Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia: An Introduction 2021005385, 2021005386, 9781032010885, 9781032010861, 9781003177074

Citation preview

Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia

This book presents an introductory overview of the socio-economic organization of creative industries, focusing on the East Asian context. Establishing a theoretical framework founded on the work of Richard Caves, Howard Becker, and Pierre Bourdieu, this textbook is an accessible introduction to creative and cultural industries. Drawing on examples from Japan, South Korea, and China, it both examines what is unique about cultural production in these countries and places them in a global and intercultural context. Building on themes of uncertainty and networks of cooperation, Brian Moeran looks at the role of social ties in defining notions of quality. He then analyses the positioning of individual actors, organisations, and commodities in each field of cultural production and the exchanges of economic and symbolic capital that take place between them. Examples are taken from a range of cultural and creative industries, including film, music and fashion. Overall, Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia serves as a foundational introduction to the study of creative and cultural production in East Asia. Brian Moeran was Professor of Business Anthropology at Copenhagen Business School, and is Honorary Professor at the Universities of Hong Kong, Exeter (UK), and Zheijiang Gongshan (China). He has written and edited several books on the cultural industries and was founding editor of the Journal of Business Anthropology.

Creative and Cultural Industries in Asia: A Routledge Textbooks Series Series Editor: Dixon Heung Wah Wong, University of Hong Kong

The textbook series is written for use in courses both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels for any cultural and creative industries program taught in tertiary educational institutions. Textbooks in this series are generally divided into two categories. The first includes textbooks which provide a comprehensive introduction to the important domains of the field such as cultural policy, commercialization of creativity, organization and labour management in creative industries covering fully important theoretical and empirical issues in the domains. Textbooks in the second category focus on a singular cultural and creative industry in Asia such as Asian film industries, digital entertainment industries, and advertising business integrating the latest knowledge into the practice of the industry. Given the importance of practicality in the field, the series emphasizes practitioner’s insights so as to provide both academic insights and practical experience for those who want to join cultural and creative industries. Practitioners in the industries are encouraged to submit their manuscripts. The series is also characterized by its interdisciplinarity and globality. We are keen on publishing textbooks that adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the study and understanding of cultural and creative industries. Although the book series focuses on the creative industries in Asia, we welcome manuscripts that locate Asian cultural and creative industries in a global context, particularly those manuscripts that can help identify the similarities and differences between Asian cultural and creative industries with their counterparts in Europe or the US.

Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia An Introduction

Brian Moeran

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Brian Moeran The right of Brian Moeran to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moeran, Brian, 1944- author. Title: Creative and cultural industries in East Asia : an introduction / Brian Moeran. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005385 (print) | LCCN 2021005386 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032010885 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032010861 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003177074 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cultural industries--East Asia. | Creative ability--East Asia. Classification: LCC HD9999.C94733 E186 2021 (print) | LCC HD9999. C94733 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/770095--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005385 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005386 ISBN: 978-1-032-01088-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01086-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17707-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074 Typeset in Galliard by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Creative, cultural, and copyright industries

vi vii 1

PART I

Theoretical approaches

21

1 Economic properties

23

2 Creative worlds

38

3 Fields of cultural production

56

PART II

Creative industries

73

4 Music

75

5 Fashion

92

6 Incense

110

PART III

Marketing creativity

127

7 Markets

129

8 Fairs and festivals

143

9 Celebrities

157

Conclusion: The name economy

170

Index

178

Illustrations

Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2

3.3 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1

A goblet-shaped vase or two human profiles? A rabbit or a duck? A circuit of affordances Asian popular music forms as a system of differences A partial field of fashion magazines, showing the relations between individuals (designers, models, stylists, photographers, magazine staff), products (clothes, photographs, texts, magazine titles, advertisements), and institutions (fashion houses, agencies, publisher, advertisers) down the value chain from suppliers to customers Exchanges between different forms of capital Traditional recording industry value chain Digital music industry value chain The structure of the luxury fashion industry The fashion show framework Fashion show organisation Chinese incense burner, with plum blossom motif Genjiko- symbols, with titles of each chapter of the Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu Incense manufacturing process New-style incense holders A field of values

41 42 54 58

60 67 78 83 94 99 101 112 113 116 122 135

Tables I.1 Classification systems for the cultural and creative industries I.2 Country-specific list of cultural and creative industries in the Asia-Pacific region

10 11

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I wish to thank several hundred students at the University of Hong Kong who attended the ‘Introduction to Creative Industries’ course that I gave every semester between the autumn of 2013 and the spring of 2018. Possibly without being aware of it, their questions and comments helped me write this book. I will forever remember Jackie Xi Qianyue’s dissection of the theories of Pierre Bourdieu in the first essay she ever wrote as an undergraduate, and Justin Chu Ho Ting’s fearless (and humorous) questioning of his ‘professah’. I also wish to thank Dixon Wong Heung Wah for inviting me to teach in the Global Creative Industries Programme that he founded and oversaw during my stay in Hong Kong. Others who gave their unstinting assistance in administrative matters include Shirley Chan Lai Pek and Yvonne Yeung Siu Han. I am very grateful to them both – in particular to Shirley, who, together with Lai Mei Fong and ‘CK’ Lee Chi Keung, has been one of ‘Prof Boo’s slaves’ for far too many years, since I first joined HKU back in September 1992. I wish her, and ‘Poon taitai’, lots of happiness in their well-earned retirement.

Introduction Creative, cultural, and copyright industries

This book is about various forms of cultural production which in recent years have been labelled ‘creative’, ‘cultural’, ‘contents’, or ‘copyright’ industries by governments in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, North America, East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), and various countries in South East Asia. It looks at ‘creativity at work’, in the sense that it examines processes of cultural production and social organisation. Its focus is on the East Asian region, and it adopts as its theoretical framework:   

Richard Caves’s outline of the economic properties of creative industries; Howard Becker’s discussion of the operation of art worlds; and Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of fields of cultural production. It also takes into account:



Erving Goffman’s concept of frame analysis.

Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia is mainly concerned with the different and varied social processes of cultural production found in what are loosely called the ‘creative’ and/or ‘cultural’ industries in East Asia: in particular, advertising, art, fashion, film, incense, music, and publishing. The book asks where ‘creativity’ is to be found, and suggests that it is often facilitated, as well as constrained – or ‘afforded’ – by seemingly not immediately relevant factors like budgets, deadlines, on-the-job experiences, employment conditions, personal networks and connections, industry structures, outsourcing, copyright, tacit knowledge, information sharing, and attitudes towards creative work itself. In its attention to the East Asian region, the book also notes that the very concept of ‘creativity’ is a cultural understanding which is often limited not just to a particular society, but also to a particular industry within that society. In other words, specifically Japanese, Korean, or Chinese understandings of creativity may differ among those employed in each country’s fashion, film, and music industries because of the different ways in which they are organised. Hence, what is ‘creative’ for a mainland Chinese film director may not be ‘creative’ for a fashion designer, or for a copywriter in a Chinese advertising agency. Even so, I argue, how they go DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-1

2 Introduction about conceiving, manufacturing, and distributing their creative products bears sufficient resemblance to what we find in cultural production in the United States of America and Europe to enable us to make detailed comparisons between the East Asian region and the West. This is the main aim, and strength, of this book.

Why study cultural production? In economic terms, the ‘creative economy’ – a term popularised by John Howkins back in 2001 – is an extremely important part of each nation’s GDP. Howkins himself suggested that the creative economy was worth US$2.2 trillion worldwide in 2000 and growing at an annual rate of 5 per cent (Howkins, 2001). A report published over a decade later suggested that creative and cultural industries (henceforth CCI) generated US$2,250 billion in revenues (3 per cent of the world’s GDP) and 29.5 million jobs worldwide. These worldwide revenues at the time exceeded those of telecom services (which amounted to US$1,570 billion globally), and surpassed the GDP of India (US$1,900 billion). Within the total, the top three earners were television (US$477 billion), visual arts (US$391 billion), and newspapers and magazines (US$354 billion). The top three employers were visual arts (6.73 million), music (3.98 million), and publishers (3.67 million). With 29.5 million jobs overall, CCI employed 1 per cent of the world’s active population (UNESCO, 2013). Figures published by UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) are more conservative: the size of the global market for creative goods, it says, were US$208 billion in 2002, increasing to US$509 billion in 2015, with an annual growth rate of 7 per cent. Of this, mainland China accounted for a US$168.5 billion trade in creative goods, up from US$32 billion in 2002, while the Asia-Pacific region as a whole accounted for about one-third of global revenues and 43 per cent of jobs worldwide (UNCTAD, 2018). It can be seen that different reports come up with very different sets of figures. This is in large part because of what their authors decide should, and should not, be included in the ‘creative economy’. Howkins included research and development, something that is a large part of all, not just creative, industries. UNCTAD focused on what it referred to as ‘creative goods’ (categorised as art crafts, audiovisuals, design, digital fabrication, new media, performing arts, publishing, and visual arts). As a result, there is little consensus as to the exact economic importance of CCI around the world. However, whatever figures are used, they all reveal that CCI are important. They also tell us why we should be studying cultural production, especially in the Asian region, which is sustained and driven by large populations (those of China and India alone make up one-third of the world’s population), and which is home to such leading CCI corporations as Tencent, CCTV, and Yomiuri Shimbun. Europe and North America are the second- and third-largest CCI markets, while Latin America and Africa (including the Middle East) rank fourth and fifth, respectively. Nevertheless, CCI players see great development opportunities in these two regions. Although each world region develops its own momentum and

Introduction

3

regional strengths, it has a lot in common with the others because of employment through outsourced production and shared consumer preferences. Creative and cultural industries are not important simply because of their size. They are also a driver of development and stimulate new creative ideas and technologies. They therefore have knock-on effects on the entire economy. For example, Pokémon, which was originally launched as video-game software, has developed into a major media franchise which includes comic books, anime, movies, and related products, and which has achieved significant popularity, not only in Japan but also overseas. It is estimated that the net worth of the Pokémon franchise in 2020 was about US$15 billion, and that the video games market as a whole was worth more than US$90 billion. The global gaming market amounted to just over US$152 billion in 2019 and is forecast to rise to well over US$250 by 2025 (with the Chinese games market alone set to reach US$35 billion by the end of 2021). By contrast, in 1982 the global market was worth just US$17 billion. In addition, creative activities contribute significantly to society in three important ways. 1

2

3

First, they tend to provide employment and careers for people of all ages and backgrounds, but especially for young people. In Europe, for instance, CCI sectors have typically employed more people aged 15–29 years than have any other sector. Second, compared with more traditional industries, they tend to favour the participation of women. Statistics compiled by the UK government, for instance, have shown that women accounted for more than 50 per cent of people employed in the music industry in 2014 (vis-à-vis 47 per cent in the active population overall). However, in some industries – like video games – women are greatly under-represented, even though half of all gamers are women. Third, although CCI have their corporate behemoths, cultural production tends to be driven by small businesses or individuals, a fact which gives rise to agile and innovative employers. For example, more than half (53 per cent) of Canadian gaming developers claim to be independent operators. In the United States, artists are three and a half times more likely to be self-employed than are US workers overall.

These three tendencies are not necessarily or entirely beneficial. Young people are often employed because, as is also true of women workers, they can be paid less than older, male employees. Although nominally independent, small businesses and individuals can also be squeezed financially by larger corporations subcontracting creative work to them. Creative workers may also be obliged to take up secondary occupations (for example, teaching) to supplement earnings from their freelance work. In certain respects, the ideology of ‘creativity’ is used to mask exploitative relations in various forms of cultural production. We should also note that CCI are primarily an urban phenomenon, although some forms of cultural production – in particular those connected with traditional

4 Introduction crafts – are carried out in rural areas. As such, CCI promote the redevelopment and growth of cities around the world – in particular by creating a world-class cultural infrastructure. For example, building a new museum often offers opportunities for a city to engage in associated urban development projects and to develop a new ‘city brand’ around creative and cultural industries. Such flagship projects boost a city’s attractiveness to tourists, and act as a magnet for talented and highly skilled workers. For example, Bilbao, in Spain’s Basque Country, is now an icon of culture-led urban regeneration, thanks to construction of the Guggenheim Museum, which led to the creation of more than 1,000 full-time jobs. The number of tourists visiting Bilbao and its environs has also multiplied eightfold. Equally important, CCI make cities more liveable, providing cultural hubs with all kinds of activities around which citizens develop friendships and networks, build local identity, and find fulfilment in their lives. Finally, in addition to all these social benefits, CCI represent a set of knowledgeintensive industry sectors focusing on the creation and exploitation of intellectual property, and covering such sectors as: arts and crafts; designer fashion; film, theatre, and the performing arts; advertising; architecture and design; publishing; broadcast media; and recorded music. Creative industries also extend into culture, lifestyle, and non-profit sectors. Software development, computer services, digital media, communications, and a wide range of services in the heritage sector (museums, libraries, archives, cultural education, and so on) are often included in each country’s list of CCI. This is why cultural production and its associated industries are worth studying.

Definitions It is clear from the above that cultural production is now of great interest to policy makers in local and national governments all over the world, as well to international organisations like UNESCO. What is not clear, however, is what exactly is meant by each of the terms used, since they differ from one another in emphases and are not necessarily used in a uniform manner. Governments also have a tendency to switch between terms over time. For example, the Japanese and Korean governments at one point preferred the term ‘copyright (or content) industries’, implying that intellectual property was their primary concern. However, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry now uses the phrase ‘creative industries’, of which one subdivision is ‘content’. For their part, the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s central government focus on what they call the ‘cultural industries’ (as do, incidentally, Finland, Germany, and Spain, among others). This makes sense given their emphasis on culture in their 2011–2015 five-year plan for economic development. The Chinese cities of Shanghai and Yanhai, however, follow the UK and call their different forms of cultural production ‘creative industries’, while Beijing follows Taiwan and Hong Kong, which compromise by calling them ‘cultural and creative industries’.

Introduction

5

Are there any differences between these three terms: culture, creative, and content/copyright? If so, what are they? And what problems surround their usage? Cultural industries UNESCO defines cultural industries as those industries which produce tangible or intangible artistic and creative outputs (which may be products like a pop CD, film, or fashion item, as well as theatre, ballet, or concert performances). Governments like cultural industries because they believe that they create wealth and generate income by exploiting national cultural assets, and by producing knowledge-based goods and services of all kinds (from Pokémon to traditional folk crafts). What cultural industries have in common is that they all make use of cultural knowledge – sometimes involving the use of creativity and intellectual property – to produce goods and services which have social and cultural meaning for their consumers. Precisely because their main aim is to communicate with audiences (by means of fashion, films, music, books, video games, and so on), we may regard cultural industries as being involved in the production of social and cultural meaning. Governments’ and other organisations’ current praise for cultural industries contrasts strongly with earlier academic criticism of the role of culture in the economy. Indeed, the term ‘cultural industry’ (or what at the time was called ‘culture industry’) traces its genealogy back to social analyses conducted by members of the Frankfurt School in Germany (and later in the United States) during the 1930s and 1940s. At that time, scholars like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer scathingly criticised the commodification of art and culture in capitalist societies and the emergence of a popular culture industry. Many left-wing academics continued to hold the view that culture and the economy were mutually hostile because, when they came together, culture invariably ‘degenerated’ and became ‘homogenised’. However, later research suggested that the process of commodification did not, and does not, always or necessarily result in the degeneration of cultural expression. Rather, the opposite may be true. As a result, by the 1980s, the term ‘cultural industry’ no longer carried the same pejorative connotation as it had earlier. It began to be used in academia and policy-making circles in a positive way, and referred to forms of cultural production and consumption that had at their core a symbolic or expressive element. In other words, there has been a gradual shift in the way culture was once seen as outside and divorced from the interests of capital and the money economy to now being regarded as central to them. Creative industries The term ‘creative industries’ is almost – but not quite – interchangeable with the concept of ‘cultural industries’. It tends to emphasise the social processes of production itself, rather than the production of social and cultural meanings (although these are often part of the creative process). In other words, the term ‘creative

6 Introduction industries’ focuses on the organization of work processes required to make products, while ‘cultural industries’ highlights the end product itself in its cultural environment. The term ‘creative industries’ began to be adopted by governments – notably those of Australia and the UK – from the mid-1990s as part of their cultural policies. One major reason for its being preferred over ‘cultural industries’ was the fact that the word ‘creativity’ was – and, of course, still is – generally viewed in an extremely positive manner by all sectors of society. Everyone wants to be ‘creative’! In this it differs from ‘culture’, which, as we saw above, is often contested. The British Labour government drew on these positive connotations in 1998 when it began to develop new arts and cultural policies, and the newly formed Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) defined creative industries as: ‘Those activities that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the general exploitation of intellectual property.’1 This brings in a second distinction between ‘creative’ and ‘cultural’ industries. While ‘creative industries’ emphasise the individual and his or her creativity, innovation, skill, and talent in the exploitation of intellectual property, ‘cultural industries’ highlight those industries whose inspiration derives from heritage, traditional knowledge, and artistic elements resulting from creativity. It is this difference in emphasis that allows various Asian countries to include such categories as cultural exhibitions, cultural facilities, cultural properties, and tourism within their cultural industries, while the UK and some other national governments exclude them on the grounds that they are not ‘creative’. Whilst serving as a useful beginning, the DCMS definition suffers from a number of problems that will surface from time to time in this book. 1

2

First, it is inconsistent. Although it does reflect an underlying economic reality, it excludes industries with the same features as the great majority of those that it includes, and includes others that do not share these general features, without a clear rationale for doing so. For example, it includes art, but excludes cuisine. It also lumps art and antiques together, even though the latter would seem more at home under the cultural industry category of cultural heritage. In a fully consistent definition, all industries included would share key common features, and no industry would be excluded so long as it shared these common features. Second, the DCMS definition could be seen to apply to almost all economic activities – from automobile manufacture to software technology – in that these, too, involve some degree of creativity, either in the conceptualisation of new products and services or in making innovations in how such products and services are manufactured, communicated, distributed, and sold to consumers. From this we can see that the issue is not whether there is, or is not, any ‘individual creativity, skill or talent’ in a particular sector, but the degree to which it is found there. This suggests that we need to look at what some scholars have referred to as ‘creative intensity’: in other words, at the proportion of workers in any given creative industry who are engaged in a creative

Introduction

3

7

occupation. This would show that music, architecture, television, and design (including designer fashion), for example, are far more ‘creative’ than other recognised creative industries such as art and antiques, software and electronic publishing, and digital and entertainment media. This is a point to remember when we come to look at the production of incense in Chapter 6. Third, and this is a point I will come back to a little later, the DCMS – like all policy makers following in its footsteps – does not define what creativity actually is. Nor does it suggest how best to measure it in such a way that comparisons can be made among the so-called creative industries. Some might regard the number of patents registered annually as one sensible means of measurement. But these are skewed to the manufacturing sector. Artists, musicians, filmmakers, authors, and so on rarely, if ever, patent anything. Others might prefer to examine the extent to which employers introduce new products and services, on the one hand, and new business practices or processes, on the other. Once again, though, some sectors which would score highly by this means of measurement may well not accord with our understanding of ‘creative industries’.

The use of the term ‘creative industry’, therefore, raises several problems surrounding different forms of cultural production. One distinctive feature of creative industries, though, is worth noting. These days they tend to use labour from software occupations – and more broadly from those employed in interactive computer technology (ICT) – in combination with other forms of creative labour. This is interesting in that it points to structural changes in the creative industries since the late 1990s brought about by digitalisation, and more generally by the impact of ICT. This is a point that we will again encounter when I discuss the music industry in Chapter 4. Copyright or content industries Is the notion of ‘copyright (or content) industries’ any more precise in its terminology? This mode of classification is closely linked to the concept of informationdriven economies, and includes such ICT-led activities as scientific and technological innovation, software and database development, telecommunication services, and the production of hardware and electronic equipment. At first glance, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) seems not to want to clarify our definitional confusion. It says: Industries that make use of copyright and related rights protection are often referred to as the copyright-based or the creative industries. They generate direct and indirect contributions to economic performance and development and are considered of growing importance for the achievement of important national economic and social objectives.2 Like cultural and creative industry definitions, the WIPO definition is concerned with a nation’s economic performance and social objectives. However, it clearly

8 Introduction does not highlight the exploitation of cultural assets or individual creativity. Rather, the focus is on how best to take advantage of, and thus to make money out of, copyrights in the advertising, film, music, publishing, and other similar industries. In other words, while ‘cultural industries’ are consumer-oriented in their focus on social and cultural meanings, and ‘creative industries’ are producer-oriented in their focus on the organisation of creative work processes, ‘content industries’ are concerned with whether a particular end product is, or is not, sufficiently ‘creative’ to warrant its being copyrighted. In other words, they are product-oriented. WIPO goes on to distinguish between different kinds of copyright industries. The two main ones that are of interest to us here are ‘core’ and ‘partial’ copyright industries. These it defines as follows: 1

2

Core copyright industries are ‘wholly engaged in the creation, production, performance, exhibition, communication or distribution and sales of copyright protected subject matter’. WIPO includes under this category such forms of cultural production as literature, music, theatre, film, the media, photography, software, visual arts, advertising services, and collective management societies. Partial copyright industries are those forms of cultural production in which only part of the production is linked to copyright-protected material: for example, design, architecture, jewellery, furniture, and other crafts. (The element attributable to copyright varies according to the extent to which they are protected by copyright legislation.)

In this book, we will not be focusing on this economic aspect of copyright in the content industries except in so far as it affects creative processes and the forms of social organisation in which cultural production takes place (in particular, as we will see later, in the music industry). I will, instead, situate my discussion of artworks, advertising campaigns, fashion magazines, K-pop, manga, and so on within the broad sphere of creative and cultural industries, which is a term adopted by several governments in the Asian region (often as ‘cultural and creative industries’).

Which industries are ‘creative’? These sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting, definitions raise the questions: what exactly are CCI, and which industries should be included in, and which excluded from, the term ‘creative and cultural industries’? There are no easy answers to these questions. Broadly speaking, the term ‘creative and cultural (or cultural and creative) industry’ refers to any industry which supplies cultural, artistic, or entertainment goods and services, and in which creativity and design play an important role. Bearing in mind the slight differences in emphasis between ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ industries, and the problems associated with the DCMS definition of the latter, let me start by making clear that, just because an industry – like the

Introduction

9

automobile or aircraft industry, for example – includes an important element of design, it is not necessarily a creative industry. Why not? First, because it does not produce cultural or artistic goods with expressive or creative content. Its products – cars or airplanes – do not provide consumers with the same kind of symbolic experience or entertainment that they get from media, music, films, or video games. And, second, only a very small percentage of its total manufacturing workforce is engaged in the creative work of design. In other words, automobile and aircraft industries have low ‘creative intensity’. The same applies to other industries which make use of design to mass-manufacture products: kitchenware, garden furniture, carpets, television sets, lampshades, Venetian blinds, shampoo, ladders, and so on. None of these should be seen as ‘creative’ goods because they are first and foremost functional, rather than expressive or symbolic. Similarly, neither YouTube nor social media are normally regarded as cultural or creative industries. They may be vehicles for individuals to create cultural content, but such individuals work entirely independently of the social medium concerned and their outputs are not usually covered by intellectual property or copyright. In other words, a medium like YouTube merely acts as ‘host’ to music, films, and videos that may seem creative to some people. It is not an industry as such, but a media platform. Unlike television, for instance, it does not directly employ people to create content that the medium itself directs and finances. This may, of course, change. Indeed, one thing we should be aware of with different forms of cultural production is that they have been changing, and continue to change, very rapidly over time – particularly as they adopt new digital technologies. Netflix, for example, started out as a media platform, but now finances the production of films and TV series shown exclusively on Netflix. As a result, it can be classified as an integral part of a film and TV ‘creative’ industry. So, where do we stand? According to UNESCO, cultural industries include the following: advertising; architecture; crafts; designer furniture; fashion clothing; film, video, and other audio-visual production; graphic design; educational and leisure software; live and recorded music; performing arts and entertainment; television, radio, and internet broadcasting; visual arts and antiques; and writing and publishing. This list covers more or less the same industries as the original DCMS classification. Although there are a one or two alternative classification systems, these industry sectors have formed the basis upon which all subsequent categorisation of CCI has taken place in different countries in Asia and around the world. As we can see from Table I.1, there is no definitive worldwide agreement among governments about which industries should be classed as ‘creative’ and/or ‘cultural’ and which not. This is because different countries have different industry strengths and weaknesses, so their governments tend to promote those that they feel can contribute usefully to their economies. For example, the UK definition once included Formula 1 racing cars under ‘Design’ – a subcategory not found in other parts of the world. For their part, the Malaysian government includes ‘Tourism’ and mainland China ‘Cultural Tourism’ within their lists of cultural industries. Taiwan includes ‘innovative lifestyle’ under ‘Cultural Facilities’ as one

10 Introduction Table I.1 Classification systems for the cultural and creative industries UK DCMS Model

UNESCO Institute for Statistics Model

WIPO Copyright Model

Advertising Architecture Art and antiques market Crafts Design Fashion Film and video Music Performing arts Publishing Software Television and radio Video and computer games

Industries in core cultural domains: Design Festivals Film and video Interactive media Museums, galleries, libraries Performing arts Photography Publishing Television, radio Visual arts, crafts

Core copyright industries: Advertising Collecting societies Film and video Music Performing arts Publishing Software Television and radio Visual and graphic art

Industries in expanded cultural domains: Advertising Architecture Audio-visual hardware Musical instruments Printing equipment Software Sound equipment

Partial copyright industries: Architecture Clothing, footwear Design Fashion Household goods Toys Interdependent copyright industries: Blank recording material Consumer electronics Musical instruments Paper Photocopiers, photographic equipment

of its CCI, while, in one of its official documents, the Japanese government includes both ‘food cultures’ and ‘hospitable’ (omotenashi) customer services as part of its effort to maintain cultural distinctiveness in the East Asian region. In the words of its Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI): In its long history, Japan has accepted various cultures from the East and the West, and it has redefined them and created new unique ones taking advantage of its characteristics as an island nation. This experience has led to creating a variety of fascinating creative industries that Japan presents to the world with pride.3 Fashion is another industry that has caused governments problems. It is commonly accepted as a creative industry in many North American and European countries because it focuses on design, and design is seen to be ‘creative’ – hence the category ‘Designer Fashion’. But fashion is also part of the clothing and textile industry, which is not regarded as ‘creative’, since it deals with mass production and merchandising – hence Japan’s category of ‘Fashion Design and Textiles’. The

Introduction

11

Table I.2 Country-specific list of cultural and creative industries in the Asia-Pacific region China

Japan1

Korea2

Taiwan

Hong Kong

Advertising Arts and antiques Arts training Cultural entertainment Cultural exhibitions and fairs Cultural tourism Digital content and entertainment distribution Film and television Internet Music and video Performing arts Publishing

Service: Advertising Architecture Arts Computer software Design Film Music and video Publishing Television and radio

Advertising Animation Broadcasting Characters Comics Cultural exhibitions, fairs, and festivals Cultural properties Design Digital cultural systems Edutainment music Film and video games Publishing Traditional arts and crafts

Advertising Architecture Arts and crafts Broadcasting and television Cultural facilities Design Film Performing arts Popular music Publishing Software Visual arts

Advertising Architecture Art, antiques, and crafts Computing Design Digital entertainment Film and video Music Performing arts Publishing Software and IT Television and radio

Manufacturing: Crafts (jewellery, leather goods) Cuisine Fibre and apparel clothing Furniture Stationery Tableware Toys

1

The Japanese government has no official list of creative industries. This list is based on Yoshimoto, 2003 and Kakiuchi and Takeuchi, 2014. Based on Government of Korea, 2013.

2

government of Hong Kong originally adopted the latter view of fashion and did not include it among the territory’s creative industries, since fashion designers generally worked for large textile manufacturers in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. However, in recent years, it has changed its policy and now regards fashion as part of design, so it is considered one of the territory’s creative industries.

Creativity The difficulty faced by governments in different countries when deciding what to call their different forms of cultural production does not simply stem from national priorities. Both ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ are catch-all words which in practice can encompass virtually anything we are predisposed to include. After all, in anthropological terms, ‘culture’ refers to the ‘whole way of life’ of a distinct people or social group. Clearly, to treat cultural industries as covering everything from shampoo and soap to food and drink serves no useful purpose in policy terms. This is why governments have focused on the cultural production of social meanings which are open to interpretation by their audiences and consumers.

12 Introduction So, too, with ‘creativity’, which I treat as an integral part of all forms of cultural production discussed in this book. Here we face two problems. One I mentioned before. No government in the world has yet dared to define what it means by ‘creativity’. This is probably because policy makers have very little experience of being creative themselves, and because they know – quite rightly – that those who are creative will probably never agree on what ‘creativity’ or ‘talent’ comprises. The other problem surrounds the DCMS’s and national governments’ emphasis on individual creativity. This is problematic because, in all CCI, creative work is carried out by people working together. In this respect, creativity is a product of teamwork, not of any one specific individual in that team. It is how people work together when creating an advertising campaign, video game, or anime cartoon which is at the centre of all forms of cultural production. Think of a film, for example. Every time you finish watching a film, you will see a seemingly endless list of credits, with the names of all the different people – usually several hundred – who have, in one way or another, contributed to its production. These include, on the one hand, all those involved in the creative side of production – the actors, director, cameraman, costume designer, composer, stuntmen, and so on; and, on the other, those concerned with financial, legal, and administrative matters. The latter, ‘humdrum’ personnel include producers of various sorts, set designers, carpenters, lighting, sound and props technicians, location scouts, musicians, legal advisors, animal trainers, personal assistants to cast members, accountants, runners, stand-ins, and so forth. The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of the production of music, fashion collections, books and magazines, video games, anime, and advertising, among other industries. You may counter-argue by asking: ‘What about art? That is all about individual creativity, surely?’ Well, the answer to that question is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’: yes, because it is true that an artist generally works on his or her own in a studio painting a picture or making a sculpture; no, because the artwork that an artist produces is very often made with a particular gallery dealer or collector in mind. In other words, an artist works closely together with others in the art world, and these others influence – sometimes dictate –the form and content of the final artwork. At the same time, as we will see in a later chapter, artists rely on all sorts of support personnel, including suppliers of the materials they use, to complete their work. Some artists – like Damien Hirst in the UK – employ dozens of people to manufacture their artworks. All they do as artists is come up with the concept: in Hirst’s case, preserving a tiger shark with formaldehyde, or maggots and flies feeding on a rotting cow’s head, each displayed in a glass display case. They then employ others to stuff the shark, get hold of the flies, maggots, and cow’s head, and make the display case. Clearly, the degree to which people in the production of film and of art work together, and the number who do so in each, is different. Nevertheless, both of these forms of cultural production involve teamwork. So, although we talk of individual pop singers and groups (like Kim Taeyeon and Girls’ Generation), or of individual fashion designers (like Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, and Issey

Introduction

13

Miyake), we should remember and accept that they are supported by a large number of personnel without whom they would be unable to do what they do so well. A creative idea may come from a single individual, but the finished creative product is always a result of teamwork. All the same, this focus on social processes does not explain what creativity is. How are we to define this slippery concept? After all, it is often not clear precisely why or how a fashion designer thinks that his latest collection of clothing is ‘creative’; or a critic thinks the latest film by a well-known director is ‘not that creative’. All we can do is take their word for it. As a result, our best attempt at defining the term, perhaps, is to say: creativity is what people in a particular creative world agree is ‘creative’. This definition is helpful, I think, for two reasons. 1

2

First, it recognises that understandings of creativity differ among different people working in different forms of cultural production: what is ‘creative’ for an advertising copywriter may not be so for a film scriptwriter, and vice versa. Second, because it addresses and resolves a related problem: ‘creativity’ and ‘creative’ (or their linguistic equivalents) mean different things to different people living in different countries around the world.

Thus, an American’s idea of what is or is not ‘creative’ differs radically from that held by an Indian, Indonesian, or Japanese. In China, for example, creativity has often been associated with the foreign content of films imported from Hollywood, as well as of K-pop and J-pop from Korea and Japan, suggesting that creativity is a foreign concept. For their part, Japanese have traditionally regarded creativity as emerging from years of patient imitation (monomane) of a master’s work. This is a far cry from Picasso’s (negative) appreciation of Matisse, in which he said: Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.4 This quotation nicely shows the difference in understandings of creativity by a Spanish painter living in Paris in the early twentieth century and an apprentice to a traditional craftsman, calligrapher, or brush-and-ink painter in Japan. In this book, we will look closer at what kinds of ideas are, and are not, considered creative by people working in different forms of cultural production.

Cultural production One issue underlying the various forms of ‘creativity’ found in creative industries is this: how can an industry, which generally signifies the mass production of uniform commodities, be creative – a word which (in the West, at least) signals individuality and difference in particular products (like an artwork, film, pop song, or

14 Introduction fashion collection)? In short, the term ‘creative industry’ sounds very much like an oxymoron. This might also be said of another term used throughout this book: ‘cultural production’. After all, ideally, culture is something that is. Yes, it is produced by someone, somewhere, at some time or other, but for the most part we experience culture. We do not think much about how it is produced, and generally we prefer it that way. In this book, however, we should accept that all the forms of cultural production I talk about are simultaneously both cultural products or performances and commodities at the same time. Take women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines, for example. In Japan, popular titles like Classy, Spur, and Miss Katei Gaho- are cultural products in a number of different ways. 1

2

3

First, they run features and fashion stories, making certain kinds of fashion styles known to their readers. They spread the word about what’s ‘in’ and what’s ‘out’ when it comes to clothes, and advise their readers on the ‘best’ combinations with which to wear those clothes, together with the kinds of make-up and hair styles that might suit them best during the coming ‘season’. (This means that they also culturally prescribe time.) They instruct women in the appreciation of beauty, and advise them how to look beautiful. Second, they tell their readers about family values, social – especially gender – issues, horoscopes, sex, how to get rid of cellulite, what handicrafts they might usefully take up, where to go for their holidays, and the best ways to cook a quick, tasty meal without too much trouble when they get home in the evening. Third, they celebrate by means of the latest gossip, those working and hanging out in the fashion, media, and entertainment worlds. They teach readers the names of important designers, models, and fashion photographers (‘China Machado in Givenchy by Richard Avedon’). They also inform them about which celebrities attend whose fashion shows and wear which designers’ clothes (‘[K-pop singer] Eunbi attending Tsukasa Mikami’s autumn–winter collection during Tokyo Fashion Week’). Fashion magazines thus provide readers with lifestyle recipes, as well as models, for how they might live their lives. These are part of all those meanings that go to make up ‘culture’.

But such magazines, like many other media, are also commodities – in two different ways. 1

2

First, they are products of the publishing and print industries and important sites for the advertising and sale of commodities (especially those related to fashion, cosmetics, fragrances, and hair and personal care). Like women’s magazines in general, fashion magazines are deeply involved in capitalist production and consumption at national, regional, and global levels. At the same time, second, fashion magazines are full of promotional ‘spin’ of one kind or another. We find spin in the names of the people involved in the

Introduction

15

creation of the images we see in the magazines’ pages. We find it, too, in the names of the products used to make up a face or clothe a body, as well as in the names of members of the fashion world – designers, models, photographers, make-up artists, and hair stylists – and of various different celebrities (‘Fernanda Ly photographed by Ezra Petronio. Make-up by Georgina Graham; hair by Pierpaolo Lai’). These two themes of culture and economy are, like Siamese twins, inseparable in all forms of cultural production. All aspects of the economy (whether economists admit it or not) are cultural; and there is nothing in what we regard as ‘culture’ that cannot be commodified and so made economic. As a result, it is often impossible to tell when something or someone is being represented as ‘cultural’ and when ‘economic’. This is an essential feature of cultural (as well as of media) production. As we will see in the final chapter of this book, it gives rise to what I call a ‘name economy’.

The study of East Asian cultural production Finally, let us look at how scholars have studied different forms of cultural production over the years and how I intend to do so in this book. There are two main issues of which we should be aware. First, a very large part of scholarly attention on creative industries has focused on fashion, film, music, art, theatre, and so on in Western countries – specifically North America and Europe (especially the UK). Relatively little attention has been paid to creative industries in other parts of the world such as the Middle East, South America, or Africa. Perhaps, given the development of the economies of most countries in these regions, this is not that surprising. What is surprising, however, is the relative neglect of creative industries in the Asian region, which has the world’s second- and third-largest economies (mainland China and Japan, respectively) and numerous burgeoning economies (Korea, India, Indonesia, Taiwan) whose creative industry products are known worldwide – like Bollywood films, K-pop, and Japanese anime and video games. As a result, the field of Asian creative industries has for the most part been left open to Asian scholars, who make use of Western academic traditions to explore and analyse the industries producing Asian pop music (Mandopop, Cantopop, J-pop, K-pop), manga comics, films (including anime and soft porn), fashion, and so on. This is something I myself do in this book. But this raises an intellectual issue of great import to scholars in what are broadly speaking called ‘Asian Studies’. They might well ask: is my use of theories developed by American and French scholars in a different socio-cultural context to ‘explain’ different forms of cultural production in the East Asian region just another example of ‘intellectual imperialism’? Should I have adopted a specifically ‘Asian’ set of theories in order to ‘explain’ different forms of cultural production in East Asia? On the surface, these points seem fair enough. Are there not certain concepts that Asian scholars have come up with to analyse different social and cultural

16 Introduction phenomena in the East Asian region? This is a good question that deserves an answer. One such concept is that of ‘cute culture’ (or kawaii bunka), which emerged in Japan during the 1980s and which has since spread to other parts of Asia, where the concept of ‘cuteness’ has partly retained, but also partly shed, its ‘Japaneseness’. Another concept, put forward by the Japanese cultural studies scholar Koichi Iwabuchi, is that of ‘cultural odourlessness’ – a term he initially applied to the way in which the content of Japanese television programmes appealed seamlessly to audiences in other parts of East Asia. Yet another concept is that of a ‘snack economy’, whose use at the moment appears to be limited to Korea, although another term mentioned in parallel, ‘attention economy’, is advanced by a Western scholar. The thing is, these explanatory terms are cultural, not sociological. As such, while they may be useful terms with which to consider consumer taste, they cannot be used to inform creativity in cultural production (especially in situations where ‘nobody knows’ if a product is going to be successful or not). I am not aware of any specifically Japanese, Korean, or Chinese sociological theories that may be used to explain different forms of cultural production in East Asia. The second challenge facing Asian scholars in the study of cultural production is that of multi-disciplinarity. The study of creative industries in Europe and the United States – unlike the study of the economy (economics, economic sociology), for example, or of political systems (political science) – has been carried out by scholars in a variety of different disciplines. Thus we find articles on different aspects of creative industries by economists, economic geographers, cultural geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, and scholars in cultural studies, law, strategic management, organisation studies, advertising, and marketing, among others. Each of these tends to bring its own discipline’s interests and theoretical approaches to the topic under study. Thus we come across articles dealing with such varied topics as: information goods; the economic properties of creative industries; labour relations and the creative class; careers and the project-based nature of creative work; the training and labour supply of artists; gender inequalities in the creative industries; culture, clusters, districts, and quarters; corporate strategies and industry structure; creative cities; networks and inter-firm relationships; transaction costs; technological developments and social behaviour; performers in the digital era; creative processes and the ‘motley crew’; trade fairs and festivals as field configuring events; art auctions; cultural heritage, economic analysis, and public policy; performance indicators; intellectual copyright laws and collective rights management; the economics of superstars; and so on and so forth. The advantage of this multi-disciplinary approach to the study of creative industries is that it provides an extremely broad understanding of a large number of issues that need tackling. The disadvantage is that, even if one were somehow able to read everything that has been published about cultural production, there is no one way to discuss or analyse it. This, in itself, makes us consider whether it is possible to present a single, coherent theory that encompasses all aspects of East Asia’s creative, or cultural,

Introduction

17

industries and, if so, which theory that might be. Every discipline seems, at first sight, to have both strengths and weaknesses. What I have noticed over the years, however, is that while there are numerous theoretical – and at times somewhat abstract and top-down – overviews of organisational structures, employment relations, industry sectors, creative clusters, and so on, there are comparatively few fine-grained and detailed studies of how different forms of cultural production actually work in practice. It is this last approach that I am going to adopt in this book, for two reasons. First, I am by training a social anthropologist. This means that I tend to spend months, years even, doing ethnographic fieldwork in a particular cultural and/or creative industry (in my case, ceramics, advertising, fashion magazines, incense manufacture, and publishing in Japan). The theories that I adopt when writing up this research are, therefore, ‘bottom-up’, in the sense that they are based on what the people with whom I interact tell me, as well as on my own observations of what they do and how they do it in a particular field of cultural production. Unlike scholars in such other disciplines like economic geography, cultural economics, and institutional sociology, I do not start with a particular theory and then try to find out how best it fits, or fails to fit, with a particular set of industry relations. My methodology, then, is to start studying people, organisations, and cultural products at a micro-level of daily interaction. It is only later, once these micro-level data have been collected and analysed, that I can move towards midor macro-level theories. The good thing about this way of working is that theories are always founded in realities and are never abstract. Second, even though scholars in the different disciplines I mentioned above are all studying creative and cultural industries, very few of them stop to ask themselves what exactly creativity is. In other words, like policy makers, they take creativity for granted. Sometimes, they carry out statistical surveys or other forms of creativity measurement, but – as I hinted at earlier – these tend to be inadequate for one reason or another. The exceptions here are sociologists, anthropologists, and some scholars in cultural studies, who have provided in-depth studies of creative processes in advertising, arts and crafts, fashion, manga, music, soft porn, and other forms of cultural production – mainly in Europe and the United States, but also in Japan, in particular, within the Asian region. Nevertheless, we still do not know enough about what actually goes on when a film, advertising campaign, fashion collection, or similar creative product is made. We need to know more about        

who does what, for whom, why, when, where, how, and with what result

18 Introduction in order to understand how creativity takes place and how culture is produced. This is where anthropology’s method of participant observation comes in handy. In my own fieldwork, I have always made it a rule to do myself, wherever possible, what the people I am studying do. This means that I made pottery and held my own pottery exhibition when I studied ceramics; came up with advertising slogans and taglines for clients of the advertising agency in which I spent a year in Tokyo; made my own perfumes when studying the incense industry and smell culture in Japan; and interacted with a publisher to discuss writing a book in Japanese when I was studying the Japanese publishing industry. I will often refer to, and reflect upon, these lived experiences of creativity in cultural production as I deal with theoretical issues in this book.

Notes 1 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/183544/2001part1-foreword2001.pdf. 2 www.wipo.int/copyright/en/performance/. 3 www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2013/0621_01.html. Note the confusion, once again, between ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’. 4 https://libquotes.com/pablo-picasso/quote/lbm6q2a.

References CCI definitions and references Bakhshi, Hasan, Alan Freeman, and Peter Higgs (2013) A Dynamic Mapping of the UK’s Creative Industries. NESTA. www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/a_dynamic_mapp ing_of_the_creative_industries.pdf. UNCTAD (2018) Creative Economy: Trends in International Trade in Creative Industries, 2002–2015. https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ditcted2018d3_en.pdf. UNESCO (2005) The 2005 Jodhpur Consensus. www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_uploa d/culture/Cultural_Industries/HK_Open_Forum/Backgrounder-FINAL.pdf. UNESCO (2013) Creative Economy Report: Widening Local Development Pathways. www. unesco.org/culture/pdf/creative-economy-report-2013.pdf. WIPO Magazine (2005) ‘Copyright-based industries: assessing their weight’. www.wipo. int/wipo_magazine/en/2005/03/article_0012.html.

General readings Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (1972) ‘The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception’. In Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder & Herder, pp. 120–167. Caves, Richard (2000) Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Florida, Richard (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Ginsburgh, Victor A. and David Throsby (eds) (2006) Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. Volume 1. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Introduction

19

Hesmondhalgh, David (2018) The Cultural Industries (4th edition). Los Angeles: Sage. Howkins, John (2001) The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas. London: Penguin. Landry, Charles (2001) The Creative City. London: Earthscan/Comedia. Menger, Pierre-Michel (2014) The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moeran, Brian and Ana Alacˇ ovska (eds) (2012) Creative Industries: Critical Readings. Oxford: Berg. Oakley, Kate and Justin O’Connor (eds) (2015) The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries. London and New York: Routledge. Towse, Ruth (ed.) (2010) A Textbook of Cultural Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Regional readings Chua, Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds.) (2008) East Asian Popular Culture. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press. Craig, Tim (2013) Cool Japan: Studies from Japan’s Creative and Cultural Industries. Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Government of Korea (2013) Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural Industries. www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/kr/kr181en.pdf. Kakiuchi, Emiko and Kiyoshi Takeuchi (2014) ‘Creative industries: reality and potential in Japan’. GRIPS Discussion Paper 14–04. www.grips.ac.jp/r-center/wp-content/uploa ds/14-04.pdf. Keene, Michael (2013) Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media. Cambridge: Polity. Montgomery, Lucy (2010) China’s Creative Industries: Copyright, Social Network Markets and the Business of Culture in a Digital Age. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Otmazgin, Nissim Kadosh (2005) ‘Cultural commodities and regionalisation in East Asia’. Contemporary Southeast Asia 27 (3): 499–523. Otmazgin, Nissim Kadosh (2014) Regionalizing Culture: The Political Economy of Japanese Popular Culture in Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Yong, Jin Dal (2016) The New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2003) ‘The status of creative industries in Japan and policy recommendations for their promotion’. Social Development Research Group. www.ico-d.org/ database/files/library/japan.pdf. Wuwei, Li (2011) How Creativity is Changing China. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Part I

Theoretical approaches

Now that I have outlined the terms used by policy makers to discuss different forms of cultural production, and shown how the contents of creative and cultural industries vary according to government and cultural preferences, I want to examine how the CCI and cultural production have been studied by particular scholars. Part I of this book, therefore, will look at three different theoretical approaches to the study of social processes involved in cultural production. The first is that of an American economist, Richard Caves, who in 2000 published what has come to be seen as the definitive book on creative industries. In it he outlined seven properties which, he argued, make creative industries different from all other industries. I will discuss these economic properties in Chapter 1. The remaining two theoretical approaches are sociological. Back in 1982 – when some scholars were interested in cultural production, but not in creative or cultural industries per se – the American sociologist Howard Becker, who is also a practising jazz pianist, published Art Worlds. In this book he took issue with art historians’ approach to art and argued that art was not the work of the individual ‘genius’, but the result of ‘networks of people cooperating’. These networks involved different people doing all the different jobs that enabled ‘art’ to be created for, exhibited to, and sold by members of what Becker called an ‘art world’. I will discuss and illustrate this approach in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, I will examine the third theoretical approach – that of a French anthropologist-cum-sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. Working independently, but more or less at the same time as Howard Becker, Bourdieu put forward the idea that cultural production takes place in a ‘field’ of ideologies and practices where interested individuals and organisations compete for power. It was in his attention to power that, although in some ways developing a theoretical outlook that was similar to Becker’s ‘art world’ theory, Bourdieu added an inimitable French touch to the study of cultural production and the formation of taste. The idea of a field of cultural production enables us to consider additional theories – like those of a creative class and creative clusters – which have been developed in other disciplines and which have a bearing on our own interest in creative and cultural industries. DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-2

22 Theoretical approaches The task ahead of us is simple: to ascertain how far the theories put forward by Richard Caves, Howard Becker, and Pierre Bourdieu are applicable to East Asian forms of cultural production. As we shall see, although not perfect, they work pretty well.

1

Economic properties

In his book Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce, the Harvard University economist Richard Caves outlined a theory of contracts which, in his opinion, differentiated creative industries from other industries that economists were used to studying (Caves, 2000). As he pointed out, economists had in the past studied different industry sectors in order to tease out their special and distinctive features. Thus, they had examined the pharmaceutical and computer-chip industries for their capacity to innovate; and food-processing industries for the ways in which they established product differentiation and promoted dominant brands. One sector that they had overlooked, however, was that of creative industries: in other words, those industries supplying goods and services that, in Caves’s own words, ‘we broadly associate with cultural, artistic, or simply entertainment value’ (Caves, 2000: 1). The question that economists had ignored, but which Caves wished to address, was this: why are activities in the creative industries organised in the ways that they are? There are relatively few large corporations, for example, and the bulk of cultural production is carried out by small firms; people working in the creative industry sector tend not to have full-time employment, but are employed as and when their services and talents are needed. Creative industries, therefore, are marked by a proliferation of personal networks which are activated and renewed with every new project (a film, a record album, a fashion collection, and so on). The answer Caves gave in his book centred, as I said, on a theory of contracts. People in the creative industries, he argued, deal with one another in the ways that they do because of certain ‘bedrock properties’. It is these properties which underpin the kinds of contracts entered into in the film, publishing, music, and other industries, and which explain why creative activities are organised as they are. In short, he said, they give rise to similar organisational patterns in different forms of cultural production in which substantial creative activities take place.

