, it becomes imperative, he ar gues, to create an imaginative vocabulary that can challenge biocapitalism's fantasy of endless accumulation. While global ization democratizes the imagination, creating new identities and new public spheres, for Szeman, it simultaneously shifts our focus away from culture-the predominant aesthetic and representational condition of postmodernism-towards macrop olitical issues. In this context, he says, class struggle reasserts itself, political economy returns with a vengeance, and even the immanent aesthetic of workerist theory seems to pale in com parison with the transcendent mediation of radical contestation.
Journal of NELTA Bagmati, 2018
The present day world is the world of global village. So, we are in a global community sharing our words, goods and services to each other. This is all due to the global interactions among and across the people. Due to the exchange of culture, knowledge, technology, media and images; societies really have become complex. One of the complexities is related to language that all societies have become cocktailed or mixed up. In all the fields people enjoy and prioritize the use of many more languages. Equally, they are staring the world through globally circulated and chained instruments. They are in a tie of mutual sharing and behaving like a global member with unique features in a diversified society. This is the reason why the studies on globalization and intercultural communication have become the major concerns across the world. Like in the other fields, people are very much curious about the role of globalization, industrialization, and inter and cross-cultural communication in the arena of language education. This paper has presented a critical summary on globalization and the global cultural flow caused by it with reference to the work of Appadurai (1995) on disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.
Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures, 2001
Think of the Mexican entertainment market, with its young population and fast-growing middle class, as a teenager out looking for a good time after being cooped up for too long. For economically emerging peoples all over the globe, Hollywood speaks a universal language Ð Forbes. (Gubernick and Millman, 1994, p. 95) Worried that free trade is making their indolent lifestyle less viable, the French are blaming sinister conspiracies and putting quotas on American movies Ð Wall Street Journal Ð Europe. (Brooks, 1994, p. 34) It's not the heat, and it's not the humidity: what's really enervating is day after relentless day of news reports about the G-7 trade negotiations in Tokyo. GATT. Market-share targets. The Uruguay Round. Consultations with the Canadian Prime Minister. Drowsy yet? Part of the problem is that trade talks always focus on desperately unexciting commodities; given the choice between reading about tariffs on nonferrous metals and, say, Julia Roberts' marriage, many people will skip the trade-barriers story. So here's an age-of-Clinton hybrid: movie stars and arcane trade issues, together in one convenient package Ð Time.
Handbook of Critical Policy Studies
This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for 'going on' in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and, in this context, also highlights the role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies. These general propositions are illustrated from 'economic imaginaries' (other types of imaginary could have been examined) and their relevance to economic policy. Brief comments on crisis-interpretation and crisismanagement give this example some substance. The conclusion notes some implications for research in critical policy studies.
Journal of World-Systems Research, 2011
In this essay I link Giovanni Arrighi's world-historical framework in The Long Twentieth Centuryto debates about the "cultural turn" in global capitalism since the 1970s. I do so primarilythrough interrogation of the writings of one of the major figures in such debates: FredricJameson. In his Jameson's engagementwithArrighi's, he emphasizes the determinative influenceof finance capital on an expansion in the degree of cultural abstraction and fragmentation that isemblematic of the post-modern condition. Building on this linkage, I extend and…
2010
This is the introduction to the book, Cultural Political Economy, published by Routledge in 2010. The global political economy is inescapably cultural. Whether we talk about the economic dimensions of the “war on terror”, the sub-prime crisis and its aftermath, or the ways in which new information technology has altered practices of production and consumption, it has become increasingly clear that these processes cannot be fully captured by the hyper-rational analysis of economists or the slogans of class conflict. This book argues that culture is a concept that can be used to develop more subtle and fruitful analyses of the dynamics and problems of the global political economy. Rediscovering the unacknowledged role of culture in the writings of classical political economists, the contributors to this volume reveal its central place in the historical evolution of post-war capitalism, exploring its continued role in contemporary economic processes that range from the commercialization of security practices to the development of ethical tourism. The book shows that culture plays a role in both constituting different forms of economic life and in shaping the diverse ways that capitalism has developed historically – from its earliest moments to its most recent challenges.
2008
ABSTRACT The media imperialism thesis is the most widespread systemic account of cultural globalization. In this paper, I argue that the media imperialism approach, as a global version of mass culture theory, shares with it many of its analytical and empirical limitations. While ethnographic approaches in global media studies provide a useful perspective from which to correct some of the empirical flaws of the media imperialism paradigm they are unable to produce an alternative account of equal analytic and systemic scope.
Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop present Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as a project that seeks to deepen Critical Political Economy (C*PE) through an engagement with the cultural turn. This article critically assesses their success in such an enterprise. It begins by framing CPE within Jessop and Sum’s previous work on the Regulation Approach, in order to show why the former can only be understood as the result of a critical dialogue with the latter. Next, my reconstruction of the main elements of Sum and Jessop’s CPE is presented. After having carefully examined its main assumptions and concepts, I criticise CPE’s main novel element, an ontological cultural turn, due to the culturalist risks it engenders. In order to substantiate and exemplify that theoretical criticism, I review CPE’s application to the analysis of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. This article concludes by showing the main difficulties that CPE faces as an alternative for deepening C*PE and proposes the Amsterdam School of Transnational Historical Materialism as a more suitable direction in which that initiative could be advanced.
Cahiers d'études africaines, 1995
This is a review essay of three works which offer poignant critiques of analyses and representations of capitalism as a universal category. Through empirical case studies, the authors refine and even subvert the homogenization narrative of globalization and capitalist history, and the concomitant assertion of the inevitability of the unilinear integration of local 'tradition'-bound communities into the global space-time of modernity. However, through combined recourse to a historical sociology of actions and methodological individualism, certain authors fail to address sufficiently the theoretical quandary raised by the relationship between culturally constituted subject-positions (agency) and socioeconomic or political organizations (structure). The problem of positing 'culture' as an autonomous-and hence potentially overdetermining-category remains. Furthermore , while taking issue with the 'disenchantment' reading of capitalist history, these critiques of standard approaches to local capitalisms in terms of their correspondance to the founding model of Western capitalism ignore recent, critical reappraisals of the narrative of the very history of capitalim in the West. Increased attention to historical regimes of value and truth, as opposed to culturally inspired complexes of meaning, redirects analysis to the question of how power is involved in the construction of efficacious historical referents.
Public culture, 1990
Schafer 1963). The two main forces for sustained cultural interaction before this century have been warfare (and the large-scale political systems some- times generated by it) and religions of conversion, which have sometimes, as in the case of Islam, taken warfare as one of the ...
2007
This paper will take the opportunity to reflect upon the question of cultural policy in the 21st Century. It highlights the factors to be taken into account. It argues that the old models will no longer work due to the changing nature of culture and the cultural economy. The paper will map out these changes as a prelude to rethinking cultural policy making.
The purpose of this working paper is twofold: to consider whether and how the European Union (EU) play a major role in global cultural politics and economy (taking as case study the film sector) and to analyze whether the United States keep playing a key role in global cultural flows or their dominance is challenged by other countries - such as China - or by main digital players. Thus, the article offers a first investigation in order to understand the influence of the EU in global governance of trade and culture, paying special attention to the nexus between culture and digital platforms and to analyse whether this influence is translated into a change of balance of power in the global cultural economy.
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