Nobody knows The first property of creative industries that Richard Caves mentioned is that, whether you are making a film, designing clothes for a fashion collection, putting together a pop album, or publishing a novel, you never know if what you are DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-3

24 Theoretical approaches making is going to be successful or not. In other words, consumer demand for creative products is uncertain. It is only when a film reaches the cinema, a fashion collection is displayed in department-store outlets, a CD or book appears on the shelves of a record or book store that you learn whether it is going to be a failure or a success. This Caves referred to as the nobody knows property of cultural production. Why should this matter? Well, apart from the obvious reason that anyone producing anything wants to make a profit, creative industries suffer from the problem of what economists like to call ‘sunk costs’. In other words, all forms of cultural production tend to require a lot of financial investment up front and it is only when a product reaches the market – months, occasionally years, later – that there is a return on that investment. Take fashion, for example. As we will see later in this book, most fashion designers who wish to be recognised for their work participate in the biannual fashion weeks in one of the fashion capitals of the world. Putting on a show in New York can cost US$50,000 just to rent space, with a further investment of US $100,000 for production costs (including hair styling, make-up, dressers, set design, lighting, and music). Several thousand more dollars are required to pay the models who wear the designer’s clothes on the catwalk. None of these sunk costs usually generates any immediate return. Rather, each fashion show is a PR stunt designed to attract media attention, but also, importantly, buyers from department stores and other retail outlets. If impressed by a particular item of clothing, the latter will work with the designer to make it ‘consumer friendly’ and appropriate for the market. This takes time, and the designer is rewarded financially only several months after an order is made, filled, and delivered. Models, too, have their own start-up sunk costs, including photos, composite cards, plane tickets, and visa sponsorship (paid in advance by their agencies). They also have to pay for agency PR, portfolios, and a chauffeur-driven car service (taking them from one fashion show or casting to the next). Casting itself is extremely time consuming, but unpaid unless a model is hired for the job in question. Even so, she is paid for her services only after the client pays her agency – in theory, thirty days after completion of the modelling job. If a client fails to pay the agency, the agency refuses to pay the model. Here is an example of the kind of exploitation in CCI which I mentioned as being possible in the Introduction. Another industry we might consider in the context of sunk costs is that of academic publishing, of which this book is an example. A book can take anything from six months to several years to write. During this time the author is unlikely to receive any money from her publisher, unless she is famous or the publisher is particularly keen to acquire rights to the manuscript – in which case, an advance may be paid. Once an author completes her manuscript, the publisher has to send it out for review to – usually – three reviewers, who receive a small fee or equivalent in kind (a choice of other books published by that publisher). If accepted, the manuscript usually needs to be revised in accordance with reviewers’ suggestions before then

Economic properties

25

being edited by a freelance copy-editor contracted by the publisher. A designer has to be employed to design the cover of the book, and an in-house production manager oversees the layout (as well as everything else to do with the lead-up to printing). Then a printer is contracted to print the book, and some advance advertising and marketing is often carried out. Someone is employed, too, to provide an index (although the author herself may choose to do this time-consuming task). Occasionally, a publisher will pay for a manuscript by a foreign author to be translated and, if that manuscript has already been published in its original language, for translation rights, too. In addition, it will pay a lot of money in distribution costs to ensure that the book reaches retail outlets around the country where it is displayed for sale. So, before a potential reader ever lays eyes on a particular book in a book store or online, the author has spent a massive amount of unpaid time writing it, while the publisher has invested anything up to US$10,000 to produce and market it. An academic book in Europe and the United States tends to spend between six months and a year in production before it is ready to be sold. The first return on this investment of time and money will come between three and six months after the book has been published, when retailers pay the publisher monies owed from sales (a small percentage of which goes to the author at the end of the year in the form of royalties). This means that the publisher needs to cover its costs for anywhere between a year and eighteen months before seeing a return on the money it has invested in publication of a particular manuscript. If only a few people buy it, the publisher stands to lose money because none of the up-front costs – copy-editing, book design, layout, printing, distribution, and so on – can be reused towards publication of another title. The costs, then, are well and truly irretrievable, or ‘sunk’. It can be seen that academic publishing, like most other forms of cultural production, is a risky business. As a result, cultural producers will try to find ways to lessen or offset those risks. Academic publishers, for example, develop ties with, and rely upon, educational establishments such as university libraries which, in the days when governments thought it right to provide as much funding as possible to their school and university systems, almost always bought new titles in those areas of research and study in which their university staff specialised. With financial cutbacks in education, however, publishers have found it much harder to sell individual titles (unless they are textbooks). In Europe and the United States, then, academic publishers are almost totally reliant on university library budgets to cover their sunk costs. This is not – or not yet – the same in a country like China or Japan, even though, in the latter, publishers have to pay additional up-front costs in the form of author royalties, which are paid at the time of a title’s publication (on the basis of the total print run), rather than one year down the line (when royalty payments are based on actual sales). There are three main reasons why East Asian publishers can keep their costs down. The first is the overall cost of production. Both employees’ salaries and printing costs are much lower than in Europe and the United States, so a publisher’s sunk costs are not as high. A second reason concerns the relationship between publishers and universities. No university in China, Japan, or any other

26 Theoretical approaches East Asian country is willing to buy an academic book at the price level charged by European and American publishers. East Asian publishers therefore have no alternative but to keep their prices down. However, this also allows them to sell their titles outside the higher education market to individual readers, and so keep the overall market comparatively buoyant. The third reason is related to distribution. Books in Asian languages – Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and so on – are sold only in those countries where those languages are spoken and read. This means that, unlike books in English (or Spanish), they are distributed locally rather than worldwide. This saves immensely on overall production costs since global distribution is very expensive. (It also explains, incidentally, why books published by UK imprints are more expensive than those published in the United States. UK publishers have to distribute all their books throughout the United States since that is where over 80 per cent of their sales are made.)

Art for art’s sake The general assumption among economists is that workers do not care much about the work that they do. This explains their alienation – in the sense that they do not put more than minimal effort into what they are paid to do. They care primarily about their pay and working conditions, and that’s it. They are not really interested in the (part of a) product they are assigned to make. Caves argues that creative workers, however, do care about their work. Indeed, they are often far more concerned with how a film or fashion collection is going to turn out than with how much they are paid and how many hours a week they have to work. A film actor or fashion designer cares a lot about the originality of the work in which she is investing her time and energy, as well as the technical skills that go into it, and how creativity is harmoniously achieved without upsetting others involved. This attitude is known as the art for art’s sake property. This is not to say that everyone working in different forms of cultural production feels the same way and believes in art for art’s sake. In every activity – making an advertising campaign, publishing a book, designing a fashion collection – some people are doing creative work, while others are not. A film producer, for example, is mainly concerned with procuring finance and overall management of production; an account executive in an ad agency is there to liaise with the client and oversee the work of others in his team, like the copywriter and art director, who are creative. Every cultural or creative industry, therefore, employs a mix of creative and what Caves called ‘humdrum’ personnel. The latter do not care too much about the finished creative work. Rather, they are in their job mainly for the money. As we will soon see when we come to discuss how people working in cultural production are continuously engaged in creating, sustaining, and managing their individual reputations, creative workers display some of their skills to impress their audiences. But they also make use of less obvious aspects of their craft to impress their fellow workers, since it is often only fellow professionals who recognise and applaud, or criticise, the use of specialist techniques. Whatever others’ reactions,

Economic properties

27

creative workers will do their utmost to show – through talent, skills, techniques, and occasional inspired deeds or words that fall outside the expected script of activities – that they care about their work. In the Western world, precisely because creative people see themselves as ‘artists’ rather than ‘craftsmen’, they may think rather too highly of their individual abilities and be reluctant – or even refuse – to compromise in the face of difficulties raised by the humdrum personnel with whom they work. Such insistence on art for art’s sake can even extend to creatives’ attitudes towards their clients. In one London ad agency, a copywriter is said to have cut off his client’s tie with a pair of scissors because of a disagreement between them. Given the scarce resources and limited project completion time available, however, creative people must compromise; they must learn to accept the opinions of others and to be flexible. This is not nearly so much of a problem in East Asian countries, where self-centred individualism is frowned upon and teamwork emphasised in almost all walks of life. Finally, we should realise that ‘creativity’ is an unknown factor in the organisation of cultural production. Film actors, jazz pianists, and advertising copywriters are employed for their creative talents, but just how they will deploy those talents can never be anticipated in advance (even by creative people themselves). As a result, the art for art’s sake property dovetails with that of nobody knows as well as uncertain demand.

Infinite variety Precisely because demand is uncertain and nobody knows if a cultural product will sell or not, cultural producers need to ensure that they cover all – or at least a majority of – their consumer market’s tastes when they publish a book, screen a film, or present a fashion collection. As Caves points out, book readers, film buffs, and fashionistas are all faced with numerous choices when visiting a book store or website, deciding which film to see at which cinema or on Netflix, or selecting one department store or fashion boutique over countless others. Moreover, a film buff also makes a decision about how to view a film. She may go to the cinema, but she might equally decide to stay at home and watch a movie on television or a DVD. The same goes for consumers of other cultural products who are able to make their selections among not just products, but also media and sales outlets. Although, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, consumer tastes tend to reflect preferences associated with age, gender, and class (or what he calls ‘class fraction’), they are never entirely predictable. They contribute, therefore, to the uncertainty of demand and support the nobody knows property. But they also mean that, in order to cover their costs, cultural producers usually need to avoid putting all their eggs into one basket and produce a large variety of products that they think will meet with the approval of one sector or another of their consumer market. So we do not just find books and films when we go to book and record stores. Both books and films (and music) are divided into dozens of different categories or genres: action, biography/memoir, children’s, comedy, crime, documentary,

28 Theoretical approaches drama, family, history, horror, mystery/thriller, nature, romance, sci-fi, sex, sports, supernatural, teenage, travel, and so on and so forth. Of course, most publishers or filmmakers (or artists, or fashion designers, or musicians, or singers) do not try to produce all these genres, unless they are – like Random House or Sony Pictures – very, very large organisations. Instead, they settle on a particular niche market. The Canadian publishing house Harlequin, for example, publishes only romance novels for women. Verve Records in the 1950s and 1960s focused on putting out jazz albums by the likes of Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, and Oscar Peterson. In the East Asian region, Hong Kong University Press publishes books that, in its own words, ‘examine, critique, and celebrate Asia’s place in the world’ and continues to ‘seek out and disseminate the best work by both new and established voices on every aspect of the Asian experience’.1 Even so, no publisher or record company ever knows for certain whether a particular book title or pop song will become a best-seller or not. A drama feature film may have all the ingredients a film producer thinks necessary for success – at least one very famous actor paired with an equally famous actress, exotic locations, expensive pyrotechnics and stunts, even a plausible storyline – but when it reaches the cinemas, the film may fail miserably. Nobody knows why. This explains why two things happen when a film is a box-office success. First, the studio responsible for the hit will almost immediately commission a follow-up film (or films). This is why, for instance, after the success of Jaws – the first film to gross US$100 million – Universal Studios made three sequels: Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D (also known as Jaws 3), and Jaws: The Revenge. While the first two did not attain the success of the original, they both made a lot of money. The third has been described by film reviewer Roger Ebert as ‘not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one’.2 Even so, like its predecessors, it made a profit, although not on the same scale. Two decades later, both Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3, starring Jackie Chan, significantly outperformed the original film at the box office, making US$347 million and US$258 million, respectively, against US$244 million. Similarly, the success of Pirates of the Caribbean (US$654 million worldwide box-office receipts) led to a trilogy, of which the first and third sequels, Dead Man’s Chest and On Stranger Tides, both grossed over US$1 billion. The second thing that happens when a film or book or pop song is a great success is that it is immediately copied by competitors. This is known as the ‘me too’ phenomenon. We find it everywhere when it comes to cultural production – witness Microsoft’s Zune following in the wake of the Apple iPod’s success, or the creation of Windows 7 to compete with Apple’s OS X to ‘create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics’. Following the success of Jaws, numerous films based on man-eating creatures were released through the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s and even the 1990s. US audiences were invited to watch films with titles like Grizzly, Barracuda, Alligator, and Piranha, and Japanese audiences Psycho Shark (released in the US as Jaws in Japan). The Italian film Great White was so close to the original Jaws film that it invoked a plagiarism lawsuit by Universal.

Economic properties

29

For the most part, however, individual films, books, rock albums, and so on are unsuccessful. Hence, the search for an elusive hit impels studios and publishers to put out a very large number of products. For example, in 2018, China produced 1,082 films; Japan 613; South Korea 454; the United States 576; and India a whopping 1,966.3 Similarly, in 2015, 338,986 books were published in the United States; 470,000 in China; 76,445 in Japan; 45,212 in Korea; and 173,000 in the UK.4 How many of these do we recall? How many were hits? In the previous year in Japan, Haruki Murakami’s collection of short stories Men without Women was an immediate hit, with people queueing all night to be the first to buy the book when it went on sale. But what other titles were best-sellers on the same scale in Japan that year? In the United States in 2018, films like Black Panther and The Avengers: Infinity War grossed around US$700 million each, but several others (Climax, The House That Jack Built, and Burning, for instance) did not even reach the US$1 million revenue mark.5 Caves points out that the infinite variety economic property is not limited to consumption. It also affects the production of cultural products and refers to the universe of possibilities in which the film director, author, artist, composer, designer, or other creative person makes her selections when making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, and so on. After all, a painter can choose whether to paint a realistic self-portrait, impressionistic landscape, abstract still-life, expressionist group of figures, or whatever. Both the style and the subject matter are virtually unlimited. However, artists also have to take into consideration their potential audience, which means that they need to tailor their work to fit that audience’s likely taste. As Bourdieu points out, there are as many fields of consumer preferences as there are stylistic possibilities in cultural production. This explains the existence of genres in art, books, fashion, film, music, and so on. Every cultural and creative industry tries to channel the infinite variety of consumer tastes into particular types of its cultural product as a way to overcome nobody knows. But this means that, although every cultural producer can in theory create any kind of work she wants to create, in practice she is constrained by the available genres, which reflect the different cultural interests of consumers, if she wants to sell her finished work and have it appreciated more widely than by her inner circle of family and friends.

A list/B list Besides the use of genres in cultural production, another way for producers to combat the nobody knows property is by establishing a system of reputation, with regard both to cultural products and to those who are responsible for them. As consumers, we tend to watch a particular film or read a book because our friends tell us about it, or we read a critique of it on social media or in a newspaper or magazine. One thing that almost always plays a part in our decision about whether or not to watch a film or read a book is the name of the director, main actor, or author. As we will find out in greater detail later, reputations and names – like genres – are established to offset the difficulty facing cultural producers because of

30 Theoretical approaches the uncertainty of demand. Indeed, reputations and celebrities themselves become genres, as actors, singers, authors, fashion designers, artists, and so on are typecast and ranked. These rankings are also based on vertically differentiated skills, which Caves refers to as A list/B list. Reputations operate in several ways, depending on the cultural product in question. Here I will enumerate four such ways: medium, genre, work, and people. 1

2

3

4

First, in art, for example, the medium is important. In the Western world, a potter working with clay, or a letterer in stone, is seen to be ‘lower’ than a painter working in oil on canvas, or a sculptor carving marble. But this kind of reputation is not universally fixed. It can, and does, differ from one society to another. In some countries in East Asia, for example, pottery and calligraphy are very highly rated as artistic media, along with lacquerware and swordmaking. In Europe and the United States, these are regarded as ‘mere’ crafts, not ‘art’. All the same, by adhering to a taxonomy, the medium helps fix types of cultural production and so helps deal with, if not overcome, the nobody knows property of cultural production. A second reputational hierarchy may be established with genres. In the West, classical music and modern jazz are seen (by some people, at least) to be ‘superior’ to popular music, within which pop, rock, R&B, country and western, and other genres compete among themselves for artistic and popular recognition. The same goes for film, where the feature film is distinguished from animation and documentaries, and itself contains ranked categories like drama, romance, comedy, sci-fi, and so on. Although Western audiences have long associated animation with Walt Disney cartoons for children, more recent work in Japan by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli has finally raised animation to the highest reputational level in film production in general. Without doubt, it is the cultural work itself and the people involved in its creation that are most important, and they stand in reciprocal relation to one another. This leads to the third and fourth means by which ranking is assessed. A work is assigned to an A list or a B list (or a C or even a D list) according to how consumers and critics judge its content (storyline, narrative style, characters, and so on) vis-à-vis similar works. What interests them is how well the work in question deals with the possibilities, problems, and constraints of its medium and genre. This kind of judgement may well be independent of the work’s financial success. In other words, best-selling pop songs or fashions are not necessarily the ‘best’ in musical or aesthetic terms. The reverse may well be true – initially, at least. Indeed, creative people often regard the financial failure of their work as a mark of high quality! Finally, A list/B list rankings stem from what is seen to be the existence of especially talented creative people who contribute their expertise to products that are recognised as being innovative, different, and thus exceptional. This is so because they exhibit a profound understanding of the particular form of cultural production (art, fashion, soap, or thriller) in which they work. The

Economic properties

31

cultural goods that they produce not only improve the lives of those who consume them but also exhibit special qualities which testify to their makers’ special talents. At the same time – with an aesthetically pleasing circularity – the already known talents of the maker testify to the special qualities of the creative product itself. For example, if we know that a director of superior ability, like Akira Kurosawa, Bong Joon Ho, Ang Lee, or Zhang Yimou has made a film, we are more likely to pay attention to it than to one by an unknown director, and to consider it ‘good’. A well-known director gives a new film a ‘pedigree’ that attracts an audience, in the same way that a new collection by Issey Miyake or Minju Kim raises the expectations of fashion aficionados. But this is on the side of consumption. A list/B list rankings are also formed by people involved in the production of a creative work, as they observe how each participant performs in the creative process, and the talent that she brings to bear on the task at hand. Here the judgement is concerned more with professionalism, skills, and overall specialist techniques as viewed by fellow professionals, rather than an untutored (or only partly tutored) audience. Judgements made during the processes of cultural production, then, set up an informal ranking of personnel. One director is clearly better at managing the myriad people and parts in a film than another; one costume designer is a genius at putting together a wardrobe that perfectly matches the mood of a film; one actor is renowned for his ‘difficult’ personality and one actress for her ‘chameleon’ acting ability. This recognition, establishment, and ongoing negotiation of reputation takes place not just among the leading players in a film production (director, actors, director of photography), but also among all other personnel, including location manager, continuity person (script supervisor), casting director, camera operator, gaffer (lighting), key grip (lighting and rigging technician), production sound mixer, boom operator, production designer, art director, set decorator, construction coordinator, prop master, costume designer, key make-up artist, special-effects supervisor, stunt coordinator, post-production supervisor, film editor, visual effects creative director, sound master, and all those members of a film crew under their command. A list/B list rankings, as developed by participants in different forms of cultural production, have financial repercussions. Most people in Hollywood, Bollywood, or the Hong Kong, Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, or Japanese film industry will agree among themselves about which of them is an A list director of photography and which a B list actor, and studios (which are themselves ranked in terms of genres, box-office hits, and so on) will staff their productions accordingly. The budget allocated for a film usually determines whether it will employ A or B list personnel, since the higher up the reputational scale you are, the more you can charge for your services. Since the rankings developed by producers of cultural products and works may not accord with those arrived at by their consumers, all cultural and creative industries have established award systems, in which industry participants make

32 Theoretical approaches public their preferences and understandings of what and who is ‘the best’ in any particular year. Thus, the Academy Awards (or Oscars) and Grammys nominate a select few films, songs, albums, directors, actors, singers, and many others in the film and music industries as potentially ‘the best’ in any one year. Members then vote and the winner is announced in each category. By both nominating a select few and then picking a winner, awards like these point out to the public who or what the industry concerned believes that consumers should like (whether they do or not is another matter). In this way, as we will see in Chapter 8, the A list/B list rankings system tries to overcome the uncertainty of demand, while also enabling those nominated and selected as winners to negotiate better financial terms for their ensuing work. At all times, all forms of cultural production are dominated by rankings.

Motley crew As we have seen in the examples given above, many forms of cultural production require diverse skills and specialised workers who somehow have to coordinate their work and solve problems together. This is known as a motley crew property. Filmmaking (and here I include animation) is probably the most complex of all the creative industries, although others – like advertising, fashion, and pop music – are by no means simple. Not all forms of cultural production, however, are complex when it comes to creative inputs. Artworks, for instance, are usually created by a single painter or sculptor; and novels and poetry are usually written by a single author. That being said, although the creative processes in both art and literature may be performed by a single individual, that individual relies on all sorts of other people (what Howard Becker calls ‘support personnel’) to enable them to carry out their work and bring it to public notice, so the motley crew principle still applies. An artist, for example, needs someone to provide him with materials (traditionally, a canvas and oil paints) before he even starts creating his masterpiece; once it is completed, he needs a gallery owner to accept that his artwork is indeed a ‘masterpiece’ and to exhibit it to the public in her gallery. The motley crew has two organisational implications. The first is in the selection of personnel for a film, advertising campaign, rock album, and so on. Whoever is employed on the project will have different ideas and ways of doing things from others who are not selected, and this will influence the ensuing processes of creative inputs and cultural production. Moreover, it may be that a casting director wants a particular pair of actors to work together on a film. If one of those actors is unavailable or unwilling to participate, the casting director may call on another actor to fill her place, or may decide to employ a totally different pair of actors. In either case, the group dynamics will be different from what was originally imagined. This is the second implication. Seamless cooperation needs to be maintained throughout the production process. Whether it is or not depends almost entirely on the ‘mix’ of individual team members and their ability to work together.

Economic properties

33

The fact that so many people are involved in the completion of a creative work contributes to both the infinite variety and nobody knows properties of cultural production. The first arises out of the fact that all the participants use their different individual talents and skills to the best of their abilities and as they think appropriate to the creative work in question. Because of their insistence on art for art’s sake, and because they need to display their skills in the ongoing maintenance and building of reputation (A list/B list), creative workers may well find themselves disagreeing with one another about the best way to edit a pop song or illustrate a marketing strategy in a TV commercial. The solutions adopted are rarely the same in each project, whether a music album or an ad campaign. As a result, there is an infinite variety in the ways that a motley crew does things together. And, of course, nobody knows at the time whether the decisions they make collectively will, or will not, work when their creative work finally reaches consumers.

Time flies The fact that cultural production consists of so many different inputs from the motley crew means that they need to be coordinated temporally. Timing is everything, both in the selection of personnel and in how they work together on a project. Because time flies, one not-quite-so-famous actor may be hired for a film because he happens to be available right now, whereas the preferred, more famous actor will not be free until next month. The same is true of all hirings of both creative and humdrum personnel. Once they have embarked upon a project, cultural producers cannot afford to hang around waiting for people to finish other jobs. They are always and continuously aware of the issue of sunk costs. Time flies is important because almost every form of cultural production has to be completed to a schedule. An advertising agency charged with creating a campaign for a client, for example, usually has about three months to complete it. In Japan, the agency first has to assemble an account team, consisting of advertising executive, marketing, media buying, and creative personnel, who are selected according to their availability, given the other campaigns they are working on simultaneously. The creative team cannot start throwing around ideas for the ads or television commercials that it would like to make until the marketing team has analysed the client’s sales and marketing data, and proposed a strategy. Usually, it will want to conduct its own research and so needs to hire a market research company to carry out surveys of potential consumers of the client’s product. Once this has been done (and during this time, the copywriter and art director will be working on other campaigns for other clients), the account executive and marketing team members will work out what they think the best strategy could be for the advertising campaign. It is only then that they call in the creative team, explain what is required, and tell them to go to work. What follows is a series of meetings in which account executive, marketing team, and creative team thrash out various ideas. Once they are finally agreed on which creative approach is best, they meet with the client to secure its approval. If

34 Theoretical approaches approval is given, the account team can move to production of the campaign and bring in the media-buying team to work out the most advantageous ways to promote the client’s campaign. If the client does not approve – and very often it does not at first – then the account team goes back to the drawing board in order to come up with an alternative set of images and strategy, as directed by the client. And the clock is ticking all the time, especially if the advertising campaign is timed to coincide with a product launch, and that product launch has already been announced by the client. This sort of temporal pressure is, as I said, true of almost all forms of cultural production. Film production is especially complex, and a director will invariably shoot scenes out of order, so very few of the people involved really know what the whole film is about until they see it in the cinema. This is partly because certain actors are only available at certain periods during production, so the scenes in which they appear have to be shot one after the other, regardless of their place in the story arc. Location is a factor, too. It makes more sense to film all the scenes set in a particular location (an apartment, for example, or a desert-island beach) in one go, so the entire crew does not have to keep moving back and forth between locations (which in a film can change quite rapidly from one scene to another). This makes sense financially, too, because it reduces costs, and ultimately time flies is all about money. Adhering to a prescribed budget is crucially important in cultural production for, as we have already seen, sunk costs are unlikely to be recovered for at least six months after a particular work has been completed and put out in the public sphere. Ars longa Many forms of cultural production are more or less instantaneous: here today, it seems, and gone tomorrow. We go to a concert to hear our favourite K-pop group, or to a cinema to see the latest Bollywood film, and by the end it is over and done. Or so it seems. If this were true, though, cultural producers would be deprived of quite a lot of money that they can be paid for their creative contributions. The songs that we hear at a concert are composed by someone, and every time those songs are played in public – whether at the concert or on the radio, before a political rally, or in a shopping mall as background music – their composers receive some sort of royalty; and the performers are rewarded, too. In other words, in spite of the immediate enjoyment of their work, art for art’s sake is of a long-term duration. This is what Caves calls ars longa (i.e. ‘art is long’). Ars longa is all about copyright. CCI develop ways to prolong the life of their products. The music performed at a concert is converted into a CD for listening, or streamed to digital media for downloading at a price; the film that we watched last night will in due course be available in DVD form, or included in the offerings of a video-on-demand entertainment provider like Watchaplay (Korea), Youku Tudou (mainland China), or Viu (Hong Kong and Southeast Asia). Both concert and film may also be shown on network television. A book may be transformed into a film or theatre

Economic properties

35

production, and made available on a digital reading device like Kindle. All these different media platforms bring in revenues, a proportion of which is divided among the personnel responsible for the creative inputs. Who owns the rights to what, then, is a very important issue in cultural production. As we have just seen, rights continue to bring in money for a long time. An author’s copyright, for example, extends to seventy-five years beyond his or her death. This means that someone like Haruki Murakami will continue to be paid a royalty on everything he publishes and sells throughout his lifetime (and far beyond). But it does not mean that he will receive all the money from every sale, because he has assigned his work to a publisher who does all the necessary work described earlier to transform a manuscript into book form. As a result, the publisher and author will split the proceeds, with the publisher getting the lion’s share. Most authors receive only about 10 per cent of every sale. Copyright law varies around the world, so the nature of the contract signed between a publisher and an author or a record company and a composer, which determines who receives how much from what, may differ from one country to the next. An English-language author, for example, may receive 10 per cent from the sale of every copy of her book in her home market, but only 5 per cent abroad. Alternatively, she may secure 50 per cent of a deal with a foreign publisher to have her book translated into Spanish, but then get nothing for each copy sold in that language. She may also receive 10 per cent for digital rights, and 25–50 per cent for film rights, although a lot depends on her (or her agent’s) ability to negotiate with the publisher. A Japanese, Korean, or Chinese author may be offered a rather different contractual deal. In Europe and the United States, CCI tend to hold the whip hand in negotiations with those who supply them with creative material. In the music industry, for instance, record companies are notorious for paying minimal royalties to young singers or groups whose first album has been accepted for release. Elsewhere, it is only comparatively recently that fashion and news photographers have been able to demand payment for reproduction of their work in other media outlets. The same holds true for academic authors whose work is copied by university students and libraries. In the UK and other northern European countries, every educational institution now records how many pages of which work its staff and students have copied, and the author is subsequently remunerated through a licensing agreement. This is not yet the case in the East Asian region, however, so think about the legality of what you are doing the next time you copy or download a book without permission. Precisely because rights can potentially generate a lot of money, companies will purchase other companies in the cultural and creative industries. As we will see when we discuss the music and fashion industries in the second part of this book, this is particularly true of Europe and the United States, where independent record labels and publishers are continually being bought up and taken over by larger competitors that keep a watchful eye on particular labels’ singers and performers, or particular publishers’ lists of authors. By acquiring these companies, they acquire the rights to all their creative products and the revenues that accrue

36 Theoretical approaches from them. Consequently, what seems like a large financial outlay can be quickly recouped if those rights prove lucrative and bring in a regular stream of income.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have outlined Richard Caves’s discussion of what makes creative industries different from other industries studied by economists. To recap: in his opinion, there are seven distinguishing ‘bedrock structural properties’. These are: 1

2 3

4

5 6

7

Nobody knows: the fundamental uncertainty facing any producer of a creative good, in which consumer reaction is neither known beforehand nor easily understood afterwards because it is an ‘experience good’. Art for art’s sake: the various attitudes adopted by creative workers towards their work – in particular, originality as well as technical and professional skills. Infinite variety: every creative good is a distinct combination of inputs leading to infinite varieties of options during the production process as well as finished products. A list/B list: vertical differentiation deriving from the fact that an output’s quality depends on all inputs performing according to a particular standard; small differences in skills and talent may yield huge differences in stylistic and/ or financial success. Motley crew: relatively complex creative goods require diversely skilled artistic and humdrum inputs. Time flies: temporal coordination is essential when coordinating complex projects with diversely skilled inputs to ensure that a creative good hits the market at the right time. Ars longa: the durability of a creative good invokes copyright protection, allowing a creator to collect royalties or rents.

As I see it – and as I have tried to show in this chapter – each of these properties in some way derives from, and depends upon, one or more of the others. For example, the fact that nobody on the production side knows whether their latest film, pop song, or fashion collection will meet with critical or financial success when offered to consumers (nobody knows) means that they have little alternative but to put out all sorts of different film, songs, and designs (infinite variety) in the hope and expectation that one of them will become a hit. This infinite variety of products automatically produces more specialists in numerous sub-genres of creative work, many of whom are prepared to forgo immediate financial reward for what they do (art for art’s sake) in the hope and expectation that they will be properly rewarded in the long run (ars longa). This itself contributes to and strengthens the hierarchical differentiation of artistic personnel (A list/B list), a differentiation that is needed in large part because it offers a tried and tested solution to the radical uncertainty over production in the first place (nobody knows).

Economic properties

37

At the same time, such uncertainty stems in part from the unpredictable combination of personnel and personalities involved (motley crew), and from the fact that it is often extremely difficult to coordinate their individual inputs to a film or pop song (because of, for example, the conflicting schedules of individual participants) (time flies). The fact that each of these economic properties interacts with the others suggests that what marks creative industries as profoundly different from other parts of the economy is their uncertainty: the uncertainty of taste and consumer demand and of what will be a ‘hit’ and what a ‘miss’; the uncertainty of personnel and temporal coordination; the uncertainty of rankings (which can be upset by a single event, like the uncovering of massive tax evasion by the Chinese film star Fan Bingbing); and the uncertainty of what is meant by ‘art’ and ‘artistic talent’. It is the ‘uncertainty principle’ underpinning the organisation, artistic style, reputations, and creativity in creative industries that we should remember while reading the remaining chapters in this book.

Notes 1 https://hkupress.hku.hk/cnt/about.php. 2 https://uk.askmen.com/entertainment/galleries/the-worst-movies-ever-made-3.html. 3 www.statista.com/statistics/252727/leading-film-markets-worldwide-by-number-offilms-produced/. 4 www.statista.com/chart/12358/which-countries-produce-the-most-books/. 5 www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&year=2018-01-01,2018-12-31&start=51& ref_=adv_nxt.

References Becker, Howard S. (1982) ‘Reputation’. In Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 351–371. Caves, Richard (2000) Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caves, Richard (2006) ‘Organization of arts and entertainment industries’. In Viktor A. Ginsburgh and David Throsby (eds), Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. Volume 1. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 533–566. Moeran, Brian (2005) ‘Economic properties of cultural production’. In Brian Moeran, The Business of Ethnography. Oxford: Berg, pp. 171–182. Towse, Ruth (2002) ‘Book review: Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce by Richard Caves’. Journal of Political Economy 110 (1): 234–237. Towse, Ruth (2010) ‘Caves’ analysis of the creative industries’. In Ruth Towse, A Textbook of Cultural Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 390–396.

2

Creative worlds

So far I have discussed cultural production in the context of the different industries – like fashion, film, and so on – in which it is found. In this chapter, I want to look at the other half of the phrase ‘creative industries’ and discuss the concept and processes of creativity that take place in cultural production. In so doing, I will make use of two theoretical approaches: the first that of ‘art worlds’, outlined by the American sociologist and jazz pianist, Howard Becker; the second that of affordances and constraints, which I myself have discussed in another book, The Business of ©reativity. By relating the argument in this chapter to the seven economic properties outlined in the previous chapter, we should be able to gain a clearer understanding of how cultural production works in practice.

Creative worlds and collective activity As I mentioned earlier, in his book Art Worlds, Howard Becker argued that an art world is made up of ‘networks of people cooperating’ – a proposal that was later unwittingly taken up by Richard Caves when he suggested that the organization of personnel in creative industries is characterised by a motley crew of different specialists. This collective activity takes place at particular moments in the creative and humdrum processes, as well as between the different stages through which cultural products and performances must pass before reaching the public. According to Howard Becker, the first of these stages is conception: somebody must have an idea for a film or pop song or video game. Whether that idea is good and unusual, or trivial and banal, is often irrelevant. What does matter is whether or not the idea has market potential (nobody knows), because – as we saw in the previous chapter – all forms of large-scale cultural production require upfront financial inputs (sunk costs). For artists and writers working on their own, however, the creative concept itself becomes important (art for art’s sake), and money less so. Second, execution is needed: in other words, once conceived, the idea must be carried out and transformed into an anime film, video game, advertising campaign, or whatever. How people do this varies greatly according to the type of cultural work they are undertaking. Writing an academic book like this, for example, demands little more than an author’s willingness to sit down at a computer and, DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-4

Creative worlds

39

making use of her literary and linguistic skills, work through the various theoretical ideas and examples needed to outline the subject at hand and meet the publisher’s expectations (which are usually based on the original book proposal or concept). Other forms of cultural production – especially those involving a performance of some kind – are more complex in their organisation (motley crew). A theatre play, for instance, once written, needs a director and skilled actors. A place to perform has to be negotiated and stage hands recruited. The play must then be rehearsed several times before its performance (time flies). The same goes for a pop concert or music festival. First, songs need to be composed and lyrics written. A venue must be found and a performance date arranged. Musicians have to learn all the songs, and – in the case of a K-pop group, for instance – dance routines must be choreographed and practised by the performers. Third, both conception and execution need support. This comes in two main forms. The first of these is the provision of materials. Almost all creative activities require materials and equipment of some kind: an artist needs paints, brushes, and a canvas; a writer needs a computer with word-processing software, printer, and paper; a ballet dancer needs point shoes and a costume, plus, ideally, a supporting rail for her legs and feet and a mirror in which to observe her steps; a photographer requires at the very least a camera (and a computer to edit digital photographs), but maybe also backdrops, lights, and so on and so forth. The second kind of support is provided by personnel of all shapes and sizes (motley crew). Theatre stages need sweeping; film crews must be provided with food and drink while on the job; choreographers and singing coaches aid pop singers; paintings have to be framed, pianos tuned, books copy-edited and printed. Actors, musicians, fashion models, singers, writers, and other creative personnel usually have agents and managers (or, in the case of artists, gallery owners or dealers) to represent their interests. Without such support from humdrum personnel, cultural production would grind to a halt. Fourth, all forms of cultural production require appreciation. Otherwise, they would not be made or performed in the first place. Again, appreciation comes in two main forms. First, a film or video game is (or is not) enjoyed by a particular audience for which it is intended. Appreciation here is guided by taste and expressed by word of mouth or through social media. Second, a cultural work or performance is usually subjected to critical reviews that are published, for the most part, in newspapers and specialist magazines. Critics provide an aesthetic, intellectual, and/or moral argument justifying the socio-cultural value and existence of different forms of cultural production. In other words, they uphold what passes for socially acceptable tastes of various kinds. Such critical appreciation tends to have an effect on those who produce creative works, since how a fashion collection or crime novel is reviewed influences the way in which the designer or author goes about her next work. Appreciation, therefore, links consumers to producers and back again through the concept of taste, especially in this era of social media and user feedback (nobody knows and infinite variety). Finally, cultural production requires training. People working in the fashion, film, music, and other industries have to learn and hone the skills and techniques

40 Theoretical approaches they need to perform well in the kind of work they do. This holds true for every stage of cultural production: conception, execution, support activities, and critical appreciation. Training may be formally undertaken at educational institutions like schools of art, design, fashion, and music and/or learned on the job in an informal kind of apprentice system that is often found in the CCI. Once again, taste comes to the fore, both in the content of what are considered to be ‘skills’ and in what kind of training the relevant institutions provide.

What do we mean by ‘creativity’? Each of the stages of cultural production outlined here involves ideas of creativity. A creative idea for a fashion collection needs to be perceived as different from other fashion collections and ideas preceding it. Carrying out an idea involves all sorts of people working together and introducing their own visions of how the original concept might be modified, improved, expanded, or simplified while being executed – something that they cannot do efficiently without proper training and the services of support personnel. Appreciation, too, requires interpretation, which itself involves reimagining how a cultural work might have been or might (as well as should) be. What do we mean by ‘creativity’? One answer that I really like came from a copywriter working in a Japanese advertising agency. ‘Creativity’, he told me, ‘is being half a step ahead of society. If you’re a whole step ahead, society cannot follow you, so being creative means being just a little bit in front of others.’ In other words, creativity is not what Mao Zedong called a ‘Great Leap Forward’. It is more like a series of small dance steps. Let me illustrate this point in another way. One phrase that everyone – from business gurus to undergraduate students – uses in relation to creativity is ‘thinking out of the box’. This is a nice phrase. It slips easily off the tongue. Precisely because of that, however, it stops us from thinking through the idea of creativity. How so? Because ‘out of the box’ implies that you are inside a box in the first place, and that you want to escape because it is constraining you in some way or another (almost certainly with the kinds of rules and routines that guide all forms of cultural production). Fair enough. But think about what a box actually is. For a start, it has walls (and sometimes a lid), which are generally made of materials that you cannot see through. This means that, when you are inside a box, you have no idea what is going on outside, or who is doing what, why, how, for whom, and with what effects (all of which are important to our understanding of cultural production). But the reverse is also true. If you are outside a box, you cannot see what is going on inside (or who is doing what for whom, how, with what effects, and so on). Thinking ‘out of the box’, then, may be a good idea if you happen to be a frog and want to jump out to join your friends in a neighbouring rice field. But what if you are a human being trying to do creative work? Suppose you are stuck inside a box with a lot of friends, and you are looking for a way out. Then, one day, quite by chance, when your friends are all asleep, you come across a virtually invisible

Creative worlds

41

door which opens when you press a crack on the wall. So you find your way out of the box. But when you try to get back in and tell your friends, you find, as in all the best children’s stories, that the door works only one way – like those turnstiles at metro stations, stadiums, or zoos. You have no option, then, but to stay outside. When your friends wake up, they immediately realise you are no longer inside the box with them. But they have no idea what has happened to you, because they cannot see through the walls of the box (and they have not spotted the concealed door, of course). Did you manage to escape on your own, or did someone help you? How did you do it and what are you up to now? How could they learn from your success? So, defining creativity as thinking out of the box really makes little sense. In order to be able to recognise something, or someone, as ‘creative’, those left behind in the box must be able to compare that ‘creativity’ with what they have been doing. And it is impossible for them to do that if they cannot see what is happening on the other side of the box’s walls. This is why I like to think of creativity as being on the edge of the box. Everyone can see what is happening on the edge – both those outside and those inside – so they all have an opportunity to judge it and compare it with what has gone on before. Being on the edge allows you to interpret a goblet-shaped vase as two human profiles, or a rabbit as a duck (or vice versa). Being on the edge also allows you to bridge the gap between previously unrelated frames of reference and to see analogies that nobody has seen before. This was what happened with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the Western printing

Figure 2.1 A goblet-shaped vase or two human profiles?

42 Theoretical approaches

Figure 2.2 A rabbit or a duck?

press. He cleverly adapted a screw press used in winemaking and used his goldsmith’s knowledge of metals to create a moveable type made of alloy which could be stamped onto paper numerous times. Being on the edge of the box, then, is like being a half step – not a full step – ahead of society. But where exactly is the edge of the creative box? A plastic, metal, or wooden box has walls with edges that are firmly fixed by their material. But creativity is not fixed in cultural production. Indeed, something is ‘creative’ precisely because it is not fixed. A creative box, then, is not a solid plastic, metal, or wooden form. Rather, like Alice’s looking-glass, it is fluid. Imagine a box made of some kind of resin that is just solid enough to sustain a form but changes shape every time you touch it. That is creativity on the edge. It is all about people and what they do with things. It is about how people are constrained from doing what they want to do because of technologies, materials, lack of money, deadlines (time flies), where they are working, and the other people with whom they are working (motley crew). This suggests that creativity is not just about products but also about processes. In general, when we talk about an individual’s creativity, we are almost invariably considering something that he or she has invented (and then made): for example, the Walkman, for which Masaru Ibuka (chairman of Sony) and Akio Morita (the company’s CEO) acted as ‘godfathers’ for the product’s runaway success in late 1979 and 1980. Or think of Google, invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the mid-1990s. Just how these products came into existence, however, is often unclear, although creative people often post-rationalise and give a simplified account of what they did in order to come up with their invention. Like many after-the-event explanations, such accounts tend to gloss over messy details (and the same can be said of theatre, music, and other performances which are later

Creative worlds

43

judged to be ‘creative’). Yet, it is precisely out of such messy details that creativity emerges, as people struggle to overcome all sorts of problems, often over many years. So creativity is also about people’s encounters, engagements, and negotiations with other people – including consumers of the genre with which they are engaged. In other words, it is about social processes that impinge upon creativity – something that, as an economist, Richard Caves largely failed to take into account, other than in abstract terms. Because creativity in different forms of cultural production is for the most part collaborative, I am interested in what people in the Japanese advertising industry call ‘human chemistry’, or what Keith Sawyer (2003) refers to as ‘group flow’: in its potential to bring people together in highly attuned and synchronised interactions, where each individual aspires to the same shared purpose (such as the invention, design, and manufacture of a new product) and wants to do her best (art for art’s sake). Two words that people often use when they talk about creativity are ‘innovation’ and ‘improvisation’. Let us start with innovation, which implies that something is ‘new’. But when is something really new? And what makes it so? If I make a box out of plastic, rather than the traditional wood, that may indicate an innovation in materials. But is this innovation particularly ‘creative’? After all, I have merely introduced a different ready-made material with which to manufacture a standard object. I have not invented plastic as a substance, or anything like that. I have simply improvised. Another thing about innovation, as Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam point out, is that you can gauge it only by looking backwards at past products (Ingold and Hallam, 2007). In other words, innovation is, in this respect, nothing other than a means of measurement. This raises the question: can creativity be measured? Governments like to think so and cite endless statistical data relating to turnover and employment figures in different forms of cultural production to prove their point. But, as I argued above, we need to focus on processes of ‘in-the-making’ as well as on the products made. Improvisation, on the other hand, is very different from innovation in that it is spur-of-the-moment extemporising. It consists of people coming up with novel responses to a creative problem, without being certain about how what they are doing will turn out. In this respect, it is forward-looking. It takes people away from the security of habitual practice and leads them to the edge of the unknown. This makes improvisation perilous. In different forms of cultural production, it obliges people (fashion designers, film directors, musicians, photographers, and so on) to come up with something whose outcome they cannot necessarily envisage (a different kind of nobody knows), but which has to be novel and coherent – usually in front of a client or another audience. As a result, there is a tendency for them not to improvise, to rely on stock tricks of the trade that have proven effective in the past, rather than risk failure, even though they know deep down that by not failing they have in a way failed because they have not taken any risks. Although I have here made an analytical distinction between innovation and improvisation, in practice it is often hard for those working together in collaborative

44 Theoretical approaches situations to detach one from the other, product from process. After all, people working in CCI are always conceptualising and manufacturing new films, fashions, and pop songs on the basis of previous films, fashions, and pop songs, and their experiences in producing them. For creative personnel, primarily because they are working for the most part with defined genres and brands, the present is the past. As a result, we can say that creativity is product-as-process – neither one nor the other, but both together. When we talk of creativity, therefore, we are talking about how all these people, each brought in because of his or her special skills and professional knowledge, engage with one another and negotiate their different understandings of what it means to be creative as they go about making a film, pop song, fashion collection, animated cartoon, or advertising campaign. For them, creativity is as much in these social engagements and negotiations as it is in the finished product. Creativity is a social and cultural process.

Creativity, constraints, and affordances According to Becker, in all forms of cultural production people tend to rely on established conventions (about how a film should be made, a fashion collection displayed, or a piano sonata performed) to help them go about their work efficiently (motley crew and time flies). They all make use of standard equipment and materials, which allow them to work in the ways that they do and which affect the finished forms of that work. It is convention that usually influences what materials are used; what abstractions are best suited to convey ideas or experiences; and the form, or genre, in which the chosen materials and abstractions are combined. Conventions underpin taste in cultural production. While conventions enable creative work, however, they also constrain. A film director, for example, knows that he has to edit all the film he has shot into a compact production usually lasting between 90 and 120 minutes. He has to take into account the fact that audiences are unlikely to sit through a film that is three or four hours long. Similarly, a pop songwriter knows that every song she composes should consist of a judicious mix of verse and chorus repeated throughout, with the option of starting with an introduction, including a bridge in the middle, and a coda to finish it off. Likewise, the lyricist knows that the words for each verse should be different, but those of the chorus more or less the same. Such constraints more or less dictate the films we watch and the music we listen to, and lead us to ask whether there is such a thing as ‘creativity’ if everything is more or less the same. But constraints do not have to constrain creative processes; they can also enable them. Indeed, many creative people would be unable to produce the work that they do without constraints of one kind or another. For instance, an art director in a Japanese advertising agency once told me that the more constraints were imposed upon him by the client – in terms of budget, consumer target, product use, end benefits, and so on – the happier he was, because constraints forced him to think laterally, to move beyond normal rational paradigms, and thereby to

Creative worlds

45

move to the edge of the box. The same is true of many artists who wrestle with stylistic constraints imposed by the work of their predecessors and contemporaries in an attempt to impose their own unique vision of the world around them. You only need to listen to Beethoven’s piano sonatas and compare them with those by Mozart and others among his musical predecessors to understand this. Precisely because constraints can enable as well as hinder creativity, I am going to introduce another word: affordance. The concept of affordance is less binding in its meaning and, therefore, to my mind, better suited to describe and analyse the various ways in which creative workers are helped, supported, facilitated, enabled, and/or constrained as they think and go about their tasks in different forms of cultural production. Affordances can be physical – like the keyboard, display screen, and mouse built into a computer system which enable something to be done. Or they may provide signs, such as when a particular design feature provides a clue about a device’s proper operation and thereby helps people to understand it – like the various buttons with arrows, colours, and icons on a television remote control which guide the user to lower the volume, change channels, record a programme, and so on. As such, affordances facilitate functional, intellectual, and sensory understandings. All forms of cultural production engage with circuits of affordances in order to function effectively. As we will see in the following subsections, such circuits comprise techno-material, utility (or use), temporal, spatial, social, representational, and economic affordances, each of which can feed into – and be activated by – others. These are marked by four main characteristics. 1

2

3

They reveal distinctive social relations among specific creative and humdrum personnel: for example, in the fashion industry, designers, fashion houses, seamstresses and other support workers, suppliers, buyers, models (and their agencies), hair stylists, make-up artists, photographers, celebrities, magazine editors, and so on. All these people interact with one another in various ways, and with various aims in mind, that together give rise to a set of conventions about who should interact with whom, in what ways, and at what point in the process of conception, execution, promotion, distribution, and sale of fashion items. A circuit of affordances enables people to work together in shared economic activities made possible by these distinctive social relations. Thus, all the personnel mentioned in the previous point combine to prepare for, present, and promote a fashion designer’s biannual collection in New York, London, Milan, or Paris – the fashion capitals of the world – with a view to attracting revenue: sales orders for the fashion house; advertising for the fashion magazines; fees and commissions for support personnel. Affordances help cultural workers come to a generally recognised agreement in their creative world about what makes a work ‘good’, and about how creative processes should be organised and managed. In this way, on the one hand, they create a shared accounting system for evaluating economic exchanges (including money, credit, and payments in kind, as well as a

46 Theoretical approaches

4

recognised division of markets). On the other hand, they give rise to shared understandings about the meaning of everything they do together. These understandings include moral evaluations, trust, solidarity, and shared attitudes towards what, in the examples given here, constitutes ‘fashion’. Every circuit of affordances, with the emphases given to each of its components, marks a clear boundary separating members of the circuit from nonmembers. The members of a fashion world are not the same as those of an art or film world, although each world can intersect (as when film actresses wear fashion designers’ dresses during red-carpet events). This means that each creative world has some control over transactions crossing its boundaries.

1. Techno-material affordances Materials and their associated technologies govern the ways in which cultural producers think about and work on a particular project. An architect has to learn the mechanical rules of engineering to prevent his building from collapsing; an author has to learn the grammar and vocabulary of her language as well as the patterns and rules of the genre (romantic novel, thriller, or scholarly monograph) that she wishes to employ before she can start to write. In the advertising and fashion magazine industries, copywriters and art directors use particular forms of punctuation and font sizes for headlines, then select the typeface that they feel is best suited to the advertised product or the model who appears on the magazine’s cover. Materials afford modes of production. Although in almost all cases it does so, a finished work does not have to conform to conventions. If it did so in its entirety, all creative work would be set in stone (and therefore not ‘creative’). Therefore, adaptations, of one sort or another, are made in various forms of cultural production. For example, a porcelain urinal, when signed R. Mutt, can be transformed (by Marcel Duchamp) into an art object, as can a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde and placed (by Damien Hirst) in a glass vitrine case. The introduction of new technology, together with its availability at affordable prices, can lead to new or change old conventions, and thus alter the final form of creative products. The adoption of computers has revolutionised cultural producers’ ways and means of communicating their ideas as well as transforming how they go about their work in the first place. Writing a book with word-processing software is a totally different activity from writing one in longhand or even on a typewriter. Digital photography has made it possible to make radical alterations to images. Faces are contorted, bodies twisted, limbs elongated. With a few clicks of a mouse, Photoshop (or similar software) can make a model look perfectly proportioned and remove a stray wisp of hair here or an untimely pimple there. Airbrushing is now the norm, rather than the exception. Digital technology affords art directors, photographers, and cameramen new ways, and new conventions, of carrying out their work, and thereby changing established tastes. It also affords the introduction of new materials, such as the use of flat liquid crystal display screens in the work of video artists. Even the layout of

Creative worlds

47

buttons on electronic instruments can give a musician unanticipated ideas, so that the industry keeps providing new ways of ‘tweaking the knobs’. These then afford new sounds (and the rise of the DJ as ‘musician’). In earlier years, the development of industrially manufactured steel frames for guitars, together with amplifying equipment, led to a move away from large orchestras to the formation of small bands. This itself brought in the new genre of rock music – a genre which is now more or less consigned to small bands. As well as constraining, materials and technologies enable. Yet, in enabling, they also constrain. This is the explanatory power of affordance. 2. Spatial affordances Space – and its corollary, place – also afford cultural production in a number of ways. A Japanese potter firing a traditional wood-fuelled climbing kiln, for example, is acutely aware of the fact that the temperature in each chamber, and in each part of each chamber, is never consistent. As a result, he knows from experience both what kind of pot (large or small; plate or vase) should be placed where in which chamber and what colour glaze comes out best at which temperature (green at the hot front of the lower shelves; brown at the cooler rear of a chamber). These spatial affordances can themselves be prompted by material and technical affordances (the copper in a green glaze needs more heat than the feldspar, wood ash, and straw ash that are combined to make brown). In this respect, space can both afford and frame a cultural product. Space can also bring about symbolic effects. In a studio shoot for an advertising campaign, different personnel are assigned to work in different areas of the studio and its annex. The ‘set’, where the photographer works with the model, tends to be located at the ‘innermost’ part of the studio. At the ‘outer’ edge, near the entrance, gather the agency’s account manager, art director, client, and others not directly involved in the shoot. The model is tended to by a make-up artist and a hair stylist in an adjoining annex. But there is one highly charged common symbolic space at which the two key actors – the art director and the photographer – take up their positions and negotiate the results of every ‘take’. It is there, a photographic stand, that all come together to examine what has been done and decide how best to proceed. In other words, space frames social interaction. Spatial affordances also make themselves apparent in the institutions used to display or perform creative work. Theatres are of necessity quite small, because a play of any kind requires that its audience can hear the actors’ voices without the mediation of microphones, and can clearly see their facial and bodily gestures. This is not the case in a concert hall where audibility, not visibility, is paramount (although musicians must be able to see one another in order to be able to perform together). So space frames performer–audience relations. Physical location can also be important symbolically, as opposed to technically. Acting a part in Hamlet in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, for example, can be more inspiring, and generate more kudos, than playing the same part in a repertory theatre in the north of England (A list/B list). Putting on

48 Theoretical approaches a fashion show in the Palace of Versailles can induce a thrill not experienced, perhaps, in a run-down warehouse in Seoul. Playing a Beethoven piano concerto in the concert hall of the Berliner Philharmoniker can be more uplifting than performing the same piece with a different orchestra in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Spatial and other affordances often combine to frame the appreciation of a cultural product. For example, in Turkish carpet-making, certain combinations of spinning, knotting, and weaving techniques, sizes and colours, and stylistic elements (techno-material and representational affordances) are known to be characteristic of specific regions and eras of production, and affect collectors’ appreciation of the finished products. The same is true of French wines, many of which are classified by the land – or terroir – on which the grapes are grown. Wines produced in a designated vineyard not only explicitly recognise the savoir faire of the viticulturist but also contribute to the development of regional gastronomic cultures. 3. Temporal affordances A third set of affordances surrounds the use of a second framing device – time – in cultural production. Generally speaking, as an affordance, time is important in three rather diverse ways. First, the moment when a creative product has to be ready for a particular event or the market affects its planning and execution (time flies). Deadlines have to be established and met. The fixing of a particular time and date for a fashion show or concert obliges participants to schedule the various tasks that need to be completed – designing, sewing, fitting, and modifying a dress, for example, or rehearsing the set list and making the necessary sound and lighting arrangements – in order to be properly prepared to go on the catwalk or stage and perform in front of an audience. The complexity of such deadlines varies according to the creative product in question. Time affords not just the process of producing a cultural good but also the practices of evaluating it when finished. A film’s release date can help or hinder its chances of being nominated for an Oscar or other film award, while the sequence in which films are shown at a festival may affect their chances of winning a prize. (The earlier a film is shown, the less likely it is to win an award.) Second, time depends on the medium or communicative channel used. For example, the fact that a fashion show conventionally lasts for an absolute maximum of twenty minutes affects how many items a designer can show. This, in itself, influences her choice of garments: formal or informal, evening dress or casual skirt, and so on. The fact that she has a maximum of six months in which to prepare a seasonal collection means that a limited number of articles of clothing can be designed and made in time for the show. Third, time is important in the sense that every creative product is conceived, executed, promoted, distributed, and received in a historical context of all the similar products that have preceded it. Ideally, it should differ – if only marginally – from

Creative worlds

49

both these previous products and contemporaneous alternatives. Thus, a team of designers working on Uniqlo’s Princesse tam.tam swimwear line is required to create something ‘new’ yet still ‘distinctly Princesse tam.tam’. This year’s collection must differ from last year’s as well as from the latest offerings from the likes of H&M, Top Shop, and Victoria’s Secret. However, while being recognisably different, it must also accord with consumer expectations of both Uniqlo and the Princesse tam.tam product line. All forms of cultural production take place in this kind of socio-cultural, temporal frame. 4. Representational affordances Representational affordances are fundamental to creative practices and products, even though creative people are often unable to talk coherently about their work. These affordances are primarily aesthetic (or, to use a less loaded term, ‘appreciative’). They give rise to formal properties based on such concepts as genre, form, and style, so they influence different tastes. But they may also be derived from health and legal considerations – the latter often concerning intellectual property rights (ars longa) and how these are interpreted. Commercials for pharmaceutical products on Japanese television, for example, must be accompanied by a ping-pong warning sound. In many countries, cigarette advertisements must include a written warning about smoking’s detrimental effects on health. Less formally, a recent development in the fashion world has been disapproval, or even banning, of ‘sizezero’ catwalk models. All of these examples have a bearing on – or frame – how a product is advertised or a fashion item presented. Different genres tend to give rise to distinct representational styles and accompanying affordances. Different genres of music – classical, rock, and jazz, for instance – bring together different instruments and different ways of playing them. Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique rules out certain compositional choices, especially those which suggest traditional harmony. In book publishing, literary genres have separate conventions for paper size, title and cover layout, binding methods (cloth and/or paperback), and so on. Travel guidebook writers, too, have to follow stringent rules about word count, style, and genre, and strictly adhere to their editorial brief. While they take pride in meticulously following instructions (since this may lead to further commissions), they also try to move to the edge of the box by providing work that is ‘atmospheric’, has ‘an angle’, and gives a sense of ‘being there’ to an imagined audience. No work that we think of as ‘contemporary art’, no film that we consider an ‘action film’, no music that we listen to for its ‘rock’ is ever marked by an aesthetic that is not an essential and accepted characteristic of contemporary art, action film, or rock music. Each carries its own representational conventions – abstract daubs of paint on an unframed canvas, car chases with special effects, and the inevitable quartet of lead singer, drummer, rhythm and bass guitarists in a rock band. These make the creative product immediately recognisable for what it is. The same is true of the hospital dramas, quiz shows, reality TV, sitcoms, and soaps which comprise our standard television fare. Each brings with it shared conventions,

50 Theoretical approaches expectations, understandings, and interpretations. This, in itself, explains how formulaic they tend to be, while simultaneously making overt claims to ‘creativity’. In this way, representational affordances ultimately sustain different genres. Creative people can push the borders of each of these genres (infinite variety), but only so far. Others will usually catch up with them in time (‘me too’). After the Sony Walkman was launched, it was followed quite swiftly by the Walky (Toshiba), CassetteBoy (Aiwa), and MiJockey (Panasonic). Other innovations may take longer to attract imitators. In the opening movement of his 9th Piano Concerto (K271), Mozart treated piano and orchestra as equal partners in a musical dialogue. Nothing like this had ever been done before, and it was not tried again until almost thirty years later, when Beethoven chose to open his 4th Piano Concerto with the soloist. While Sony was a half step ahead with the launch of the Walkman, Mozart appears to have been a full step ahead of his contemporaries and the musical world was unable to catch up for a while. 5. Social affordances We may broadly divide social affordances into three sets. First, there are those that stem from the fact that most forms of cultural production consist of close contact and communication among networks of cooperating personnel. Every cultural or creative industry has a pool of skilled personnel on whom it can draw to carry out some specialised task. Who you work with can have an effect on how you work together and what the finished creative work will look and/or sound like. There are two basic organisational principles underlying the work of the motley crew, both of which affect how cultural production is executed. The first of these principles is stability. Creative personnel are allocated particular tasks because they work for organizations – copywriter for an advertising agency, for example, or stylist for a fashion magazine – and build their networks, reputations, and careers through their organisational affiliations. Their work thus tends to follow established practices in those organisations. This means that their work can be governed by internal politics relating to hierarchy, promotion opportunities, gender, and so on. The other principle is based on discontinuity. Most people working in cultural production do not belong to organisations. Rather, they are freelance workers who are contracted separately for each task – for instance, a freelance copywriter for a particular ad campaign, or a model and make-up artist for a fashion shoot. Since they never know when the next job will come along, these workers need to ensure that they cultivate close personal connections with those who are likely to employ them. This is often why one hair stylist or actress, rather than another, gets a particular job. Their professional qualifications and special talents matter, of course, but when there is little difference between numerous contenders for a job, the one with the closest ties to the employer will usually get it. The second set of social affordances derives from the fact that a lot of creative work in different forms of cultural production is commissioned. There is nothing new in this. In the art world, over many centuries patrons have had an enormous

Creative worlds

51

influence on the selection of an artist’s subject matter, materials, size of work, and so on. Collectors of contemporary art still commission work. It is their likes and dislikes that determine what other artists paint and what will, or will not, come onto the market in the longer term. Cultivate a collector and, as an artist, you may make your name; offend one, and you may be doomed to insignificance (A list/B list). The same is true of advertising, where the client has a major role in the selection of campaign ideas put forward by an agency. It may also insist on using a particular model, actress, or celebrity in the campaign and on selecting the clothes she wears. It may even interfere with details of the print ads to be run, or tell the photographer how to do his job. Each of these decisions will affect the overall look and style of the campaign. This brings us to the final set of social affordances, which concerns how they affect cultural products themselves. On the one hand, by commissioning work, advertising clients, collectors, gallery owners, museum curators, government ministries, and other patrons influence the form that work takes. On the other hand, particular combinations of personnel can lead to particular, and in time predictable, styles of work (representational affordance). Indeed, the more people work together, the more likely they are to develop particular routines and styles (and thus generate genres). Certain film directors (like Akira Kurosawa and Pedro Almodóvar) work with a ‘stable’ of actors on whom they draw for each successive work and create a certain recognisable style. Similarly, musicians team up to form groups that then develop a particular ‘sound’: Seo Taiji and Boys, for example, who introduced MIDI (Musical Instrumental Digital Interface) to Korean pop music; or YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra), whose pioneering use of synthesisers, samplers, and drum machines contributed to the development of contemporary Jpop, as well as synthpop, ambient house, and other genres of popular music. 6. Economic affordances First, the general state of a country’s economy influences the extent to which cultural production is or is not creative, since the ‘bottom line’ tends to assume overriding importance in a recession. In times of financial crisis, collectors are loath to commission new works by unproven artists, and producers are unlikely to finance avant-garde films by young directors. In times of prosperity, advertisers are prepared to give creative ideas a chance; in times of hardship, they focus on sales and are not prepared to take risks on ‘creativity’. Sometimes, the lack of market demand virtually cripples any chance of original creative work. Yet, it may well be precisely economic desperation that prompts creative people to find new ways of representing the same old ideas. Second, the budget that is allocated for a film, rock concert, fashion show, or advertising campaign has a huge effect on its form. The concert series (or ‘spectacular’) This Is It, which Michael Jackson was rehearsing up to the time of his death, allowed for a multi-purpose stage with mobile ramp, ejector platforms, and numerous stage effects, including enormous robots and pyrotechnics, as well as a

52 Theoretical approaches giant video screen with specially shot film, backing singers, musicians, dancers, and aerialist choreography. In contrast, a normal rock concert or festival allows for little more than the standard equipment (lighting and sound) that enables a group or groups to perform their music on stage in front of an audience. Similarly, in advertising, a large budget affects a campaign’s style and expression since it enables the use of a mass medium like television as well as shoots in foreign (usually exotic), as opposed to domestic, locations. A small budget usually means that advertising creativity will be limited to print advertising and take place in a studio. A big budget also enables the recruitment of (internationally) famous personnel (A list/B list) for films, concerts, advertising campaigns, and so on: $100 million obviously buys more ‘star power’, more computerised pyrotechnics, and more exotic locations than $10 million. This scale of economic input not only affords the finished product a certain cultural cachet but generally increases the likelihood of a warm reception from the public. Everyone loves a blockbuster … usually (although nobody knows). Economic affordances find their most obvious expression in price. An auctioneer relies on the hammer prices achieved in previous auctions to estimate how much a particular item – for example, a painting by Matisse or a set of Ai Wei Wei’s ‘Neolithic’ pots – will fetch. The price is usually, but by no means always, fixed according to the cost of materials and labour that go into a product’s manufacture. A Japanese tea bowl, for example, uses the same amount of clay and glaze as a donburi noodle bowl. But, whereas a potter might sell the noodle bowl for JP¥3,000, he can command far more for his tea bowl because its buyer will regard it as an essential part of the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu or chado-) in which aesthetic affordances play a large part. As a result, the potter may charge between JP¥30,000 and JP¥3 million for the tea bowl, depending on his reputation and on how much he thinks the buyer is prepared to pay.

Circuits of affordances As we have seen, cultural production invariably comprises interrelated affordances, one or more of which may assume greater significance than the others in different creative contexts. Those involved continually find themselves having to deal with one affordance or another, and sometimes several all at once. Yet, in spite of the variations in how, when, and where the six affordances occur, it is rare that any one of them is entirely absent from any form of cultural production. Let us take what we now know as ‘Hollywood’ as an example. In the early days of filmmaking, when the movie camera was not what it is today, electric light was not strong enough to substitute for natural light (techno-material affordance). As a result, production companies based in New York and Chicago started to seek out sunnier locations during the winter season (temporal affordance). The stable climate, constant supply of natural light, wide variety of landscapes, low wages, and

Creative worlds

53

close proximity to a large urban workforce led them to choose southern California (specifically Hollywood) as the best place to set up their new motion-picture companies (techno-material, spatial, social, and economic affordances). This location afforded an increase in the number of outdoor shootings, which encouraged directors to position their cameras more freely (techno-material affordance), split camera ‘takes’ into more frequent and shorter shots (temporal affordance), and introduce long shots as they moved actors and animals deeper into the available space (representational affordance). From such developments emerged the idea of film as spectacle, resulting in the blockbuster (economic affordance) and especially the Western genre, which quickly developed conventions of chases, battles, gunfights, rugged cowboys, and so on (representational affordance). A few decades later, these conventions were transferred to the police detective genre. Similarly, until the middle of the last century, artists normally worked with oil paints on a canvas, even though both caused them difficulties of one sort or another. For instance, oil paints react with untreated canvas, which made it necessary to protect the canvas with a coating that tended to discolour over time, leaving a brownish tint. Oil paintings also take weeks to dry. In part, these issues explain modern American artists’ embrace of acrylic paints, which use synthetic resins rather than oil as a binder and enable colours to be applied directly to the canvas without any sign of a brushstroke. They also dry extremely fast and are cheap enough to be bought by the gallon. In this way, the new painting style of Abstract Expressionism came into being. Representation, then, is often bound up with techno-material conventions. Because notes cannot be sustained on a harpsichord except by holding down the keys, a player has to increase the number of notes played in a particular time span in order to make the music sound ‘loud’. It is this that separates the music of Bach, for example, from that of Mozart or Beethoven, who were able to compose for the pianoforte, with its technical ability to play both loud and soft notes. At the same time, a composer selects one key rather than another for a melody, then one note or phrase rather than another, because a particular aesthetics of music allows it and not the other (for instance, use of a heptatonic rather than pentatonic scale). She also writes for one instrument or group of instruments rather than another – because stringed, rather than brass, instruments are seen to be a better fit for a romantic piece of music, for instance – and each of the musicians then makes choices about the phrasing or bowing of the final score. Such conventions allow us to call that score (classical, pop, jazz, rock, and so on) ‘music’ rather than mere ‘noise’. So, materials afford techniques; techniques afford styles; styles afford finished products which are themselves afforded by time and place, as well as by others collaborating in creative work, and exchanged for sums of money. The same holds true for all of these in reverse. Because each affordance interacts with and plays off the others like a musical quartet, we may see affordances as together forming a multifaceted circuit particular to each creative context. It is affordances that sustain every creative world.

54 Theoretical approaches Economic

Representational

Social

Techno-Material

Spatial

Temporal

Figure 2.3 A circuit of affordances

Conclusion In this chapter, I have made use of the work of the Chicago sociologist Howard Becker to examine creative worlds. In so doing, I have tried to explain what I think creativity is, while also advancing my own ideas about how creativity is inflected by a ‘circuit of affordances’. But have I successfully explained creativity? Creative products in themselves are characterised by what Becker calls a ‘fundamental indeterminacy’. Films, fashion shows, studio shoots, and music gigs vary enormously, even though they may be realised by the same personnel in, to all intents and purposes, the same environments using the same materials and techniques. Yet, they are all marked by an inconsistent series of participants’ choices: the choice, for example, of how to shoot a particular scene, or cut and sew a particular material, frame a photo, or phrase a musical idea. Every creative product becomes what it is, says Becker, because of choices made by those involved from a range of possibilities involving personnel, the mobilisation of resources, conventions, reputation, and means of distribution. Our main concern, then, should be what guides such choices – materials and available technologies, aesthetic ideals, genre and cultural style, personal networks, power relations, money, and on. As a general rule, in the CCI creative work moves through many hands before it finally passes from producer to consumer. In so doing, it is subject to all sorts of improvisations and evaluations made by a long series of skilled intermediaries (professional colleagues, clients, performers, managerial staff, and so on) before they

Creative worlds

55

arrive at some sort of shared agreement about what constitutes both ‘creativity’ and ‘good work’. To understand the meaning of creativity, then, we need to explore the choices that are made by those involved and from what range of possibilities they are selected. This means that, as students of creativity, we need to adopt not just the role of detached observers but also that of observant participants. We ourselves must be creative.

References General readings Becker, Howard S. (1982) ‘Art worlds and collective activity’. In Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 1–39. Becker, Howard S. (2006) ‘The work itself’. In H. S. Becker, R. R. Faulkner, and B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds), Art from Start to Finish. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 21–30. Burr, Chandler (2005) ‘The scent of the Nile: Jean-Claude Ellena creates a new perfume’. New Yorker 81 (4): 78–88. du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus (1997) ‘The production of the Sony Walkman’. In Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage and the Open University, pp. 42–46. Ingold, Tim and Elizabeth Hallam (2007) ‘Creativity and cultural improvisation: an introduction’. In E. Hallam and T. Ingold (eds), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. ASA Monographs 44. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–24. Moeran, Brian (2011) The Business of ©reativity. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Moeran, Brian and Bo Christensen (eds) (2013) Exploring Creativity: Evaluative Practices in Innovation, Design, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, Keith (2003) Group Creativity: Music, Theatre, Collaboration. Mahwah, NJ: Psychology Press. Ueyama, Shu- (1982) ‘The selling of the Walkman’. Advertising Age, 22 March.

Regional readings Kawamura, Yuniya (2004) ‘The Japanese revolution in Paris fashion’. Fashion Theory 8 (2): 195–223. Keene, Michael (2006) ‘From made in China to created in China’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (3): 285–296. Kim, Kyung Hee (2007) ‘Exploring the interactions between Asian culture (Confucianism) and creativity’. Journal of Creative Behavior 41 (1): 28–53. Moeran, Brian (2009) ‘The organization of creativity in Japanese advertising production’. Human Relations 62 (7): 963–985. Mori, Yoshitaka (2009) ‘J-pop: from the ideology of creativity to DIY music culture’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10 (4): 474–488. Park, Gil-Sung (2013) ‘Manufacturing creativity: production, performance and dissemination of K-pop’. Korea Journal 53 (4): 14–33. Skov, Lise (2002) ‘Hong Kong fashion designers as cultural intermediaries: out of global garment production’. Cultural Studies 16 (4): 553–569.

3

Fields of cultural production

In the last chapter, I made use of an ‘art world’ approach to discuss creativity in different forms of cultural production. Now I am going to look at how the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed a similar – though in places crucially different – theory of a ‘field’ of cultural production. Simply put, there are four main differences between the two approaches. 1

2

3

4

While Becker focused on networks of people cooperating, in particular on the support provided by humdrum personnel in an ‘art world’, Bourdieu tended to see these networks in terms of people competing for power in what he called a ‘field’ of cultural production. Bourdieu also focused overtly on organisations, as well as on individual people, and argued that these organisations (a film studio, for example, or a publishing house) are always and continuously jostling for position in a field of cultural production (film or publishing). It is the specialist positions they take (as producer of anime films, for example, or publisher of romance novels) that distinguishes them from their competitors (who similarly develop their own areas of expertise). A field of cultural production, therefore, consists of positions and position-taking by actors in the field. This kind of competition among participants is not simply in terms of economic profit and market share (what Bourdieu called ‘economic capital’). Rather, other forms of capital come into play: in particular, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. To these, I am going to add intellectual capital, since many forms of cultural production create and live off intellectual property and copyrights. Participants in every field of cultural production bring cultural capital to the work that they do. The firms that employ them make use of their employees’ educational qualifications (the university they attended, or where they trained in their profession), intellectual abilities (in particular, their creativity), social networks, and overall cultural background to combine into ‘symbolic capital’ to advance their economic interests. A field of cultural production, therefore, is characterised by the exchange and conversion of different forms of capital. Precisely how individual actors go about taking up positions and converting different kinds of capital depends very much on their social disposition (what

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-5

Fields of cultural production

57

Bourdieu called ‘habitus’) – on their social background and education, on the way they have been brought up, on where they have lived, on what kinds of things they like, on their hobbies and friends (in other words, on their educational, intellectual, social, and cultural capital). In short, your habitus makes you who you are and gives you the disposition that you have towards life. And who you are has an effect on how things are done. It also often influences other people and organisations with whom you interact as you go about making a film, music album, or fashion collection. None of these differences was totally ignored by Howard Becker in his outline of a theory of art worlds. He talked about the effects of training, for example, on artists (as part of their habitus and disposition). He also discussed four different kinds of artists – integrated professionals, mavericks, folk artists, and naive artists – thereby showing the different positions that a would-be artist might adopt as a survival strategy in an art world. In a way, he also outlined a field of artistic activity by including chapters on the people and organisations or institutions providing resources, art criticism, distribution, and state patronage. In that he also discussed how artists made their reputations, he could also be said to have anticipated Bourdieu’s ideas about social, cultural, and symbolic capital. But Becker did not talk about them as institutions in a field, preferring to stick with his idea of networks of people cooperating. In other words, he did not treat them all as an integrated system in the way that Bourdieu did.

The structure of a field The first thing we need to recognise is that our lives consist of a series of choices. We choose what to do in the future (what job to do, who to marry) in the same way that we have made choices in the past (what subject to study at university and where) and are making others right now (by reading this book and not another, by putting aside social media for an hour or two to concentrate on study). Each of the choices we make has a knock-on effect on choices we make later in our lives. If we decide to study creative industries at university, for example, we are unlikely to be able to become doctors, scientists, or engineers. We more or less limit our future job opportunities and careers (in the same way that those choosing to study medicine or law limit their future careers), and these choices dictate what kind of people we will have as colleagues and maybe even friends in the future. They may also influence our choice of partner when it comes to getting married (always assuming that our parents do not interfere and that we have a free choice). So, while we make our choices in life from a seemingly limitless array of possibilities, they are in fact for the most part constrained or afforded by what has happened before. Bourdieu himself used the phrase ‘a space of possibles’ to describe this situation. He suggested that this orients – or, as I would put it, affords – the concepts, ideas, and ways of working of those employed in different fields of cultural production, even without their being aware of it. It defines their universe of problems, their

58 Theoretical approaches intellectual benchmarks (usually defined in terms of an industry’s leading figures and successful products), and their references to what can and cannot be achieved, and how. What is important here is that choices made within this space of possibles establish and reflect difference: differences in job opportunities and careers; differences in the people we meet and associate with; differences in the kinds of clothes we wear; differences in the films, books, and music we like; and so on and so forth. But it is not the individual differences that attract the attention of a sociologist or anthropologist studying cultural production. It doesn’t really matter that there are different styles of Cantopop: saccharine boy-meets-girl love songs, or political allegories, or mockeries of tabloid culture. It also doesn’t matter that there are different singers, like Joey Yung, Kay Tse, Sam Hui, Juno Mak, and Eason Chan, with different songs and reputations. What matters is that the differences between singers and singing styles form a system of differences within Cantopop, which is itself part of a system of Chinese pop music in general (mainly Mandopop in mainland China, but also regional variants in the Chinese diaspora of Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore) and, more broadly, Asian pop music (notably, J-pop and K-pop). This kind of system of differences is to be found in all forms of cultural production. Fashion, for example, has its different styles (formal, informal, casual, evening, sports, men’s, women’s, kids’, and other kinds of ‘wear’) as well as Cantopop Popular Styles

Representative Singers

Romance/ Ballad Cover Versions Film/TV Theme Songs

Eason Chan Kay Tse Joey Yung Juno Mak Sammi Cheng

Mandopop

Primary Audience

Hong Kong Guangdong Guangxi

J-Pop

Ballad

Ballad Hybrid

R&B Bubblegumpop

R&B Pop Electronic

Jay Chou Stanley Huang Stefanie Sun Lu Han

BoA Girls’ Generation Seo Taiji Kim Tae-yeon EXO

Ayumi Hamasaki Thelma Aoyama Namie Amuro Kobukuro Arashi Takeshi Kaneshiro

South Korea Korean Diaspora

Japan

Ah Niu

Aaron Kwok Faye Wong

K-Pop

Takeshi Kaneshiro Aaron Kwok Faye Wong PRC Taiwan Singapore Malaysia Indonesia

Figure 3.1 Asian popular music forms as a system of differences

Rock Hip hop Anime image songs R&B Urban Pop Neo-folk

Fields of cultural production

59

different kinds of stores where you can buy these different styles (Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons, Uniqlo, Alibaba, Shanghai Tang, Bossini, Found Muji, BEAMS, and so on). So, too, with films, video games, manga, books, and all kinds of media forms, each of which establishes and maintains sets of differences within itself, as well as between itself and other similar, but not identical, media. When we think of different forms of cultural production in this way we come to realise that differences are established and maintained in three main ways and that a field therefore consists of three interdependent entities. 1

2 3

People: the individual actors involved in making a film, producing a fashion collection, devising a video game, and so on, together with the networks of creative and humdrum personnel with whom they work in a motley crew. Products: the infinite variety of films, clothes, games, books, comics, songs, designs, and so on put out by individual actors and their networks. Institutions: the organisations – like film studios, fashion houses, game developers, record companies, and publishing houses – which employ people to make all these different cultural products, and which compete with similar organisations in the different markets in which they operate (A list/B list).

One way to imagine the structure of relations in a field is to see them as part of a value chain between ‘upstream’ suppliers and ‘downstream’ customers. Cultural production is a bit like a rowing relay race, in which a crew of people (such as concept generators) launches its boat (a cultural product) at the head of a river and rows as fast, but also as stylishly, as it can downstream, before jumping out at a fixed point and handing over to the next crew (of producers), which jumps in and rows just as hard and stylishly to the next fixed point. Then it is their turn to jump out and let a new crew (of distributors) take over the boat and row. And so the race goes on, until all the boats in the race finally reach the crowds waiting for them downstream and one of them is declared the winner. Figure 3.2 illustrates the interrelations between people, products, and institutions in the context of fashion and fashion magazine publishing. There are three main products interlocking with one another: fashion items (clothes); fashion images (photographs of the clothes); and the fashion magazines (nowadays mainly digital) in which these photographs appear (together with accompanying texts). In addition, there is a fourth product: advertisements that appear in a fashion magazine or on a website. Each of these products is dealt with by different people and institutions. 1 2 3

Fashion designers and fashion houses (brands) in the case of clothes, as well as the advertisements that they usually place in fashion magazines. Photographers, models, make-up artists, hair stylists, and their agencies in the case of fashion photographs and fashion advertisements. Magazine editor and sub-editors, creative director, fashion stylist, and art director in the case of the magazine itself.

Designer

Freelance Staff

ADVERTISERS

Beauty industry Travel industry Automobile industry Retail etc. value chains

LOCAL MAGAZINE INDUSTRY

Figure 3.2 A partial field of fashion magazines, showing the relations between individuals (designers, models, stylists, photographers, magazine staff), products (clothes, photographs, texts, magazine titles, advertisements), and institutions (fashion houses, agencies, publisher, advertisers) down the value chain from suppliers to customers

DOWNSTREAM CUSTOMERS

READERS

MAGAZINE TITLE

Hair Stylist

Photographer

Model

Make-up artist

AGENCIES

Celebrity

IN-HOUSE MAGAZINE STAFF Editor-in-Chief, Creative/Fashion Director, Stylist, Art Director

INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE MARKET

FASHION HOUSE

Brand

UPSTREAM SUPPLIERS

60 Theoretical approaches

Fields of cultural production

61

Now, precisely because individual actors, products, and institutions are parts of a system of differences, they all have to make choices about what kind of product to make, how to do so, and how to differentiate themselves from other products and other people and institutions doing similar kinds of work. This is where Bourdieu’s notion of positions and position-taking comes in. Every field of cultural production, he argued, is made up of a – sometimes greater, sometimes lesser – number of positions, available to all participants or ‘players in the game’. These positions include available roles and the attendant ensemble of people, social relations, and cultural behaviour surrounding each role (the ‘rebel’ singer, the ‘avant-garde’ designer, the ‘independent’ film director). Positions refer, too, to types (or genres) of cultural product (romantic ballad versus hard rock; literary fiction versus manga; suspense versus comedy). They also encompass institutions and how they differentiate themselves from one another through branding: Comme des Garçons versus Issey Miyake versus Chanel in the field of fashion; MGM versus Sony Pictures Entertainment versus Nikkatsu in that of film; SM Entertainment versus Johnny & Associates versus Yoshimoto Ko-gyo- in that of the music and entertainment business. Most of the time positions are standardised. Photography has all kinds of product categories – nature, food, portrait, urban, and so on, in addition to fashion and beauty – in which photographers specialise. Cinema, too, has its genres – suspense, comedy, romance, supernatural, science fiction, pornography – in which production studios and/or directors (and sometimes actors) tend to specialise. So, too, with publishing, where books are first broken down into ‘academic’ and ‘trade’ (i.e. not academic), then subdivided into categories like history, sociology, medicine, law, and so on, on the one hand, and fiction (classics, crime, historical novels, romance, science fiction, and so on), non-fiction (biography, cookery, environment, travel, and so forth), and children’s (teen, fantasy, young adult, and so forth), on the other. The same kind of standard classification system can be found in all forms of cultural production, primarily because it helps television stations, film studios, publishers, and so on come to terms with the problem of uncertain demand (nobody knows). Standardisation makes it difficult, but not impossible, for new positions to be opened up in the spaces between already occupied positions. For example, when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published by Bloomsbury in 1997, it was classified as fantasy literature for children aged between nine and eleven years old. The success of the book and subsequent volumes in the series led to further demand for magic-related books, which themselves revived a vampire trend in children’s literature as a whole. This, in turn, led to adaptations that took vampire literature into the realm of science fiction (where vampires fed on energy rather than blood). As a result, the standard genre of children’s fantasy fiction – with its subcategories of magic and vampires – morphed into a new ‘position’ that brought these two subcategories into the realm of science fiction. It is the potential changes in the structure of positions made possible by individual and institutional actors’ search for difference that lies at the heart of every field of cultural production (and, of course, of advertising and marketing in

62 Theoretical approaches general). The ‘creativity’ in ‘creative’ industries is, perhaps, this search for difference – for an ‘edge’ that makes a film, pop song, video game, or vampire book seem different enough to attract an audience. (This is a slightly different way of looking at ‘creativity on the edge’.) What that difference may be is often not understood clearly in advance (nobody knows). It may be in the storyline (a vampire sucking energy, rather than blood, even though blood is itself a form of energy); in a name (of an actor, an author, a brand) (A list/B list); in appearance (Madonna in a cone-bra corset; Johnny Depp sporting a moustache, instead of being cleanshaven); in the concept, design, price, availability, trendiness, or cultural exoticism of the product – who knows? But it’s the difference that can make the difference between a ‘hit’ and a ‘miss’.

Positions and position-taking In order to give a clearer picture of how a field is structured by means of positions and how different actors take up positions in a field, I am going to talk now about the field of Japanese advertising. An advertising field anywhere in the world is a bit of a hybrid form. It consists primarily of organisations involved in the creation of advertising campaigns – full-service advertising agencies (like Dentsu- in Japan), for the most part, but also ‘creative shops’, market research firms, production companies and their supporting personnel, studios, and various agencies to assist in hiring models, actresses, photographers, make-up artists, and so on, as required. The field also contains a range of self-regulating bodies like the American Advertising Federation (AAF) and the Japan Advertising Agencies Association (JAAA), each with their own annual awards and publications. However, because all advertising is placed in a variety of media, its field of cultural production overlaps with other fields, notably those of publishing (newspapers and magazines) and broadcast media (radio and television). Because advertisements are also placed on billboards in public and private spaces, on various forms of transport, and on internet websites, and because advertising is created for an extremely broad range of national and multinational firms – ranging from banks to brewers, by way of automobiles, department stores and other retail outlets, fashion and clothing manufacturers, food producers, pharmaceuticals, soaps and detergents, sports equipment, and so on and so forth – the field of advertising also contains all these advertising corporations on its periphery. Some of what Bourdieu called these ‘players in the game’ of advertising are household names; others are not. When it comes to advertising agencies in Japan, most of us, I am sure, have heard of Dentsu- and Hakuho-do-, but we are less likely to know about agencies like So-tsu- or even To-kyu-. The same goes for media organisations. We have probably heard of the Yomiuri Newspaper and Television companies, but not of the Nishi Nihon Newspaper and Broadcasting companies. Finally, we all know the names of Japan’s multinational corporations – Toyota, Matsushita, Shiseido, and so on – but few of us have heard of local advertisers like Kewpie Foods or Yamamotoyama.

Fields of cultural production

63

So the field of Japanese advertising comprises a range of positions encompassing, first and foremost, A list/B list advertising agencies, media organisations, and corporate advertisers, but also all sorts of support organisations (production companies, market researchers, model agencies, studios, and so on). Now, imagine you are starting up a new advertising agency. How can you possibly take up a position in such a crowded field? More importantly, how can you become a major player in the field when you are a newcomer? These were the questions faced by Masao Inagaki and three friends who, in March 1956, decided to launch their own advertising agency, Asahi Tsu-shinsha (or Asatsu- for short), in Tokyo. As a latecomer in the Japanese advertising field, Asatsu- had to find a way to slip through the stranglehold then exerted by the large, firmly entrenched agencies like Dentsu- and Hakuho-do-, both of which had been in business for well over half a century and had, as a result, built up seemingly impregnable networks of personal contacts among those responsible for the sale of advertising space in newspapers and magazines. This might have proved an impossible task had it not been for another major – seismic, almost – development in the field of Japanese advertising: the introduction of television. Just three years before Asatsu- came into being, the Japanese government issued its first television licence, to NHK. Six years later, in 1959, Japan’s first commercial television network was established, and the new advertising medium of the TV commercial was born. This new medium created an opportunity for new positions to be taken by both established agencies and newcomers, and Asatsu- took full advantage to break into the field. When it was founded, before the start of commercial television, Asatsu- needed to place advertising for its clients in the established media of newspapers, magazines, and radio. Of these, newspaper advertising was the most prestigious, and therefore the most difficult to break into, since all newspaper advertising was handled by a selected handful of major agencies like Dentsu-. As a newcomer to the field, Asatsu- found it virtually impossible to approach media organisations directly because they refused to deal with new, untried agencies. As a result, it had to go through one of the so-called ‘monopoly agencies’ (senzoku dairiten), such as Dentsu-, in order to place its newspaper advertisements on behalf of clients. This cut into its profits, since the monopoly agencies took a cut for every advertising space purchased by Asatsu-. This was where the obvious potential of the new medium of television came to Asatsu-’s rescue. The new commercial television stations were financed by advertising, but because it was a new medium, nobody was quite sure how to exploit its potential. TV producers needed advertising to finance their programming. They were also desperate for programme ideas that would attract both sponsors and audiences. However, the established agencies did not want to invest in the new medium because they were making comfortable livings and profits from the old ones. Why take risks on television when print advertising provided financial security? If the established agencies were not prepared to take risks, perhaps an upstart agency could? At least, that was Inagaki’s thinking. Asatsu- had started off by using

64 Theoretical approaches the personal contacts he had developed during his previous career in the Japanese publishing industry to break into magazine advertising in a big way. (This was easier to enter, though less lucrative, than newspaper advertising.) Inagaki and his colleagues then had the smart idea of creating a link between the old print medium of magazines and the new visual medium of television by transforming printed comics into animation films. In 1964, they arranged for the broadcast on TV of the manga comic series Eightman. The programme immediately attracted an audience rating of more than 30 per cent. It also attracted sponsors who advertised directly through Asatsu-, rather than through one of the well-established agencies. Two years later, Asatsu- created a link with another part of the publishing industry when it televised the book Super Jetter, and simultaneously arranged serial rights for the story to be published as a children’s manga magazine. Next, it transformed a drama about baseball, Kyojin no Hoshi, into an animation series that drew the highest annual ratings for all television programmes during the next three years. By 1973, the agency was creating its own television animation series. These included, as one example, Majinger Z, which fuelled a long-term ‘robot boom’ among young children in Japan. The high-tech robot cat Doraemon has been a long-running hit for Asatsu-. All this time the agency was able to gather more and more corporate clients who wanted to sponsor and/or advertise on its programmes. (Sponsorship was preferable in that it permitted the development of various forms of product placement in animated TV films.) By the mid-1960s, of course, other agencies like Dentsu- and Hakuho-do- were also, albeit a little belatedly, producing anime programmes for television networks. But Asatsu- had what is often called ‘first-mover advantage’ and was able to profit beyond the placement of media products because of its preparedness to take risks in programming early on, before other advertising agencies woke up to the possibilities of the new medium of television. This it did in two ways. First, by establishing a niche market for itself in television and magazine publishing, Asatsu- was able to enter into business relationships with major corporations like Bandai Toys and Sega Games that wished to sponsor its programmes. In so doing, it initiated long-term partnerships with these toy and game manufacturers, and in numerous cases profited from merchandising rights associated with its programmes. Second, it entered into long-term business relationships with television stations that were keen to put on what they hoped would be popular new programmes (nobody knows). In return, these stations – TV Asahi, Yomiuri Television, Nippon TV, and so on – introduced Asatsu-, through their own business networks of sponsoring corporations, to ‘blue-chip’ advertising clients (referred to in Japanese as ichiryu-, or ‘first-stream’, clients). Normally, it would have been impossible for the agency to have done business with such well-known corporations because of its own low position (A list/B list) in the field of power that characterises Japan’s hierarchy of corporate prestige. Moreover, since Japan’s television networks are closely linked to national newspapers in terms of investment capital, personnel, and supply of news, they

Fields of cultural production

65

helped Asatsu- make and sustain contacts with advertising departments in their affiliated newspaper companies. In this way, the agency was able to break through the newspaper space-buying oligopoly of large and well-established advertising agencies in Japan as it began to place advertisements directly, rather than through the powerful agencies. This case study well illustrates the strategic possibilities and positions that may be taken in a field of cultural production – provided an organisation or individual player has the necessary lateral thinking to spot and exploit them. By the simple strategy of transforming different print media products into the new medium of television programming, and vice versa, Asatsu- was able to link the partly separated, partly overlapping, fields of publishing and television. In addition, it made use of connections established in one field to enter into and take up an important position in related fields. It is now – as Asatsu--DK (ADK) – the third-largest agency in Japan after Dentsu- and Hakuho-do-.

Forms of capital The case study of Asatsu- also neatly illustrates the point that I made at the beginning of this chapter: that there are three superimposed layers of cultural production in any field. 1

2

3

First, there is the media product itself – the television programmes, cartoon strips, books, and advertising campaigns (print ads and TV commercials) in which Asatsu- is involved. Second, there are the individual players or actors who take part in the production of the advertising work: the account executives, copywriters, art directors, market analysts, and media buyers who work for the agency, and the various advertising managers in media organisations and client companies with which Asatsu- has dealings. Third, there are the institutions – in particular, advertising corporations and sponsors, media organisations, and ad agencies – which make up almost the whole of the structured field of advertising. All of these use diverse strategies to position and reposition themselves continuously vis-à-vis others in the field. Together, they fashion, create, manipulate, and maintain an intricate web of economic and symbolic capital of the kind discussed by Bourdieu.

Before illustrating this point further, I should explain the different forms of capital in a little more detail. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, every field of cultural production contains cultural, social, intellectual, and symbolic – as well as economic – capital. 1

Cultural capital refers to the cultural knowledge, training, competences, and dispositions of individuals employed to make a film or fashion collection, to edit a book or magazine, to come up with a new pop song or video game. A film studio or fashion house is only as good as its employees, and its success

66 Theoretical approaches

2

3

4

5

depends on its ability to attract and retain highly motivated, capable, and imaginative staff (art for art’s sake). Cultural capital also encompasses each individual’s social class and educational background (academic or educational capital). Social capital takes into account the fact that people working in the fashion, film, and other creative industries never work on their own; rather, they are always dependent on others, both for the supply of new projects and when working together (motley crew). It is with whom they interact that contributes to their social capital (A list/B list). The same can be said of organisations, as we have just seen in the way in which Asatsu- developed relationships with sponsors and media. Like ad agencies, film studios, fashion houses, record companies, and other organisations invest a great deal of time and effort in developing and maintaining close relationships with suppliers and distributors, since these are vital to their success (nobody knows). Intellectual capital is another kind of resource that is vital to the success of a cultural producer. While also making use of individual competences and knowledge, the distinctive feature of most creative industries is that they possess the right to use and exploit intellectual content – copyright of a film, a fashion photograph, or a book, for example. They make this content available in such a way that it generates a financial return over a long period of time (ars longa). In this respect, intellectual capital is very close to economic capital. However, as we will see when we come to discuss markets in Part III of this book, the precise value of every intellectual ‘right’ depends on factors outside its strictly monetary value. Symbolic capital refers to the accumulated prestige, recognition, respect, and thus overall worth accorded to particular individuals, products, and institutions. In this respect, it is an intangible asset that amounts to a mark of distinction, or a ‘brand’, which reflects how they want to be seen and how, hopefully, others in the field see them (A list/B list). No film studio, no fashion house, no record company, no publisher willingly embraces the idea that it merely wishes to make a profit (art for art’s sake). Rather, it is concerned with the manipulation and maintenance of reputation and names – a topic to which we will return in Chapter 9. Economic capital refers to the upfront investments made by cultural producers in order to finance the production and distribution of films, music, magazines, video games, and so on. Such investments are recouped only after these products have been placed before consumers, so producers must be able to pay all sunk costs in advance (through bank loans, cooperative financing, and/or other means). They make use of accumulated economic capital – some of which comes from intellectual capital (ars longa) – to expand their businesses.

It is the exchanges between economic and symbolic capital that are of primary concern to us here. How economic capital is converted into symbolic capital, and vice versa, by all participants in any field of cultural production is an essential part of position-taking, although it is not always immediately apparent to those of us

Fields of cultural production

Social

67

Intellectual

Economic

Cultural

Symbolic

Figure 3.3 Exchanges between different forms of capital

who are not involved in the industry concerned. As a start-up agency in 1956, Asatsu- had absolutely no symbolic or economic capital, so its founders set about creating both. By turning a well-known book or manga comic (symbolic capital) into a television series by means of personal connections in the magazine trade (social capital), the agency was able to exploit copyrights through merchandising (intellectual capital) and make a substantial profit (economic capital). At the same time, it accumulated symbolic capital because these print media were popular and written by well-known authors (who had accumulated their own symbolic capital over the years). By attracting sponsors with their own independent cultural or symbolic capital, the agency was able to build its own prestige by association, since the name of a ‘first-stream’, or top-rate, company doing business with Asatsumade Asatsu- seem to be a top-rate advertising agency. With this symbolic capital, it was then able to create more business deals whose success bolstered its status. In this way, it converted its symbolic capital into economic capital and then back again, before reconverting it into economic capital, which it then used to enhance its reputation within the overlapping fields of advertising and media. We find the same sort of thing going on in all forms of cultural production. A singer gains symbolic prestige by performing a concert in the AsiaWorld-Expo in Hong Kong or the Budokan in Tokyo, rather than some lesser-known, smaller venue in a provincial town. Precisely because the prestigious concert arena is large, it holds a larger crowd, which generates more money – more economic capital – in the form of ticket (and merchandise) sales. If the concert sells out, the singer accumulates even more symbolic capital for being able to fill a 14,000-seat arena. This enables their manager to book even larger venues in other parts of Asia, again enhancing the singer’s symbolic capital. And so on.

68 Theoretical approaches

The symbolic economy By now it will have become clear that, when discussing cultural production, we need to consider not just the material production of a work but also its symbolic production: in other words, the production of – and belief in – the value of that work. This is why – when studying the field of art, for instance – we need to take into account not just the direct producers of a material work (artists, writers, sculptors, designers, and so on) but also those who produce meaning and create value in that work (critics, gallery owners, publishers, fashion magazine editors, museum curators, teachers, and so forth). It is the combined efforts of this ‘art world’ which create a consumer ‘market’ for something that is called ‘art’, ‘literature’, ‘fashion’, or whatever. The work of art – or cultural product – thus becomes a manifestation of the field as a whole. Not surprisingly, all the different actors in a field compete with one another for power. An artist competes with his fellow artists to be seen as ‘the best’ artist of his generation; a gallery owner competes with other galleries to exhibit the works of that ‘best’ artist; a patron competes with other collectors to buy the ‘best’ works of the ‘best’ artist; and a museum curator tries to stay ‘ahead of the game’ by hosting an exhibition of the ‘best’ artist’s work before any other curator has thought to do so. Which gallery, which collector, which museum decides to exhibit or buy this work has an enormous effect on the artist’s reputation as an artist (rather than as a mere ‘painter’). Similarly, where he studied, with whose artistic style he associates his work, with whom he makes friends, and even whom he chooses to marry can all affect how he comes to be evaluated as an ‘artist’. Take Ai Wei Wei, for example. The fact that he is the son of a famous Chinese poet, Ai Qing, and spent his childhood in exile gives him a head start when it comes to international recognition of his political activism, on the one hand, and his acceptance by the Western art world, on the other. His entry in the English version of Wikipedia mentions where he studied – the Beijing Film Academy in mainland China and the Universities of Pittsburgh and California, Berkeley, as well as the Parsons School of Design in the United States (educational and cultural capital). We learn that he befriended the beat poet Allen Ginsberg while living in New York. Wikipedia also mentions the names of his teachers (Bruce Dorfman, Knox Martin, Richard Pousette-Dart) and his artistic influences (Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns), all of whom give him symbolic, social and cultural capital and help situate him and his work historically in the field that we call ‘art’. All these contacts paved the way for Ai to return to his homeland and undertake artistic and political activities that have given him symbolic prestige both at home and abroad. In addition, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Hans Ulrich Obrist (2016), has published a book recounting his conversations with Ai Wei Wei over the past two decades. In it he says that, by being artist, poet, architect, curator, antiques expert, publisher, urbanist, collector, and blogger, Ai keeps ‘extending the notion of art’. Comments and contacts like these

Fields of cultural production

69

enable Ai to convert his symbolic capital into money: thirteen irregular, unglazed jars that he decorated (and perhaps also made) were displayed at Art Basel Hong Kong in April 2017 with an asking price of US$350,000. This is what I mean by ‘symbolic economy’. Of course, Ai has to have some measure of ‘artistic talent’. No art world or field of cultural production is self-defeating enough to promote people without any artistic ability, since that would undermine the value that it attributes to ‘art’, ‘fashion’, ‘literature’, or whatever. But how that ‘talent’ is defined tends to be unclear. Is it because his work is so expensive that Picasso is considered a ‘great’ artist? Is Marc Jacobs a ‘great’ fashion designer because he has worked for the household-name brand of Louis Vuitton? Is Sofia Coppola coming to be seen as a ‘great’ film director because she is the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola? Or is it that each of these people is ‘great’ simply because of the paintings, fashion collections, or films that he or she has created? One thing that is clear in every field of cultural production is that the distinction between economic and symbolic capital is never entirely clear. Indeed, the role of money in cultural production is often debated (art for art’s sake). Publishers, for example, distinguish between commercial fiction and literary fiction. The former is expected to sell well; the latter, not so much. That said, many publishers are quite happy to publish the occasional book with artistic or literary merit since these enhance their prestige and thus bolster their symbolic capital; and, of course, they are delighted when a literary author, like Samuel Beckett or Gabriel García Márquez, writes books that sell unexpectedly well over the course of several decades (and for which the publisher continues to hold the copyright). For the most part, though, a publishing house will make its money from other kinds of fiction – crime stories, romances, thrillers – which do not possess the symbolic capital of ‘literature’, especially that written by Nobel prize-winning authors. So all fields of cultural production tend to be divided into two parts: the massconsumer markets for short-term successful products that are generally seen to have little or no ‘artistic’ merit; and the limited market for what are seen to be high-quality goods. In other words, while the former builds up economic capital at the expense of symbolic capital, the latter works in the opposite way by exploiting symbolic capital at the expense of financial success. One reason why this can happen is because, as I mentioned earlier in this book, every anime film, pop song, fashion item, book, video game, and so on is both a cultural product and a commodity. It is this uneasy relationship between culture and the economy that allows those who participate in different forms of cultural production to develop both symbolic and economic capital. The other reason has to do with rankings. As we have seen when discussing Richard Caves’s economic properties of creative industries, there is a hierarchical ranking of institutions and personnel (A list/B list), and of products, in all forms of cultural production. Moreover, this ranking extends to associated institutions like concert halls, retail outlets, exhibitions, prizes, and so on. Each ranking generally takes into account two things: a cultural product’s aesthetic or cultural value (art

70 Theoretical approaches for art’s sake); and its ability as a commodity to become a ‘hit’ (thereby overcoming nobody knows). Precisely because rankings are based on both the cultural and commodity value of an artwork, film, classical music album, or whatever, it is very easy for those involved to use one set of criteria to justify or criticise the other. For example, some attribute the extraordinary success of Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ in 2012 to the catchy tune, silly dance routine, and clever marketing, whereas others point to the fact that the lyrics and the dance contain an ‘artistic’ element of social criticism (of a particular lifestyle in Seoul). Precisely because nobody knows whether a product will become a hit, when it is, those in the industry can claim that their economic success is actually due to artistic brilliance (art for art’s sake) and so convert economic into symbolic capital. Equally, when a product fails, the participants can claim that it was so packed with innovative artistic brilliance that the public simply ‘did not understand it’. In every field of cultural production, therefore, there are some at the elite end of the prestige spectrum who claim that their products are artworks, not commodities. Indeed, most young people starting out in fashion, music, or art deny that they have any interest in making money out of what they do. This ‘disavowal of self-interest’, to use Bourdieu’s term (equivalent to Caves’s art for art’s sake), is the fundamental law in any field of cultural production which is structured by the opposition between ‘commercial’ and ‘non-commercial’ interests. These are found in every field’s distinction between ‘large-scale’ and ‘restricted’ production: between the immediate, but temporary, success of ‘best-sellers’, on the one hand, and the deferred but lasting success of ‘classics’, on the other. In other words, commerce cannot be separated from culture.

Concluding comment I have in this chapter outlined Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of a field of cultural production, first by comparing it with Howard Becker’s theory of art worlds, then by focusing on how a field is structured according to positions and position-takings, on the one hand, and by conversions of economic and symbolic capital, on the other. I made use of a detailed analysis of the strategies of a Japanese advertising agency to illustrate these points, and to show that a theory developed by a French sociologist is wholly applicable to a non-Western business context. The fact that songs, books, films, and so on are both cultural products and commodities reinforces one of the properties outlined by Richard Caves for creative industries: art for art’s sake. The artistic qualities that are seen to lie in a cultural product not only counterbalance its commodity nature but act in tandem with another of Caves’s properties: nobody knows. This opposition between ‘art’ and ‘money’ underpins both how actors in a field take up positions and how they continuously try to convert symbolic into economic capital and back again in an endless cycle of power and prestige. They use this denigration of money as a mark of success to promote social, cultural, and symbolic capital. At the other end of the scale, of course, can be

Fields of cultural production

71

found those who judge everything according to its financial success. Artistry has irrelevant. So, while some struggle for power by emphasising profit, others do so by stressing artistic merit. This is a classic argument over the merits of quantity visà-vis those of quality. Did the Harry Potter series of children’s stories sell so phenomenally well because they made use of clichéd ideas and a simple writing style? In other words, by an extraordinary inverse logic, did the fact that J. K. Rowling wrote comparatively badly enable her books to sell in their millions? Or is the Harry Potter series ‘good’ in itself? Is it a superb example of children’s literary fiction? Nobody knows.

References General readings Bourdieu, Pierre (1993a) ‘Some properties of fields’. In Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question. London: Sage, pp. 72–76. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993b) The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) ‘The author’s point of view: some general properties of fields of cultural production’. In Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: The Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 214–277 (esp. 231–239). Hesmondhalgh, David (2006) ‘Bourdieu, the media and cultural production’. Media, Culture & Society 28 (2): 211–231(esp.211–217). Rocamora, Agnès (2002) ‘Fields of fashion: critical insights into Bourdieu’s sociology of culture’. Journal of Consumer Culture 2 (3): 341–362 (esp. 341–351). Thompson, John B. (2010) ‘Publishing fields’. In John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 3–14.

Regional readings Sabine Chretien-Ichikawa, Sabine (2015) ‘Shanghai: a creative fashion system under construction’. China Perspectives 3: 33–41. Kawamura, Yuniya (2004) ‘The Japanese revolution in Paris fashion’. Fashion Theory 8 (2): 195–223(esp. 195–204). Nakajima, Seio (2016) ‘The genesis, structure and transformation of the contemporary Chinese cinematic field: global linkages and national refractions’. Global Media and Communication 12 (1): 85–108. Obrist, Hans Ulrich (2016) Ai Weiwei Speaks: With Hans Ulrich Obrist. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shin, Solee and Lanu Kim (2013) ‘Organizing K-pop: emergence and market making of large Korean entertainment houses, 1980–2010’. East Asia 30 (4): 255–272.

Part II

Creative industries

Having laid out three theoretical approaches that I believe are useful to an understanding of cultural production, I am now going to explore three different creative and cultural industries: music, fashion, and incense. The music industry is interesting because it has been totally transformed by digitisation since the beginning of the new millennium and is now first and foremost a copyright industry. It has also seen the rise of non-Western forms of pop music, notably K-pop, in which singers are taken on, trained over a number of years, and eventually have their music produced in a way hitherto not found outside Korea. I will trace these developments and show how music is primarily a ‘rights industry’. For its part, the fashion industry is interesting because it is one of the most technologically ‘primitive’ of all forms of cultural production (most articles of clothing are made on sewing machines that are virtually indistinguishable from their mid-nineteenth-century predecessors) and has not yet been affected by the digital revolution, except in its dissemination of images on the internet. Fashion has traditionally not been protected by copyright, although fashion house logos are now trademarked for brand protection. At the same time, since the very beginning, the whole concept of ‘fashion’ has been associated with Paris. The question then becomes: how can an Asian fashion designer have her work accepted by the French fashion world? The manufacture of incense is interesting because it is almost exclusively geared towards production and consumption in Asia. Incense is of little consequence in Europe or the United States, but it is an important cultural and religious phenomenon from the Middle East to the Far East by way of South Asia. However, as we shall see, incense production is significantly different from the music and fashion industries, and at certain points fails to conform to Caves’s economic properties. Does this mean that it is not a creative industry per se? And, if this is the case, does it call into question whether the theories I discussed in Part I are applicable in a specifically Asian context? In addition to continuing to make use of the theories of Richard Caves, Howard Becker, and Pierre Bourdieu, I will reintroduce the concept of frame, developed by the Chicago-based sociologist Erving Goffman, and discussed briefly earlier in the context of spatial and temporal affordances. Frame analysis neatly accounts for principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation, based on tacit theories about how things should be done, in different forms of cultural production. DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-6

4

Music

For most of its existence, what we call the ‘music’ industry was really two industries, since it was divided between music and recording (which together constituted a ‘field’ of music). ‘Music’ referred to the performance and public consumption of musical compositions in a variety of locations, including bars, clubs, concerts, dance halls, radio and television programmes; ‘recording’ to the manufacture and distribution of records, tapes, and compact discs. Music is thus, on the one hand, integrated into broadcasting, whose policies affect what happens in the music industry; and, on the other, it encompasses live performances that are global in reach and so affect the industry’s promotional practices and use of media (think of international rock festivals or individual singers’ and groups’ world tours). As we shall see in this chapter, with the onset of digital technology and file sharing, the recording industry has now been subsumed under the music business as a whole and is no longer the preferred form by which we consume music. In this respect, the music industry is now a rights, not a manufacturing, industry (ars longa). It is organised around the management and exploitation of talent, which has to be recognised, nurtured, and marketed to meet public taste. What makes the music industry different from many other media is the close connection and continuity between production and consumption. We all have access to musical instruments and equipment; we can record and edit our music on our computers, then upload it onto websites. In this respect, as consumers, we can quickly become producers of music. We can also play for audiences on the street or in clubs and bars. Forms of consumption can become forms of production: with the right equipment and knowledge, we can make new music; simply by playing other people’s records in public, we can build a reputation as a DJ. This new version of the music industry should not be regarded as a homogeneous entity. Like all creative industries, it comprises numerous genres. Each of these (classical, country, jazz, rap, rock, and so on) is different from the others, not only in terms of its musical content, but also in how its production, distribution, and (often) consumption are organised. The economy of dance music, for instance, with its network of clubs, DJs, independent record labels, and specialist importers, works differently from the economy of mainstream pop, which depends on radio and TV, teen magazines, and multinational corporations. Each genre has its own unique network of participants whose coordination has implications for DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-7

76 Creative industries their personal careers, power, and status (motley crew) as well as for the genre’s successes and failures. Strictly speaking, therefore, we should think in terms of a number of different music industries which – together with associated media promoters, musical venues, internet distributors (like YouTube, Google, and Spotify), record labels, producers, rights management organisations, talent scouts and agencies, music publishers, concert organisers, and so on – constitute a field of music production ordered by a single rights regime. As we will soon see, this field often includes on its periphery IT and data-collection companies, as well as corporations like Pepsi and Mitsubishi, which sponsor musical events and stars as part of their overall marketing strategies (and as part of ongoing exchanges between economic and symbolic capital). The complex structure of the field of musical production and consumption makes it virtually impossible to deal with the music business as a whole in an introductory book of this nature. Therefore, I will first focus on pop music and briefly describe how a pop song is produced. I will then provide a historical overview of the pop music and recording industries in the United States and Europe over the past 120 years, outlining major technological innovations and the structural changes that these engendered. Finally, I will describe pop music production, distribution, and consumption in East Asia – particularly in Japan and South Korea – in order to show how the global diffusion of pop music is also marked by local cultural and structural characteristics.

The song At the heart of all the activity that goes on in the production of pop music is a single goal: popular, and thus financial, success. But how is such success achieved? Does it lie in the song itself? Or in the singer? Or in the sound? Is it made possible by bribery and massive plugging on the radio and in other media (known as ‘payola’)? In other words, is it the way in which a song is produced and distributed that determines success? Nobody knows for certain, of course, but what those in the music industry are looking for in what they produce is something that appeals to the public’s imagination, and to its secret dreams and hidden passions. This means that the key players need to be close to, and able to feel, the pulse of a song’s potential audience. Mindful of the fact that every field of cultural production consists of products, as well as of participating individuals and organisations, let us start with the music itself. Producing a pop song that meets musical, technical, financial, and commercial considerations needs a motley crew whose members understand technical production, artistic personality, musical know-how, and both the public and the market. In the midst of such complexity, even though they insist ideally on artistic integrity (art for art’s sake), what they produce is in many ways formulaic, rather than creative as such. After all, every song exists in relation to other songs. Consciously or unconsciously, it often draws on and references melodies, lyrics, harmonic sequences, rhythms, narratives, and the use of instruments, sounds, and voices. As such, no song can be totally ‘original’.

Music

77

Every pop song has a tune, lyrics, and a singer, none of which can stand on its own. A song’s form, too, almost invariably consists of a standard three-part structure (Hennion, 1990):   

an introduction which reveals the mood of the song by means of sound, rhythm, and tempo; an alternation between verses – where the music is subordinate to the lyrics, as the singer tells a ‘story’ that inspires particular feelings in the audience – and a repeated or insistent chorus, often with marked harmonic cadence; and a conclusion, where the last verse leads into the final chorus and often a repeated ‘loop’ that gradually fades away (because the audience’s dream should not be ended just like that).

Given this formulaic structure, where can we find the difference that produces a hit (or a miss)? One is in the music itself. Almost every song has a ‘gimmick’ or ‘trick’ – a particular rhythm or a short instrumental solo, for example – that gives the song its individuality and makes it memorable. Another is in the story. Although, as I suggested above, the lyrics tend to be formulaic – in that they combine conventional simplicity with such feelings as love, money, power, success, and so on – it is not what they say so much as how they say it that often makes the difference. At the same time, there are no written rules, no infallible tricks that will guarantee success. Those involved in the production of a pop song rely as much on intuition, a ‘feel for the game’ as Bourdieu put it, quickness of judgement, and sensitivity to what an audience might be looking for as they do on textbook theories of musical production. In this respect, nobody knows applies as much to the processes of production as it does to consumer taste or audience reaction. This is what underlies reality television competitions like The Voice of China or Korea’s Got Talent. Possessing a ‘voice’ cannot be reduced to solid vocal technique; rather, it attracts attention because its inflections, nuances, and expressive power are immediately captivating and recognisable, and – it is believed – reveal a singer’s personality. While a voice can be trained, it cannot be manipulated in the same way as a singer’s appearance may be (by means of clothes, make-up, hair styling, and lighting). In this respect, it is seen to convey the singer’s authenticity, and it is with this perceived authenticity that the public wishes to identify. How a producer or record label recognises such a voice is similarly inexplicable. Just as a classical music teacher cannot explain how he hears ‘musicality’ in the efforts of a novice pianist, or a model agent what she means by a prospective model’s ‘look’, a successful record producer will often admit that he is guided by nothing more than intuition, a ‘feel for the game’, when identifying a significant new ‘voice’.

Production As I remarked above, the field of music is marked by a close proximity between production and consumption. We can see this clearly in the recording of a pop

78 Creative industries song, when those involved constantly switch between producing the song and listening to how it sounds as they go along, transforming musical techniques into a musical image with which an audience will want to identify. Indeed, we might go so far as to say, with Antoine Hennion (1990), that the organisation of production is based on a single aim: to introduce the public into the studio. This is achieved by various means: for example, through techniques of cutting and mixing which introduce elements of everyday life into the song being recorded; through ensuring that both the singer and humdrum personnel are there as representatives of the public to voice their opinions about each stage of the production process; and through mutual criticism within the production team, as each participant acts as an audience for the others. In other words, when making and recording a song, those concerned are both its producers and its consumers. This is how they try to overcome the fact that nobody knows. At the same time, though, by continuously taking their audience into account, they lessen the emphasis on another economic property mentioned by Richard Caves: art for art’s sake. Artistic integrity must in some ways be sacrificed to an imagination of what the audience wants. Still, we might add that, by incorporating their imaginings of what will please their audience within a song, music producers are also displaying their musical knowledge and experience as artistic taste. Once written, a song must be sung, recorded, and ‘produced’ (by means of editing, mixing, sampling, and so on). In the good old days, before digitisation, the production resulted in a master tape which was then pressed and manufactured as a vinyl record, cassette, or CD, before being distributed to retail outlets and heavily promoted on radio shows and television programmes in the hope that consumers would be persuaded to buy it. The main players in this traditional value chain were the record labels (Atlantic, Polydor, Decca, and so on), distributors (the largest recording companies like EMI and Warner), radio and television networks, and retailers (HMV, Virgin, Tower Records, and so forth). The job of the record labels was – and still is – to seek out and develop new talent, for whom they provided essential services such as music production, record or CD manufacturing, and distribution, marketing, promotion, publicity, sales, and legal representation for issues like copyright and licensing for airplay. Because of these essential services that they provided, the record labels were able to make the most profit and have the greatest direction over the value chain as a whole. In other words, traditionally, the recording industry had almost total control over

Artist

Record Label

Manufacturer /Distributor

Producer Figure 4.1 Traditional recording industry value chain

Retailer

Consumer

Retailer

Consumer

Music

79

both production and consumption. Its profits came from finding new talent and producing their music (the ‘artistic’, or ‘creative’, side of the music business), while at the same time exploiting the use of that music as ‘content’ through (part) ownership of copyright (the commercial side) (ars longa). In order to be able to exploit musical content, the record labels need to ensure that contracts are signed with composers, lyricists, and performers, although often the artist or group is also the composer and lyricist of a popular song. The label provides the latter with an advance to cover the costs of producing a master tape, which it then manufactures and distributes on vinyl records and compact discs. Between 80 and 85 per cent of all singles and albums released fail to cover their costs (nobody knows), and even a second album following on from a successful debut is not guaranteed success. The contract is based on a royalty payment of somewhere between 11 and 20 per cent of total sales, after production costs have been recouped, although in fact the artist’s royalty base is knocked down to about 75 per cent of sales since record labels have been known to cheat by subtracting a ‘packaging charge’ from retail sales revenue, and by claiming 10 per cent ‘breakage’ on all products shipped. Costs that are not recouped on a first album are carried forward to the second album, and so on, so that young musicians are faced with a long, uphill climb to eventual success, as well as being open to exploitation. The contract signed between label and artist or group is – like contracts signed between fashion houses and model agencies in the lead-up to a fashion week, or between publishers and authors – an option contract, which gives the label the option of distributing the next song or album. This makes sense in that the label is involved in enormous sunk costs with a new artist and can reasonably expect to recover this investment only three or four, or more, albums down the line. However, once an artist does achieve success, she tends to want to renegotiate her contract to obtain more favourable terms or may even attempt to move to another label if she is not satisfied by the outcome of negotiations. As a result, the record label has only limited ability to collect the jackpot generated by a highly successful artist. There are two points in the value chain where economies of scale are important: distribution and promotion. Supplying a large number of wholesalers and retailers around the world with records or CDs requires a huge distribution network. This itself involves very high fixed costs which only the largest record labels, known as ‘majors’, have been able to afford. Because these majors control access to end consumers, they can make money out of their distribution networks by imposing tariffs and conditions on smaller, independent labels (known as ‘indies’) which do not have adequate distribution networks, and which therefore have to rely on the majors to get their records to consumers. (This is reminiscent of Asatsu-’s early relations with oligopolistic advertising agencies when placing newspaper advertising; see Chapter 3.) This kind of economy of scale is also found in promotional activities. Most marketing is carried out when a record is released, and involves intense radio and television plugging, as well as word of mouth, to generate sales. Given that there are limited channels for promotion – especially on radio and television – compared

80 Creative industries with the number of records produced (infinite variety), those labels with the most ‘clout’ are usually able to dominate media coverage. This means that their own artists’ records tend to get more airtime than those of independent labels (A list/B list). Airtime, of course, leads to more sales, which lead to more profits, which lead to majors becoming even larger, thereby allowing them to gain even firmer control over music promotion (and distribution). As a result, the recorded music industry in the United States and Europe is now an oligopoly. A handful of majors, like the Universal Music Group (including PolyGram and EMI), Warner Music, and BMG-Sony, produce something like three-quarters of the world’s turnover, while the remaining 25 per cent is made up of thousands of independent labels, which enjoy competitive advantage because they act as talent scouts and develop new talent (art for art’s sake). For their part, the majors focus on the ‘star system’ (A list/B list), sacrificing the search for new talent and instead promoting a limited number of stars, whose careers they manage by means of their distribution networks and vast marketing resources. The distribution of roles in the industry is, therefore, clearly defined. It closely adheres to Bourdieu’s distinction between ‘the establishment’ and ‘challengers’, between large-scale and small-scale production, between ‘traditional’ and ‘avant-garde’ players who, as we saw in Chapter 3’s discussion of advertising, seek to accumulate economic and symbolic capital in every field of cultural production.

Technology Let us now look at how technological innovations have affected the field of music. The music recording industry is now approximately 120 years old. In its infancy, it was dominated by a handful of firms who were responsible for most of the industry’s technological advancements. These early innovators fought to establish control over the way music was produced and played – first on wax cylinders on which sound waves were scribed and later on flat shellac (later vinyl) discs, whose manufacture was less costly per unit than that of wax cylinders. This change in standard led to a very slight increase in competition in the recording industry, although it was extremely modest by comparison with other industries. Magnetic tape recording The first significant impact on the industry’s structure came with the advent of magnetic tape recording in 1950. Magnetic tape was unbelievably cheap when compared to the old recording technology: a first-class tape recorder cost no more than a few thousand US dollars. Also, tape machines enabled much easier, and less time-consuming, editing than was possible on earlier, glass-based master recordings. With vinyl recording, if a mistake were made, the whole song had to be rerecorded. By contrast, multi-track tape technology made it possible to replace a flawed passage by splicing in a re-recording of that particular part of the song. This not only reduced production costs but also enabled new recording studios to set up and launch their own labels (techno-material affordance).

Music

81

In order to compete with the established recording companies like Columbia, Decca, RCA Victor, and Capitol, which had hitherto enjoyed a 75 per cent share of the record sales market, the new independent labels started to record and promote a new form of music: rock and roll (representational affordance). Elvis Presley, for example, made his first records with a small Memphis label called Sun Records. Other new, small firms like Atlantic, Savoy, King, Peacock, and Imperial also promoted new musical styles, so that by the mid-1950s these independent labels, helped by the rise of independent distributors, accounted for more than 50 per cent of total market share (position-taking). By 1962, this had risen to 75 per cent. So, a new technology gave rise to both a new industry structure and to the popularity of a new musical form. Together, these developments totally altered the field of music. Moreover, the 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of a youth music market in both the United States and Europe, and an increasing spread of audio sets throughout the world. This expanding market increased the value of rents generated by copyrighted music. As a result, the larger record labels decided to adopt a new strategy of vertical and horizontal integration in order to reassert their dominance, which resulted in a spate of mergers and acquisitions in the 1960s and 1970s. Vertical integration was achieved by buying up other recording companies, which enabled integration of their A&R (Artist and Repertoire) divisions, together with the development of their recording artists and songwriters. Between 1963 and 1971, for example, Warner bought the Reprise, Atlantic, Dunhill Records, Elektra, and Asylum labels. Its main aim in these acquisitions and takeovers was to own a repertoire of artists, and thus copyrighted material. In addition, though, it often gained ownership of these smaller companies’ expensive pressing plants, and their distribution networks. Although major firms had their own distribution networks in the 1950s, smaller record labels made use of independent distributors, which thus provided a significant alternative channel in the field. In order to counter this, labels like ABCParamount (MCA), Capital (EMI), and CBS (Sony) began to make significant buyouts and so achieved horizontal integration. In particular, by purchasing distribution companies in other countries, these firms were able to ensure fast international distribution of their records and cassettes, and prevented local distributors from siphoning off revenues generated by copyrights. The independent labels that were purchased by the majors had previously relied on independent distributors. Now, however, they were obliged to distribute their records through their parent company. This put further financial pressure on the independent distributors, and many of them filed for bankruptcy in the 1970s. As a result, the remaining indies had no alternative but to distribute their records through the major labels’ distribution systems, too. Consequently, by the end of the 1980s, the music recording industry was dominated by just six large multidivisional, multi-product firms which accounted for nearly all of the industry’s market share, when measured by distribution. This meant it was almost impossible for new entrants to obtain national distribution.

82 Creative industries I say ‘almost’ impossible because, as Asatsu-’s disruption of Japan’s advertising industry demonstrated (see Chapter 3), every field of cultural production offers the possibility of innovation. In the case of the recording industry, small new firms have traditionally been product innovators. The fear was that the highly concentrated nature of the distribution system did not just limit competition but reduced the diversity and variety of music offered to consumers. Before anyone in the recording industry could come up with an alternative and innovative breakthrough, however, there was a technological revolution which not only shattered the distribution oligopoly but threatened the industry itself. This was digital technology. Digital technology Compact discs (CDs), introduced to consumers in the 1980s, were the first element in the recording industry’s shift to digital technology. Because a compact disc uses a sequence of 0s and 1s to reproduce sound waves, many consumers were able to play them on their home computers and transfer (or ‘rip’) songs from CDs onto their computers’ hard drives. However, in the early years of home computing, it took a very long time to transfer a three-minute song, and that song then took up a lot of space on the hard drive, so people generally did not share files before the mid-1990s. This situation changed dramatically with the arrival of the MP3 file format. Developed by engineers in Germany, MP3 is an audio compression format that generates virtually the same sound as a compact disc, but at one-tenth or even one-twentieth of the size. It achieves this through discreet sampling of continuous sound waves, on the one hand, and by passing the resulting samples through highand low-band filters, on the other. This has radically reduced both the time taken to download a song and the space that song occupies on a hard drive. The first MP3 player arrived on the market in September 1995, and over the next few years MP3 files began to spread across the internet, in particular by way of underground pirated song networks. Napster, the first large-scale file-sharing network, was launched in 1999. These developments had two major consequences. First, independent artists were able to make their own MP3 files and offer them for free as a way of promoting their music. Second, the small size of a typical MP3 file enabled widespread file sharing among consumers of music ripped from CDs. The major recording companies regarded this as an infringement of copyright (hence the term ‘piracy’), so they went to court, where they successfully argued that file sharing had a detrimental impact on their record and CD sales. The introduction of MP3 has been little short of cataclysmic for the recording industry in three respects. First, record labels no longer control the supply of artists and their music, since anyone can now record their own music and upload it onto the internet for public consumption. Second, they no longer control the distribution of music since the old producer–distributor–retailer–consumer value chain can be bypassed. Third, MP3 and its variants permit the downloading, circulation, and sharing of music in a manner that makes us question the social and

Music Artist

Record Label

Manufacturer /Distributor

Retailer

83

Consumer

Producer Digital Intermediary

Artist

Consumer

IP rights protection body Figure 4.2 Digital music industry value chain

economic value of an actual recording. Nowadays, a recording is no longer primarily a physical object (like a vinyl record or a CD) which is displayed visibly in a store or someone’s home. Rather, it tends to be intangible and invisible, except as a file icon on a computer display or cell-phone screen. As a result, the major labels have lost control over how consumers listen to music. This, in itself, has lowered barriers of entry into the music market. MP3 has opened up new positions in the field and these positions have been taken not by different players in the music industry but by new digital intermediaries and data/ IT companies. These include iTunes and other retailers that sell downloads to consumers; Spotify and other services that stream music; and YouTube, which provides a kind of video radio, while its parent company Google organises the world’s information. These new position-takers focus their activities on the circulation of musical content and how to turn that into revenue and profit – mainly by streaming, data collection and analytics, and cloud storage, as well as by attracting advertisers to websites that contain sounds, images, data, and information. They are not interested in investing in the production of new material and artists who, as Keith Negus (1999) argues, have now been redefined as content providers, rather than creative producers. So the old production and distribution oligopoly has now been broken into two separate sectors in which musical ‘creativity’ is totally divorced from humdrum marketing. This conflict between those who derive their profits from producing music and those who do so from exploiting that music as content is now breaking into a war over ‘rights’. Industry organisations and musicians are voicing concerns that the new digital intermediaries and IT companies are not accurately reporting the quantity of music used on their services. Revenues from rights, therefore – especially for musicians who are not considered ‘stars’ (A list/B list) – are not compensating for losses in sales of recorded music. This has led a few artists (such as Taylor Swift) to withdraw their music from streaming services as they assert their right to determine where and how it is made available to consumers.

84 Creative industries The full effect on the field of music brought about by the introduction of digital technology is not yet fully understood. Clearly, as I have shown here, the field as a whole has been shaken up as new players from the field of IT have entered the music market and old players from the recording industry have struggled to survive. Digital technology has also affected working practices in music production, since it makes it possible to sample, loop, and process sounds into completely new songs, arrangements, and even musical genres. This means that the recording studio is no longer the place where creativity takes place. Rather, the control room is now the locus of creative work as the music producer, who can compensate for ‘mistakes’ made by musicians and singers, becomes the major creative force behind every musical output. This allows the producer, rather than record label, to link up and cooperate directly with artists and, in this process, his role is transformed from engineer to stage performer. Another change arises from the fact that the production of music is now almost entirely disconnected from physical geography. The internet makes it possible for artists, musicians, and technicians working together on a recording to be located in entirely different parts of the world. For instance, orchestration can be recorded in London, a tabla drum solo added in Mumbai, the vocal recorded in Los Angeles, and the final mastering completed in Tokyo. This kind of production pattern obviously challenges the idea of a physical art world.

East Asian music production Music in the East Asian region has always had the potential to cross national borders. From the mid-1970s, for example, Japanese enka romantic ballads like ‘Kitaguni no Haru’ were quickly covered by Cantopop and Korean singers. During the past twenty years or so, however, pop music in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – collectively known as Mandopop, Cantopop, J-pop, and K-pop – has regularly crossed each of its national borders and spread throughout the East Asian region. This has led singers to hold concerts abroad and to sing in languages other than their own, with Cantonese and Korean stars singing in Putonghua and Japanese, and Japanese in Putonghua, as they try to broaden their audience markets. Given that pop music in most countries (with the exception of English-language songs) usually takes place within national boundaries (French songs in France, Italian in Italy, German in Germany, and so on), this is somewhat unusual, although there is some crossover between English and Spanish in the United States because of the large Spanish-speaking population there. In spite of these linguistic and cultural crossovers, pop music in the East Asian region initially followed the general patterns of production and distribution prevalent in the United States and Europe. This is not surprising since mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have all been affected by the same set of technological innovations discussed in this chapter. There are, however, certain cultural and structural peculiarities that are worth noting, because they reveal that the global music business is not quite as homogeneous – or indeed

Music

85

‘global’ – as some people think. Rather, an argument can be made for a specifically ‘East Asian’ field of music. Japan Prior to the digital revolution, the major record companies in Japan were – like their American counterparts – also the main distributors of music throughout the country. There was, however, one difference that made vertical integration even stronger in Japan than it was in the United States: major record companies like Sony Music and Victor Entertainment were subsidiaries of electronics manufacturing companies (Sony, which famously introduced the Walkman, the compact disc, and the PlayStation; and Japan Victor Corporation, which made the country’s first television sets and developed the VHS home video recorder). This vertical integration was strengthened through the use of exclusive contracts with artists. Before the 1950s, the main distribution channels for music in Japan – as elsewhere in the world – were concerts, radio, and audio recordings. However, with the arrival of television, there was a demand for Western-style music programmes, which – as we saw in the previous chapter’s account of television programming involving the Asatsu- advertising agency – the established record companies were unwilling, or unable, to satisfy. As a result, Shin Watanabe, a former jazz musician, saw an entrepreneurial opportunity and started to produce Western-style music programmes for television from 1957 onwards (position-taking). His company, Watanabe Production, made the master tapes and administered copyrights, while delegating manufacturing and distribution to the established recording companies, which themselves started outsourcing Western-style music in order to reduce production costs and entrepreneurial risk. This itself gradually brought about the end of the exclusive contract system over the next two decades. The advent of television, therefore, together with its demand for Western-style music, afforded a new organisational structure in Japan’s music industry, where there was a separation between the production and distribution of musical content, and vertical integration within a closed system became vertical separation within an open system. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the importance of copyright in the music industry, several record companies later became concerned with the issue of holding copyright, and started to develop new artists and produce original material (ars longa). This was particularly urgent because of the potential development of multiple uses of music in advertising, films, supermarkets, discos, and other semipublic spaces, as well as on radio and TV. However, because of decreasing demand for audio recordings with the advent of digital technology, record companies later began to hive off the manufacturing part of their business to other firms. As a result, they now specialise in the production and distribution of music, and no longer promote the sale of hardware produced by their parent companies. As I have said, Japanese record labels used television to promote their records and turn them into ‘hits’, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. In itself, this was not too different from the recording industries in the United States and Western

86 Creative industries Europe. As audiences grew tired of such programmes, however, Japanese recording companies had to develop new marketing strategies. One of these was to create promotional tie-ins with other media – notably, with advertising agencies and their clients, which, from the mid-1970s, began to use ‘image’ songs in their television commercials. These were simultaneously popular songs and commercial songs, but they did not mention the sponsoring company’s or product’s name; they appealed to consumers first and foremost through their music image (cultural capital). Shiseido and other cosmetics companies were the first to adopt this advertising strategy. Their success led other companies to follow in their footsteps so that, by the early 1980s, more than half the songs in the Japanese charts were image songs (economic capital). This trend brought record labels into contact with advertising agencies and corporations not directly involved in music production or distribution, and it led to further contacts through the medium of the pop concert, which, from the late 1970s, began to be integrated into Japanese corporations’ cultural marketing strategies. This process was spearheaded by advertising agencies like Dentsu-, which invented the idea of the ‘crown’ (kanmuri) concert, in which a company’s name featured prominently. This strategy was then extended to music festivals and stage musicals in the 1980s as corporations sought to convert their economic capital into cultural capital. For example, in 1986, Dentsu- persuaded Mitsubishi Electric – at the time considered to be a somewhat staid and unsophisticated corporation – to employ Madonna to dance and sing ‘Like a Virgin’ in one of its commercials, and to sponsor her sell-out tour of Japan a year later. Mitsubishi then sponsored an accompanying TV documentary about the tour, during which it aired a new commercial in which Madonna sang ‘La Isla Bonita’. The success of this campaign encouraged Mitsubishi (and, of course, Dentsu-) to host an annual music event (called ‘Mitsubishi Super Selection’) in which the newest and most popular artists from a variety of musical genres were invited to perform. Over the years, they successfully transformed what was initially an advertising strategy into a major cultural event, which itself was later transformed into an event with a social message. As a result, Mitsubishi was able to generate considerable cultural and symbolic capital through its continued music sponsorship. This integration of music into corporate promotional strategies has been somewhat confusing for the Japanese music business as it continues to turn away from its popular audience in order to take advantage of sponsorships. Most sponsors, however, choose only big names (A list/B list) in order to promote their own prestige (symbolic capital) and have little interest in developing the music scene and enhancing audience enjoyment. As a result, popular music in Japan can be said to be controlled by advertisers, rather than record labels. All the same, much of what has happened in the Japanese music business parallels what has occurred in the United States and Europe: the emergence of small, independent record companies, for example, which have distributed their recordings first through major labels and later via websites, where artists, too, have offered their music directly (and for free) to their audiences; and the industry’s

Music

87

concern over declining record sales due to the advent of digital file sharing as IT and data analysis companies have entered the field. In many ways, then, it would seem as if the effects of the digital revolution – and, like the invention of the printing press, the camera, and the phonograph, this has been a major cultural revolution – are universal. Korea But are they really? Developments in the pop music industry in South Korea suggest that it is not the technology itself that effects change so much as how people use it. The term used to describe the popularity of Korean culture from just after the beginning of the new millennium is Hallyu.2.0 or ‘second Korean wave’ (the first, rather different, Hallyu occurred in the 1990s). Starting with the 2002 soap drama Winter Sonata, Korean TV dramas, music, and, to a lesser extent, films have become staple entertainment for audiences in Japan and mainland China, as well as other parts of East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, these products are becoming increasingly popular as far afield as Iran, Turkey, Germany, France, Chile, and Peru. K-pop is unique in the sense that it seems to have risen out of nowhere and become a global phenomenon. It shares very little similarity with Korean pop music before the 1990s in that it uses a diatonic, rather than the traditional pentatonic, scale; the singing style is resolutely like Western pop; and dance is an integral part of a singer’s performance, unlike traditional Korean music, where the singer invariably stressed a raspy vocalisation and stood stock still. Indeed, there is nothing inherently ‘Korean’ about K-pop, which makes use of lyrics peppered with English phrases like ‘baby, slow down’, ‘talk talk’, and ‘I love you so much’. Despite appearances, however, as Zhang and Negus (2020) point out, K-pop is not unique; rather, it is indebted to the Japanese music industry. For a start, the visual aesthetic of K-pop, with its pretty-boy and -girl groups, was inspired by the ‘cute’ yet ordinary idols developed by the Japanese music industry from the early 1970s onwards. Moreover, the category of K-pop itself was introduced by Japanese music companies, and its songs were often written, arranged, produced, and marketed by personnel from the Japanese music industry. Third, Korean companies like SM Entertainment were directly modelled on Japanese talent production companies like Johnny and Associates, and they followed the example of J-pop by encouraging fan involvement in, and influence on, the careers of music idols. K-pop features numerous idol groups, like Girls’ Generation and Super Junior, which include a large assortment of young girls or boys. They wear shiny clothes, dance in perfectly synchronised routines, and often look better than they sound. That K-pop is first and foremost image music can be seen, too, in popular groups’ repeated rounds of TV appearances on game and variety, as well as music, shows; in the proliferation of life-size cut-outs of idols in retail stores; and in their photos on products, as well as in their manufacturers’ ads. All of these features are also found in Japanese pop. In many ways, of course, K-pop’s focus on image simply

88 Creative industries perpetuates the music industry’s shift from audio to visual that came to the fore with the emergence of MTV and its requirement that every song must have an accompanying video. Indeed, it pushes this shift in emphasis to its logical conclusion. Is it this, then, that explains the sudden surge in popularity of K-pop? Some scholars argue that its success is due to cultural factors and its songs’ appeal among a growing market of young consumers; others that the Korean government has been instrumental in promoting K-pop as part of its strategy to enhance the nation’s ‘soft power’; yet others that technological developments have been crucial since they have shifted control of music from the record labels, which dominated the production and distribution of Korean pop songs in the latter half of the twentieth century, to online distribution via the internet. K-pop’s global success, the final group say, is due to its early adoption of digitisation and online videosharing sites like YouTube. Each of these explanations has some validity, but even in combination they do not fully explain the phenomenal success of K-pop. This is because they all ignore the important players driving the organisational dynamics of the K-pop industry: the singers, producers, record labels, studios, and agents who put everything together and push the products onto the market. In fact, K-pop’s success is primarily due to the fact that it is systematically manufactured by large Korean corporations like SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment. It is here that the field of Korean music is structurally different from those of the United States and Western Europe. Although there are agents of various kinds in the music business (from artists’ managers to concert promoters), these individuals are almost invariably concerned with managing or promoting an already finished product. In South Korea, they also produce the product. In other words, the ‘Korean-ness’ of K-pop lies in its production strategies; not in its songs. This does not mean that the country’s entertainment houses ignore what is going on in Europe and the United States. Indeed, they actively outsource composition duties to global sources, especially in Sweden and the United States. But they then modify the composers’ songs and adapt them to Korean audience expectations by means of a meticulous, step-by-step process of refining, changing, and polishing. It is this internal reprocessing of externally generated creative ideas that marks the new position taken by Korean entertainment houses in the field of music. Before the emergence of SM Entertainment and its competitors, Korean record production was controlled by a small number of record labels which produced, manufactured, and distributed pop music. A combination of the lifting of government restrictions, an expansion of the television market, and the growing popularity of Western-style music from the late 1980s onwards led – as it did in Japan – to the establishment of small studios which pioneered the production of new forms of music. These studios not only mediated between musicians and their audiences but also doubled up as producers, which allowed them to shape the popular music market. They gradually adopted a set of production strategies which eventually led to the vertical integration of artistic selection, training, image making, songwriting, management, contracting, and album production.

Music

89

This form of vertical integration is very different from that which we discussed earlier in the context of the American music scene. In particular, K-pop has adopted a novel approach to recruitment and the training of future stars. Trainees – many of them in their early teens, with some even younger – tend to be taken on after passing a lengthy audition process or winning a competition. Their apprenticeships are then systematised through a contract lasting at least seven years, and consist of rigorous training in a wide range of activities: singing, dancing, rapping, composition, playing musical instruments, and learning foreign languages and manners. In other words, the entertainment houses aim for the start-to-finish manufacture of in-house talent. Over the past two decades, then, what were originally small, independent studios have become large, hegemonic empires which now define the contemporary Korean music scene. As each entertainment house has refined its organisational identity to cultivate a coherent ‘brand image’, it has narrowed its range of artists and musical genres on the basis of ‘tried and tested’ recipes (rather like the major record labels in the West). In this respect, the entertainment houses’ strategies to overcome the uncertainty of the market (nobody knows) have restricted the range of products they supply (infinite variety). With the aid of feedback loops that help predict success, K-pop songs have become quite predictable and the Korean music scene extremely homogeneous. This suggests that the field is ripe for new developments. But what will they be?

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that it is difficult to talk of a single music ‘industry’ because that industry also consists of a recording industry. I have therefore preferred to discuss the music business in Europe, the United States, and East Asia in terms of a field of cultural production in which technological innovations have led to structural adjustments of one sort or another among the different players in the field. Occasionally, as in the case of K-pop entertainment houses, a new player emerges and takes up a previously unoccupied position, thereby causing other players (studios, distributors, artists) to adjust their positions, as each seeks to gain or maintain control over musical rights. It is this focus on rights that makes music a content, or copyright, industry in which different collective and individual interests are negotiated and such notions as ‘originality’, ‘creativity’, and ‘copying’ are politically constituted. I have here focused on technological, social, and commercial developments in the field of musical production in the East Asian region. As we have seen, in spite of appearances, the development of K-pop owes much to what had been happening in the Japanese pop music industry. Zhang and Negus (2020) have shown further that such transnational characteristics link the production of pop music in the East Asian region as a whole. For example, the manufacture of ‘beautiful’ boy and girl idols takes place not only in Japan and Korea but also, and increasingly, in mainland China. The development of K-pop-like idols in China has come about through a series of interventions both within and outside the industry. Together these have

90 Creative industries radically changed the field of music production there. First, in the 2000s, the development of Chinese urban society led to ever greater use of smart phones and social media, which in turn underpinned the growth of what might best be described as a ‘data-driven’ economy. And these fast-growing Chinese digital platforms needed content, which the Korean entertainment houses were more than happy to provide (position-taking). As a result, K-pop idols became extremely popular among Chinese fans. At the same time, Korean entertainment companies formed joint ventures with Chinese concerns that had deeper knowledge of the domestic music market. For their part, Chinese internet and venture capital companies (including Alibaba) started to invest in the Korean entertainment industry. These deals led to personnel exchanges between Korean and Chinese music professionals, while SM Entertainment and other production companies put together bands containing a mixture of Korean and Chinese idols who sang K-pop songs in Chinese. In 2016, an intervention by the Chinese government further altered the field of East Asian music. South Korea’s deployment of a defence system developed by the US military heightened political tension with mainland China. As a result, the government in Beijing cancelled concerts and tours by K-pop musicians and even refused to allow them, and other Korean stars, to appear on talent shows and television series. This led to Chinese pop stars like Lu Han and Kris Wu, who had previously been members of K-pop bands, filling the gap and becoming popular in their own right. As a result, a more specifically ‘Chinese’ idol system started to develop. What we see here, as in earlier K-pop borrowings from J-pop, is an expansion and alteration of the field of pop music in East Asia, as industry organisations take up new positions afforded by technological, political (appreciative), and commercial (economic) developments. It is also worth noting the way in which the introduction of digital platforms triggered a reconfiguration of the music industry from a supply chain of products (records, cassettes, CDs) to an interactive circuit in which musicians, organisations, industries, and fans engaged with one another to shape and update a continual flow of musical content. Internet giants like Baidu, Alibaba, and TenCent, not music production companies per se, have been most active in the field of music as they nurture new talent. Notwithstanding these – in many ways revolutionary – developments, the music industry in the East Asian region is still characterised by Becker’s ‘networks of people (and organisations) cooperating’. It still consists of creative musicians – some of whom adhere to the idea of art for art’s sake – and humdrum personnel working together as a motley crew to produce a more or less infinite variety of musical sounds according to strict schedules and deadlines (time flies). All actors in the field jostle for power and fame (A list/B list), and ownership of copyright (ars longa) is paramount. Although data analysis of pop fans’ likes and dislikes on social media platforms has taken much of the guesswork out of music marketing, there is still an element of surprise, as envisaged hits continue to flop and seemingly runof-the-mill songs top the charts (nobody knows). In other words, the theories of Richard Caves, Pierre Bourdieu, and Howard Becker still hold good in the East Asian entertainment industry.

Music

91

References General readings Caves, Richard (2000) ‘Dealings between artist and record company’. In Richard Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Arts and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 61–67. Hennion, Antoine (1990) ‘The production of success’. In Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. London: Routledge, pp. 185–206. Negus, Keith (1992) Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold. Negus, Keith (1999) Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London and New York: Routledge. Wikström, Patrik (2009) The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. Cambridge: Polity.

Regional readings Asai, Sumiko (2008) ‘Firm organisation and marketing strategy in the Japanese music industry’. Popular Music 27 (3): 473–485. Kimura, Atsuko (1991) ‘Japanese corporations and popular music’. Popular Music 10 (3): 317–326. Lie, John (2012) ‘What is the K in K-pop? South Korean popular music, the culture industry, and national identity’. Korea Observer 43 (3): 339–363. Oh, Ingyu (2013) ‘The globalisation of K-pop: Korea’s place in the global music industry’. Korea Observer 44 (3): 389–404. Park, Gil-Sung (2013) ‘Manufacturing creativity: production, performance, and dissemination of K-pop’. Korea Journal 53 (4): 14–33. Shin, Solee and Lanu Kim (2013) ‘Organizing K-pop: emergence and market making of large Korean entertainment houses, 1980–2010’. East Asia 30 (4): 255–272. Zhang, Qian and Keith Negus (2020) ‘East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of fandom in China’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 23 (4): 493–511.

5

Fashion

As with music, what we think of as ‘fashion’ is made up of more than a single industry. First, there is the fashion industry itself, which consists of two major components. On the one hand, there is the small, atelier-style, hand-produced ‘high’ fashion known as haute couture, which makes one-off, made-to-measure (or ‘bespoke’) garments for celebrities and other elite customers at extremely high prices. This is luxury fashion. On the other hand, there are factory-made, off-therack clothes in standardised sizes and at more affordable prices which are known as ‘ready to wear’ (or, in French, prêt-à-porter). The fashion industry is dominated by producers: fashion houses like Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and others which also have their own brand retail outlets. Second, there is the fashion apparel industry, which was initially led by companies such as Liz Claiborne, Nike, and Reebok, but which is now headed by ‘fast’ fashion retailers such as Zara, Primark, and Uniqlo. The fashion apparel industry is characterised by global commodity chains in which the labour-intensive, lowcapital manufacture of clothing is typically outsourced by European and American brands and carried out in low-wage, developing countries, especially in South, Southeast, and East Asia (for example, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and mainland China). Both the fashion and fashion apparel industries set fashion trends which they then supply by means of the latest styles of clothing. In addition, there are the clothing, garment, and textile industries, each of which may contribute to fashion in one way or another while also overlapping with the others. The clothing industry, for example, covers all types of clothes from fashion, on the one hand, to uniforms and workwear, on the other. By contrast, the textile industry is less concerned with fashion; rather, it focuses on the production of the fabrics and textiles (including denim, flannel, cotton, and synthetic fibres) that fashion house designers and other manufacturers select for dressmaking and tailoring. For instance, the Japanese textile giant Toray has developed a range of popular fabrics from fleece to Heat-Tech, Air-Tech, washable wool, and seamless clothes for the mass retailer Uniqlo. For its part, the garment industry is characterised by very small production units (usually of a dozen workers or fewer) and a subcontracting system that links homeworkers to manufacturers. These producers are highly versatile and able to satisfy last-minute, unpredictable requests, so the garment industry tends to be DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-8

Fashion

93

oriented towards the production of fashion. It owes much of its dynamism to immigrants and their entrepreneurial abilities in each of the fashion ‘capitals’ of London, Paris, Milan, and New York. The families of US designers Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, and Marc Jacobs all worked as immigrants in the garment industry; and the same is true of up-and-coming AsianAmerican designers, including Doo-ri Chung, Phillip Lim, and Derek Lam. Strictly speaking, therefore, the field of fashion comprises five different but overlapping industries which tend to epitomise all that is wrong with the capitalist system of production. They often house workers in what are described as ‘sweatshop’ conditions, typified by long working hours, a lack of benefits, and no worker representation. They pay wages that are far below minimum requirements in the countries whose companies are outsourcing production abroad. They are known to employ child labour. And, because of the ubiquitous consumption of ‘fashion’, they make a significant contribution to environmental degradation, primarily through their extensive usage of cotton, wool, silk, and other raw materials. Clearly, the broad nature of this field does not make for simple analysis, since it encompasses an extremely wide range of issues, including some that do not immediately fall within our everyday understanding of the word ‘fashion’: for example, outsourcing and global commodity chains; supply-chain innovations and buyer–supplier partnerships; Fordism and flexible specialisation; labour exploitation (in particular, in relation to immigrants, women, and children); retailing and fast fashion; product development and design; free-trade agreements; and sustainability (including recycling, second-hand clothing, and charity organisations). As a result, in this chapter I will focus on some of the more obvious features of fashion, as we commonly perceive it: designers; shows; and magazines. Together these support the idea that fashion is a ‘cultural commodity’ located within value flows which cut across garment production, fashion display, and fashion images.

The organisation of fashion The production and diffusion of fashion is organised along two main axes: luxury fashion and industrial fashion. In this respect, the field of fashion follows a general ‘dualist’ structural principle laid down by Pierre Bourdieu in that it consists of two coexisting sub-fields. One of these comprises ‘restricted’ production where designers idealise a devotion to their profession and cultivate ‘form for its own sake’ as they produce ‘sacred’ goods (art for art’s sake). The other encompasses ‘large-scale’ production which is designed to have the widest possible effect on the public as designers submit themselves to the ‘market’ and produce ‘profane’ goods. These two sub-fields may then by further subdivided: for example, conservative, traditional fashion houses (like Chanel and Givenchy) are associated with the ‘right bank’ of the River Seine in Paris, while avant-garde challengers (like Jean Paul Gaultier, agnès b., and Christian Louboutin) are associated with the ‘left bank’. In the luxury fashion system, different fashion worlds in the fashion capitals of New York, Paris, London, Milan, and Tokyo have created distinctive organisational environments for the production of new fashions. In Paris, for example,

94 Creative industries small firms traditionally made fashionable clothing to order for a relatively stable clientele. Designers knew their clients personally and understood the social circles in which they moved. The clothes they made had to be perfectly executed since this clientele would be carefully observed by friends and acquaintances at social gatherings. In such a milieu, fashion depended on silhouette and technical details that provided diversity in the clothes that were made and worn. It was the silhouette which defined what fashion was, and it was changes in, or modifications to, a silhouette that determined change. The designers developed and perfected their skills in draping and cut. All this changed in the decades following the Second World War as the escalating cost of made-to-order clothes led to a drastic decline in the number of customers who could afford them. Street fashion influenced the development of ready-to-wear fashions in the 1960s. Designer firms began to license the use of their names on other products – accessories, perfumes, and, later, homeware – and clothing styles were used to create and sustain a prestigious image that then led to the sale of other products (symbolic to economic capital). The international expansion of their businesses in the 1970s meant that designers no longer knew their customers personally; nor were they familiar with their way of life. The fashion world thus became separated from the world of social elites. The 1990s saw the emergence of luxury goods conglomerates like LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), Richemont, and Kering (formerly PinaultPrintemps-Redoute) which, as in other creative industries such as publishing and music, began to consolidate their positions by means of acquisitions and mergers: Christian Dior and Kenzo were subsumed under LVMH; Chloé and Shanghai Tang under Richemont; and Yves Saint-Laurent, Balenciaga, and Gucci under Kering.

LVMH

KERING

RICHEMONT

Dior Givenchy kenzo Celine Loewe Marc Jacobs Fendi Pink

Gucci Balenciaga Saint Laurent Sergio Rossi Alex. McQueen Bottega Veneta Stella McCartney Brioni

Chloé Alaïa ShanghaiTang Dunhill Lancel Net-a-Porter.com

Individual designers

Individual designers

Individual designers

Fashion Accessories

Perfume Shoes

Figure 5.1 The structure of the luxury fashion industry

Fashion

95

These conglomerates used the biannual collections as a way to generate publicity, and their designers began to offer two types of fashionable clothing: conservative clothes for the very rich; and brash, avant-garde clothes to attract attention to the brand and licensed products. In addition, they used their portfolios to divide up which fashion houses produced which kinds of fashion, and employed star designers accordingly (for instance, John Galliano at Dior for his ‘porn chic’ style, and Donna Karan at DKNY for her ‘modern clothes for modern people’). Because clothes fashions ceased to be the major source of income for these firms, designers were more or less free to develop their ideas in any direction they pleased. As a result, fashion itself became increasingly unstable and unpredictable, recycling styles associated with popular music genres such as punk (Vivienne Westwood), hip hop (Nike, Tommy Hilfiger), and grunge (Doc Martens, and Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis), as well as borrowing eclectically from other media and clothing styles in different parts of the world. Consequently, clothes are increasingly coded with meanings that some groups understand while others do not. This has led to a situation where, instead of representing a set of styles adopted by the upper class and disseminated downwards, luxury fashion is marked by subtle changes that exert a discreet influence on some members of the public but not others. The era of the powerful bandwagon effect is over. Industrial fashion is created by anonymous designers working for international clothing manufacturers, which sell similar products to analogous social groups in different countries around the world. There are also smaller firms that limit their distribution to their domestic markets. Rather than selling particular styles, both of these groups of producers use advertising to sell an image that can compete with other images. Such images – in the case of firms like Ralph Lauren and Esprit – focus on a well-defined look associated with a particular lifestyle that is followed by a particular group of people. Alternatively, the likes of Benetton try to provide what consumers in a particular age group want. As the fashion system has become increasingly decentralised and complex, and in order to serve these markets efficiently, industrial fashion firms have made use of fashion forecasting (nobody knows). Forecasters – ‘creative trend bureaus’ like Carlin, WGSN, and Mintel – consult with textile and fabric designers to predict colours and materials two years before a particular fashion style is marketed. They also try to interpret political, economic, and socio-cultural events, and monitor how clothes are being worn by people in the street. Thus, the focus on Iraq and the Middle East in the early 2000s soon gave rise to ‘sand’ colours and ‘desert’ themes. In this sense, forecasters ‘design’ trends and produce thirty to forty trend books a year (fifteen to twenty for each fashion season), covering everything from colours, fabrics, and yarns to clothing categories like menswear, womenswear, sportswear, and lingerie, and using keywords which do not – and are not meant to – provide a single answer to anything. Rather, the intention is to inspire people with regard to future fashion trends.

96 Creative industries

The fashion world A field of fashion is organised around a specific set of beliefs about what constitutes ‘fashion’ and the value of fashion. In the UK, for example, fashion is popular, rather than elitist, whereas in France it is very elitist and conservative. What is of interest, therefore, is how these beliefs are produced and disseminated, and by whom, in the fashion world. In this section I will look at fashion’s three main processes: production (fashion designers), performance (fashion shows), and promotion (fashion magazines and blogs). The fashion designer The first point of entry for anyone interested in the fashion world is to learn the names of famous fashion designers based in the five fashion capitals of Paris, London, Milan, New York, and Tokyo: for example, Stella McCartney, Jean Paul Gaultier, Donatella Versace, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo. Then the novice learns the names of the great fashion houses and their principal designers: Chanel (Virginie Viard), Christian Dior (Maria Grazia Chiuri), Louis Vuitton (Nicolas Ghesquière), Gucci (Alessandro Michele), Prada (Miuccia Prada), Calvin Klein (Italo Zucchelli), Burberry (Riccardo Tisci), and so on. It will soon become apparent that most fashion designers circulate from one fashion house to another every few years. For example, Raf Simons was creative director at Dior before moving to Calvin Klein, and from there to Prada; Nicolas Ghesquière worked for Balenciaga before moving to Louis Vuitton; and Maria Grazia Chiuri was at Valentino before becoming Dior’s first woman creative director. By the time this book is published, many of these designers will almost certainly have moved on again. In many ways, the fashion designer is seen as a kind of magician. This ‘designer mystique’ was created in the 1970s when designers like Karl Lagerfeld, Yves SaintLaurent, and Giorgio Armani achieved star status by promoting their personal visions of fashion, but it can also be seen as a clever marketing strategy by the fashion houses to boost womenswear sales, increase retail prices, and earn greater profits. At the same time, there is a kind of contagious magic effect between designers and fashion houses in that each gains symbolic capital from the other, which enables both to make even more money. This kind of symbolic imagemaking may be completely unrelated to the clothes-making process. Designers also earn symbolic capital by means of their collaborations with well-known artists in the fashion and other creative worlds: Issey Miyake with the photographer Irving Penn; Yohji Yamamoto with the Japanese actor and film director Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano. They also earn it when celebrities make public appearances in their clothes, as when Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas, and Marilyn Manson wear outfits designed by Lee Joo Young, or when Michelle Obama wears gowns by Asian designers Jason Wu, Thakoon Panichgul, and Prabal Gurung. But what does a fashion designer actually do? Do they need to understand every aspect of a garment’s construction, pattern-making, and fitting? Some designers

Fashion

97

merely scribble a sketch (Karl Lagerfeld was famous for this) or outline a concept (Rei Kawakubo), from which their assistants make a three-dimensional garment that approximates the drawing or idea. Others (Kenzo and Yohji Yamamoto) have received a formal and systematic training in the whole process of garment-making, and have mastered the necessary technical expertise. Issey Miyake says that he starts the creative process of design by wrapping a piece of fabric around himself. His clothes are born out of the movement of his hands and body, so that fashion design becomes a process of manual labour. Traditionally, in France, most designers were trained in the house of an established fashion label. (After moving to Paris in the 1960s, Issey Miyake was apprenticed to Guy Laroche before serving as assistant to Hubert de Givenchy.) This resulted in a cohesive group with shared ideologies, norms, and values that aided the diffusion of new trends and enhanced the prestige and mythology of the couturier during the twentieth century. Most designers, however, are not celebrity names. Rather, they work in an organisational setting as a member of a team, designing clothes under the name of a ‘master’ designer or brand (as in Tommy Hilfiger, for example) and receive no public attention or recognition for what they do. Regardless of whether a designer is a celebrity or an anonymous employee, though, each of them works in the centre of a large network of cooperating people (that is, in a fashion world): assistant designers, pattern-makers, samplesewers, and cutters, all of whom contribute to the final outcome. The designer’s job is like that of an orchestral conductor: they produce fashion by coordinating the work of a large group of skilled experts. In spite of the hype that fashion is ‘art’, a designer works from the idea of the human form, which she dresses in a number of standardised sizes, using standard items of clothing (shirt, dress, trousers, and so on), which are modified in standard ways (sleeves, collars, buttons, pockets, and so forth) according to standard cultural and aesthetic ideals of beauty and proportion. This necessity for designers to conform to the human form entails the employment of models, who often act as ‘muses’ and wear the designers’ clothes at fashion shows and in magazine articles and advertising campaigns. This, in itself, demands the use of high-quality photographers, together with fashion stylists, make-up artists, hair stylists, model agency bookers, and all sorts of related personnel who together make up the fashion world. Conformity to the human form belies the emphasis we tend to give to a fashion designer’s ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’, since the human form affords what we can do with clothes. Yet a designer’s perceived talent is essential if a fashion company is to justify its price tag and license products that are virtually identical to similar products. The manufacture of both Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger underwear, for example, is licensed to and undertaken by Jockey. The differences in the fabric and cut of the three brands are minimal, so they can only really be distinguished from one another by the name that is sewn into the waistband (a name that, let’s face it, is rarely seen once they are worn). As we will see in a later chapter on celebrities and stardom, names in different forms of cultural production take on a magical aura.

98 Creative industries Out of such talent emerges a designer’s charisma. This, too, is essential to the brands that carry their names and embody their presence, even when licensed to other manufacturers. A designer’s products are in many ways like religious sacraments in that they are infused with the spirit of the firm for which they work (symbolic capital): Chanel, Dior, Versace, Prada, or Gucci. Fashion aficionados buy that charisma, which is extended to perfumes, accessories, and interior design through strategic licensing agreements. In this respect, the fashion world and the field of fashion as a whole participate in a game of deception. The focus on the magical powers of the designer is the result of what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) calls ‘collective misrecognition’, in that the production of fashion as sacred ‘art’ depends upon a ‘social alchemy’ in the art world which stresses the designer’s creativity (art for art’s sake) at the expense of the sales and marketing strategies that underpin it. The fashion designer, in effect, is an ‘apparent producer’ whose position in the field is authorised by the fashion house or brand. The brand consecrates the clothes as ‘fashion’ and thereby creates the creator. It does this primarily by means of its collections, which are unveiled at the biannual fashion shows in the fashion capitals of the world. The fashion show A fashion show is a biannual presentation of a new clothing collection on moving bodies for an audience. The new collection is produced by a designer, brand, company, or group of companies. The parade of moving bodies is an essential feature of the show, and has given rise to the modelling profession, as well as to a range of conventions of movements, poses, and looks. It is accompanied by music which emphasises the rhythm of movement and blocks out other sounds from the overall impression. The moving bodies are predominantly female. Although menswear fashion shows have been held since the late 1920s, they are still far outnumbered by womenswear shows. The presentation for an audience is associated, first, with the restricted hierarchical space (spatial affordance, or frame) in which a fashion show is presented and, second, with balancing the two essential concerns of product promotion – sales and entertainment (economic and representational affordances). A fashion show and its modes of presentation may be explained to a large extent in terms of dramaturgy and frame analysis, as put forward by the American sociologist Erving Goffman (1986). First and foremost, it is an exercise in impression management, where ordinary conduct imitates cultural proprieties. For example, a fashion model wearing a famous designer’s dress on the catwalk imitates (in exaggerated style) an ordinary woman walking along the street in an everyday dress. What she wears is modelled after actual clothing, but it is also a model for women’s everyday clothed appearance. By interpreting others’ identities and adjusting to new environments, a fashion show thus helps build a woman’s identity about what it means to be a woman. At the same time, the fashion show is a social framework which provides standards that guide participants about how they should behave and act. These standards involve rules, some of which are obvious (like the presence of an audience)

Fashion

99

while others are not (like the way in which a model should parade on stage). Such rules make the behaviour of all participants intelligible. Framing applies both to the spatial (catwalk, set, runway design) and temporal (music, performance, staged appearances) affordances of the fashion show. In the process, it refers to those principles of social organisation which define the meaning and significance of the event, its personnel, and its products. Framing devices include the technologies, props, and conventions that set the fashion show apart from ordinary interaction and define what is going on both within the show itself and between the show and the outside world. In this respect, every show is divided between front-stage performance, for media, buyers, and (elite) consumers, and back-stage production, where a large number of people, hidden from view, work to realise the show. First, let us look at the front-stage performance. Fashion shows are set apart from the outside world and clearly define ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spheres in terms of their location and layout. They tend to be held in locations that are chosen to colour the atmosphere of the show: from aristocratic ‘palaces’ to derelict factories, by way of warehouses, theatres, and museums. Typically, the venue has no windows and the fact that it is totally enclosed enables the staging to be completely controlled. In this way, the attention of the invited audience is directed away from the outside world and made to focus entirely on the fashion show performance. OUTSIDE WORLD

LIMINAL

Production

INNER

BACK STAGE

AUDIENCE

CATWALK

FRONT STAGE

OUTER

PRESS

AUDIENCE INNER

OUTER

Performance Figure 5.2 The fashion show framework

100 Creative industries The parade of models showing a designer’s collection typically – though by no means necessarily – takes place on a raised stage called a ‘catwalk’ (signifying a narrow passage), or ‘runway’, which – like an airplane taking off – refers to the launch of a new collection. The raised dais – like a theatre stage, Oxbridge college high table, or church altar – gives ritual significance to the activities performed there, and exalts the performers (which is why models become famous among fashion aficionados). In this way, the members of the audience (those who look) are separated from the performers (those who are observed). Gazes are further directed by bathing the runway in bright light and leaving the surrounding audience in the dark. The audience itself is ordered according to a set of framing conventions or ‘politics of seating’. Invariably, press photographers are placed at the end of the runway to enable long-lens shots of the models walking down the catwalk. But some space also needs to be available for a side view and a position closer to the start of the runway for the ‘return’ shot of each model. Photographers also need to have access to positions from which to shoot the guests, and especially the ‘dignitaries’ in the front row, if not during the show then immediately before or after it. So photographers are given privileged visual positions, underlining the importance of mediating the event to absent audiences. In the politics of seating, choice spots are determined by their proximity to, and view of, the action on the catwalk. The seating area in front of the cameras at the end of the stage is considered to provide the best view. In general, though, the prime seats at a fashion show are in the front row, either at the end or along the sides of the stage. These are reserved for the most important guests: magazine editors, who are the essential filters through which the shows are reported in the media; and celebrities, whose presence tends to generate extra prestige (symbolic capital). In sales shows, buyers are also seated in the front row. However, these days, most buyers view the collection informally beforehand in the showroom, so the purpose of the show itself is usually to present an overall image for the press, and only indirectly to display clothes to buyers. The seats behind the first row are for less important (that is, less prestigious) guests, including many buyers and business contacts, company employees, design school students, and other interested members of the public. A fashion show is typically accompanied by a set of slides that project the company logo and credits, as well as images, colours, and designs that enhance the overall concept. At the rear of the catwalk, therefore, we find the set design, which both serves as the backdrop to the performance and separates front stage, where the collection is appreciated and consumed by the audience, from back stage, where it is pieced together and produced by the designer. The back-stage area consists of separate stations for various professionals (hair stylists and make-up artists, sound and lighting technicians, decorators) in order to facilitate easy communication among the whole motley crew. While the front-stage area is carefully scripted in its staged framing devices, both in place and time, in order to exclude all possibility of unscripted behaviour and individual improvisation in the performed ritual, back stage is usually characterised by ordered chaos –

Fashion

101

‘order’ in the necessary arrangement of clothes that allows models to dress, disrobe, and dress again at great speed, and ‘chaos’ in the sheer number and range of personnel and the multiplicity of tasks they must carry out to enable the frontstage performance to proceed smoothly. Most of the professionals at a fashion show have assistants, and different people will arrive and begin their specialist tasks at various points throughout the day. It is not necessary for dressers to be present when the lighting and chairs are being set up, for example, and the models arrive only when the hair stylists and make-up artists are ready to start preparing them. Similarly, waiters and seaters tend to precede the invited guests by no more than a few minutes. The same is often true of the designer or designers themselves, depending on the type of fashion house and the scale of the show (which can range from US$50,000 budget presentations to US$5 million extravaganzas). By the time the show is ready to begin, the back-stage area will be filled with people who are all there to ensure that the performance runs smoothly. As the venue is often small, only essential people are allowed into this area. The production manager has a crucial role to play at the start of the show, since she not only communicates with all the different professionals but also acts as a link between front and back stage, cueing lights, sound, and the choreographer as well as the models. Once the show is over – somewhere between twelve and twenty minutes after the first model walked out onto the runway – everything is quickly dismantled

Figure 5.3 Fashion show organisation

102 Creative industries back stage. Hair stylists and make-up artists pack their bags; models rush off to their next shows; and dressers arrange the clothes on hangers or in boxes to be sent back to the showroom. The fashion show marks the transition from the production of fashion to its promotion. The fashion magazine Although the fashion show used to be the main means by which fashion images were diffused, this important task is now primarily carried out by international fashion magazines (notably Vogue and Elle) and fashion photographers (such as Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, and Nick Knight). Nevertheless, fashion show and fashion magazine are still locked in a struggle for control over fashion’s images: the former wants to sell a brand; the latter is determined to act as a cultural intermediary that brokers the images. This has led to a kind of stalemate where the one cannot exist without the other. As a result, the promotion of fashion images has become even more global. Fashion magazines, like fashion itself, juxtapose two themes that lie at the heart of this book: culture and economy. This is because these are both cultural products and commodities (as I discussed in detail earlier), promoting both fashion images and fashion brands. While providing three to four dozen pages of fashion ‘stories’ illustrating the latest fashion styles (often photographed in exotic settings) worn by the latest ‘classical’ and/or ‘edgy’ models, magazines also carry advertisements for the fashion houses that make these styles and covertly promote their products in their pages. Probably the easiest way to understand that a fashion – or indeed any other – magazine is both a cultural product and a commodity is to look at its front cover. Here we find the title, which itself often signifies something or someone (Vogue indicates ‘in fashion’; Elle a ‘French woman’), plus all those headlines – or, as they are called in the trade, ‘sell lines’ – that help us assess whether we do, or do not, want to buy this particular issue of this particular publication: ‘Fashion’s best and barest’; ‘Glowing skin – how to get it, how to keep it’; ‘Change your life in one week’; ‘Power plays – secrets of the rich and famous’; ‘100 objects of desire’. These messages suggest to women what they, as cultural objects called ‘women’, should be contemplating. This, in effect, is what fashion is all about. European and US fashion magazines have, until very recently, promoted an image of woman that affirms and sells white skin, youth, beauty, charm, and sexuality as valuable attributes of femininity. By contrast, in many Asian countries, magazines emphasize the cover model’s skin quality, charm, and elegance, rather than overt sexuality as such. Cover models everywhere are carefully made up and dressed in extremely expensive and fashionable clothes and accessories, the details of which are listed on the contents page, usually in a box where the cover photo is reproduced for ease of recognition. These details are followed (or preceded) by the names of the photographer, stylist, make-up artist, hairdresser, and so on, who together have helped transform the young woman on the cover into a style icon.

Fashion

103

In addition to selling fashion and beauty contents, therefore, magazine covers sell the designers, fashion houses, models, photographers, make-up artists, and hair stylists who generate the glamour of the fashion world. Fashion magazines, then, are all about glamour. From ‘Love on the Adriatic’ to ‘Frock Stars’, their editorials and articles make use of those who are already stars to comment on fashion items: ‘Madonna’s Name-Check T-shirt’, ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’s Corsage – Sometimes a Star’s Look is so Right it Changes the Way We Dress’. They also turn fashion designers into celebrities by showing their readers who is wearing what, made by whom, for what occasion, where, and with whom (who is also wearing what, made by whom, and so on). Moreover, this extends to the rest of the fashion world, where photographers, models, make-up artists, hair stylists, and other ‘gurus’ are all thrust into the celebrity spotlight. The photographs, the gossip, the clothes, the accessories, the make-up, the hair, and the perfumes combine in glitterati mode. This is sympathetic and contagious magic at its most effective. A fashion magazine is an avenue of stores along which the fashion, fashion accessory, and beauty industries parade. Although magazine covers can include blatant examples of ‘puffery’, as editorial staff pander to the hands that feed their exotic lifestyle, the most obvious form of economic and cultural promotion is to be found in the dozens – often hundreds – of advertisements that any one issue of a fashion magazine will carry. Clearly, the publishers are most interested in advertising, because it is the income from advertisers that funds the magazine’s salaries and pays for its office space as well as the production and distribution costs of each issue. Ideally, advertising revenue also contributes to the profits that publishers hope to make. This is why even a magazine with good circulation figures may be withdrawn from sale. In the eyes of the publisher, if a title fails to attract sufficient advertising, nothing – not even a large readership – justifies its continued publication. Every fashion magazine, then, tries to appeal to both (potential) advertisers and readers, in one way or another. In addition to obliging them to wade through page after page of advertisements, fashion magazines advertise their readers to the advertisers by giving statistics of their readers’ ages, average household incomes, marital status, home ownership, and so on. They tell advertisers how much money their readers spend on average on fashion, beauty products, and accessories (which form the bulk of their advertisements). They tell them about their readers’ international travel destinations, the kinds of cultural entertainment they prefer, how many bottles of perfume they own, even what kinds of cars they drive. They also tell them what percentage of their readers are annual subscribers, because that figure tells advertisers how many readers are a captive audience (as opposed to those who do or do not buy the magazine from a newsstand or a convenience store each month). The fact that the fashion industry has mechanisms like the fashion magazine for obtaining consumer feedback, while simultaneously promoting the latest fashion styles and brands, is not surprising, as it is a means towards overcoming market uncertainty (nobody knows). But the fashion world has in recent years been obliged

104 Creative industries to accept a new entrant (position-taking) – the fashion blogger – who provides similar information to that provided by the magazines, but from a street or consumer – rather than media – level. The fashion blog emerged thanks to the Web 2.0, which enabled the production of fashion and interaction among fashion aficionados through online content, and thus a shift away from passive media spectatorship. The earliest fashion blogs appeared in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century and were defined by individual bloggers – like Susanna Lau (whose parents are from Hong Kong) – who shared their fashion preferences online. They were almost immediately copied by established fashion magazines, which began to incorporate blog elements on their websites as a user- rather than industry-driven approach to fashion communication. Although there are different kinds of blogs, ranging from professional webzines to somewhat narcissistic personal visual diaries, they all provide new ways of promoting fashion. They have developed new forms of fashion narrative, like the snapshot and documentary-style real-life photos, but they also tend to reproduce established fashion media layout and visual aesthetics. The fashion blogger goes beyond the fashion magazine in that she is model, reviewer, and publicist, and in one or two cases designer, too. Fashion blogging itself has contributed to breaking down the fashion magazine’s historical hegemony in disseminating fashion images. Clearly, there is a new hierarchy when a fourteen-year-old blogger is invited to sit in the front row of a fashion show, alongside world-renowned magazine editors like Anna Wintour of US Vogue. Fashion houses have become acutely aware of the power of bloggers as both arbiters of taste and trendsetters who can blog or tweet directly from fashion shows and provide instant material whereas the production time of fashion magazines is typically five to eight weeks (although this has decreased with the online publication of fashion events). Although spontaneous and uncontrolled, this user-generated promotion tends to reinforce established preferences in the global fashion consumer culture, so that both fashion houses and fashion magazines have sought to co-opt bloggers. At the same time, fashion blogging is quite similar to the traditional fashion magazine. Both make use of advertisements paid for by fashion and cosmetics companies as well as editorial content to entertain and inform their audience. Like fashion magazines, bloggers produce and retain full control over their editorial content, but they also accept the automatic insertion of advertisements in the margins and/or as banners (via Google AdSense, for example). In addition, they sometimes earn extra money by acting as writers, image providers, stylists, or consultants to fashion houses and fashion media, although this may leave them in the same predicament as the magazines by restricting their freedom to criticise the fashion industry and obliging them to exercise selfrestraint when discussing the fashion world. As a result, they end up in service to the fashion system, which is probably unique among all forms of cultural production (outside of academic writing) in that it has no organs of objective criticism.

Fashion

105

Asian fashion worlds Given that fashion is a system of interlocking institutions, organisations, groups, practices, individuals, and events which developed first in France and then in other parts of Europe and the United States, we need to explore how the field of fashion in the East Asian region works. This is particularly important because the history of fashion has always paralleled political and economic history, from Rome and Byzantium to France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. With the rise of the Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian economies, we need to ask: do designers in Japan, China, Korea, and elsewhere work in the same way, making use of the same aesthetics, as designers in Paris, London, and New York? Where do they show their collections? In Tokyo, Seoul, or Shanghai? Or in Paris, London, or New York? How do they promote their work and through what media? Let us start by looking at those Japanese designers – Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo – who took the Paris fashion world by storm in 1981 and were instrumental in persuading the fashion industry to accept Tokyo as the fifth fashion capital of the world. Given that the fashion system is characterised by French hegemony, how did these designers manage to get themselves legitimated as world-class designers and their collections as ‘fashionable’? For a start, all three created a new style characterised by monochromatic, asymmetrical, and baggy looks. They reshaped the symmetry of clothes and designed wrapped garments to respond to the body’s shape and movement. This style embraced what was seen as a ‘Japanese’ aesthetic, which placed great significance on clothing inherited from the past, including farmers’ functional clothing and ancient Japanese quilting and textile designs. Their concepts were undoubtedly different, new, and original when compared with the rules that defined French designers like Chanel, Dior, and Yves Saint-Laurent. Indeed, the Japanese ‘aestheticisation of rags’ (also known as ‘Hiroshima chic’) was a slap in the face of French luxury fashion. At the same time, however, all three Japanese designers had already set up their own companies in Japan in the 1970s, prior to going to Paris. So why go to France at all? The answer to this question is to be found in the overall structure of the field of fashion. The purpose of showing collections at that time was to induce department store buyers and other retailers to place orders for clothes shown on the catwalk. Because Western buyers were reluctant to make the long trip to Tokyo, Japanese designers wishing to expand their market had little option but to show their work in Paris. Once there, they opened up their own stores and began manufacturing in France so that their labels could read ‘Made in France’ rather than ‘Made in Japan’ (symbolic capital). In other words, by showing their collections and opening their stores in Paris, Miyake, Yamamoto, and Kawakubo confirmed the symbolic importance of Paris as the core of the fashion system. In order for them to be acknowledged by the fashion world, they needed to become part of the network of fashion journalists, editors, and publicists and so become recognised by traditional, established designers and their entourages of photographers, model agencies, make-up artists,

106 Creative industries hairdressers, fashion stylists, and so on. Thus, although their aesthetic approach challenged the clothing system, their business approach reinforced the Frenchdominated fashion system. This point is exemplified by two other Japanese designers – Kenzo- Takada and Hanae Mori – who joined, rather than challenged, the fashion system: Takada made ready-to-wear clothes in the French style, while Mori was the first (and so far only) Asian female couturière to receive official permission to make haute couture fashion in Paris. So what does this example of Japanese fashion designers tell us about the current situation in mainland China, where there is burgeoning consumer interest in fashion, and where fashion and clothing that have hitherto been discussed in terms of ‘Made in China’ are now being hailed as ‘Made by China’? How do Chinese designers think and talk about their work? Like Japanese designers before them, Chinese (and Korean) fashion designers have tended to discuss their work in terms of national identity. In other words, they refer to their cultural background as a way to differentiate themselves in the global market. These references have first and foremost been to traditional clothing – the cheongsam or qipao in China and the hanbok in Korea – just as Miyake and his compatriots used traditional Japanese clothes to mark their work as different. But there have also been references to colours, forms, and textures that Asian designers see as part of their cultural and/or national identity: shuliang fabric and silk in China, together with traditional Chinese symbols (dragons, lanterns, and peonies); linen in Korea, together with the use of complementary colours (yellow, blue, white, red, and black). While this use of specific cultural forms of dress, fabric, and design by Chinese and Korean designers has been characterised as an integral part of their cultural identity, in fact it has merely echoed Western perceptions of what ‘Chinese’ or ‘Korean’ fashion ‘should’ look like (something Hong Kong designers faced as far back as the 1990s). In other words, if Korean and Chinese designers wish to be accepted by the French/Western fashion world, they need to start by adhering to Europeans’ and Americans’ Orientalist images of their countries. Like the Japanese designers before them, Frankie Xie (also known as Xie Feng) and Ma Ke turned their sights on Paris and were the first Chinese designers to show their collections there. They have, however, also started to modify their ‘Chinese-ness’ by introducing a more modern image of China based on a philosophical interpretation of ‘the Chinese spirit’. Ma Ke’s brand, Exception, may be considered the first brand created by an indigenous Chinese designer which carries no obvious Chinese symbols. Instead, it delivers an Oriental spiritual message of Zen-like peace, calm, frugality, and harmony. In other words, instead of delivering Chinese culture in explicit, direct, and exterior form (through dress styles and decorative motifs), contemporary designers in China are now conveying their ‘Chinese-ness’ in a more subtle, indirect, and partially hidden manner. That they may be successful in this assertion of Chinese ‘we-ness’ versus Western ‘they-ness’ probably has less to do with the Western fashion system and more to do with the market in mainland China, which is potentially so enormous that Chinese designers have no need to try to impress themselves upon the French

Fashion

107

fashion world (which is, anyway, desperate to tap the Chinese market). Notably, most contemporary designers run successful retail businesses in mainland China and are able to produce both commercial designs and more ‘artistic’ work, which is now designed, as well as manufactured, in China. The conclusion that the Chinese fashion world might operate almost entirely independently of European and US fashion is supported by the fact that it now has its own media outlets in addition to international fashion magazines like Vogue. Hung Huang, China’s answer to both Oprah Winfrey and Anna Wintour, for example, not only publishes iLook but also writes culturally sensitive articles which are syndicated to the global fashion weekly Women’s Wear Daily as ‘ChinaFile’. She also manages the retail store BNC (Brand New China), which stocks the work of individual Chinese designers as well as its own brand, designed by in-house designer Xiang Yaodong. Thus, new actors, new institutions, and new processes of legitimation are emerging to challenge the hegemony of the dominant Eurocentric fashion system, as designers seek to legitimate themselves by putting forward their understandings of what it means to be a modern ‘Chinese’, and by looking beyond the Western fashion system to explore the tensions between humanity and culture.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have outlined the fashion system, showing how it is divided not only between fashion and the manufacture of mass clothing but also between ‘high’, haute couture fashion and ready-to-wear, prêt-à-porter fashion. This dualism is typical of every field of cultural production: classical versus popular music; major studio versus independent film production; academic versus trade publishing; books versus manga comics; porcelain versus stoneware pottery; and so on. I suggested that the best way to understand the fashion system is to look first at how it is produced, then at how it is performed or exhibited, and finally at how it is publicised. I illustrated this approach with reference to fashion designers, fashion shows, and fashion media (magazines and bloggers), then used this framework to discuss how East Asian designers – especially those in Japan and mainland China – have engaged with the Western fashion system, in particular the Parisian fashion world, to negotiate Orientalist notions of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Chinese’ fashion and recreate their own understandings of what it means to be a Japanese or Chinese designer in the global fashion system. When discussing fashion shows, where designers exhibit their collections, I made use of Erving Goffman’s concept of frame analysis to argue that the fashion system is in large part an exercise in impression management. I also used this concept to explain that each fashion show is framed in terms of time (the order in which participants arrive and the sequence of clothes worn by the models on the runway) as well as space (in particular the separation of front from back stage, but also the distribution of the audience in the venue according to their relative importance in the fashion world). Frames organise social behaviour. All of us adopt different kinds of behaviour (formal, informal, ritual, intimate, and so on) according to whether we are

108 Creative industries attending a fashion show, joining the after-show party, talking with friends in a café, attending a lecture, visiting an art gallery, and so forth. We can see how people behave differently in the activities that characterise all forms of cultural production: an exhibition in an art gallery, a classical music performance, a pop concert, a film festival, an auction, a trade fair, or an art fair. All of these are marked by particular forms of behaviour among participants, who attend in order to show that they are members of an art, music, or film world and behave in ways expected of them by others in that world. While fashion designers, artists, gallery owners, museum curators, musicians, actors, and directors all operate in a particular field of cultural production at the macro-level, they also make use of frames at the micro-level to position themselves in the particular creative world to which they belong.

References General readings Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) ‘Who creates the creator?’ and ‘Collective misrecognition’. In Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 76–77 and 81. Crane, Diana (1999) ‘Diffusion models and fashion: a reassessment’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 566: 13–24. Engholm, Ida and Erik Hansen-Hansen (2014) ‘The fashion blog as genre: between userdriven bricolage design and the reproduction of established fashion system’. Digital Creativity 25 (2): 140–154. Goffman, Erving (1986 [1974]) ‘The theatrical frame’. In Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp. 125–155. Mears, Ashley (2011) ‘Economics of the catwalk’. In Ashley Mears, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 27–70. Moeran, Brian (2015) The Magic of Fashion: Ritual, Commodity, Glamour. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Rocamora, Agnès (2002) ‘Fields of fashion’. Journal of Consumer Culture 2 (3): 341–362. Skov, Lise, E. Skjold, B. Moeran, F. Larsen, and Fabian F. Csaba (2009) ‘The fashion show as an art form’. Creative Encounters Working Paper 32. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. http://openarchive.cbs.dk/bitstream/handle/10398/7943/Creative %20Encounters%20Working%20Papers%2032.pdf?sequence=1.

Regional readings Clark, Hazel (2012) ‘Chinese fashion designers: questions of ethnicity and place in the twenty-first century’. Fashion Practice 4 (1): 41–56. DeLong, Marilyn (2015) ‘The emerging Korean designer in the South Korean fashion industry: interview with Yoon Kyung Lee’. Fashion Practice 7 (2): 267–282. Ferrero-Regis, Tiziana and Tim Lindgren (2012) ‘Branding “Created in China”: the rise of Chinese fashion designers’. Fashion Practice 4 (1): 71–94.

Fashion

109

Kawamura, Yuniya (2004) ‘The Japanese revolution in Paris fashion’. Fashion Theory 6 (2): 195–224. Mears, Patricia (2008) ‘Exhibiting Asia: the global impact of Japanese fashion in museums and galleries’. Fashion Theory 12 (1): 95–120. Min, Seoha (2015) ‘Korean fashion designers’ use of cultural expression and its influence on their design’. Fashion Practice 7 (2): 219–239. Park, Judy (2015) ‘Star power in Korean fashion: the win–win relationship between Korean celebrities and designers’. Fashion Practice 7 (1): 125–133. Peirson-Smith, Anne (2013) ‘Wishing on a star: promoting and personifying designer collections and fashion brands’. Fashion Practice 5 (2): 171–202. Skov, Lise (1996) ‘Fashion trends, Japonisme and postmodernism: or “What is so Japanese about Comme des Garçons?”’ Theory, Culture & Society 13 (3): 129–151. Tsui, Christine (2013) ‘From symbols to spirit: changing conceptions of national identity in Chinese fashion’. Fashion Theory 17 (5): 579–604. Welters, Linda and Arthur C. Mead (2012) ‘The future of Chinese fashion’. Fashion Practice 4 (1): 13–40.

6

Incense

So far in my discussion of different forms of cultural production in East Asia, I have made use of a variety of theories put forward by European and American scholars to analyse and explain creativity at work in the music and fashion industries. I have suggested that such theories work in the East Asian context – at least in the examples and case studies presented in the previous two chapters. But is this always so? A Chinese, Korean, or Japanese scholar or student might justifiably ask: are CCI in the East Asian region not sufficiently different to warrant a different interpretive frame from those provided by scholars such as Richard Caves, Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Erving Goffman? We have seen that both the music and fashion industries in Japan, Korea, and China have taken slightly different courses from those charted by Western music and fashion. So is there a specifically Asian theory that could be used to analyse and explain CCI in mainland China, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere? In order to try to answer this question, in this chapter I will present a case study that is specifically ‘Asian’: incense production. Incense is an important part of the cultures of countries in the Middle East as well as South, Southeast, and East Asia. Although you occasionally come across domestic manufacture of incense for a specific purpose in Europe – like that made by monks and nuns at Mucknell Abbey, an Anglican Benedictine monastery in England, which is sold to churches around the UK and beyond – the main producers are to be found in India, mainland China, and Japan. By focusing on incense production in Japan, I hope to show the extent to which a specifically Asian cultural industry does, or does not, fit into the theories presented in this book. Do concepts like A list/B list, time flies, and infinite variety apply to incense production? To what extent, and in what ways, does this industry consist of networks of people cooperating? Can those involved in the manufacture and consumption of incense be said to constitute a field of cultural production? How is the latter framed? And what affordances come into play when making incense?

The uses and appreciation of incense The burning of incense in China, Korea, and Japan is coextensive with the development of the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese civilisations. This is evidenced in a DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-9

Incense

111

number of different ways. First, as in ancient Egypt, incense in these countries has been a central part of their religious traditions – particularly those associated with Buddhism and ancestor veneration. The Buddha’s words are said to be as fragrant as incense, and the Tenrikyo- Buddhist sect in Japan advocates ‘spreading the aroma’ of Buddhist scriptures among its followers. Second, the ingredients used in incense have from ancient times been accorded medicinal and healing, in addition to spiritual, properties. The constituent woods and plants grow predominantly in South and Southeast Asia. Bought and sold along long-established trade routes, they underpin Chinese and other East Asian herbal medicine systems. For example, camphor – a common ingredient of incense – is burned to help people suffering from eye trouble and used to treat stomach and heart ailments. Third, incense was, and still is, used to measure time. The Chinese invented ‘incense clocks’ – sticks that burned so evenly and regularly that they were used to indicate how much time had passed. This accurate timekeeping was particularly useful for Buddhist temples as they performed services at regular intervals throughout the day. Incense was also used to time the recital of su-tras by monks and priests. An incense clock – consisting of a trail of loose incense placed in a channelled container – is still lit inside the entrance to the To-ji Temple in Kyo-to, Japan, at nine o’clock each morning. It burns until four o’clock in the afternoon, half an hour before the temple closes its doors to visitors. Meanwhile, in the secular world, Japanese geisha used to charge their clients according to the number of incense cones burned during their visits. Fourth, in addition to these spiritual, medicinal, and temporal manifestations, the appreciation of incense, and scent more generally, has given rise to various artefacts of material culture. We find bronze burners, bamboo receptacles, lacquer boxes, and all kinds of fragrance-related accessories developed to increase the appreciation of incense. Sandalwood, harvested in parts of Indonesia and Mysore in India, has been used to make fragrant Buddhist sculptures and fans. Similarly, at the end of the sixth century CE, Prince Sho-toku (574–622) sculpted a statue of the Buddha’s mother from a piece of fragrant driftwood donated by Awaji islanders. Materials are given cultural values precisely because they are used for particular purposes, as can be seen in the ways they are designed. For example, the fifty-two Genjiko- symbols – so-called because each represents one chapter of the Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu in the eleventh century CE – are used by aficionados of ko-do-, an incense-smelling competition, as well as to decorate tea utensils, furniture, kimonos, cakes, and other items in contemporary Japan. Fifth, because the appreciation of incense has long been a spiritual, cultural, and moral pursuit among priests, court nobles, warriors, and – later – merchants, it has taken on spiritual and aesthetic qualities. Japanese believe that fragrance calms the spirit. In former times, they also believed that the smell of clothes was more important than their appearance, and that the kind of incense a member of the nobility created reflected, or even enhanced, their character in some way. In ko-do-, they have developed an olfactory aesthetic, as they ‘listen’ to small pieces of fragrant wood (known as monko-).

112 Creative industries

Figure 6.1 Chinese incense burner, with plum blossom motif

Finally, at a more prosaic level, incense was used to fumigate clothes, not simply to reflect the wearer’s personality, but to disguise their body odour in an era when washing was far less frequent than it is today. Incense thus had three primary uses in pre-modern Japan: ritual, play, and masking. To some extent, these have persisted into contemporary Japanese society, and traditional incense manufacturers supply what they view as three quite distinct markets: Buddhist temples; aficionados of the Japanese tea ceremony and ko-do-; and a mass leisure market.

Japanese incense production The Japanese incense market amounts to about US$20 million a year – not a large sum when compared with the film, music, publishing, or other CCI in that country. About 40 per cent of all households in Japan use incense every day for

Incense

113

Figure 6.2 Genjiko- symbols, with titles of each chapter of the Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu

one purpose or another, primarily connected with Buddhist ancestral rites. Of the 120 or so incense manufacturers in Japan, the top four have a 60 per cent market share, with the turnover of the second-largest company less than one-quarter – and the third and fourth approximately one-seventh – that of Nihon Ko-do-, the largest manufacturer, which supplies 40 per cent of the market. About 70 per cent of Japan’s incense is manufactured by just twenty or so factories and workshops in Ei-ura and Ichinomiya on the west coast of Awaji Island in the Inland Sea, at the mouth of Osaka Bay. Some of these manufacturers sell their own branded products, but many others are subcontracted by larger firms and do not produce their own brands. Incense is made by blending aromatic woods and plant materials, oils, charcoal, water, and the bark of tabu, a species of camphor tree which is used as a fixative. Together these form a sticky paste which can be formed into various shapes, such as sticks and cones. There are two main types of incense: combustible and noncombustible. The former is lit by a flame and then blown or fanned out, leaving an ember that continues to smoulder and release fragrant smoke. The latter needs a separate, constant heat source, such as a steady flame or lump of charcoal. In this chapter I focus on the production of combustible incense.

114 Creative industries Three factors are significant in the manufacture of incense and contribute to the wide variety of fragrances. One is the strength or weakness of a particular scent. This affects how it is appraised. For example, Japanese women tend to prefer weakly scented rather than strong-smelling cosmetics. The second factor relates to the quantity of materials used, since a minute fraction of one ingredient may give off an extremely strong fragrance, while a large amount of another may emit only a faint smell. The third factor is heat. Molecules fragment when burned, so a material may have very different properties in its raw and heated forms. This means that it is very difficult for an incense blender to judge the strength of an ingredient’s smell with any precision before it is burned. Moreover, because that smell changes during the course of burning, blenders have to develop an extremely detailed knowledge of the materials they use. Incense is made in a more or less standardised manner that, to some extent, resembles processes found in other crafts, like pottery. First, raw materials have to be purchased; then they have to be blended, kneaded, formed, dried, packaged, and transported to markets that consist of contracting incense producers (in the case of subcontracted work), wholesale distributors, and retail outlets, including department stores and supermarkets, as well as specialty stores and Buddhist temples. The ingredients are purchased either directly from wholesalers in various parts of Southeast Asia or, in the case of smaller firms, from importers in Japan. The first problem facing any independent incense manufacturer is the quality of these raw materials – in particular, aromatic woods, barks, resins, and plants. Precisely because Japanese incense uses natural materials, consistency is often an issue. Ingredients like sandalwood, anise, clove, cinnamon, and camphor vary not just from one country to another, but from year to year, and thus from one supplier to the next (material affordance). Therefore, it is impossible to predict how these materials will burn. This is an intriguing variation on Caves’s economic property of nobody knows. Firms try to overcome such variations and maintain product consistency by purchasing in bulk and mixing together, say, three different years’ stock of a particular ingredient. However, bulk purchase of some materials has recently become problematic because of Indian government restrictions on the sale of sandalwood and new international protocols on the sale of aloes and musk. Together, these regulations have driven up wholesale prices, which has had a knock-on effect on retail product sales (material, representational, and economic affordances). The variations in natural raw materials must be considered when blending the ingredients together, as the quality of the benzoin, camphor, or tabu fixing wood determines whether an incense must contain a little more, a little less, or the same amount as is specified in the original recipe. One such quality difference may be regional: Vietnamese aloeswood, for example, is generally quite ‘sweet’, while that from Indonesia is more ‘spicy’. Other differences are less predictable. The end result is that incense blenders cannot operate like Western-style perfumers who utilise synthetic oils, even though many of them now buy such oils from suppliers and incorporate them in their products. No recipe can ever be set in stone. Blending ingredients to make new incenses is considered an extremely important, specialist job, and certainly a step above kneading. It is in the blending of

Incense

115

materials that a product’s final fragrance is formed. An incense blender has to imagine and work out how an incense will burn – what fragrances will be emitted when the stick is first lit, for example, and how a room will smell once the stick has finished burning – since different ingredients burn at different rates (temporal affordance). The challenge here is to ensure that the original smell that arises during the mixing of an incense’s ingredients will be identical to the smell given off by that incense when it is burned. In this respect, incense is viewed as very different from perfumes, which come across directly and therefore demand great precision when their ingredients are blended. Incense blenders tend to categorise their products according to two criteria: those that use sandalwood as their base and those that use aloes (or agar). There is a general preference for the former in spring and summer, and the latter in autumn and winter (temporal affordance). Between twenty and thirty further ingredients are added to one or other of these bases in a traditional, standard incense. Kneading involves the thorough mixing of an incense’s aromatic ingredients with water and a fixative agent (tabu bark). Just how much tabu bark powder and water are used determines the duration of an incense stick’s burn (the stickier the texture, the longer it lasts) (material affordance). Most firms add colour to their incenses, although one or two do not (on the dual grounds that their customers are buying the smell and that natural materials should not be gaudily coloured). The uncertainty of consistency in raw materials that affects the blender’s work resurfaces in that of the kneader, whose primary concern is with the consistency of the fixative agent and the water that is used when kneading together the ingredients. There are three important qualities that a kneader has to bear in mind: the materials’ adhesiveness or viscosity, hardness, and softness. Aromatic woods tend to react a little differently by season, and they also vary by age, origin, and time of cutting. Thus, precisely because it is imported from different places at different times, some pieces of tabu bark are less glutinous than others (material, spatial, and temporal affordances). Therefore, as with the aromatic ingredients, a manufacturer will always have at least three different strengths of tabu to hand during the kneading process. The kneader’s task is further complicated by the fact that pipe-supplied water tends to vary slightly in quality from day to day. Even minute variations can affect the hardness, colour, and final shape of an incense. Moreover, the workers who knead the ingredients and form the sticks, as well as the machinery they use, may introduce yet more inconsistency to the production process. Different workers have different ways of working. As a result, one batch of kneaded material may be harder or softer than another batch made by a different kneader, so the amount of water to include may have to be adjusted on an individual basis. In the forming process (seikei), the shape (stick, spiral, or cone) and size (and therefore burning time) are both fixed. The standard diameter of an incense stick is between 5 and 7 millimetres, and the most common length is 14 centimetres, although 7–8-centimetre sticks are made for home use, and 30–40-centimetre sticks (which are correspondingly thicker) are frequently burned in temples. The kneaded materials (which look like clay that has been through a pug mill are fed into a forming machine that presses them into long pieces of ‘spaghetti’. These are then

116 Creative industries cut, trimmed, and placed in two rows on corrugated board trays for drying. By one estimate, an 80-kilogram batch of kneaded incense materials (the standard weight for most kneading machines) produces 1,200 trays, each of which holds approximately 660 sticks. This process may be repeated up to five times each day, so a factory with a single forming machine might produce around 4 million incense sticks a day. Drying used to be the main bugbear of incense production, since the air has to be the correct temperature and humidity to prevent the sticks from warping. Thus, direct sunlight was avoided as the trays of sticks, stacked as many as fifty high on trolleys, were turned every so often (as in drying pots) to facilitate equal drying over the course of at least one week (and up to three weeks or more during the humid rainy season). Nowadays, drying takes place in specially ventilated rooms where fans maintain a constant temperature (approximately 22 degrees centigrade) and enable the sticks to reach the required 7 per cent moisture content within 24 hours. Nevertheless, to achieve perfect results, the trays still need to be rotated at regular intervals so that the sticks spend equal amounts of time close to and further away from the ventilating fans. Once completely dry, the sticks are taken to the packing room where teams of workers sort, weigh, wrap, and box them. Incense is always sold by weight – from 25 grams upwards (e.g. 35, 60, 80, up to 500 grams). The majority is sold loose in boxes, although some is wrapped in small cylindrical bundles prior to boxing. The packaging both protects the fragile incense sticks and provides some sort of linguistic

Figure 6.3 Incense manufacturing process

Incense

117

and/or colour-coded guide to the scent of the contents – in other words, it helps brand the product. The boxes are then transported by truck to their destinations.

Manufacturing clusters Let us now look at the relations among incense manufacturers: how they are positioned in a field of cultural production and constitute networks of people and organisations cooperating. As a generalisation, we can say that incense manufacturers defy generalisation. At one end of the spectrum, a producer may employ several dozen, or even hundreds, of workers in a fully automated factory with extremely high-tech equipment (some of which is patented). At the other end, a small family firm might employ a single man to help operate basic machinery and a couple of women to sort, wrap, and pack the incense once it is ready to leave the factory. Two or three companies in Kyo-to and Sakai have been in business for more than three centuries; others in Ichinomiya and Ei-ura for no more than a few years. Most, however, have operated for several decades. Some firms are wholly independent and sell their own products on the market. Others are subcontracting firms that manufacture a single product from blended materials supplied by a parent company, so the latter controls both the development of the fragrance and the sale of the finished incense product. Yet other firms act as suppliers while also producing their own brands. The prevalence of subcontracting in the Japanese incense industry will come as no surprise to those who understand how the country’s economy functions. As Rodney Clark (1979: 63) noted many years ago in The Japanese Company: ‘activities ranging from gathering raw materials, refining them, turning them into parts, assembling components, marketing the product and carrying it to the customer, may in Japan all be undertaken by separate companies, specialized in a particular task’. In other words, the Japanese economy depends in large part on networks of cooperating organisations (social affordance). The field of incense production is similarly marked by ‘industrial gradation’. Nihon Ko-do-, Shoyeido, and Gyokushodo- (all located outside Awaji) are clearly − in their own ways − ‘first-stream’ (ichiryu-) companies. Baikundo-, Daihatsu, and Kunjudo-, which are located in Ichinomiya and market their own brands, are ‘second-stream’ (niryu-) manufacturers. Finally, smaller firms, like Nihon Senkoand Ko-gyokudo-, which either primarily or exclusively supply incense under contract to larger firms, are ‘third stream’ (sanryu-). Therefore, the field of incense production is clearly structured into A list/B list manufacturers. Apart from encouraging workforce homogeneity, less emphasis on financial management, and considerable interdependence, subcontracting tends to encourage the geographical clustering of firms in specific areas. There are usually particular reasons for this. For example, prior to the Pacific War, between sixty and seventy firms made incense in Sakai, the old trading port of Osaka, and together supplied 70 per cent of the Japanese market. This manufacturing cluster arose in pre-modern times because of Sakai’s strategic position as a port for aromatic materials shipped in from Southeast Asia for use in Chinese medicine and incense.

118 Creative industries Moreover, by grouping together in this way, the incense makers’ cooperative in Sakai was also able to control the flow of products throughout Japan (material, spatial, and economic affordances). Another cluster developed on Awaji from the second half of the nineteenth century through a slightly different set of circumstances. The inhabitants of Ichinomiya and Ei-ura were fishermen who had to find alternative means of earning a living during the winter months when rough seas often prevented their boats from leaving harbour. Because they also shipped tabu bark along the Inland Sea from Kyushu in the west to Sakai in the east, these fishermen already knew a little about incense production. Thereafter, they learned the basics from their contacts in Sakai and, with the help of some of the town’s workers who ‘defected’ to Awaji on the promise of higher wages, started to make basic cedar needle incenses, which they then shipped loose to the established firms in Sakai (position-taking). Therefore, Awaji’s production was subcontracted by Sakai’s manufacturers, and the cluster of producers on the island arose because local fishermen acted as go-betweens in the shipping of a local ingredient, tabu, rather than from their trading in raw materials per se, although they quickly used their boats to look for, find, and ship home many of those raw materials. As a result, between 1870 and 1900, at least fifteen manufacturers established themselves in and around Ei-ura. There were, however, some marked differences among these producers during these early decades of development. By the late 1870s, one manufacturer was buying up others’ incense, labelling it as a single product, and shipping it on his own boat to Kyushu on the western edge of the Inland Sea. In other words, local producers were allowing one of their number to brand and sell their produce as his own. Favourable economic conditions induced by the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars around the turn of the twentieth century then allowed other manufacturers to introduce their own product labels as the mechanisation of machinery hitherto powered by foot enabled them to embark on limited mass production (techno-material affordance). During the latter years of the Taisho- Period (1912–1926), two rather different marketing strategies emerged. Some manufacturers started to use fragrance in their incenses for the first time as they targeted an upmarket clientele. Others saw an opportunity to use new technology to make mosquito-repellent incense coils for mass consumption (representational affordance). It was for the latter that Eiura incense duly became well known throughout Japan. These different strategies reflected a form of vertical production, since fragrant incenses were – and still are – deemed ‘superior’ on account of the specialist knowledge that is required to blend olfactory materials (A list/B list). However, this superiority was clearly limited. In the years leading up to the Pacific War, manufacturers began to supply Osaka and Kobe retailers with branded goods whose labels were provided by the sellers, which meant that many of them were unable to maintain their individual identities or establish independence in the search for market openings (positions and position-taking). Awaji really came into its own as a manufacturing centre in the years following the end of the Pacific War, mainly because the city of Sakai was flattened by Allied

Incense

119

bombing and a number of the town’s firms relocated to the island. There were two main reasons for this move away from the port: space and ease of transportation. First, land was considerably cheaper on Awaji, so it was possible to purchase a comparatively large area for a reasonable price and build a factory on it, with ample room for drying and storing the incense (spatial affordance). Moreover, the local people lived in fairly large farmhouses, which meant they had sufficient room at home to undertake family-based piecework (naishoku) (social affordance). Second, it was comparatively easy for manufacturers to transport raw materials around the island. This was crucial to the development of Ei-ura and neighbouring Ichinomiya, because rapid transportation meant that producers could subcontract parts of the manufacturing process to smaller concerns without fear of delays. In addition, they could outsource the wrapping and packaging of the finished incense to local women who wished to supplement their regular household income. Finally, Awaji’s manufacturers were located within easy striking distance of the major port cities of Kobe and Osaka, as well as the island of Kyushu (spatial affordance). Sixteen firms have formed Hyo-go Prefectural Incense Cooperative (Hyo-goken Senko- Kyo-do- Kumiai) on Awaji, but these companies do not cooperate on any of the main tasks of incense manufacture: purchase of raw materials; kneading of those materials; forming; drying; packaging; distribution; or sales. They obtain their aromatic woods, resins, oils, and so on from a wide variety of sources – all of them in Japan and most of them in and around Osaka (unlike some larger firms which purchase materials from Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Vietnam, and India) – but there is no coordinated buying, and they all buy primarily for immediate use, with very little stockpiling. Similarly, each firm distributes its products along its own wholesale and retail routes to specific parts of Japan. There was a move in 2005 to sell ‘Awaji island incense’ in France as part of the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s ‘Japan Brand’ initiative to encourage overseas marketing of Japanese products, but this was very much a one-off, rather than the start of a new era of collaboration. As a result, while vertical relations between Awaji’s manufacturers and their suppliers are marked by cooperation, those between the manufacturers themselves are marked by competition. In other words, there is greater cooperation between Awaji and Sakai companies than there is on Awaji Island itself. So, why does the field of incense production continue to be marked by manufacturing clusters? One possible explanation has to do with land holdings, which tend to be rather small and scattered in Japan. Traditionally, the inhabitants of Eiura have subdivided their production processes because they have rarely had access to sufficient land to manufacture everything on one site. For example, a single producer might store raw materials in one building, knead them next door, then transport the kneaded materials to two other adjacent buildings five minutes’ walk away for forming and drying. Meanwhile, the firm’s owner might use part of his family home as an office, with another room set aside for his wife and an employee to sort and pack the finished incense into boxes. This division of tasks around the village is characteristic of even the largest incense manufacturer in Ei-ura. Viewed in this light, it could be said that subcontracting is merely a social mirror of practices enforced by traditional landholding patterns. If these patterns oblige a

120 Creative industries business owner to split up his production processes anyway, why not farm out those processes that he and his family, for one reason or another, do not particularly wish to do themselves?

Marketing incense The sole route by which an incense manufacturer can become independent of subcontracting arrangements and/or wholesaler relations is to develop and market a series of new products. This enables him to produce his own incenses, rather than rely on orders to make some other firm’s products, and then sell them directly to retail outlets rather than to wholesalers or large-scale manufacturers. To become independent, the head of a firm needs to think strategically, know the incense market well, and be sufficiently skilled to make new, desirable fragrances. Knowledge of the market is, of course, crucial. The strategic ability to spot an opportunity has enabled some Awaji firms to become more or less independent and thereby effect a shift from the third to the second stream (position-taking). As I said earlier, during Japan’s pre-modern period, incense was marketed primarily to two groups: Buddhist temples; and tea masters and ko-do- aficionados. At that time, what might be termed a leisure market did not exist. Manufacturers in Awaji initially produced standard pine-needle-scented incenses for burning during Buddhist rituals. However, they soon realised that there were two seasons when people burned a lot of incense − during the obon ancestors’ festival in mid-August and at New Year − while other periods throughout the year could be extremely slack in terms of demand (temporal affordance). This prompted two responses from manufacturers. First, they evened out their production over the year in order to meet the high demand during the mid-summer and year-end festivals. Second, they began to explore the possibilities of making non-Buddhist-related incenses with a variety of fragrant oils. In the two decades leading up to and following the Pacific War, leisure-related fragrant incenses accounted for no more than 40 per cent of total production. From the beginning of the 1970s, however, there was a marked increase in demand for scented products, so that by 1982 Awaji manufacturers were producing eight times more fragrant incense than they had in 1965 (and only a little less ceremonial incense). Over the course of those seventeen years, the ratio of Buddhist- to leisure-related products shifted from 62:38 to 7:93. It was by introducing new products to satisfy this marked change in consumer demand that some firms on Awaji were able to liberate themselves from the subcontracting relations to which they had hitherto been tied. Most of Awaji’s manufacturers, even those that primarily or exclusively supplied larger firms, had their own incense recipes, some of which had been handed down through the generations. These recipes provided those who were willing to take a risk and experiment with new fragrances with some basic principles on which to work. (That said, changing market tastes – especially the recent trend away from strong-smelling incense – meant that many of the resulting products were unsuccessful.) In order to come up with a new product, an incense manufacturer must

Incense

121

take three factors into consideration: price, concept, and image. The importance attached to each of these varies according to which end of the spectrum a firm occupies. For instance, an incense manufacturer’s decision to start with product concept or price is largely dictated by the size and stability of his firm, together with the quality of his product. Smaller companies manufacturing lower-end incense, like those on Awaji, tend to use price as their initial guideline, whereas larger firms producing high-end incense tend to start with product concept. The reason for this is fairly clear. The proportions of expensive aromatic materials used with the tabu fixative determine the price of each product. This means that, when a manufacturer decides to pitch a new mid-price product, he knows that he cannot incorporate too much of a particularly expensive material (like aloes or sandalwood), and what he must do to make up for any shortfall. Thus, to some extent at least, price determines the ingredients of every new product, and the proportions in which they are used. The incense blender then works within these financial and material constraints. It is this reliance on price – as opposed to concept or image – which can be said to distinguish firms of the second stream from those of the first. As noted above, in order to introduce new products, manufacturers must have intimate knowledge of their markets. The largest of these is the leisure market, which has continued to grow over the past four decades and now accounts for more than 90 per cent of total production in Japan. One challenge in the development of this market has been to overcome younger generations’ inherent aversion to incense used in Buddhist rites. The manufacturers have addressed this issue, first, by coining the term o-senko- (fragrant incense) to distinguish their leisure-related, ‘modern’ incenses from o-ko- (incense), which has connotations of the strong-smelling, plain incense that is still burned in temples and at ancestral shrines. Second, they have developed holders that allow an o-senko- incense stick to burn at an angle, as opposed to the traditional, vertical burning of o-ko-. Third, they make products that are more compatible with contemporary Japanese people’s lifestyles. Many of these incenses contain synthetic materials with subtler scents than the traditional ingredients, like aloes and sandalwood (although the latter are usually still included in the incense base), and some of them are smokeless, which makes them much more suitable for use in modern, virtually air-tight, and often cramped apartments. As part of this transition to new products, manufacturers have also introduced different stick lengths and widths, which they tint in ways that often reflect their olfactory content (mauve for lavender, pink for rose, and so on) (representational affordances). An incense manufacturer must take into account all of the variables of the production process (outlined earlier in this chapter) if he is to develop products that will sell and thereby gain independence from the subcontracting system. Most importantly, he must understand which materials complement one another, and how best to blend them: for example, cloves must be added at the start of the blending process and benzoin at the end. In addition, a blender must consider the relative strength of each oil, resin, wood, or plant and work out the proportions in which they are mixed so that the finished recipe generates a balanced and pleasant smell. Any man (and, in my experience, it is almost invariably a man) who knows how to do all this, and then packages, brands, and markets his products

122 Creative industries

Figure 6.4 New-style incense holders

successfully, may well escape the constraints of subcontracting and turn his business into a first-stream company.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have provided a detailed ethnographic account of how incense in made on Awaji Island. Now it is time to reflect on whether Japanese incense production falls fairly and squarely within Richard Caves’s analyses of the economic properties of creative industries, and whether it fits with Howard Becker’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories. By now, it should be abundantly clear that the Japanese incense industry constitutes one of Bourdieu’s fields of cultural production. This particular field consists of three different levels of manufacturers (first, second, and third stream), various types of retailers (from independent shops to department stores), wholesalers, and suppliers of raw materials as well as autonomous associations, cooperatives, and local and national government authorities. Within it, position-takers jostle for position – in particular, third-stream subcontracted producers, who develop and market their own products as a means to gain independence as second- or even first-stream firms. In the process, all firms are engaged in exchanges of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital. The greater a firm’s product diversity, the greater its cultural

Incense

123

and symbolic capital, which is then converted into economic capital – primarily through the introduction of new recipes (intellectual capital). Manufacturers that escape from the subcontracting system and become independent gain respect, while those that subcontract their work to other firms gain social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Symbolic capital applies to products and clients as well as to manufacturing processes. The firms that supply high-quality incense to famous Buddhist temples in, for example, Kyo-to and Nara gain considerably more prestige than those that make mosquito coils for use in the home. Both production and sales rely on interpersonal networks between different companies and/or retail outlets. Therefore, the field of incense production also complies with Becker’s argument that art worlds – as well as other creative worlds like fashion and music – are characterised by networks of people (and organisations) cooperating. Making incense is a collective activity in which seemingly separate stages of conception, execution, and support in terms of both materials and personnel are necessary. Finally, incense is marked by critical appreciation, both in the training of blenders and in the art of ko-do-. So, Japanese incense production seems to accord with the theories of both Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker. But what of Richard Caves’s analysis? Should incense production be classed as a ‘creative’ – or merely a ‘cultural’ – industry? First, manufacturing a stick of incense is nowhere near as complex as making a film or staging a fashion show. Music, too, is by no means a simple form of creative production, as the earlier discussion of K-pop clearly reveals (see Chapter 4). In marked contrast to all of these industries, incense production needs no largescale organisations to provide a steady supply of highly trained personnel. Instead, apprentices are trained in-house, on the job. Of course, apprenticeships are also a feature of more complex forms of cultural production, but in such cases they are almost invariably backed up by certification through formal education in specialist fashion, film, art, or music schools. Second, although different forms of cultural production tend to involve numerous small firms, incense production may be considered a special case in that there is only one large corporation making and subcontracting the manufacture of incense in Japan, with the bulk of cultural production carried out by small, familyrun firms. Moreover, many people working in the sector, especially women, do not have full-time employment; rather, they are taken on temporarily as ‘humdrum workers’ as and when their services are needed. This is a characteristic of many industrial sectors in Japan. Third, incense production meets most, but not all, of Caves’s ‘bedrock properties’. The way in which manufacturers are organised into first, second, and third streams clearly fits Caves’s A list/B list economic property, as does the ranking of products (from temple incense to mosquito coils). However, incense production in Japan does not encourage a celebrity or star system of the kind we find in film, music, and other CCI. In other words, A list/B list does not extend to individual personalities in incense production. This is significant because, as I will argue in a later chapter, stardom is the one feature that is found equally in all creative industries.

124 Creative industries Nevertheless, with Caves, we may say that the Japanese incense industry has the potential to create an infinite variety of products and put them on the market. Moreover, there is certainly an element of uncertainty regarding the success of any new product, and thus what Caves terms ‘symmetrical ignorance’ regarding its future value (nobody knows). However, we should recognise that this is true of all commodities, to some extent at least. Although the exact ratio is disputed, it is reasonable to suggest that somewhere between 40 and 80 per cent of all new products fail each year. This calls into question Caves’s inclusion of nobody knows as an economic property that is specific to creative and cultural industries, although we should accept that failure rates in these industries are at the higher end of the figures just quoted. Another of Caves’s properties, time flies, is similarly problematic, since it is clear that, although some incenses are seasonal and must therefore be on stores’ shelves in time for the obon festival, New Year, and even Valentine’s Day, for the most part production follows standard procedures found in the manufacture of other commodities, like soaps and detergents, that are not considered creative industries. In other words, the production of incense is subject to time constraints that are found in all industries, not just CCI. The fact that workers (other than part-time female employees) are employed permanently means that time flies is not an issue when drafting contracts. In most CCI, contracts – whether between artist and gallery owner, pop singer and record label, or novelist and publisher – are very important. By contrast, in incense production, they are not, mainly because production is not divided into numerous individual projects in the way that films, music albums, fashion collections, and advertising campaigns are. As a result, workers do not need to be hired under specific contracts. The skills found in an incense factory are constant, as are the group dynamics of the employees. This also affects the part played by the motley crew, in that the employees’ various skills are deployed successively, at each stage of the production process, rather than simultaneously, as in a film or recording studio. Finally, there are the combined issues of creativity (art for art’s sake) and copyright (ars longa). Although individual incense blenders are clearly creative in the ways in which they formulate new recipes, there is little of the ‘creative intensity’ that one finds in the fashion, film, and music industries. Similarly, although they clearly take pride in their work, blenders do not collect royalties or rents on the fragrances they manufacture and market. One reason for this is that the natural materials they use are not consistent from one bulk purchase to the next. Another reason is that, as with the manufacture of perfumes, the formula of every new incense builds on those that have preceded it. As a result, it is very difficult to set a recipe in stone and patent it as ‘original’. This means that it is virtually impossible to prove infringement of copyright. As in the fashion industry, copyright is asserted in the design of brands, not by combining materials in a novel way. If the Japanese incense industry does not exhibit all seven of the economic properties that Caves suggests define CCI, is his theory wrong? Or is it simply that incense production is not a creative industry – in contrast to the fashion, film, music, and publishing industries?

Incense

125

I think it is fair to say that incense-making is a cultural, rather than a creative, business, not least because there is no real opposition between ‘art’ and ‘money’ (art for art’s sake) in the incense industry. Moreover, its successful products tend to be manufactured on an ongoing basis over long periods of time. In other words, market uncertainty (nobody knows), deadlines (time flies), and on-the-spot improvisation by employees working together on a single project (motley crew) are not significant aspects of incense-making, whereas they are in the fashion, film, music, and other truly creative industries. On the other hand, the incense market does have a dual structure of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ goods (Buddhist temple, leisure, and mosquito coils), which, as I have noted earlier, is characteristic of all CCI. Overall, though, the production of incense is more like the manufacture of ‘bespoke’ luxury chocolates, folk craft pottery, or designer chairs – it comprises a cultural, rather than a strictly creative, industry.

References Bedini, Silvio A. (1994) The Trail of Time: Time Measurement and Incense in East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Rodney (1979) The Japanese Company. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott (1994) Aroma. London and New York: Routledge. Gerlach, Michael (1992) Alliance Capitalism: The Social Organization of Japanese Business. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kyo-iku I’inkai, Ichinomiya (1989) Ichinomiya no Kaori. Kobe: Bunkyo- Shoin Insatsubu. Moeran, Brian (2007) ‘Marketing scents and the anthropology of smell’. Social Anthropology 15 (2): 153–168. Moeran, Brian (2009) ‘Making scent of smell: manufacturing and consuming incense in Japan’. Human Organization 68 (4): 439–450. Morita, Kiyoko (1992) The Book of Incense: Enjoying the Traditional Art of Japanese Scents. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International. Morris, Ivan (1969) The World of the Shining Prince. Harmondsworth: Peregrine.

Part III

Marketing creativity

In Part I of this book, we looked at three different, but overlapping, ways in which different forms of cultural production have been theorised. Then, in Part II, I explored three CCI – music, fashion, and incense – and explained how we might apply these theoretical understandings to each industry’s structure and practices. At the same time, I made use of Erving Goffman’s frame analysis in my discussion of fashion shows. Now, in the final part of this book, I will turn my attention to the marketing of creativity. The three chapters presented here are closely interrelated. In Chapter 7, I outline my understanding of what a market is. By focusing on how every market is made up of people, institutions, and commodities, I will draw comparisons with Bourdieu’s concept of field. At the same time, by focusing on the difference between singular value (expressed in price) and plural values (expressed in terms of aesthetics, social relations, space, time, materials, and technology as well as money), I will suggest that CCI markets are symbolic rather than purely economic. This distinction parallels the point I have already made that pop songs, fashion collections, manga comics, video games, and so on are both cultural products and commodities. This emerges again in my discussion of fairs and festivals (Chapter 8), where purely business matters are intermixed with carnival-like activities in which values other than price play an important part in business-to-business (B2B) relations. In this respect, as I demonstrate, fairs and festivals are ‘tournaments of values’ in which various corporations and individuals exchange social, cultural, intellectual, symbolic, and economic capital. At the same time, however, precisely because fairs and festivals act as frames to bring together all kinds of industry players, they may be said to represent a field of fashion, film, music, television, and so on. In other words, they are also ‘field configuring events’. Finally, in Chapter 9, I look at the role played by celebrities in different forms of cultural production. While the economic properties of art and music, film and fashion, publishing and advertising tend to differ considerably from one another in their emphases, all forms of cultural production – with the exception, as previously mentioned, of incense-making – make full use of celebrities, primarily to overcome the nobody knows aspect of creative markets. I show how, in the East Asian region in particular, celebrities are deployed in a variety of related media to promote cultural goods and ensure the stability of their markets. In this respect, the study DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-10

128 Marketing creativity of celebrities is a study of names – a theme I explore further in the Conclusion to this book. In short, the way in which celebrities are used in all forms of cultural production to sustain markets for creative goods and services constitutes a name economy.

7

Markets

An intra-Asian market for creative and cultural goods and services can be said to have emerged in the East Asian region in the mid- to late 1990s. If you were to look up any evening’s television entertainment in a Hong Kong newspaper from that period, you would generally find the territory’s Chineselanguage stations airing programmes with titles like Mask Rider Black, Tekkaman Blade, Chibimanko-chan, and Japanese Idol Theatre. Many of these were dubbed into Cantonese and featured creative products from Japan’s animation industry (for example, Doraemon, Sailor Moon, Dr Slump, Captain Tsuga, and Dragonball). These also appeared in manga comic-book form, with Sailor Moon translated as Mei Siu Neoi Zin Si, Dragon Z as Lung Jiu Z, and Slam Dunk as Lam Yi Tong Yap Cheung. The creators of these characters – including Tezuka Osamu, Fujiko Fujio, and Takahashi Rumiko − were household names among Hong Kong fans, and the characters themselves decorated (and still do, of course) everything from pencil cases and stationery to baby sponges, towels, and other domestic products to create ‘image alliances’ as part of the marketing of popular culture. Twenty years later, the East Asian craze for Japanese popular culture has broadened into an intra-Asian market for all sorts of creative cultural products from Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China as well as Japan and Hong Kong. As we saw in Chapter 4, Asian audiences now enjoy K-pop, J-pop, Mandopop, and Cantopop. They also watch Korean TV dramas like Dae Jang Geum and Love in the Moonlight, and films by such renowned directors as Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Ang Lee, Takeshi Kitano, and Bong Joon-ho. Many of these directors’ films (together with Korean TV dramas and K-pop, Japanese fashions, anime and manga, and other popular East Asian cultural products) have also become well known to audiences in North America and Europe, not least because of the sizeable immigrant populations in those regions (such as Koreans in the United States, and Indian and Chinese communities in the United Kingdom). Although this is not the place to discuss the globalisation of Asian cultural products, we do need to keep this in mind as we look at what a market is, and at how producers and audiences interact in the consumption of creative works. DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-11

130 Marketing creativity

A market of singularities All forms of cultural production take place within what we call a market economy. An artist produces a painting that is sold for a price that the market will bear. Typically, he works alone, although he may share studio space with other artists. He may deal directly with clients from his studio or set up a stand at an art fair, but for the most part he will rely on the services of a private gallery or art dealer to sell his work – usually to private collectors, but sometimes to other art galleries, auction houses, or museums. The artist must pay a commission (sometimes as much as 60 per cent of the price) on every sale, and the asking price will depend on his reputation, the medium in which he works, and the subject matter. For all the cultural importance of the works of art that are bought and sold by private individuals and public institutions, the art market is a private, for-profit system that functions within the market economy. The market economy is a social system in which goods and services (films, fashion, and freelance personnel, for example) are bought and sold. Sellers offer these goods and services in return for payment, and buyers purchase the items they want by paying for them. Trade takes place when buyer and seller agree on a price. Prices are usually determined by a combination of the quantity of goods offered by the seller and the buyer’s willingness and ability to pay for them. In some countries or specific contexts (a second-hand market, for example), buyer and seller will haggle over the asking price, but for the most part prices are fixed. A price need not be a sum of money, however. For instance, a product or service might be exchanged for another in a swap or barter. This happens quite regularly in the creative industries, where freelance personnel might work on a particular job for very little money in the expectation that they will be rewarded in some other way. Fashion models, for example, often agree to do a photo shoot for little or no money in exchange for a couple of items from the designer’s latest collection. As we will see later in more detail, they might also appear in a magazine spread for very little reward in the hope that this will generate interest and lead to a lucrative contract with a prestigious fashion house like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, or Chanel. (In the early 2000s, a model appearing in the fashion pages of US Vogue received only US$150 a day, plus a bonus of US$300 if she featured on the front cover. By contrast, the ‘face’ of a leading brand could expect to earn anything from US$100,000 to US$1.5 million.) Strictly speaking, fashion, film, art, manga, and so on operate in what Lucien Karpik (2010) has called ‘a market of singularities’. Every fashion model is perceived to be different from every other fashion model; every anime different from every other animated film; every painting different from every other painting; every wine appellation different from every other appellation (infinite variety). As a result, each cannot be measured against the others in the way that economists have constructed their understanding of the market economy. The market of singularities exists because, as I pointed out earlier, creative goods are both cultural products and commodities. They contain within them multidimensional qualities: a film has a storyline, cinematography, actors, special

Markets

131

effects, music, costume, direction, editing, and so on that are not, and can never be, precisely replicated in any other film. (Even if this were possible, consumers would not go and see it.) All of these qualities are uncertain, in the sense that nobody knows in advance what will please the members of an audience who lack the producers’ knowledge. This means that consumers need help – formally, by means of critical judgements published in newspapers, magazines, and other media, and informally, through word of mouth (often by way of social media). As a result, it is not price competition that prevails in a market of singularities, but (perceived) quality competition. In addition to the fact that CCI markets tend to operate rather differently from other markets, we should not forget that they are often inflected with local cultural peculiarities. Markets in Japan, for example, often deviate from the norm of perfect competition espoused by Western economists because of their long-term, intricately nested, and socially embedded sets of relationships among buyers and sellers (see Chapter 6). The media market, for instance, consists of interlocking shareholding among various newspaper companies, television channels, and radio stations, which form competing groups, each of which shares and adjusts its print and broadcast content in perpetual competition with the others. In other words, Japanese (and Korean) markets are characterised by strategic alliance structures (keiretsu and chaebol) that are rarely found in European or North American markets. The ideals that underpin East Asian markets also differ from those in the West. For example, Confucian culture – which is based on interpersonal relationships, rather than the kind of impersonal market espoused by Western economists – has informed Japanese and Chinese understandings of how a market should work. Moreover, in addition to promoting CCI in general, the governments of Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan have played active roles in determining how each individual creative or cultural industry should be developed and when.

What is a market? The fact that prices for cultural goods and services are not determined first and foremost by supply and demand leads to the question: what is a market? Is it – as economists insist – an abstract economic model that allows communication between individual buyers and sellers on the basis of assumptions relating to choice, competition, and efficiency? Does it refer merely to the competitive and impersonal trade of goods, services, and money? My answer – and it is one that would be given by most economic sociologists and anthropologists – is an emphatic ‘no’. Economic activity is always profoundly social, even when seemingly impersonal. Competition, for example, is a social relationship between two or more actors aiming for an end that cannot be immediately achieved. As I will show later, other mechanisms – besides price and exchange – shape every market: interpersonal relations, for example, and symbolic evaluations affect the price at which a good or service is exchanged. Markets are also frames for social interaction where offers are evaluated and priced, and compete with one another. In other words, they are arenas of social interaction for the exchange of goods and services, and thus

132 Marketing creativity consist of communities of products, institutions, and individuals, where goods and services create, mediate, and maintain social relationships. This is obvious in the case of physical markets and, as we will see in the following chapter, trade fairs. But it is also true of financial markets and virtual markets like Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay. But does such interaction take place among rational, calculating actors, as economic theorists insist? Or do other factors come into play when participants have to reach decisions under conditions in which they are uncertain of the best option? Clearly, what passes for rationality plays a greater part in some markets than it does in others. The approach to markets that I will adopt here focuses on how actors within a particular social world or field try to match their evaluations of cultural goods with the prices attached to them. These evaluations may be in part rational, but they are also often emotional. How else can one explain the sale of Damien Hirst’s poorly stuffed shark to US hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen for US$8 million? Markets emerge and are sustained because of two questions that underpin all market exchanges. The first of these is: how much does it cost? The second is: how much is it worth? These questions are not the same: the first concerns price; the second concerns values other than price. Competition arises because people measure price and worth in different ways. Neither is intrinsic to a particular cultural good. Rather, both are influenced by extrinsic factors. You can see this very clearly by looking at artworks and fashion brands. The price of a painting by Picasso or Cezanne bears no relation to the cost of the materials that were used to create it. Similarly, in the case of Hirst’s infamous stuffed shark, the artist received almost US$70,000 from Charles Saatchi, who commissioned the artwork. He then paid a fisherman US$8,000 for the shark itself, and an undisclosed sum to have it preserved in formaldehyde and installed in a glass case. The remainder was pure profit for Hirst. As the English tabloid newspaper the Sun exclaimed: ‘£50,000 [US$68,160] for fish without chips!’ Twelve years later, Cohen purchased the piece from Saatchi for almost 120 times the latter’s original outlay. The same is true of a Chanel perfume or Louis Vuitton handbag. There is no obvious relation between the cost of materials and labour, on the one hand, and the retail price, on the other. Yet, fashion aficionados are willing to pay more than US$2,700 for a plastic Louis Vuitton handbag, or US$320 for a 30-millilitre bottle of Chanel No. 5 that costs considerably less than US$15 to manufacture. In order to understand this apparent paradox, we need to distinguish between the different kinds of evaluation we make when assessing the price and worth of cultural goods.

A field of values All forms of socio-economic behaviour – as well as everything we say, the expressions we use, and the judgements we make – are motivated and underpinned by evaluations of one kind or another. The same may be said, too, of all the objects

Markets

133

that we find, make, and use in our daily lives. A pebble on the beach has no value until I pick it up, take it home, and use it as a paperweight or an ornament on my windowsill. For some people, a painting of a jumble of squares, rectangles, and triangles found in the attic is something that a six-year-old might have drawn and should be thrown away. Others might recognise it as an early Cubist masterpiece by Picasso that is worth US$100 million. Everything is in the eye of the beholder. This means that any study of a particular culture – whether of its social organisation, economic structure, religious beliefs, artistic forms, legal system, or other phenomena – is a study of the values held by people living in that culture and the evaluations they make of other people, events, deeds, words, and viewpoints. In this sense, values constitute our socio-cultural beliefs and moral principles – the criteria by which we judge or evaluate what is worthwhile in our daily lives. Economists tend to ignore this fact. For example, they talk about value in the singular when discussing how a market sets the price for a particular good or service. So far as they are concerned, value relates to economic utility, price, and the worth that individuals and social groups assign to commodities in the market. In its singular form, then, value has been examined principally as a means towards equating the ‘inherent’ qualities of commodities with their quantitative worth. In short, value equals price. Sociologists disagree with this viewpoint. They argue that you cannot explain market trade solely in terms of calculation, costs, benefits, profits, prices, and utility in the way that economists do. Other factors, such as discrimination, taste (good, bad, and no), authenticity, and the test of time (vintage, antique, patina), are also needed to explain why things are as they are and why people see them in the ways that they do. These values (plural) contribute to, but are more than, price. In other words, there is a ‘double discourse’ of value/values at work: the former is concerned with money, commerce, technology, industry, production, and consumption, together with the people engaged therein; the latter take into account culture, art, status, and other forms of non-monetary appreciation. Therefore, if we are to understand why a woman is prepared to pay thousands of dollars for a plastic handbag, or an art collector millions of dollars for a stuffed shark, we need to look beyond cost benefits and price and consider the values of both consumers and the professional groups that occupy particular structural positions in creative fields or worlds. Actors, for example, see their work differently from costume designers, cinematographers, and stage hands. Yet, all of these professionals have to negotiate their diverse understandings of ‘good’ work in order to complete a film successfully (motley crew). Moreover, these understandings will differ, at least to some degree, from those held by those doing ‘good’ work in the publishing, fashion, or video games industry. We need, then, to consider how people negotiate among themselves the exact meaning of particular values in different contexts, and how, as a result, values motivate social behaviour. Is an actress’s performance based solely on her own interpretation of the script, the director’s instructions, or some combination of the two? How much is she influenced by her fellow actors on the set? How much does

134 Marketing creativity the director amend his vision of a particular scene because of the way in which the actress interprets it? Both director and actors are continually evaluating who is doing what, when, and how, and adapting their own actions accordingly. This negotiation of values occurs in almost every form of cultural production (although not in incense-making, as noted in Chapter 6). We also need to think about out how qualitative values are converted into quantitative value, and how the latter has an effect on the evaluation of quality (or values) (exchanges of cultural, social, symbolic, and economic capital). For instance, just as a Picasso painting invariably commands a high price, a high estimate for another artwork suggests that the artist must be well known (even though he may not be Picasso). Similarly, just as an unblemished diamond ring will fetch thousands of dollars, an equally high price tag indicates that the stones in another ring are not cubic zirconia (especially if the ring is on display in Tiffany’s window). It is this balancing of values with value that gives rise to an estimation of worth. When I discussed the activities of creative worlds in Chapter 2, I talked about the different constraints, or affordances, that affect creativity in various forms of cultural production. I suggested that all forms of cultural production engage with circuits of affordances in order to function effectively and that these circuits consist of techno-material, temporal, spatial, social, representational, and economic affordances. These allow the people who work in CCI to interact with one another in particular conventional ways as they negotiate a recognised understanding and agreement about what makes ‘good’ work. Each circuit of affordances also marks a clear boundary between different creative worlds. I now want to take this argument further and apply it to markets, and thus consumers, rather than just producers. In order for a consumer to decide whether she will buy a designer dress, attend a rock concert, or bid at an art auction, she must take into account all kinds of factors that are not obviously connected to the price she is willing (or unwilling) to pay. These considerations are her evaluations of the circumstances surrounding her interest in a particular fashion item, musical performance, or work of art: in other words, the values that are linked to her disposition, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, which she brings to bear when engaging in any market transaction. Just as all forms of creative work are enmeshed in a circuit of affordances, every market transaction is made within a field of values. These values are largely the same as the affordances that affect creativity, with the exception of one: the uses to which we put the commodities we buy (something which, for creative people, is more in the realm of techno-material affordances). We make the following types of evaluations:       

techno-material; spatial; temporal;1 appreciative/aesthetic; social; use; and commodity/economic.

Markets

135

Figure 7.1 A field of values

Let me illustrate how a field of values works in everyday life. Suppose the vice-chancellor of your university has invited you to a reception at his residence one evening in July in honour of a visiting scholar. You immediately ask yourself: what shall I wear? If you are a woman, you may feel obliged to buy a new dress (or, if you are a man, a new suit), because nothing in your wardrobe will suffice for such a special occasion (use value). But what style should you buy? Clearly, the fact that the reception will take place in the evening (temporal value) at the vice-chancellor’s official residence (spatial value, social value) means that you must wear something formal, possibly in a dark colour (appreciative/aesthetic value, temporal value, use value), but your outfit should probably be made of cotton or some other light material (techno-material value) to ensure comfort on a warm summer’s evening (temporal value). In addition, it should be sufficiently ‘special’ to make you look and feel good while also, ideally, impressing the other guests (appreciative/aesthetic value, social value). All these factors will affect the amount you are prepared to pay (economic value) for the kind of outfit you require (commodity/economic value) to attend the reception in what you perceive as a ‘presentable’ manner (social value, appreciative/aesthetic value). We make similar calculations and take similar considerations into account when evaluating an artwork, deciding whether to attend a concert, or choosing which film to see this weekend. The question we ask ourselves in such transactions is always the same: is it worth our while spending this amount of money on that product? Some people insist that spending US$1,000 on a pair of Christian Louboutin Glennalta platform shoes, or US$4,500 on a Chanel classic double-flap handbag, is ‘cheap at twice the price’; others will argue that such prices are a ‘rip

136 Marketing creativity off’. Some people think nothing of paying US$200 to attend a pop concert; others prefer to stay at home and watch it for free on television. We are constantly evaluating what is or is not worth the price we are being asked to pay in terms of how we intend to use a particular item, on what occasions, and in what contexts, its constituent parts, what it looks like, how it fits in with our social lives, and so on and so forth. Whenever we consider making a purchase, we juxtapose values with value to see if they balance each other out. Together, these different values (based on evaluations) constitute different criteria for the way we estimate and value a price (valuation). They form a field that influences our selection of various cultural products. We are sometimes influenced by an object’s beauty; or by its utility, craftsmanship, or brand (and associated social status). We weigh up the different aspects of technical/material, social, situational, appreciative, and use values of every cultural product and try to calculate their combined symbolic exchange value, which we then test against an economic criterion – money or price. Does this porcelain vase have one too many zeros on its price tag? On closer inspection, is the dress that drew us into the store somewhat ‘cheap and nasty’ and therefore unsuitable for what we had in mind? If the asking price meets our symbolic exchange evaluation, and we decide to purchase a little black dress by Chanel, a Ming vase, or a photographic print of ‘Approaching Shadow’ by the Hong Kong street photographer Fan Ho, then we have engaged in what might be termed commodity exchange value. Although some values may be given more emphasis than others (a fashion model’s social recommendations rather than her appreciated beauty per se, or an artist’s technical skills rather than his finished work), it is here that quality meets quantity, culture meets economy, and values are converted into value. In this respect, a field of values consists of two intersecting circles. On the one hand, there is the price we are prepared to pay for a cultural good (commodity exchange); on the other, there are the different values, besides price, that we bring to bear on whether something is, or is not, worth the asking price (symbolic exchange). It is only when our evaluation of techno-material, spatial, temporal, appreciative/aesthetic, social, and use values matches our evaluation of price (economic or commodity exchange value) that we actually buy something. This is what markets are all about.

Experience economy It should be clear by now that, while I have hitherto talked about CCI and different forms of cultural production from the standpoint of those employed in the fashion, film, music, and other similar industries, this chapter takes into account the consumers of cultural goods and services, and thus the dynamics of the judgement of taste. Creative goods are consumed in a social context, not by isolated individuals. As hinted earlier, taste is as much social as appreciative. We take pleasure in attending a pop concert as much for the atmosphere of all the other people in the audience as to enjoy the star’s songs. We discuss books or magazines with friends in a coffee shop. When we buy artworks and hang them on the wall of our

Markets

137

house or apartment, we do so for ourselves, of course, but we also anticipate the pleasure others will get from them (and, doubtless, the social respect they will pay us) when they visit our home. One key feature of the consumption of creative goods, then, is the experience we get from them. Ultimately, the criteria by which we evaluate whether to go and see a particular film or buy a particular designer dress (symbolic exchange value) can be summed up as the experience we anticipate in so doing. As a result, many CCI and other industries orchestrate memorable events (like a rock concert, film festival, or art auction) for participants who remember them as ‘experiences’. This has been called the ‘experience economy’, which – according to the original authors of the idea, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmour – has taken over from earlier agrarian, industrial, and service economies, and includes sectors outside the CCI, like tourism, education, and urban planning (Pine and Gilmour, 1999). Precisely because people who consume cultural goods and services do so within a market of singularities, they interpret, evaluate, judge, and calculate each product on the basis of its symbolic value and the experience that it offers in exchange for a particular sum of money. The problem, however, is that no two people will ever make exactly the same evaluations of the product in question (nobody knows), even if they share similar class and educational backgrounds. This means that, in addition to the experience they seek to gain from a cultural good or service, consumers make use of education and cultural training (or capital) to inform their final decision. In other words, they rely on taste (appreciative/aesthetic value). Unfortunately, taste is notoriously difficult to explain. A lover of Beethoven’s music cannot understand how anyone can claim to like pop or rock; a fashion aficionado will spend thousands of dollars on a Dolce & Gabbana cocktail dress, but refuse to buy anything by a rival high-end designer, let alone contemplate shopping at H&M or Uniqlo. Some consumers are extremely knowledgeable about baroque music or jazz; others just like listening to it from time to time; yet others have no idea what you are talking about, but ‘know what they like’ when they hear it. As a result, there is a whole range of tastes that different forms of cultural production need to consider (infinite variety). All forms of cultural production, then, attract audiences whose members have diverse levels of involvement in what is produced for them. Those who are most involved are serious fans – or, in Caves’s term, ‘buffs’ – who cultivate extensive knowledge of a particular creative activity and may also possess some training in or experience of it (like an amateur violinist who attends classical music concerts or a painter who visits art exhibitions). In this sense, they are investing in cultural capital. The viewpoint and interests of such fans are usually quite close to those of the practising musicians, artists, critics, and others who are professionally involved. In other words, their evaluations (techno-material, aesthetic, situational, and so on values) are similar to those of the producers of the cultural good in question. They also tend to emphasise some values over others (techno-material and aesthetic, for example, over social and situational) in the same way. So, a film buff will pay close attention to how a film is directed and edited, and to the special effects that are

138 Marketing creativity used. A classical music buff will listen to how a conductor interprets a score and manages the different sections of his orchestra. And an art buff will look closely at the brush strokes, colour palette, and composition of a famous artist’s work. Buffs are interested in how a particular creative problem is solved; in the execution of a performance; in the relationships of form, content, and mood. In this respect, they are very much oriented towards the creators of different forms of cultural production, and their tastes are defined primarily by production values. Compared with serious fans’ intensive involvement in fashion, jazz, anime, and so on, the larger and more general audience for cultural goods and services is less engaged, and less likely to have had any formal training or exposure to the viewpoint of the creative talent. This general audience – which may still include lesser fans of one sort or another – is primarily attracted by the effect of a musical, artistic, or other performance, rather than the technical expertise that produces it. In other words, taste depends on – and is satisfied first and foremost by – experience, rather than the accumulation of cultural capital. Creative industries’ products, then, are in very large part experience goods. Because the buyer cannot accurately gauge the qualities of a particular creative product before committing herself to consuming it – for example, by reading a book, seeing a film, or hearing a piece of music – she has to rely on whatever sources of information are available to her in order to guide her decision. One of these is the advertising and other forms of promotion (mainly in traditional media like newspapers, radio, and television, but also increasingly social media) generated by sellers. This kind of information is designed to align a creative product with consumer taste (nobody knows), but there is only so much hard information that it can convey, and it is usually limited to the general style and contents of the product in question, together with its key participants in the case of a performing art. Consumers need more than this if they are to realise their expectations about the experience they are seeking. As a result, they also rely, to varying degrees, on critics and other certifiers who are (or present themselves as) independent, neutral, and objective assessors of creative goods. Critics’ opinions are useful because they have already seen a film, read a novel, or listened to a music album, so they can provide potential consumers with an account of their own experience as well as further details about the product’s contents and performers. On the other hand, their taste may differ from that of a particular consumer. Richard Caves’s nobody knows property applies to the consumption of creative works as well as to their production. Some critics appeal to the serious fan – or buff – by positioning a creative work vis-à-vis similar works and evaluating it according to specific techno-material, aesthetic, and other values. This is particularly true of ‘high’ cultural forms like fine art, literary fiction, and classical music. Other critics writing for less involved audiences are more likely to consider those consumers’ preferences and simply offer advice on whether they will, or will not, enjoy the work in question. This kind of criticism is generally found among ‘lower’ cultural forms such as pop music, fashion, films, and romance novels, although any one of these may produce creative works that aspire to a higher cultural status. In other words, in the first

Markets

139

instance, critics appeal to consumers’ investment in cultural capital, while, in the second, they satisfy their quest for experiences.

Symbolic markets The fact that creative goods are both cultural products and commodities, which gives rise to their consumption in terms of both cultural capital and experience, not only informs the market of singularities but frequently creates two distinct types of market within a single industry. The editor of a fashion magazine, for example, will organise photographs and text to illustrate the latest catwalk collections and promote the season’s fashions. The publishing side of the magazine, however, is exclusively focused on soliciting and securing advertisements, which are placed in and around the features. The editor tries to attract as many readers as possible on the basis of the magazine’s cultural content. The advertising department wants to attract advertisers and sells the magazine’s readers to potential clients who are interested in reaching the largest possible audience for the least outlay via their advertisements. It is here that magazine as commodity takes precedence over magazine as cultural product in business decisions. As I pointed out earlier, even a title with more than a million regular subscribers may go out of business if it is unable to attract advertising. These parallel markets have been labelled ‘commercial’ and ‘aesthetic’, although terms like ‘status’ and ‘prestige’ have also been used for the latter. This is where my model of values is particularly useful. The economic – or commercial – is opposed not simply to the aesthetic or status aspects of a market transaction, but to both simultaneously. Every transaction also involves other kinds of evaluation, so cultural production’s two types of market should, I think, be termed ‘commercial’ and ‘symbolic’. Creative works operate within both commercial and symbolic markets. A neat example of how a field of cultural production is divided in this way can be seen in Ashley Mears’s (2011) discussion of what she calls the ‘prestige’ (editorial) and ‘mass market’ (commercial) spheres of fashion modelling, which are distinct but overlap as players in each share different measures of success and value. Fashion magazine editors, on the one hand, and commercial retailers, on the other, have their own distinct understandings of good taste, good work, and fair payment. They disagree totally, for example, about what constitutes a model’s ‘look’. They also have very different interpretations of the value of money. What, then, is a model’s ‘look’? Mears argues that it is divided between what people in the business call ‘edgy’ (primarily for catwalk and magazine models) and ‘soft’ or ‘classic’ (primarily for those who are photographed for catalogues). Photographs of magazine models are mainly produced for other producers in the fashion world, while those of catalogue models are used to attract mass market consumers. ‘Edgy’ models receive relatively little payment for their work but gain considerable symbolic capital, whereas ‘classic’ models are symbolically worthless but earn steady, above-average incomes that also keep their agencies in business (economic capital).

140 Marketing creativity In other words, a model who takes home a few hundred dollars for a magazine shoot will consider another model’s much larger earnings for a department store catalogue as virtually ‘worthless’. This is because, by modelling in the pages of a fashion magazine, the first model will hope to be noticed by one of the great fashion houses and contracted as their ‘face’ in an advertising campaign for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars – an unimaginable level of income for even the busiest catalogue models. Fashion models, editors, agency bookers, and advertising clients in the fashion field, then, all compete for better positions in what amounts to a symbolic – rather than a simply commercial – market. We find a similar distinction between commercial and symbolic markets in other forms of cultural production. For example, Ana Alacˇ ovska (2013) has described how the authors of guidebooks are paid to visit particular tourist destinations and write about them within the confines of an extremely strict format laid out by the publisher. As a result, the writers find it extremely hard to include any of their own subjective experiences when giving details of a particular restaurant, hotel, shopping mall, or landmark, since they must conform to a house style that prioritises facts over emotions. Moreover, guidebook writing is very poorly paid. Nevertheless, many an aspiring travel (as opposed to guidebook) writer has been willing to engage in such work in the expectation that it will eventually enable her to publish an uncensored, personal account of her travels. The latter book may or may not sell, but either way the writer can be content that she has created something worthwhile, rather than simply fulfil a publisher’s remit (art for art’s sake). We find similar distinctions in the work undertaken by stone carvers, photographers, potters, and numerous other creative workers, so the markets in which they operate also exhibit this dual structure. Stone carvers and sculptors work freely or to commissions, but they tend to have plenty of leeway for individual interpretation and creativity, whereas letterers are restricted to carving letters (often on tombstones). Although extremely skilled in what they do, the latter are obliged to follow their clients’ instructions. (One can hardly alter a memorial inscription just to please oneself!) Similarly, advertising photographers do not have the symbolic cachet of fashion or art photographers (although either of the latter may photograph an advertising campaign for an elite client as part of their quest for symbolic status in the world of photography). Potters, too, can stick to turning out identical handcrafted crockery for use in the kitchen or on the dining table, or they can ‘upgrade’ themselves to ‘ceramicists’ and make ‘one-off’ porcelain sculptures or tea ceremony wares. These examples show the ongoing tension in different forms of cultural production between making money and creating ‘art’. This is not to suggest that each market is divided simply between money and creative ideals. Rather, as I suggested earlier, different participants in a creative world bring different sets of values to bear at different points in a creative work’s path from production to consumption. This is mainly because they have different expectations in mind when considering what the final form or use of that work will be. A fashion designer, for example, views an item of clothing somewhat differently from either a film star who is

Markets

141

looking for a photo opportunity or a cost-conscious buyer. Whereas the first brings a professional’s technical eye to bear on a dress’s ‘aesthetic’ elements (its material, weave, cut, and so on), the second considers the uses to which she can put that dress – the appreciative impact it will have on her admirers and her enhanced social image as a celebrity when her name is linked with that of a famous designer, ideally in a particular situational context (such as the Academy Awards). Together, as I suggested earlier, these five sets of values constitute a symbolic exchange value. Finally, the buyer looks hard at how best to convert this symbolic exchange value into commodity exchange value, leading to sales, turnover, and profit. In other words, we find that different people in the fashion world bring multiple values to bear on the same item of clothing. Some pride themselves on the unusual uses to which they put things: a tie transformed into a belt, or a pair of chopsticks pinning up loose hair. Others are concerned primarily with technical aspects of their work as professionals: lens aperture and shutter speed for the old-school photographer; language and typeface in the case of the magazine art director. Yet others (socialites, for instance) think almost exclusively about the social world in which they find themselves. They could not care less how a particular dress is made, or even how much it costs, provided it is made by the ‘right’ designer (social value) and looks ‘right’ for them on the ‘right’ occasion (situational value). Still others (department store buyers, for instance) might value the name of a particular designer or fashion house because it adds kudos to their store (social value), but they still view that designer’s products as commodities that must be sold (commodity value). Thus, their appreciation of a dress or suit takes on a rather different nuance from that of the disinterested ‘creative’ professional, since it is closer to an ideal consumer’s taste (which itself is influenced by all kinds of social, cultural, and symbolic factors) (commodity exchange value). Creative markets, then, consist of separate combinations and weightings of different kinds of evaluation, leaning now towards the ‘symbolic’, now the ‘economic’. The field of values that I have outlined here provides a coordinating framework for the virtually simultaneous interpretation, evaluation, judgement, and calculation of creative works in the market of singularities. The interaction between symbolic and commodity exchange values is mutual and coordinating. The commodity exchange value of an artwork almost certainly increases or decreases in proportion to the density of the other symbolic exchange values found therein. At the same time, economic value (in terms of price) can itself quickly generate symbolic and associated values (an extremely expensive artwork must be ‘good’). In other words, the various processes of valuation and evaluation outlined in this chapter enable the mutual, ongoing transformations of ‘culture’ and the ‘economy’ in which we all engage. It is with these transformations and with how people juggle the different values as they engage with creative works that this book is principally concerned.

Note 1 Hereafter, I will often refer to spatial and temporal values together as situational (that is, contextual) values.

142 Marketing creativity

References Alacˇ ovska, Ana (2013) ‘Genre and autonomy in cultural production: the case of travel guidebook production’. Ph.D. thesis, Copenhagen Business School. https://opena rchive.cbs.dk/handle/10398/8703. Beckert, Jens and Patrik Aspers (eds) (2011) ‘Part II: Aesthetic markets’. In Jens Beckert and Patrik Aspers (eds), The Worth of Goods: Valuation and Pricing in the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 131–222. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) ‘Part II: The economy of practices’. In Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 97–256. Caves, Richard (2000) ‘Buffs, buzz, and educated tastes’ and ‘Consumers, critics, and certifiers’. In Richard Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 175–200. Karpik, Lucien (2010) ‘Singularities’. In Lucien Karpik, Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 10–16. Mears, Ashley (2011) ‘Economics of the catwalk’. In Ashley Mears, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 27–70. Pine, B. JosephII and James Gilmore (1999) The Experience Economy. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Towse, Ruth (2010) ‘Markets for cultural goods and services’. In Ruth Towse, A Textbook of Cultural Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 51–75.

8

Fairs and festivals

Go to the convention centre in Wanchai, Hong Kong, Makuhari Messe on the outskirts of Tokyo, or any of the conference centres in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, or Seoul, and you will almost certainly find yourself in the midst of some kind of trade fair. Most of these are for industry participants only. In addition, most of them are for industries with which this book is not concerned: auto products, stationery supplies, medical technology, rubber processing, electronics, and toys, for example. But some are for those with which it is concerned: art, books, fashion (beauty and textiles), film, manga, music, video games, and other cultural products. In East and Southeast Asia, we can visit Art Basel, Cashmere World, and FILMART (all in Hong Kong), the Tokyo International Book Fair, Cool Kids Fashion and Jeans Expo (both in Shanghai), Beauty Asia (Singapore), Comic World (Seoul), Anime Japan, Music China, Nintendo Space World, and numerous fashion weeks in Beijing, Busan, Hong Kong, Manila, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Taipei, Tianjin, Tokyo, and other major cities. In addition to trade fairs, we find numerous festivals associated with cultural and creative industries – particularly film and music. Almost every major city in East Asia holds an annual international film festival, such as the Asia Pacific Film Festival, the Beijing Independent Film Festival, the Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival, the Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards (Taipei), the Busan International Film Festival, the Korea Queer Film Festival, and the Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Meanwhile, the long list of music festivals includes Looptopia (Taoyuan), the Electric Daisy Carnival (Chiba), the MYTH Electronic Music Festival (Shanghai), the World DJ Festival (Seoul), the Wired Music Festival (Kuwana), and the Ultra Music Festival (Singapore, Seoul, and Tokyo). Many of these events – in particular the film festivals – also give out awards and prizes. Although the media report these festivals primarily as entertainment, we should realise that they often include commercial elements in the background. For instance, while fashion weeks focus on the glitz of celebrities sitting in the front row of a catwalk show, designers are also showcasing their clothes for department store buyers. Similarly, film festivals are not just about screening new films to the public; they are also forums that enable distributors to choose the films for their local, national, or regional cinemas, and help the recipients of the various awards to advance their careers. Meanwhile, headlining a music festival invariably leads to DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-12

144 Marketing creativity increased CD sales and future appearances. It is this relationship between creative entertainment and commerce that this chapter will address.

Trade fairs The single most important opportunity for participating in and observing a field of cultural production in action is provided by one of its industry trade fairs: for example, Art Basel or FILMART. This is because the personnel and organisations of every creative industry are scattered all over the world, so they rarely, if ever, come into face-to-face contact with one another. Moreover, every industry is hierarchically structured in such a way that upstream creative personnel interact infrequently with downstream distributors and salespeople. None of these tends to have much understanding of the technological developments that underpin their work, and none is likely to meet up with technology providers (which is why the latter also attend fairs). In other words, during the normal course of everyday business transactions, the field as a whole remains hidden from view. Trade fairs change all this. In addition to bringing together geographically dispersed people and organisations, they gather all the different kinds of institutions operating in a field and so integrate upstream raw materials and design with the downstream consumer market. A book fair, for example, welcomes not only publishers, distributors, and a handful of authors, but literary agents and scouts, translators, illustrators, local sales representatives, librarians, literary associations, remainder, returns, and reprint wholesalers, design, typesetting, and printing companies, book packagers, digital systems providers, e-book developers, and so on and so forth. All of these players are there to display their wares and/or skills, and they all enter into business transactions in the hope of improving their respective positions in the field of book publishing. Fairs attract every major player in an industry in one neutral, confined space over a limited period of time (usually no more than three or four days). In this respect, fairs frame fields and enable us to see them in action. Their primary functions are to produce, reproduce, and legitimate a field (of books, fashion, film, art, and so on) and the key players’ positions within it. They do this by means of various mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion (seen in participants’ different-coloured accreditation badges, for example, or highly coveted invitations to special events). Fairs and festivals reveal how the participants go about their various tasks, what those tasks are, and how the participants take up positions, utilise contacts, and deploy their knowledge to achieve their business aims. Both frame and field, therefore, provide us with a ‘theoretical umbrella’ with which to understand the operation of CCI markets. In some industries, like international television programming, trade fairs are openly discussed as ‘markets’, even though they are largely concerned with social relationships, symbolic hierarchies, and the cultural capital that is prized by the institutional and individual attendees. This is what makes fairs and festivals so interesting: like the medieval fairs that were held outside market towns in central Europe, they combine business opportunities with elements of carnival as the participants wine and dine one another and party late into the night. To succeed, business needs entertainment.

Fairs and festivals

145

Framing fairs Framing helps identify and bring together individuals or groups who are otherwise clearly distinct and dissociated from one another. It also allows identifiable objects, goods, and merchandise to be defined and separated not only from other goods but also from the actors involved in their conception, production, circulation, or use. It is because of framing that the market can exist and that distinct agents and distinct goods can be brought into play. Fairs and festivals allow institutions and individuals to intersect and frame the economic, social, and symbolic activities relating to traded things. Overtly, both institutions and goods are about exhibiting ‘the new’ – the latest novel by a bestselling author or a well-known director’s most recent film – but what counts as ‘new’ depends upon one’s position in the field. It may be nothing more than an initial idea (or concept) put forward by a digital systems provider, for example; or it could be a finished product that reveals the full extent of the provider’s capabilities. It may refer to the materials used to package a product (a book or CD cover, for instance) or to personnel (a new and ‘hot’ art gallery or the same old faces but in new jobs). More often, though, it is the commodity itself (a book, a film, a TV series, an artwork) which is new and being traded. As we shall see, both fairs and festivals provide opportunities for participants to enter into business negotiations with long-term partners, to gain knowledge through exchanges of market information, and to initiate and sustain social relations. In other words, these events activate networks of people, information, and gossip, and allow the abstract idea of a particular field (publishing, film, television, or art, for instance) to take on concrete form. In addition, fairs and festivals allow participants to find out what their competitors are up to by observing their exhibits. In this way, they not only spawn new ideas but also help to standardise products in an uncertain market (nobody knows). As just mentioned, it is helpful to consider fairs and festivals in terms of Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘frame’. Framing occurs on five different levels:     

functional; spatial; temporal; social; and symbolic. Each of these is explored in turn below.

Functional frame First of all, fairs provide a functional frame for a wide range of activities. In this respect, different fairs and festivals have different primary functions. The main purpose of haute couture fashion weeks in Paris, New York, London, Milan, and Tokyo, for example, is to create or enhance the designers’ and fashion houses’

146 Marketing creativity images. Conversely, regional shows, like the Düsseldorf Igedo and the Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, are held to attract department store buyers and high street stores, rather than celebrities and the media. Therefore, they are primarily commercial in nature. Meanwhile, fairs like Hong Kong Fashion Week and Beijing Chic showcase regional brands with the aim of attracting long-distance buyers from Europe, the United States, and South and Southeast Asia who are looking for manufacturing capacity. In other words, their primary function is to support regional manufacturing. Then there are fairs like Première Vision in Paris and SpinExpo in Shanghai which attract fibre and textile producers, such as knitting factories, with an interest in selling manufacturing capacity worldwide. In these cases, the fair’s primary function is to support global manufacturing. In addition, countless fairs are held for specific aspects of a particular industry. Fashion, for example, is often divided between clothing and accessories, so we have the China International Gold, Jewellery, and Gem Fair in Shanghai, and Fashion Access in Hong Kong, which is described as ‘a global showcase of the latest collections on bags, footwear, leather goods, travel ware, fashion accessories, leather garments for fashion buyers, retailers, designers, wholesalers and representatives of the mid to high-end fashion tier with small to medium order quantity’.1 Meanwhile, Interfilière’s website describes its annual trade show in Hong Kong as ‘the meeting point of all global players in the lingerie and swimwear industry’.2 Similar specialist fairs are held for sportswear, bridalwear, children’s wear, hosiery, and numerous other categories of clothing. Also in the field of fashion, some fairs focus on particular materials. Thus, we have the Shanghai International Jeans Garment Fair, which ‘showcases products like textile and garment products, cotton weaving services, textile and garment development services’;3 the Hong Kong International Fur & Fashion Fair, which features everything from ‘raw materials to fur apparel and accessories’ in ‘a prestigious Fur Fair that is widely recognized by global industry players as the most essential platform for sourcing quality fur garments and raw materials’;4 and Cashmere World, also held in the Hong Kong Convention Centre, which is described as ‘a vertically integrated business platform for the international cashmere trade … a high-quality, annual meeting place for business, a catalyst for fashion trends and technology innovation, as well as a venue for the promotion of the unique qualities that make cashmere one of the world’s best-loved luxury materials’.5 But fairs like these are not simply convenient locations in which to conduct business. They also serve multiple functions for a large and diverse group of participants who have a wide variety of agendas and reasons for attending. In this respect, they are functionally unbounded. For example, it is not just the artworks that attract collectors to Art Basel Miami Beach but also the host of satellite events. A collector armed with a VIP pass can attend talks given by specially invited luminaries of the art world, visit a range of open-house viewings in the homes or exhibition spaces of leading local collectors, and attend numerous exhibition openings at public galleries. She can also buy from three contemporaneous fairs in venues across the city. (Large fairs often spawn smaller fairs.) Some industry

Fairs and festivals

147

participants may come to trade (either buy or sell exhibited products); others to obtain financial support for future projects; others to build or maintain social relations and networks; and yet others to engage in some form of reputation management by promoting a particular product, company, themselves, or some kind of political agenda. Fairs also attract participants – including media and officials – who are not closely linked to the industry in question but attend to gather ‘news’, represent one government body or another, or identify new trends. Spatial frame Second, both markets and trade fairs provide a bounded spatial frame for social interaction and the exchange of goods and services. Nowadays such a frame for a fair is, first and foremost, on a grand scale in terms of where it is held: for example, an indoor exhibition hall, stadium, or park. But the idea of a spatial frame may also be applied to the location and size of the individual participants’ stands and to the goods they display. In this respect, fairs are different from markets. They have always taken on the appearance of temporary townships or cities. They may be incorporated in a fixed town, taking over everything within it and essentially ‘becoming’ the town for a few days. We see this at the Cannes Film Festival, at the International Animation Film Festival in Annecy, and, to a lesser extent, at the combined fairs of Art Central and Art Basel Hong Kong. Alternatively, they may be held in juxtaposition to a town, outside its limits: for instance, the Frankfurt Book Fair takes place within the Messe Frankfurt exhibition grounds, and the Tokyo International Book Fair in Makuhari Messe, Chiba. In these cases, the fair becomes an extension of the town. The fact that these spatial frames are often set apart from their surroundings reflects the liminal nature of the events they host – something that is not true of traditional markets. At the same time, the spatial layout of a fair reveals the important players in the field. In other words, fairs chart the relative positions of an industry’s companies in abstract space. For example, at the London Book Fair, the largest publishers occupy the two sides of the central aisle towards the middle of the convention space, second-rank publishers cluster around them, and small independents are scattered around the edges in a pattern that reflects their respective economic rankings (A list/B list). The same is true of Art Basel Hong Kong, in which prestigious galleries like Gagosian and White Cube set up their stands in the central portion of the Hong Kong Convention Centre, with the lesser galleries elsewhere. Temporal frame Third, fairs provide a bounded temporal frame in which participants go about their business. Unlike markets, which are held on particular days of the week or specific dates each month to enable immediate exchange, fairs were instituted to enable periodic forms of exchange for large-scale – and especially international – commerce. Fairs are generally short-term events in which all related activities take place

148 Marketing creativity over three or four days (or one to two weeks in the case of a film festival). They are also usually held at regular intervals – normally once a year, but sometimes, as with fashion weeks, more frequently. In medieval times, both the frequency and the duration of fairs depended on how fast traders were able to move their merchandise from one place to another. Precisely because the participants had to travel from town to town with their packhorses, carts, and goods, fairs were scheduled to accommodate their movements. In this respect, they formed mutually dependent networks of fairs that communicated with one another.6 This kind of perpetual movement is still true of trade fairs today. Just as a medieval merchant once travelled to fairs up and down the Danube – from Krems to Vienna, then on to Freistadt, Graz, Salzburg, and Bolzano before finally heading back to Krems – each spring a modern-day book publisher may shuttle from Abu Dhabi to the Leipzig Book Fair, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, and the Salon du Livre in Paris before travelling on to the great London Book Fair. From there, if so inclined, he may fly to the Thessaloniki Book Fair prior to crossing the Atlantic for Book Expo America. History shows that there has been – and still is – a hierarchy of fairs in each network, and scheduling changes that might upset this hierarchy are invariably frowned upon. This explains why the Tokyo International Book Fair had to adjust its timetable in 2005 by rescheduling from April to July after the more prestigious London Book Fair shifted its dates from March to April because of a move to a new location. Thus, while markets tend to be independent events for local merchants and customers, fairs comprise an interlocking system which attracts sellers from far afield but only marginally addresses end users in any given locality. As mere consumers of fashion accessories, cosmetics, films, books, and television programmes, we are usually denied admission. Social frame Fourth, fairs are socially bounded and provide a partly institutional social frame. As I pointed out earlier, they have always brought together a large number of diverse participants – industry manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers – who are directly involved in the production and distribution of the exhibited products and services, and who cultivate, develop, maintain, and reinforce personal connections at every fair they attend. They also keep the catalogues that contain contact details and other information on their fellow participants. Given that most business is conducted via email or by telephone, fairs provide participants with rare opportunities to meet their business partners face to face. A US publisher can get to meet her Korean distributor or Japanese translator; a sales representative may talk directly with his firm’s digital provider. What matters here is not networks so much as contacts. For example, participants at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair cited ‘to refresh existing customer contacts’ (55 per cent) and ‘to make new contacts’ (54 per cent) as their top two reasons for attending.7 Fairs, then, are places where – as participants themselves phrase it – you ‘put faces to

Fairs and festivals

149

names’, ‘build up friendships’, and ‘need to speak about things with people because talking isn’t as heavy as the written word’ (interviews with the author, cited in Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011: 127). As one friend in the publishing business told me: ‘Fairs are talk. Seventy per cent of it is totally useless, but something often comes of the remaining thirty per cent.’ On the one hand, therefore, fairs reveal formal hierarchies, networks, and tensions within a field by means of the layout of participants’ stands: which actors are given the ‘prime’ locations; which companies are linked to form business networks; and, through the distances between their stands, which are competitors. Visibility and invisibility thus become markers of how the field is configured. On the other hand, by following individual participants (a rights manager, foreign distributor, or publishing editor), an observer may sketch, albeit in rough form, their informal networks through the numerous connections they make over a short period of time. To some extent, these contacts shed light on the whole field of publishing. Fairs frame face-to-face interaction and participants’ understandings of social networks. For example, during the course of his rounds at the London or Frankfurt Book Fair, a distributor of academic books in Japan will initiate or refresh contacts with a number of UK- and US-based academic publishers. In these meetings, he will outline the current business environment in Japan, remarking in particular on university library purchases, declining student populations, the role of academic staff in the selection of reading material, the effect of exchange rates on purchasing volume, and so on and so forth. In this way, he will reveal his web of connections and knowledge of the field of publishing in Japan. This information will help a foreign publisher to gauge which of her company’s individual titles or subject areas might be most appropriate for the Japanese market. She will also learn the best time of year for publication (Japan’s academic year starts in April, rather than September); the optimal word count for books that will be translated (Chinese and Japanese texts tend to be one-third longer than the original English); and the best titles for marketing purposes. Discussions of overall sales may also generate thoughts on the role of Amazon and other internet sellers, the consequent necessity for publishers to offer discounts on certain titles, and the use of digital technology to print on demand in Japan itself, rather than ship books back and forth around the world. Such exchanges of information, together with accompanying gossip and rumour, make it absolutely essential for those in the publishing industry to attend (or at least send a representative to) the major book fairs. The biggest and best book fairs – like Frankfurt, London, and Bologna – are marked by ‘buzz’. Indeed, it is this that makes them the ‘biggest’ and the ‘best’. The kind of information that is available, as well as the decision to divulge it or not, is often guided by the participants’ perception of buzz. Buzz opens up all kinds of opportunities that can be exploited on the spot or developed later through email before being discussed face to face at the next major book fair. Trade fairs create order in a market through their very periodicity and regularity, their exchanges of information and opportunities to reinforce contacts,

150 Marketing creativity and their creation of ‘conditions of comparability’ by means of standardised booths and furnishings in a neutral space. This order is supported by the fair’s social or institutional frame. The very fact that a book fair brings together all of the participants in the value chain, large and small, immediately circumscribes behaviour via written and unwritten rules. Precisely because it is a trade fair, participants get down to serious business and act accordingly. But it is also a trade fair, so they know that they can sometimes behave in a less formal manner. At the same time, participants constitute a field, since they represent organisations that constitute a recognised area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organisations that produce similar services and products. It is in this sense that fairs have been categorised as ‘field-configuring events’, for they frame objective relations between positions and a socially structured space in which agents struggle for power. (I will return to this later.) Symbolic frame Finally, precisely because they are field-configuring events, fairs have symbolic functions and so provide a symbolic frame. For a start, they distinguish between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, between the more and less privileged. This is revealed in terms of the disposition of space – who is placed where in the exhibition hall, as mentioned earlier, but also who may go where, when, and for what purpose, since some parts of a fair are ‘off limits’ to all except specially invited guests. Such distinctions are made most obviously in the participants’ different (often colourcoded) accreditation badges. These not only permit entry to the fairs but also give special advantages (like free travel on public transport) for their duration, in the same way that a medieval ‘passport’, or ‘conduct of the fair’, assured travelling merchants of free passage on certain defined routes for a prescribed time. (It is remarkable how many traditional practices are echoed in present-day activities.) Although fairs retain their importance and make their mark in their concentrations of goods (such as books, art, fashion, or accessories), people, and entertainment, their symbolic function is evident more generally in activities that are conducted outside, or in parallel to, the normal course of trade exchange. Food and drink are shared, parties held, relationships between male and female participants formed and occasionally consummated, and all the time information is exchanged. In modern-day fairs, as in traditional town markets, the most important exchanges often occur in the cafés and ‘watering holes’ (pubs and bars) surrounding the market place of commodities. In the past, everything from the trade of goods to the arrangement of marriages took place in such establishments, so the fair has long been a venue for the renewal of community and ‘mutuality’ among the participants as well as an opportunity to reinforce in-group boundaries. Fairs have always meant, in the words of the famous economic historian Ferdinand Braudel (1992: 85), ‘noise, tumult, music, popular rejoicing, the world turned upside down’. They were often centres of popular entertainment, where celebration could become contestation. Fair time, in other words, was carnival

Fairs and festivals

151

time. It was also spectacle time, with processions, competitions, bonfires, fireworks, juggling, miracle cures, and tooth-pulling. Nowadays, we may prefer to have our teeth examined (and, at worst, pulled) in the private comfort of a dentist’s chair, but industry fairs and festivals still provide an entertaining array of spectacles for the participants – from boozy book fair parties to topless starlets on the beach at Cannes, by way of the red-carpet approach to the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Field-configuring events and tournaments of values The fact that fairs and festivals have symbolic and social – as well as purely functional business – purposes means that we can view them in one of two ways. Either, as I have done so far in this chapter, we can say that fairs reveal how a field is constituted or ‘configured’; or we can say that fairs are competitive ‘ritual tournaments’ in which the participants negotiate their different values (techno-material, aesthetic, social, and so on). Whether we prefer one theoretical approach or the other will depend on whether we wish to emphasise the social and commercial or the symbolic aspects of a fair or festival. Precisely because fairs have different functions, they tend to display a wide variety of characteristics. A television programme fair is very different from a film festival. The former is first and foremost a sales market for rights, while the latter introduces new films that compete with one another for awards (and, in the process, garner rights sales). The former does not attract creative personnel (directors, actors, cinematographers, and so on), whereas the latter does. The same can be said of fairs that sell the same product. The Tokyo and Hong Kong book fairs are completely different from those held in Frankfurt and London. The Asian fairs’ primary purpose is to sell books to the public, whereas very few members of the public are allowed into the two European fairs, both of which prioritise the sale of rights. (Frankfurt is open to the public on the final day, but by then most of the participants have already left.) Similarly, a fashion week in Hong Kong or Busan is an entirely different proposition from a fashion week in London or Paris. The former will focus on trade (commodity exchange value), the latter on image (symbolic exchange value). We can therefore distinguish between fairs whose primary purpose is to bring together all members of a field of cultural production who engage in some kind of commercial trade, and those in which trade, while present, takes a back seat as participants engage in the construction of symbolic images. Thus, while Hong Kong International Fashion Week may configure the field of Asian fashion, Paris Fashion Week is a tournament of values in which different designers and fashion houses compete for media attention. Lampel and Meyer (2008: 1027), who coined the term, suggest that fieldconfiguring events are characterised by six features: 1

They bring together ‘in one location actors from various professional, organisational, and geographical backgrounds’.

152 Marketing creativity 2 3 4 5 6

Their ‘duration is limited, normally running from a few hours to a few days’. They ‘provide unstructured opportunities for face-to-face social interaction’. They ‘include ceremonial or dramaturgical activities’ – that is, ritual activities such as the awarding of prizes and other ceremonies. They are ‘occasions for information exchange and collective sense-making’. And they ‘generate social and reputational resources that can be deployed elsewhere and for other purposes’.

I have already described four of these features (1–3 and 5) in detail. Therefore, I now want to focus on ceremonial or dramaturgical activities, and how participants use fairs and festivals to build reputations which they can use elsewhere (cultural, symbolic, social, and economic capital). It is here that we move away from the notion of fairs and festivals as field-configuring events to one where they should be seen as tournaments of values. So, what are these tournaments of values? First and foremost, they are complex, periodic events that take place – and are seen to be – outside the routines of everyday economic life. Not everyone is allowed to attend, so participation is a privilege and brings with it recognised status and power. Those who are present at a fair or festival engage in status contests that are designed to boost their reputation or, in some cases, fame. At the same time, however, every tournament of values dispenses tokens of value that are of central importance to those who work in a particular industry: the Palme d’Or for Best Picture at the Cannes Film Festival, for example, or the MAMA (Mnet Asian Music Award) for Album, Song, or Artist of the Year in the Asian region. Different forms of cultural production, then, stage a variety of these ritual tournaments: art exhibitions, auctions, literary awards (Booker, Pulitzer, Man Asian Literary Prize), fashion shows, film festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Busan), anime film festivals (Annecy, Tokyo), music awards (Grammys, Eurovision Song Contest), video games (Game Awards), and so on and so forth. In this respect, the outcome of any tournament of values has significant consequences. A prize-winning film is likely to gain wider distribution and generate more ticket sales than a film that has not won anything; and the director and actors can expect to be asked to make a new film (with a larger budget and higher fees) (symbolic to economic capital conversion).

Prizes and awards The awarding of prizes or trophies is so much a part of our everyday lives that we take it for granted. Indeed, many of us look forward to the results of the annual Academy Awards and Grammys, when outstanding individuals in the fields of film and music receive tokens of esteem (a statuette) – a seemingly worthless object that everyone working in the film or music industry nevertheless hopes to win during his or her career. But why do we have prizes and awards? First and foremost, in the creative and cultural industries, they help to counteract the uncertainty of consumer demand. Given that nobody knows if an anime film or literary novel is going to sell in sufficient quantities to make a reasonable

Fairs and festivals

153

profit for the production company or publisher, every conceivable promotional and sales technique must be employed. This, as we will see in Chapter 9, is why cultural producers make such extensive use of celebrities and stars. It is also why they distribute awards and prizes at regular intervals each year. A film is likely to enjoy a significant increase in box-office receipts if members of the cast or crew are nominated for major awards. For example, on average, a nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards boosts a film’s audience by 22 per cent, and a win adds a further 15 per cent. Other awards, such as Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress, also have a positive impact on ticket sales. To take a more concrete example in another field of cultural production, the winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was The Sellout by Paul Beatty (the first US author to win the prize). In the week following the awards ceremony (which was televised by the BBC), sales of The Sellout increased by 658 per cent. Over 250,000 print copies of the book were sold internationally, as were more than a dozen foreign language rights. This is the kind of commercial success that a major award instigates, and publishers are assiduous about affixing stickers to every title that features on the shortlist of any literary prize in order to attract reader attention. Second, awards highlight and standardise taste, which – as we have seen – is extremely hard to predict (nobody knows). People who decide, behind the scenes, who or what is fit to receive a prize at a major festival engage with creative products as legitimated specialists, contracted to decide on their overall aesthetic and symbolic value. These people may be experts in their field (as is the case with Cannes Film Festival jurors); members of a particular creative industry (as with the Oscars, which are awarded by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences); or simply well-educated people with a good general knowledge of the field in question (like the jury for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which may consist of literary critics, newspaper editors, travel writers, artists, or even television personalities). Irrespective of whether the judges are professionals or enthusiastic ‘buffs’, however, they are invariably appointed as aesthetic (or literary) experts and guides of audience taste who ultimately act as high priests. Taste, of course, is selective. In terms of genre, for example, dramas are nine times more likely to be nominated for an Oscar than other type of film. This kind of taste selectivity may also apply to the producer of a film or the publisher of a book. Statistics show that books published by Jonathan Cape in the UK are more likely to be long-listed for the Man Booker Prize than those of other publishers. In terms of personnel, actors and actresses who have performed well in previous films are generally teamed with other highly rated performers, writers, directors, and cinematographers (A list/B list), and are thus more likely to win awards. ‘Better’ actors are sent ‘better’ scripts and thus work with ‘better’ directors in what are seen as ‘better’ films. This is a classic case of ‘to everyone who has, more will be given’. We find this kind of cumulative advantage in all forms of cultural production (and in everyday life, of course), as the symbolic capital that accompanies the awarding of a prize is converted into sales (economic capital) and financially well-rewarded careers.

154 Marketing creativity Four conditions must be met if fans and the general public are to accept the awarding of prizes. First, the organisation that awards the honour (for example, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) must possess cultural authority. This is not always as simple as it might seem. The Nobel Prizes, for example, were established by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and a weapons manufacturer. Therefore, some contemporary critics scoffed at the idea of a peace prize bearing his name. Similarly, in 1968, when Booker, McConnell Ltd announced its sponsorship of what would become one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, it was scathingly described as a firm ‘dealing in sugar, rum, mining machinery, and James Bond’.8 In November 1972, winning author John Berger protested against the company’s activities in the Caribbean by donating half of his £5,000 prize to the British Black Panther movement. Meanwhile, in East Asia, some have questioned the Korean entertainment company CJ E&M’s suitability to organise the Mnet Asian Music Awards. This dates back to October 2015, when the company (together with its US subsidiary) was sued by a Seoul-based music agency, DFSB Kollective, for infringement of copyright and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. CJ E&M eventually won the case, but neither this, nor the company’s use of employees to fill the seats at its annual general meeting in order to silence disgruntled shareholders, did much to enhance its reputation. As a result, the awards ceremony itself has been tarnished, at least in Korea. This may be why it is now held in other cities around the region (such as Macau, Singapore, and Hong Kong) where CJ E&M is not so well known and therefore will not attract adverse publicity. Second, the organising authority must make sure that the appointment of judges is fair and above board. Most importantly, it must ensure that the reputation and qualifications of each judge or juror are unquestionable and well respected by the award’s audience. Usually this is not a problem, although occasionally a juror – like Charlotte Gainsbourg at the Cannes Film Festival – may question their own competence and ability to defend their opinions against more qualified colleagues. Third, the organisers must ensure that the method of judging is unimpeachable. This is more difficult than the appointment of judges, except when – as in the case of the Oscars – prizes are awarded by a professional body’s (extremely complex system of) ballot votes that preclude on-the-spot interpersonal persuasion and bargaining. Political considerations often come into play as individual jury members try to position themselves (and their allies) in the field. For instance, in India in 2001, two members of the seventeen-man National Film Awards jury resigned amid allegations that a political ‘cabal’ had turned the awards into a farce after several films that had been ‘unanimously rejected’ by a jury panel in the first round of voting were reinstated, and even awarded prizes, in the final round (which was judged by a different jury).9 Several years later, two leading Korean music production companies, SM Entertainment and Inwoo Production, boycotted the 2009 Mnet Asian Music Awards on the grounds that the criteria for awarding prizes were ‘unfair’. So, the awarding organisation must adhere to rigorous procedures when selecting the recipients. In practice, though, cultural attitudes towards age and

Fairs and festivals

155

gender, as well as field rivalries, frequently sway decisions. Film jury members – as Charlotte Gainsbourg admitted – can be heavily influenced by other judges (especially during informal conversations between the screening of films) and not follow their own opinions. Similarly, an award at a Japanese ceramics exhibition was once determined by the oldest – and therefore most senior – judge when there was a deadlock among the other jurors. Rivalries among jury members, each of whom may support one or other of the nominees, may also influence who is finally awarded a particular prize. Those who are asked to make these decisions often find it difficult, if not impossible, to argue that one candidate is objectively ‘better’ than another and thus more worthy of a particular prize. As a result, a jury may fail to reach agreement and so awards the prize to joint winners (or, in the case of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for History, three books). This uncertainty of taste can apply to those who receive awards, too. When Adele was announced as the winner of Song of the Year at the 2017 Grammys, she said in her acceptance speech that the award should have gone to Beyoncé for ‘Lemonade’. She then broke the statuette in two and gave half to the other singer. What matters in situations like these is that the public needs to be convinced by the appearance of rigorous (and, in some cases, democratic) voting procedures and judgement criteria. Fourth, the main award – Best Director, Album of the Year, Best Adult Video – must be selective in the sense that only a very small proportion of potential recipients can ever receive it. Most awarding organisations heighten the ritual effects of these tournaments of values by preselecting the nominees for a particular prize. In this respect, awards create two distinct layers of winners and losers: first, nominated winners among all the other films, albums, or adult videos that were made that year; then, a winner among the nominees, the rest of whom become losers, too. This system establishes and sustains a ranking system (A list/B list) that is designed to counter the eternal problem of market uncertainty (nobody knows). In summary, maintaining the awarding organisation’s reputation, selecting impeccable judges, and ensuring fair judging procedures all help to legitimate the field of cultural production. The reputations of the awarding body and the jury members derive from, and contribute to, the status of the award, while the award confers status on all those involved (including the prize-winners, of course) in what Bourdieu terms a mutual ‘cycle of consecration’. Thus, in addition to their role in helping to overcome the uncertainty of cultural production, awards are designed to consecrate the hierarchy of relations in every field of cultural production. Tournaments of values, then, both create and consecrate power. They configure various fields of cultural production and reinforce their political and status hierarchies.

Notes 1 2 3 4

https://10times.com/aplf-fashion. www.tradefairdates.com/Interfiliere-M9689/Hong-Kong.html. https://10times.com/jeans-expo. www.hkff.org/furFair.php?lang=1&year=2019&id=24.

156 Marketing creativity 5 https://10times.com/cashmere-world. 6 Towns in Japan may be termed ‘Second-day market’ (Futsukaichi) or ‘Fourth-day market’ (Yokkaichi), illustrating the regularity with which fairs or markets were held on a particular day of each week or month. 7 www.buchmesse.de/en/about-us. 8 https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/8/7/ 1344358118961/Booker-prize-1968-001.jpg. 9 www.telegraphindia.com/india/bollywood-defends-awards/cid/932993.

References General readings Anand, Narasimhan and Brittany C. Jones (2008) ‘Tournament rituals, category dynamics, and field configuration: the case of the Booker Prize’. Journal of Management Studies 45 (6): 1036–1060. Anand, Narasimhan and Mary Watson (2004) ‘Tournament rituals in the evolution of fields: the case of the Grammy Awards’. Academy of Management Journal 47: 59–80. Appadurai, Arjun (1986) ‘Paths and diversions’. In A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16–29. Braudel, Ferdinand (1992) The Wheels of Commerce. Volume 2: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. English, James F. (2005) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lampel, Jo and Alan Meyer (2008) ‘Field-configuring events as structuring mechanisms: how conferences, ceremonies, and trade shows constitute new technologies, industries, and markets’. Journal of Management Studies 45 (6): 1025–1035. Moeran, Brian and Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen (eds) (2011) Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries: Fairs, Festivals and Competitive Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skov, Lise (2006) ‘The role of trade fairs in the global fashion business’. Current Sociology 54 (5): 764–783.

Regional readings Ahn, Soo Jeong (2012) The Pusan International Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalisation. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Iordanova, Dina and Ruby Cheung (eds) (2011) Film Festivals and East Asia. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. Kimura, Atsuko (1991) ‘Japanese corporations and popular music’. Popular Music (Japanese Issue) 10 (3): 317–326. Moeran, Brian (1993) ‘A tournament of value: strategies of presentation in Japanese advertising’. Ethnos 58 (1–2): 73–93. Neves, Joshua (2012) ‘Media archipelagos: inter-Asian film festivals’. Discourse 34 (2–3): 230–239 (esp. 234–239). Skov, Lise (2004) ‘Fashion shows, fashion flows: the Asia Pacific meets in Hong Kong’. In Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke, and Mandy Thomas (eds), Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 221–246.

9

Celebrities

Throughout this book, I have made use of three theoretical approaches – economic properties, art worlds, and fields of cultural production – to illustrate and explain how creative and humdrum people in CCI go about their work, why they do things in the ways that they do, and what happens as a result. In so doing, I have also looked at framing devices, field-configuring events, and tournaments of values. In talking about the various creative worlds of art, advertising, fashion, film, music, publishing, incense, and so on, I have tried to show their commonalities. But it will have become clear by now that there are as many dissimilarities between different forms of cultural production as there are similarities. The creative processes involved in making an artwork or writing a novel are not the same as those used in recording a pop song, designing a fashion collection, or shooting a film. Although they rely on support personnel for their materials and to help them publish their work, when it comes to creativity, artists and novelists usually work entirely on their own (just as I myself am doing as I write this book). This activity is very different from that found in first composing and then recording a music album, where dozens of people – musicians, sound recorders, producer, and other studio personnel – may be involved and often transform the original song as they seek to create a ‘hit’; or in shooting a film, where the motley crew usually consists of several hundred people working together on the creative product. Different kinds of creativity need different kinds of social organisation to produce, distribute, and appreciate different kinds of cultural products. This suggests that, even though fashion, film, music, and so on all involve networks of people cooperating, the degree of cooperation that is required varies enormously from one cultural product to another. The social processes that go into the making of a manga comic series, for instance, are not nearly as complex as those that go into producing an anime film, during which a number of distinct motley crews will collaborate (including script to storyboard and visual layout team; key and in-between animators, with their supervisors; and a composite and colouring team). The same is true of some of the other economic properties outlined by Richard Caves. Art for art’s sake, for example, means much more to an artist, novelist, and certain kinds of musician than it does to an advertising art director, journalist, incense blender, or K-pop singer. This is because some creative people work in an DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-13

158 Marketing creativity environment which is far more commercial and where the demands of fixed deadlines (time flies) oblige them to work to formulaic conventions (with inevitable implications for the concept of art for art’s sake). Copyright (ars longa), as we have seen, also works in different ways in different industries. It is extremely important in music, publishing, and film, which are structured around the ownership of intellectual property rights, but less obviously so in art or fashion, although fashion houses employ an alternative form of copyright in the form of trademarked logos and branding to assert their differences. By contrast, incense producers do not enjoy the benefits of any form of copyright protection because of the lack of standardisation in materials. Does this mean, then, that there is nothing that is common in equal measure to all forms of cultural production? My answer is: ‘No, not quite.’ Each and every form of cultural production uses a celebrity or star system in equal measure. Celebrities are an important aspect of all the theoretical approaches adopted in this book. 1

2

3

4 5

6

They are ranked in terms of the A list/B list economic property: as ‘stars’, on the one hand, and, in descending order of perceived merit, as ‘celebrities’, ‘idols’, ‘personalities’, ‘talents’, and so-called ‘celetoids’, on the other. They are a clearly visible part of every creative – or art – world because they operate in the nucleus of networks of people cooperating in different forms of cultural production (motley crew). Celebrity names are used to frame audience expectations and behaviour in the face of uncertain market demand (nobody knows), so they can be utilised in frame analysis, as elaborated by Erving Goffman. There is a multitude of different kinds of potential stars among singers, musicians, actors, writers, and other CCI personnel (infinite variety). Because fame is often ephemeral, celebrities come and go over time. Those who initiate creative products have to keep this in mind whenever embarking on a new film, music album, or fashion collection (time flies). A celebrity whose fame has waned for some reason before completion of a cultural product is a market liability. And finally, precisely because the status and names of celebrities are used for financial purposes, they neatly exemplify Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the exchanges that take place in every field of cultural production among social, cultural, symbolic, and economic capital.

What makes celebrities particularly interesting in the context of CCI is that they link production and consumption. They are both produced by the film, music, television, publishing, and related industries and consumed by their audiences. How they are produced affects audiences’ reactions to a celebrity or star; how they are consumed (in terms of an audience’s emotional affinity, self-identification, imitation, and projection) has a knock-on effect on how they will be utilised in future productions. Hitherto, we have considered A list/B list as a form of ranking that takes place within a particular field of cultural production (an advertising agency or recording

Celebrities

159

studio knows which freelance copywriter or music producer is a ‘star’, and which is more run-of-the-mill, whereas those who are not part of the advertising or music world do not). By contrast, the system of celebrity that is found in every field of cultural production – from art to anime by way of fashion, music, film, television, publishing, and so on – is recognised outside the industry in question. In other words, fans create, identify with, imitate, sustain, and, on occasion, destroy the household names with which we are all familiar: Lady Gaga and BoA, Brad Pitt and Jet Li, Kate Moss and Sun Feifei, Jean Paul Gaultier and Rei Kawakubo. It is this relation between production and consumption that will underpin this chapter’s discussion of celebrities, whose names and reputations comprise the linchpin in what is a fame or name economy.

What is a celebrity? Different people have different takes on what does or does not make for celebrity or stardom. Some see celebrities and stars as examples of perfection in a particular field of cultural production (especially when they win an award at the likes of the Oscars, Grammys, or Emmys). They are believed to be exceptional and gifted, to possess professional skills and abilities that can be, and are, recognised as in some way ‘better’ than those of their peers. As the Hollywood film producer Samuel Goldwyn once put it: ‘God makes the stars. It’s up to the producers to find them.’ Others are not convinced that skill, talent, or charismatic gifts determine who does, and who does not, become a star. After all, they say, not all highly talented performers become celebrities; nor are all stars highly talented. Rather, famous people become well known in large part because they happen to be the ‘right’ type of person in the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time in a particular creative or cultural industry. This leads to throwaway definitions of celebrities as ‘the Names that need no further identification’ (Mills, 1956: 71–72), people who are ‘known for [their] well-knownness’ (Boorstin, 1963: 66–67). Such definitions may not necessarily or aptly encompass the perceived abilities of Leonardo DiCaprio, David Hockney, Hayao Miyazaki, or Zeng Fanzhi, but they might apply to seemingly less skilled ‘personalities’ such as Paris Hilton, ‘Sister Furong’ (Shi Xengxia), and Kim Kardashian. How, then, do celebrities become celebrities? Are they their own agents of fame? Or are they simply manufactured by the industries in which they find themselves? To what extent do they actively take up positions in their particular field of cultural production? How much are those positions forged for them by their managers and others in the field? All sorts of factors come into play, and they are never the same from one famous star to the next. This makes it difficult to generalise, but we can probably summarise celebrity agency as consisting of:   

appearance; behaviour; and opportunity.

160 Marketing creativity Although there is not much would-be celebrities can do about the first of these (apart from undergoing plastic surgery), they can actively influence the course of the other two. Appearance In many CCI, a celebrity’s appearance constitutes his or her cultural (and corporeal) capital. Given that image is a significant part of every star’s persona, looks are clearly important, as is evidenced by the myriad images of stars that pervade our newspapers, magazines, television, and computer screens, and by the millions of selfies that are posted on Instagram and Facebook. But this does not mean that stars or wannabe celebrities have to possess classic beauty. It probably helps if they are photogenic, but make-up, lighting, and skilled camerawork may be just as important as a celebrity’s physical features. Looks can lead to typecasting and so determine the type of celebrity an actor or actress ends up becoming. For instance, a Hollywood actress’s looks may be seen as ‘too Mediterranean’ (like those of Rita Hayworth at an early point in her career), with the result that she is cast only in ‘exotic’ roles (which may be few and far between). Others who look ‘foreign’, due to some kind of indeterminate East European or Asian ancestry, may find themselves cast as femme fatales or ‘vamps’. Yet others who possess an ‘Eastern’ look may land parts in the James Bond series: for example, Mie Hama and Tsai Chin in You Only Live Twice, Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies, and Bérénice Lim Marlohe in Skyfall. Looks also encompass a celebrity’s body, which will generally be well toned, sleek, and curvaceous, and – as a result – may be perceived as ‘sexy’. But what, precisely, constitutes ‘sexiness’? In some societies, being fat or having large breasts or hips is considered sexy; in others, the opposite is true. A nymphomaniac is likely to come across as ‘sexy’, but the same may be said of an aloof woman. What is it about a celebrity’s personality that induces such audience responses? Nobody knows precisely how or why a particular person ‘clicks’ with the public, which means it is virtually impossible to manufacture a successful personality from scratch, although many have tried – especially among the selfie generation. Behaviour Two sets of activities are commonly attributed to a star’s success. First, they should know the ‘right’ people and be able to play the social game of the particular world they inhabit – what Pierre Bourdieu described as ‘social alchemy’ and ‘adversaries in collusion’. Second, success is said to come from sleeping with the ‘right’ people in that world (an intimate form of social alchemy). As we have had occasion to note at various points throughout this book, who you know is often just as important as – or more important than – what you know (motley crew). Jobs are frequently acquired through personal connections, rather than as a result of particular creative or other admired skills. Playing the social game by going to the right parties therefore helps to smooth the path to stardom

Celebrities

161

(you will recall that business invariably has carnivalesque aspects). As in trade fairs and related festivals, one needs to be seen, and seen regularly, by those who occupy positions of power and make decisions that may affect one’s career. ‘Mindfulness’ (or ‘mind share’), then, is crucial – primarily because, in industries in which there are virtually no fixed objective standards by which to measure either creativity or worth, personal tastes and hunches play important roles. Social ties influence both. They also provide a feeling of stability in industries characterised by uncertainty (nobody knows). This kind of social alchemy leads to closer physical relations among some participants, in particular between younger women (celebrity aspirants) and older men (executive power brokers): wannabe actresses and established film directors and producers, for example, or aspiring models and well-known fashion photographers. It has long been thought that sleeping with someone in a position of power will help one’s career, and scandals abound. For instance, some of China’s top celebrities have been accused of acting as high-end prostitutes for elite Communist Party officials. Similarly, it has been alleged that lower-league Chinese singers and actresses are always available for sex at various price points (a new, unsavoury take on A list/B list). Notwithstanding such salacious stories, though, all sorts of issues militate against using the bedroom as a route to success: the importance of financial profit and doubts over the aspirant’s ability to secure it; potential paternity suits; exposure in the mass or social media; blackmail; and so on. As a result, most celebrities sleep with (and sometimes marry, though often for a limited period) other celebrities of more or less similar status in a particular field of cultural production: the off–on, then definitively off, ‘super couple’ Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, for example; or the Chinese ‘power couple’ Xie Na and Jason Zhang. It is this kind of endogamy (‘in-marriage’) within a circle of celebrities that enables us to consider them as a status group. A list stars tend to consort with other A list stars; B list with B list; and so on. Relationships of this kind often seem to be forged because they enable one partner to cross over from one field of cultural production to another as their complementary attributes and skills are further exploited: former Spice Girl Victoria ‘Posh’ Beckham and her footballer husband David, for instance; or the former Miss Japan, model, and actress Norika Fujiwara, who briefly married Japanese television presenter and comedian Tomonori Jinnai. However, perhaps the supreme example of this form of career advancement through marriage was the relationship between reality television personality, socialite, businesswoman, and model Kim Kardashian and singer–songwriter, record producer, fashion designer, and entrepreneur Kanye West. In addition to his music career, the latter developed an Adidas shoe line and eponymous fashion merchandise, together with a make-up line. In the meantime, his former wife continued to star in her family’s reality TV series and launched various fragrances, a mobile game and app, workout DVDs, the Kardashian Kollection fashion collection, a children’s clothing line, an e-commerce shoe website, and a cosmetics line.

162 Marketing creativity Opportunity Opportunity relates to ability, talent, hard work, perseverance, lucky breaks, good projects, and last, but by no means least, publicity. As Hortense Powdermaker (1951) remarked of Hollywood film stars more than half a century ago, persistence and hard work tend to be essential ingredients of every success story. In themselves, however, these attributes may not be enough. (That said – as we will later see – they probably have greater effects on a celebrity’s popularity in an Asian rather than a Western context.) Ability and talent are also very important, although neither necessarily guarantees success. There are plenty of talented and able people who never achieve fame for what they do. In this respect, most are at the mercy of the ‘lucky break’ – an opportunity that arises because of some sort of social connection, the inability of another person to seize the moment, or sheer chance. This happens in large part because, in countries like the United States, such industries as film, music, television, manga, and so on (although not fashion) do not have apprentice systems. In other words, in many – though not all – countries, there is no specific path leading to success based on an accepted recognition and understanding of what constitutes skill and talent in a particular field of cultural production. Sometimes, everything falls into place after the lucky break and the path to fame suddenly opens up; at other times, it does not. An American friend of mine in the advertising business once introduced my son Maya – a struggling musician of some considerable ability – to a leading director of TV commercials in Japan. It was highly likely that the director would have employed Maya simply because of who had introduced them. But it so happened that his mother died the night before they were due to meet and the interview was cancelled. Three days later, there was a major earthquake in the north of Japan, and my son felt it prudent to move from Tokyo to the southern island of Kyushu. As a result, he and the advertising art director never met, and Maya is still a struggling musician! Although luck often plays an extremely important role in who is employed to do what in any form of cultural production, the what tends to matter more. It is all very well to receive an unexpected offer of a part in a film, or an invitation to join a pop singer’s backing group, but it may not help your career if the film or tour flops because it is packed with B list personnel (unless you are a C list actor or singer). So, it is the type of film in which you will act, the type of singer for whom you will provide backing vocals, that is paramount. Jobs in different fields of cultural production are a bit like celebrities’ amorous liaisons: people tend to work with others who are at their own level of competence. The truly lucky break, therefore, is one that offers an aspiring celebrity a job with others who are above them in the rankings (A list) – people with whom they will not have associated previously because of their own, relatively lowly status. Finally, there is publicity. Good or bad, free or paid for, true or false, publicity is seen to be an essential ingredient in creative success. It may be limited to a particular CCI, directed towards audiences, or aimed at (and reach) both, but, whatever the case, celebrities are essential marketing tools. Every film studio, fashion

Celebrities

163

house, record company, and publisher has a publicity department whose main task – especially in the Hollywood film industry – is to publicise its stars, designers, singers, or authors continuously. Numerous other players, including personal publicists, managers, agents, and the celebrities themselves, battle for control of celebrity information disseminated by the media. They spread gossip and rumour in order to make their clients more desirable to the film studios, fashion houses, and so on, but also to attract the attention of a celebrity’s potential audience. For instance, a fictitious liaison can make an audience believe that ‘their’ hero is successful because he is mixing with other clearly successful people (a variation on the exploitation of genuine amorous liaisons, discussed above). This is a good example of social and symbolic capital, which, if properly managed, can be converted into economic capital (in the form of a leading role for a hitherto unknown actress, an invitation to join a more prestigious fashion house as chief designer, and so on).

The production of celebrities The subject of publicity and its role in creating and sustaining stardom in the minds of a celebrity’s audience leads us into the realm of how stars are (or are not) manufactured. Nowadays, in this age of mass and social media, it is easy to believe that many celebrities’ fame (or notoriety) is entirely manufactured without apparent regard for professional skills, character, or achievements. Indeed, it sometimes seems that anyone can become famous – if only for a day – as a consequence of a little exposure. However, in contrast to the apparent ease with which celebrity can be attained (especially via social media), sustaining it can be far more difficult. Either way, celebrities’ reputations are almost always commodified, often by means of their association with corporations and their products: George Clooney endorses Nespresso coffee-makers; Zhang Ziyi Omega watches, Mercedes Benz cars, and Emporio Armani clothes; and Mandopop star Wang Leehom everything from McDonald’s and Coca-Cola to Nikon and Sony Eriksson, by way of Head & Shoulders, Bausch + Lomb, and Wahaha. Celebrity is not an enduring privilege; it decays with fashion and age and therefore involves the constant recruitment of new members. The logic of celebrity has taken hold not only in every sphere of cultural production but also in business, government, politics, religion, sports, and social media generally. As a result, there is enormous competition among countless ‘position-takers’, which inevitably leads to significant attrition of former celebrities. This has led to accusations that some celebrities are little more than ‘human pseudo-events’, and to the coining of the word ‘celetoid’ – by the sociologist Chris Rojek (2001) – to differentiate ‘real’ celebrities from ‘false’ ones (although defining ‘real’ and ‘false’ remains problematic). The status of being well known is not new. After all, the whole of humankind’s cultural history recounts, and sustains, the words, deeds, and reputations of famous political leaders, military strategists, philosophers, and dramatists – witness our knowledge of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, the second Emperor of the

164 Marketing creativity Tang Dynasty, Taizong (Li Shimin), the great conquerors Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, philosophers like Plato and Confucius, and dramatists such as Sophocles and Zeami Motokiyo. This has led some scholars, including Leo Lowenthal (1968 [1961]), to argue that there has been a change in the meaning of the word ‘celebrity’. While, in the past, famous people were famous because they were ‘heroes’, now they are just ‘mass idols’. These days, celebrities are primarily images in media texts and famous because of their high visibility in the media (which is why young people seek fame through social media). The system – some might call it ‘cult’ – of celebrity in Western societies has in large part derived from different fields of cultural production: in particular, theatre, but also art, music, and other forms of entertainment. An early celebrity system that encompassed ukiyo-e woodblock artists, popular writers, kabuki actors, and geisha entertainers emerged in seventeenth-century Japan. However, it is Hollywood’s studio star system that is generally considered the main precursor of our contemporary celebrity system. There are four distinct economic aspects in the creative industries’ manufacture and use of celebrities and stars: 1

2

3

4

Capital: stars help publishing houses, film studios, recording companies, and so on to accumulate capital since, through contracts, they then own the rights to books, films, songs, and so forth. These rights can be bought and sold according to corporate strategies. Investment: creative industry organisations therefore invest in potential stars (a model agency in its models; a film studio in its actors and actresses; a record company in its singers and musicians), because – in addition to creating a copyright ‘bank’ – stardom provides at least some insurance against loss over the long term (nobody knows). Nevertheless, precisely because an investment in a potential star is a sunk cost, CCI organisations need to be careful about how much they invest. In other words, financial outlays need to be handled carefully in order to avoid losses. Production: every star has tangible features that can be advertised and marketed, such as a face, a smile, a voice, a style, parts of a body, a skill, or a certain kind of (authentic or fabricated) personality. Any one of these may prompt an organisation to use a particular celebrity in a film or fashion show, music video or TV commercial. In the case of film and television, as noted earlier, a celebrity is often typecast on the basis of their features: wicked villain, rugged hero, honest nonentity, fatal siren, innocent young girl, or neurotic woman. In this way, the system provides a formula that both simplifies the production of a movie or TV series (time flies) and, in its appeal to fans, aims to overcome the uncertainty of consumer demand (nobody knows). Market: precisely because celebrities command a more or less dedicated audience that is likely to attend a movie theatre if it is screening a film starring Chow Yun-fat, Gong Li, or Jackie Chan, or a pop concert featuring Lady Gaga or BoA, they not only sell films or music but organise the market. Chow Yun-fat is not Brad Pitt, who is not Colin Firth, who is not Jackie Chan, who

Celebrities

165

is not Jean Reno, who is not ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano. Similarly, Lady Gaga is not BoA, who is not Adele, who is not Beyoncé, or any other female singer. In other words, different celebrities are cultivated to appeal to different segments of the market (or to the same segment over time). Stardom, in short, is the sum of the industrial relations of power in every field of cultural production. Stars come to represent specific motifs or social types in a society, and it is around these that their images are constructed. This is not surprising. Stars are necessary to combat the uncertainty of demand – an uncertainty that encourages, as we have seen, the development of genres (which themselves aid formulaic production and so reduce the need for creative ideas). Stars and celebrities are codified into social ‘types’ so that they can be ‘typecast’ and fit into the genres in which they appear. In this way, two mechanisms are used together to combat nobody knows, while at the same time lessening the potential for ‘creativity’ in CCI. Celebrities have four main functions in cultural production: 1

2

3

4

They are ‘household names’ whose reputations connect producers and consumers by means of the products (commodities, cultural productions) with which they are associated. They give commodities ‘cultural personalities’ by means of their celebrity endorsements in advertising and PR activities, and operate as brand names for the organisation of production and consumption. Through the diversity of their activities, they help to link different economic and cultural spheres in which other cultural intermediaries (advertising creatives, marketing executives, television directors, fashion designers, and so on) are active. In this respect, they are crucially important cross-sector marketing devices. Because they perform across different media and thereby help to link different cultural and economic spheres, celebrities may be regarded as cultural intermediaries or mediators.

Celebrities in Asia What, then, are the specific characteristics of celebrity and stardom in the East Asian region? Of course, appearance, behaviour, and opportunity are important here as they are everywhere else, as is the fact that celebrities are promoted and manufactured by means of an economic system. But do Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans view a celebrity’s appearance in the same way as Western audiences do? What kind of behaviour do they expect of their stars? Where do opportunities for stardom arise? And how are ordinary men and women manufactured as stars in the public imagination? As we have seen, a celebrity’s appearance constitutes his or her cultural (or corporeal) capital. A certain kind of face – be it classically beautiful, rugged, edgy, innocent, or whatever – is transformed into economic capital in a film, on

166 Marketing creativity television, in a magazine, on stage, or on the catwalk. However, one obvious difference between Western and Asian expectations of a star’s appearance is that Western ‘sexiness’ is downplayed in favour of multiple variations on Asian ‘girlishness’ (of which Japanese ‘cuteness’ is undoubtedly the best-known example). This is not to say that Asian stars are not ‘sexy’. Far from it. In some cases – as in certain K-pop groups – sexuality is systematically produced, commodified, distributed, and consumed by media industries. It may also be severely criticised, especially in mainland China, where both the government and fans expect the country’s film stars, in particular its female stars, to keep their sexuality within strict limits in their everyday lives and when acting. Those who are deemed to have transgressed this unseen boundary, like Tang Wei in Lust, Caution, may well be ostracised (although it should be noted that Tang Wei’s male co-star did not suffer the same fate). On the other hand, overt sexuality is sometimes rewarded. For instance, after the Japanese porn star Aoi Sora (or Sola in Chinese) transformed herself into an all-purpose ‘talent’ in mainland China, she came to be regarded as a ‘teacher’ because her pornographic films were the first many of her online fans in that country had seen. In other words, over time, their sexual content came to be seen as instructional. As mentioned, girlishness is systematically produced and reproduced by all kinds of media in the East Asian region, as they stylise teenage girls’ everyday lives in their ubiquitous focus on clothing, food, dieting, and health, schooling, leisure activities, and plastic surgery. These media teach them how to sexualise themselves so that what we see in the case of Korean girls who become celebrities abroad is a kind of ‘Lolita nationalism’ that by no means always appeals to Western audiences. Discussions of how Asian celebrities should behave also reveal cultural peculiarities. One of these is the celebrities’ ‘ordinariness’. While managers and PR personnel constantly try to present their Western stars as ‘everyday’ people, the latter still tend to come across as somewhat aloof semi-deities with whom ordinary members of the public can expect no contact. In Japan and other East Asian countries, by contrast, celebrities should first and foremost be ‘ordinary’ (which coincides with the region’s prioritisation of group interaction and behaviour over self-centred individualism). This is supported in two ways: first, celebrities tend to appear on television shows in small groups and are presented as a ‘circle of friends’, rather than individual stars; second, their very ‘celebrity’ is diffused as ‘talent’ in the sense that, like the sarariman in Japanese corporations, they are trained to be ‘generalists’, not ‘specialists’. In other words, they are not referred to as ‘singers’, ‘film stars’, ‘comedians’, or whatever but simply as people with ‘talent’. A second cultural peculiarity may be attributed to the fact that the whole of the East Asian region, to a greater or lesser extent, adheres to Neo-Confucian morality. Just like everyone else, every celebrity is expected to uphold and exemplify ideals like family values, group orientation, decorum, and public propriety, as well as perseverance, determination, hard work, and endurance. As one might expect of Neo-Confucianism, this morality is gendered. As mentioned earlier, sensual pleasure, and even partial nudity, on the part of actresses, models, television presenters, and others is

Celebrities

167

considered unacceptable in mainland China, although it is tolerated (within certain cultural limits) in both Korea and Japan. Nevertheless, there is a strong social sentiment across the whole region that celebrities should act as role models to be emulated, not scorned, by society. Another aspect of Neo-Confucianism that East Asian celebrities must observe is ‘humaneness’. Although Deng Xiaoping supposedly declared, ‘To get rich is glorious’ (Zhìfù gua-ngróng), East Asians have long recognised that the wealthy have certain community responsibilities. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are regular reports in the media of celebrities’ philanthropy, which is seen as a moral counterbalance to their affluent lifestyles. In other words, getting rich is glorious only if some of that wealth is returned to the rest of society through support for the environment, leukaemia charities, oral history, the preservation of cultural antiquities, disaster relief, NGO training, UNICEF, and so on. Philanthropy on this scale is not an exclusively CCI phenomenon. The Hong Kong Jockey Club, for instance, donates a lot of its profits from the territory’s betting activities to countless charities and community projects; and in the 1980s Japanese department stores hosted a series of art and culture exhibitions, supposedly to ‘return’ the profits they had made to their customers. (In fact, such exhibitions often generated even greater profits for the stores as they cleverly manipulated exchanges between cultural and economic capital.) Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of celebrity in mainland China is the need to adhere to what might be called ‘Chinese-ness’ (an ideology that encompasses Neo-Confucianism). This works both ways: to the advantage of foreigners who seem somewhat ‘Chinese’; and to the disadvantage of Chinese who attempt to flaunt their ‘foreignness’ to a Western audience. The aforementioned Aoi Sora is a prime example of the former as she has become a superstar in mainland China in part because of her ‘earnest desire’ to learn Chinese and use it on social media. The Taiwanese–American singer Wang Leehom is also admired and accepted in mainland China because of his perseverance in adversity and diligence as well as his ‘passion’ and ‘achievements’ in music. By contrast, some Chinese stars have been criticised for supposedly flouting their ‘Chinese-ness’. A domestic backlash against the actress Zhang Ziyi centred on her perceived complicity with the foreign ‘other’ after she was photographed in a bikini with a Caucasian billionaire, while a later scandal involving charity donations stemmed from the fact that her foreign friends failed to donate the money they had promised. Moreover, it was around this time that Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li appeared in a Hollywood film, Memoirs of a Geisha, which dressed the two Chinese stars in Japanese kimonos as an exotic, ‘Oriental’ feast for Western eyes. This ‘sin’ was compounded by ongoing tensions between the mainland China and Japan, which – as the former constantly reminds the latter – has never officially apologised for its behaviour in the 1930s and 1940s. What emerges from such commentaries is the realisation that celebrity in China is marked by a fusion of cultural (often Confucian) and socialist values, spearheaded by the Chinese Communist Party. Although it mirrors some aspects of the

168 Marketing creativity global celebrity system, it also displays unabashed patriotism. To some extent, this is also true of Korean celebrity culture, as the Korean government tends to support forms of cultural production, such as K-drama, that effectively convey the national project of globalisation. Finally, we need to return to the subject of opportunity. Here, the East Asian system of celebrity production gives rise to a rather different set of issues from that found in Western celebrity. First of all, throughout the region, stardom is largely created and sustained by two interrelated institutions: production companies and television. As we saw in Chapter 4, entertainment companies like SM, YG, and JYP play key roles in the K-pop music industry. And we find similar organisations (known as jimusho; literally ‘office’) in Japan. But whereas the Korean entertainment companies focus on manufacturing (music) stars, Japanese companies like Johnny’s & Associates are involved in performer creation, management, overall production, and especially distribution of their celebrities across the market. This market is driven by television, which not only encompasses multiple media forms (films, music programmes, variety shows, DVDs, and so on) but is also highly intertextual in nature, since it is very closely linked to newspapers and magazines. As a result, it produces both print and broadcast platforms for celebrities whose success is therefore predicated on them becoming multi-platform entertainers. Following a system that echoes the golden age of the Hollywood film studios, the jimusho decide which of their ‘talent’ should appear on which show on which television network. Hundreds of relatively small, private companies act as jimusho in Japan. Of these, the top firms form loose, hierarchically structured alliances called keiretsu, each of which may include dozens of smaller organisations. The principal jimusho at the apex of each keiretsu provides finance as needed, doles out work to affiliates, and decides which entertainers should be allocated to which projects. In return, the subsidiaries are often expected to transfer publishing rights to the parent company. All of this means that one cornerstone of the Western celebrity system – being the ‘right’ person in the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time – is somewhat irrelevant in the Asian context, because the top jimusho – such as Johnny’s & Associates, Burning Production, K-Dash, Stardust Promotion, or Yoshimoto Ko-gyo- – control hundreds of celebrities through the keiretsu system and, due to this market power, have the ability to craft new stars year after year, decade after decade; in other words, they decide exactly what a ‘star’ should be. In addition, they place this ‘talent’ however they please on major TV shows, in television commercials, and in other high-profile work, while boycotting any programmes that try to enlist celebrities from rival keiretsu. Under these circumstances, individual performers have very little say in their careers, since they are effectively contracted employees of their management companies, which exert full managerial and financial control over them. In other words, every East Asian celebrity must play the game according to strict rules and obey the referee at all times.

Celebrities

169

References General readings Boorstin, Daniel( 1963) The Image. Harmondsworth:Pelican Books. Dyer, Richard (1979) Stars. London: BFI Gamson, Joshua (2001) ‘Celebrity’. In Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 1578– 1581. Lowenthal, Leo (1968 [1961]) ‘The triumph of mass idols’. In Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, pp. 109–140. Marshall, E. David (2006) The Celebrity Culture Reader. New York and London: Routledge. Mills, C. Wright (1956) ‘The celebrities’. In C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–93. Powdermaker, Hortense (1951) ‘Stars’. In Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 228–253. Rojek, Chris (2001) Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Wernick, Andrew (1991) Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage.

Regional readings Edwards, Louise and Elaine Jeffreys (eds) (2010) Celebrity in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Galbraith, Patrick W. and Jason G. Karlin (2012) Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kim, Yeran (2011) ‘Idol republic: the global emergence of girl industries and the commercialisation of girl bodies’. Journal of Gender Studies 20 (4): 333–345. Stevens, Carolyn and Shuhei Hosokawa (2001) ‘Humanizing celebrity in Japanese music variety shows, 1960s–1990s’. In Brian Moeran (ed.), Asian Media Productions. London: Curzon, pp. 223–246. Stocker, Joel F. (2001) ‘Yoshimoto Ko-gyo- and manzai in Japan’s media culture’. In Brian Moeran (ed.), Asian Media Productions. London: Curzon, pp. 247–269. Zuo, Mila (2015) ‘Sensing “performance anxiety”: Zhang Ziyi, Tang Wei, and female film stardom in the People’s Republic of China’. Celebrity Studies 6 (4): 519–537.

Conclusion The name economy

So, there you have it – a discussion of creative and cultural industries in the East Asian region, as well as of the various mechanisms by which different kinds of cultural production are carried out in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. If you happen to be a student in Europe or the United States, you may be asking yourself: ‘Why did Brian Moeran choose to focus on East Asian CCI? Why didn’t he talk about cultural production in our parts of the world, too?’ There is a simple, two-part answer to these questions. First, I have conducted almost all of my research in Japan, and have spent almost three decades living and working in East Asia. It is a region I think I know quite well and so can write about perceptively. Second, a large majority of scholarly writings and theorising about CCI has taken place within European countries and the United States, and has been based on ‘Western’ forms of cultural production. How well such theories hold up in non-Western cultural and economic contexts is, therefore, of interest. I have made use of four such theories: 1

2 3

4

Richard Caves’s outline of the seven economic properties which, he says, make creative industries different from the industries normally studied by economists. Howard Becker’s ‘bottom-up’ approach from the perspective of the functioning of ‘art worlds’, which I then applied to CCI in general. Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘top-down’ analysis of how cultural production takes place in a ‘field’ of power relations, where individual and institutional actors compete with one another to take up ‘positions’ by means of exchanges of economic, cultural, social, intellectual, and symbolic forms of capital. And Erving Goffman’s analysis of ‘frame behaviour’ and how everyday frames – a film production, recording studio, fashion show, or trade fair, for example – tend to influence the participants’ behaviour.

Do these theories still work when applied to different forms of cultural production in the East Asian region? Yes. Are creative practices therefore the same? No. DOI: 10.4324/9781003177074-14

Conclusion

171

As I have pointed out, different industries in different countries follow the principles laid down by Caves, Becker, Bourdieu, and Goffman, but they tend to do so in slightly different ways. Differing copyright laws, for example, affect how the economic property of ars longa functions; greater concern over status affects the weight given to A list/B list rankings and to exchanges between economic and symbolic capital; the organisation of production (in K-pop, for instance) has repercussions for the concept of art for art’s sake and creativity, which itself is viewed differently in East Asian societies from the way in which Europeans and Americans see it. This in itself leads to different emphases on the workings of the motley crew in different industries in different countries. In spite of such differences in emphasis, the overall mechanisms of the markets in which CCI function in East Asia are more or less the same as those encountered in Europe and the United States. However, how governments treat cultural products and their producers can lead to differences. In mainland China, for example, government censorship means that cultural producers need to be careful about the content of the films they make or the songs they record. In other words, censorship directly impinges on whatever culturally bound concept of creativity producers may wish to follow. It can also affect a star’s reputation if he or she oversteps a particular mark – like nudity or ‘otherness’ (for instance, when a Chinese actress seems too ‘Western’ or accepts a ‘Japanese’ role). For all these differences, however, I believe I have demonstrated that CCI markets function very much as economists and economic sociologists insist CCI markets should function. All of them exhibit, to a greater or lesser degree, the economic properties outlined by Richard Caves. All of them form social – or ‘creative’ – worlds around their respective cultural products. Both these social worlds and the products form a field of cultural production in which, as Pierre Bourdieu explained, ongoing exchanges between different forms of capital are enabled and sustained – especially the transformation of economic into symbolic capital, and back again. To a large extent, then, this book focuses on what other scholars have referred to as the ‘cultural economy’ – the ways in which, contrary to what economists believe, the economy is in many important respects cultural, and culture itself is an economic institution. CCI evince this paradox very clearly. What I suggest, though, is replacing the term ‘cultural economy’ with ‘symbolic – or name – economy’. The argument presented in the previous chapter was that, even though different forms of cultural production tend to differ from one another in terms of creative processes, career opportunities, exploitation of copyright, and so on, they are united by the fact that they all develop a celebrity system. Celebrity is what allows us to talk about the ‘creative industries’ and/or the ‘cultural industries’ in the first place (which is why, ultimately, I do not consider incense production a specifically ‘creative’ industry). It underpins all media content, from gossip, fashion, and fan magazines to televised sports, talent and reality shows, by way of dot.com millionaires, celebrity chefs, cam girls, and the occasional White House intern – media content that often masquerades as ‘news’.

172 Conclusion Different forms of cultural production are organised in similar, though distinctive, ways as they struggle with the vagaries of their respective ‘markets of singularities’ (infinite variety), where, as Lucien Karpik (2010) reminds us, every product differs from all others both now and from the past. But in all CCI, including incense production, reputation is paramount, because reputations help to define and sustain the various fields, along with the aesthetic evaluations that take place therein (as well as ensuing valuations in terms of price). They contribute to the kind of economic and symbolic capital that is required in what James English (2005) has called an ‘economy of prestige’. Precisely because all CCI products are both cultural products and commodities, celebrities are both cultural and commercial in their personae. They are not just cultural intermediaries, but economic mediators. You may justifiably ask: why add yet another term to this field of study? We already have ‘cultural economy’, ‘symbolic economy’, ‘prestige economy’, and, most recently, ‘enrichment economy’. So what makes ‘name economy’ so special? It is hard enough distinguishing between the previous four terms without having to try to understand another. Is there no way to simplify this? Well, I’ll try. My answer to these questions stems from my ‘bottom-up’, inductive approach to theorising. In my work, I have always developed theories on the basis of my anthropological fieldwork data. I employ terms like ‘motley crew’, ‘art world’, and ‘position-taking’, yes, but only because they make sense in the context of my own research on the ground. (As I tried to show, for example, in my analysis of how Asatsu- became Japan’s third-largest advertising agency by taking up hitherto ignored ‘positions’ in that industry.) This is why I now argue for a ‘name’ – rather than a ‘prestige’, ‘enrichment’, ‘symbolic’, or ‘cultural’ – economy. What I have found during the course of my research over the past forty years – research that covers everything from folk art pottery, advertising, and art marketing to fashion magazines, incense production, and smell cultures – is that, time and time again, my informants have discussed their social worlds in terms of names, not culture, symbolism, prestige, or enrichment. Yes, prestige comes into the equation in the world of advertising, as does culture in that of folk art potters. But when talking about either prestige or culture, they do so almost exclusively in terms of names: of clients, corporations, other advertising agencies, and those agencies’ ‘star’ personnel; of famous potters, critics, and the department stores in which they exhibit; of rival fashion magazines, designers, models, and photographers. Thus, it strikes me that the notion of a name economy is far easier to grasp than any of the other, more abstract concepts I have mentioned here. ‘Follow the names’ (as well as ‘Follow the money’) might be good advice to anyone interested in understanding how cultural production works. This term, ‘name economy’, underpins the discussions I have presented throughout this book. All creative industries rely first and foremost on the existence and hierarchical ranking of actors in a field of cultural production. Meanwhile, what marks celebrities first and foremost is the fact that they are named. By naming individual actors, organisations, and products or brands, people express a

Conclusion

173

need to act both on and in the world. Not surprisingly, therefore, as any reader of Genesis will recall, the act of naming has great power. We Xerox documents in the office, and Hoover the carpet at home. We blow our noses with Kleenex, and cover cuts on our fingers with Band-Aids. At lunchtime, we drink a pint of Guinness and eat a sandwich. We might be wearing a cardigan, or a mackintosh, or even a leotard as we do so. This is not a preserve of the English language. Japanese office workers staple together sheets of paper with a Hotchkiss (an American manufacturer of staplers), while speakers of Tagalog in the Philippines refer to all brands of toothpaste as Colgate. Because of the power of names, many aspiring celebrities choose a new one that they feel will help their career. Thus, we have Greta Garbo, not Greta Lovisa Gustafsson; Michelle Yeoh, not Yang Zi Qiong; and Karen Mok, not Karen Joy Morris. Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch; Jet Li, Li Lianje. Some celebrities revise the spelling of their given name (Carina rather Kar-ling Lau), while others adopt an abbreviation (Ti Lung rather than Tam Fu-Wing). They may also change their given surname (Yeoh, not Yang) or omit it entirely (Angelababy, not Angela Yeung Wing). These stage names are metaphorical – like the names people give to pedigree dogs or racehorses, they form a kind of parallel universe to the names people bear in their everyday lives. Precisely because of the imperative that celebrity names must be recognised, the system risks having its structure called into question every time a new member is admitted because of the names of other celebrities (both past and present). The requirement, therefore, is that – as with racehorses – celebrity names be rigorously individualised. No two celebrities can have the same name simultaneously (although this rule tends to break down in Chinese and Korean societies, where there are relatively few family names). Each name is, in Nancy Munn’s (1986: 106) words, ‘a carrier of the unique identity of the individual’. By naming the people and things around us, we create and fix meanings, or significations, that become part of ‘culture’. These are then transferred to other realms of our existence. ‘Jet’ Li can only imply action; ‘Michelle’ Yeoh a goddesslike presence. An Italian-American singer christened ‘Madonna’ records a hit song titled ‘Like a Virgin’, promotes it with a video which confirms that she is definitely not a virgin, and launches her career as the ‘Queen of Pop’. What is it, then, that is so important about names? According to the anthropologist Michael Jackson (whose own name generates a degree of classificatory confusion), every name contains a potentiality that allows its bearer to act more confidently in situations that are unpredictable, dangerous, and subject to a high degree of uncertainty (Jackson, 2005). This notion is particularly relevant in the context of CCI, which, as we have seen, are ruled by unpredictability and uncertainty. In order to overcome this nobody knows economic property, the media promote a seamless web of names from different fields of cultural production: ‘Michelle Yeoh walked the runway for Dolce & Gabbana’s Fall 2017 fashion show in Milan Fashion Week’; ‘Karen Mok carried the torch at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing’; and ‘Angelababy, who is No. 8 on the new Forbes China Celebrity List, attended the “Christian Dior, couturier du rêve” exhibition launch

174 Conclusion celebrating 70 years of creation at Musée des Arts Décoratifs on July 3 in Paris’. In so doing, they create a readily recognisable system and link together otherwise separate industries – an actress with a cosmetics firm (Zhang Ziyi and Maybelline lipstick); an actor with a motorbike (Jackie Chan and the Bajaj Auto 125cc Discover); another actress with an accessory (Li Bingbing and her ‘Jackie’ handbag, itself named after Jacqueline Kennedy); a pop singer with a herbal drink (Joey Yung and Sensa Cools); and so on. In the various fields of cultural production, it is not the cultural products themselves – films, pop songs, dresses, paintings, video games – that circulate from one person or organisation to the next. It is their names. As I said, all forms of cultural production routinely create and make use of the reputations of individual people, organisations, and brands as part of their promotional activities. It is these reputations, rather than any common form of social organisation, production methods, market structure, or value chain, that bind together the industries of film, fashion, media, music, publishing, and so on under the single denomination of ‘creative and cultural industries’. Precisely because we are always talking, listening, reading, and writing about other people, names can be said to travel through the minds and speech of others. They float mysteriously in the air, somehow detached from their physical persons, becoming a kind of virtual form that influences our cultural understandings and reactions to products, both laudatory and critical. Consequently, as Rainer Maria Rilke once remarked, ‘Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.’1 Think of any one of the countless scandals surrounding celebrities as an illustration of this. Names tend to take on particular importance in three ways during cultural production. First, they are actively used and disseminated as part of the promotional strategies of all those in a creative world or field. Once again, ranking is a crucial factor affecting who endorses what for whom. It is not just creative industries which create A list/B list rankings of their personnel. Corporations do the same through the marketing of brands (rather than mere products), since a brand name can establish and sustain the well-received image of what becomes a branded corporation, while any corporation already endowed with such a brand image can readily transform a product into a (generally more expensive) brand. Celebrities participate in a similar exchange of symbolic and economic capital by selecting which products or brands to endorse on the basis of their own A list/B list ranking. Generally speaking, stars endorse star brands, while second-rate celebrities endorse second-rate products. However, financial reward can break this rule, as when Ringo Starr was contracted to endorse a run-of-the-mill Japanese apple juice (made acceptable by the fact that ringo in Japanese means ‘apple’). This status game which takes place between individuals, commodities, and organisations in large part explains why the film and fashion industries are so closely intertwined. Films dress actors in clothes designed by well-known fashion houses, whose designers then devote a lot of time and trouble to preparing special clothes (which may or may not be worn) for those same actors’ upcoming appearances at prestigious major events like the Busan, Hong Kong, and Tokyo

Conclusion

175

International Film Festivals (as well as the Academy Awards, of course). The hope is that the combination of celebrity and outfit will generate publicity and that such publicity will enhance everyone’s reputation and lead to further sales. Film festivals and their accompanying awards provide crucial sites for the functioning of the film industry’s field. Each name (actor, director, producer, cinematographer, screenwriter, and so on) strives to make his or her mark (positiontaking) in what is essentially a struggle for power, and so legitimate how a film is perceived and appreciated. Something similar happens in every other field of cultural production. The system of names is a system of status and power; in other words, it underpins ‘prestige’ and ‘enrichment’ economies. Second, just as we judge the quality of a film by the names of the actors who appear in it, we attribute ‘cultural personalities’ to commodities endorsed by celebrities. This is a form of contagious magic. A celebrity’s personality is transferred in consumers’ minds onto a product, so that the qualities of the two become identical. It is with these qualities that we, as consumers, identify. Thus, we find pairings such as the actress Li Bingbing and Gucci, the actor Chow YunFat and Hugo Boss, and the actress and singer Zhou Xun and Chanel, because the values embodied by these celebrities are perceived to be, in essence, extensions of the values promoted by the fashion houses they endorse. Li Bingbing’s ‘glamazon’ looks and assertive attitude, Chow Yun-Fat’s dignified gravitas, and Zhou Xun’s reputation as something of a demure fashionista (undented by the occasional nude photo scandal) make them perfect ambassadors for their respective brands. As a result, because they promote products in sectors of the economy with which they have little or no professional connection, celebrities operate as brand names for the organisation of production and consumption as a whole. They constitute a ‘world of fame’ in which opinion – rather than any specific professional quality – establishes equivalence. The worth of each person depends on others’ opinions, so organisations try to take advantage of the fact that, in Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006: 179) phrase, ‘fame establishes worth’. In the world of reputation, this relationship is one of identification, as consumers identify with what stars choose to endorse and consume, with whom, and on which occasions. Names, therefore, become a crucial site for the functioning of the field as a whole, as each name strives to make its mark in a struggle for recognition and power and so, in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) formulation, legitimate the perception and appreciation of different forms of cultural production. In other words, names underpin cultural, symbolic, prestige, and enrichment economies. Precisely because what they do has important economic consequences for both consumers and the corporations on whose behalf they are employed, celebrities – from porn stars to politicians, by way of chefs and CEOs – negotiate, and are themselves used to negotiate, cultural and economic space in all contemporary societies. Their names are a shorthand means by which we link the economy with culture. They act as both economic and cultural mediators in their own and other fields, conveniently linking otherwise separate fields of cultural production. Celebrities thus form a crucial part of the symbolic market, in which fame and worth are established by the opinions of others, rather than by any particular

176 Conclusion professional quality. Their names allow us to move effortlessly between the cultural and the economic in our everyday lives. They provide us with social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Some people are prepared to pay a lot of money for a Chanel pearl dress worn by Zhou Xun, or a pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos worn by Nicole Kidman, because they are convinced that such commodities attract the attention of others around them in their social world and make them ‘look good’. This is the basic principle of branding. Like celebrities, brands are ‘household names’ with reputations that link producers and consumers in the never-ending tournament of values between economy and culture. We live in an age, then, when it is not the struggle between rich and poor, high and low class, man and woman, or developed and developing nations that counts so much as the struggle among names. Names satisfy an intellectual demand for order, involving a long-term accumulation of social and cultural capital that is then converted into economic capital, and back again. Celebrities serve not just as ‘cultural intermediaries’ but as cultural and economic mediators, in that, as Bruno Latour (2005: 39) puts it, they ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’. Like the animals and plants in those totemic systems studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966), celebrities are deemed to be useful or interesting because they are known, rather than known because they are useful. In this sense, celebrities, afford. Initiating evaluations and valuation, and operating in a particular commercial field, they are the crucial element in a mixed economy – a name economy.

Note 1 www.azquotes.com/quote/419294.

References Boltanski, Luc and Arnaud Esquerre (2020) Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press. du Gay, Paul (ed.) (1997) Production of Culture/Cultures of Production. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage and the Open University. English, James (2005) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Featherstone, Mike (1991) Consumerism & Postmodernism. London: Sage. Jackson, Michael (2005) ‘What’s in a name? An essay in the power of words’. In Michael Jackson, Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 75–91. Karpik, Lucien (2010) Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conclusion

177

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Moeran, Brian (2014) The Business of Creativity. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Munn, Nancy (1986) ‘Fame’. In Nancy Munn, The Fame of Gawa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 105–118. Zeliger, Viviana A. (2011) Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Index

Academy Awards 32, 141, 151, 152, 153, 175; see also award; prize advertisement 49, 59, 62, 63, 65, 102, 103, 104, 139; see also television commercial advertising 10, 11; account 26, 33–4, 47; agency 1, 18, 33, 40, 44, 50, 63, 67, 70, 85, 158, 172; art director 26, 31, 33, 44, 46, 47, 59, 60, 65, 141, 157, 162; campaign 8, 12, 17, 26, 32–4, 38, 44, 47, 50, 51, 52, 62, 65, 86, 97, 124, 140; client 18, 24, 26, 27, 33–4, 44, 47, 51, 63–4, 65, 86, 111, 139; copywriter 1, 13, 26, 27, 33, 40, 50, 159; creative director 31, 59, 96; field of 62, 65, 67; industry 43, 67, 82, 172; in Japan 40, 43, 44, 62–5, 70, 82, 172; media 30, 33–4, 65, 67; see also Asatsu- (ADK); fashion magazine aesthetic 30, 39, 49, 52, 53, 54, 69, 105, 106, 111, 134–6, 137, 138, 139, 141, 151, 153, 172; ideal 97; Japanese 105; olfactory 111; visual 87, 104; see also affordance; value affordance 38, 44–54, 73, 99, 110, 114–15, 117–19, 134; circuit of 45–6, 52–4; economic 51–2, 98, 114, 118; representational 49–50, 81, 98, 114, 118, 121; social 50–1, 115, 117, 119; spatial 47–8, 73, 97, 115, 119; technomaterial 46–7, 80, 114; temporal 48–9, 73, 115, 120; see also value A list/B list 29–32, 36, 47, 51, 53, 59, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69, 80, 83, 86, 110, 117, 118, 123, 147, 153, 155, 158, 161, 162, 171, 174; see also celebrity; ranking; reputation animation 11, 30, 33, 64, 147; industry 129

anime 3, 13, 15, 38, 56, 58, 64, 69, 129, 130, 138, 143, 152, 157, 159 anthropology 11, 16, 17, 18, 21, 58, 131, 172 apparel 11, 146; industry 92; see also clothing; fashion appreciation 13, 14, 39–40, 48, 110, 111, 123, 133, 141, 175; see also taste ars longa 34–6, 49, 66, 75, 79, 85, 90, 124, 158, 171; see also copyright; economic properties art 10, 11: for art’s sake 26–7, 33, 34, 36, 38, 43, 66, 69, 70, 76, 78, 80, 90, 93, 98, 124, 125, 140, 157, 158,171; collector 12, 48, 51, 68, 130, 133, 146; criticism 57; contemporary 49, 51; dealer 12, 39, 130; exhibition 68, 69, 108, 137, 146, 152, 155, 167, 173; field of 68, 69, 144, 145; gallery 12, 39, 51, 68, 108, 124, 130, 145; visual 2, 8, 9, 10, 11; world 12, 21, 38, 50, 56, 57, 68, 69, 84, 98, 146, 172; see also artist; artwork; genre; performing arts Art Basel 69, 143, 144, 146, 147; see also fair artist 3, 5, 7, 12, 16, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 57, 68–9, 76, 78, 79–80, 81, 82–4, 85, 86, 88, 89, 96, 97, 108, 124, 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 138, 152, 153, 157, 164; make-up 15, 50, 59, 60, 62, 100, 101–2, 103, 105; studio 12, 130 artwork 8, 12, 13, 32, 70, 132, 134, 135, 136, 141, 145, 146, 157 Asatsu- (ADK) 63–5, 66 auction 16, 52, 108, 134, 137, 152; house 130

Index 179 audience see taste award 31–2, 48, 62, 143, 151, 152–5; see also prize beauty 14, 61, 97, 102, 103, 136, 143, 160; industry 60, 103; see also fashion Becker, H. 1, 21–2, 32, 38–55, 56, 57, 70, 73, 90, 110, 122, 123, 170, 171 Bollywood 15, 31, 34 book 5, 12, 18, 24, 25–6, 27–9, 34–5, 39, 46, 58, 59, 61–2, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 96, 97, 102, 107, 127, 136, 138, 143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 153, 155; Chinese 29; fair 143, 144, 147, 148, 149–50, 151; academic 25, 26, 35, 38, 61, 149; comic 3; design 25; guide 49, 140; Korean 28; Japanese 29; store 24, 25, 27; text 25, 77; see also fair; publishing Bourdieu, P. 1, 21–2, 27, 29, 56–71, 73, 77, 80, 90, 93, 98, 110, 122–3, 127, 134, 155, 158, 160, 170, 171, 175 brand 23, 44, 59, 62, 66, 69, 73, 113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 130, 136, 146, 165, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176; fashion 60, 92, 95, 97–8, 103, 106–7, 132; image 89, 100, 174; see also name branding 4, 61, 158, 176 budget 31, 34, 44, 51–2, 101, 152 Buddhist 111–13, 120; rite 113, 120, 121; temple 112, 114, 120, 123, 125 Cannes Film Festival 147, 151, 152, 153, 154 Cantopop 15, 58, 84, 129 capital 56–7, 65–8, 158, 164, 170, 176 conversion of 56, 66–7, 69, 70, 86, 94, 123, 134, 139, 152, 153, 165, 167, 171, 176; corporeal 160, 165; cultural 65–6, 68, 86, 127, 137, 138, 139, 144, 160, 165, 167, 176; economic 66, 67, 69, 70, 76, 80, 86, 94, 127, 139, 153, 163, 165, 167, 171, 172, 174; educational 68; intellectual 66, 123, 127, 170; social 65, 66, 68, 127, 163, 176; symbolic 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 76, 80, 86, 94, 96, 98, 100, 105, 122–3, 127, 139, 153, 163, 171, 172, 174, 176; see also fashion capital career 3, 16, 56, 57, 58, 64, 76, 80, 87, 143, 152, 153, 171, 173 cartoon see anime Caves, R. 1, 21, 22, 23–37, 38, 43, 69, 70, 73, 78, 90, 110, 114, 122, 123–4, 137, 138, 157, 170, 171

CCI 2, 3–4, 8, 12, 24, 34, 35, 40, 44, 54, 123, 124, 125, 127, 131, 134, 136–7, 144, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164, 165, 167, 170–2, 173; in (East) Asia 2, 9–11, 110, 170, 171; economic importance of 2–3; in Japan 112; see also creative industry; cultural industry CD 5, 24, 34, 78, 79, 90, 144, 145; sales 82–3, 144 celebrity 14, 15, 30, 45, 51, 60, 92, 96, 97, 100, 103, 123, 127–8, 141, 143, 146, 153, 157–69; career 160, 161, 162, 164, 168; appearance of 160; behaviour of 160–1; in China 167; in East Asia 87, 89–90, 127, 165–8; function of 158; Korean 166, 168; opportunity 162–3; production of 163–5; system 90, 159, 164, 168, 171, 173–4; see also fame; name economy; reputation; star China (mainland) 1, 2, 9, 11, 13, 15, 25, 29, 34, 58, 68, 77, 84, 87, 89–90, 92, 105, 106–7, 110, 119, 129, 131, 144, 146, 161, 166–7, 170, 171, 173 client 43, 54, 94, 118, 123, 130, 140, 163, 172; corporate 64; see also advertising client clothing 10, 11, 13, 24, 48, 73, 97, 98, 105, 140, 141, 146; children’s 161; industry 92; manufacturer 62, 92, 95, 107; second-hand 93; style 94, 95; traditional 105, 106; see also fashion; style; textile collective: activity 38–40, 123; management 8, 16; misrecognition 98; sensemaking 152 collector see art collector comics see manga commodity 13, 14, 70, 124, 127, 133, 134, 141, 145, 150, 165, 174, 176; chain 92; see also cultural product; value competition 56, 77, 80, 83, 89, 111, 119, 131–2, 151, 163 concept 13, 16, 49, 73, 171, 172; creative 6, 12, 13, 38–9, 40, 45, 57, 59, 62, 97, 100, 105, 121, 123, 145; theoretical 1, 5, 7, 15, 45, 73, 107, 110, 127, 145, 171 Confucianism 131, 166–7 conglomerate 94, 95 consumer 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 39, 43, 54, 66, 75, 79, 82–3, 86, 88, 95, 99, 106, 131, 133, 134, 136, 139, 148, 150, 165, 175, 176; buff 137, 138; culture 104; demand 24, 37, 120,

180 Index 152, 164; electronics 11; expectation 49; feedback 103; friendly 24; group 95, 137; market 27, 68, 69, 144; preference 3, 138; target 44; taste 16, 27, 29, 77, 138, 141 consumption 5, 14, 29, 31, 73, 75–6, 77, 79, 82, 93, 110, 129, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 158, 159, 165, 175; mass 118 content industry see copyright industry contract 35, 79, 85, 89, 117, 130, 124, 164; system 85; theory 23 convention 44–5, 46, 49, 53, 54, 98, 99, 100, 158: centre 143, 146, 147 copyright 1, 9, 34–6, 66, 69, 78, 79, 85, 89, 90, 124, 158; bank 164; in East Asia 35; exploitation of 171; industry 1, 4, 5, 7–8, 10, 73; infringement 82, 124, 154; law 16, 35, 154, 171; protection 36, 73, 158; revenue 83 copywriter see advertising copywriter corporation 2, 3, 23, 65, 76, 86, 123, 127, 163, 172, 174, 175; Japanese 63, 64, 86, 166; Korean 88; multinational 62, 75; see also Korean entertainment house cosmetics see beauty creative: class 16, 21; cluster 17, 21; economy 2–3; worker 3, 26–7, 33, 36, 45, 140; world 13, 38–55, 96, 108, 123, 134, 140, 157, 174; see also concept creative industry 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23–4, 26, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 50, 57, 62, 66, 70, 73–125, 130, 138, 143, 144, 153, 164, 170, 174; Asian 15; definition of 5–7, 8–9; and government 1, 4, 5–6, 8, 9–12, 21, 25, 43, 63, 88, 90, 114, 122, 131, 147, 166, 168, 171, 172; see also copyright industry, cultural industry, economic properties creative process 5, 8, 16, 17, 31, 32, 44, 45, 97, 157, 171 creative product 2, 13, 17, 24, 31, 35, 46, 48, 49, 54, 123, 129, 138, 153, 158 creativity 1, 5, 7, 16, 17, 18, 26, 27, 37, 50, 51, 56, 62, 83, 84, 98, 124, 134, 140, 157, 161, 165, 171; in China 13; and constraints 44–5; definition of 11–13, 41; in East Asia 27; ideology of 3, 6; individual 6, 8, 12, 42; in Japan 13; marketing 127–76; and originality 89, 97; as social and cultural process 44; understandings of 1–2, 13, 40–4, 54–5; at work 1, 38, 110; see also creative

product; creative process; improvisation; innovation critic 13, 30, 39, 68, 137, 138–9, 153, 154, 172 cultural industry 125; definition of 4–5; East Asian 1–2; economic properties of 16 cultural producer 25, 27, 29, 33, 34, 46, 48, 59, 61, 66, 153, 171 cultural product 27, 29, 30, 31, 38, 47, 51, 59, 68, 136, 143, 157, 158, 171, 174; and commodity 14–5, 69, 70, 93, 102, 127, 130, 139, 165, 172, 175; East Asian 129 cultural production 1, 2–5, 7, 8–9, 11–15, 18, 21–2, 23–35, 38–40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 73, 76, 97, 104, 110, 117, 123, 127–8, 130, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 163, 165, 168, 170–2, 174; East Asian 15–18, 22, 30, 110, 129; financing of 26, 51, 63, 66,168; large-scale 38, 70, 80, 93; organisation of 27, 50, 59, 65, 123, 157–9, 174; in practice 38; restricted 70, 93; small-scale 80; social processes of 1, 22, 31; see also field culture 4, 5–6, 11, 14, 16, 107, 133, 167, 172, 173; Chinese 106, 131; cute 16; definition of 11, 14; and economy 5, 15, 69, 70, 102, 136, 141, 171, 175, 176; food 10; industry 5; Japanese 129, 131; Korean 87, 168; material 111; popular 129; smell 18; tabloid 58 DCMS 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 deadline 1, 42, 48, 90, 125, 158 demand 176; supply and 131; see also consumer demand; market demand; uncertainty department-store 24, 27, 140; buyer 105, 141, 143, 146 design 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 40, 43, 45, 62, 93, 95, 97, 99, 106, 124; book 25, 144; graphic 9; interior 98; school 68, 100 designer 25, 29; chair 125; costume 13, 31, 133; dress 46, 134, 137; fabric 95; firm 94; furniture 9; set 12; see also fashion designer differentiation 36, 61; product 23 digital 2, 35, 51, 59, 144, 154; content 11; era 16; file sharing 87; media 4, 7, 34; photography 39, 46; platform 90; revolution 73, 85, 87; systems provider 144,

Index 181 145, 148; technology 9, 46, 75, 82–4, 87, 149; see also rights digitisation 7, 73, 78, 82–4, 88; see also music, technological innovations in disposition see habitus distributor 59, 66, 76, 78, 81, 82, 85, 89, 143, 144, 148, 149; wholesale 114 distribution 3, 8, 11, 25–6, 45, 54, 57, 66, 75, 76, 78, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 95, 107, 119, 148, 152, 168; channel 85; company 81; costs 103; network 79–80, 81; system 81, 82; see also music drama 28, 30, 64, 87, 153; K- 168; see also television economic 2, 6, 7, 45, 95, 103, 127, 131, 136, 138, 141, 145, 152, 158; analysis 16; behaviour 132; condition 118; development 4, 90; exchange 45; geography 16, 17; history 105, 150; interest 56; mediator 172, 175, 176; model 131; properties 1, 21, 23–37, 38, 69, 73, 78, 114, 122, 123, 124, 127, 157, 158, 170, 171; ranking 147; sociology 16, 131, 171, 173; sphere 165; structure 133; system 165; theorist 132; see also affordance; capital; institution; value economics 16; cultural 17 economy 16, 37, 51, 79, 90, 171, 175; attention 16; cultural 171, 172; enrichment 172; experience 136–9; Japanese 117; snack 16; symbolic 68–70, 171, 172, 175; see also culture; market; music; name; prestige education 4, 9, 25, 26, 35, 40, 56, 57, 66, 137; see also capital employment 1, 2, 3, 17, 23, 43, 97; freelance 3, 25, 50, 60, 130, 159; of women 3, 123 entertainment 8, 9, 11, 14, 23, 34, 87, 98, 103, 129, 143, 150 164; business 61, 144; company 61, 85, 87, 88, 89–90, 154, 168; East Asian 90; media 7; see also Korean entertainment house Europe 1, 2, 3, 10, 15, 16, 17, 25, 30, 35, 73, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 102, 105, 106, 110, 129, 131, 144, 146, 151, 160, 170, 171 evaluation 46, 54, 131–4, 136, 137, 139, 141, 173, 176; symbolic 133, 136; see also valuation; value; worth event 46, 48, 76, 86, 95, 99–100, 104, 105, 133, 137, 143, 144, 145, 146,

147, 148, 174; pseudo- 163; see also fair; festival; field; prize; tournament of values exchange 53, 56, 66, 67, 76, 90, 122, 127, 130, 131, 134, 137, 145, 158, 167, 170, 171, 174; forms of 147; of goods and services 131, 147; of information 149, 150, 152; rate 149; trade 150; see also capital; market experience 14, 18, 44, 47, 48, 78; Asian 28; good 36, 137, 138; symbolic 9; see also economy fair 11, 16, 127, 132, 143, 161; in East Asia 143, 154; functions of 149–50; network 148; trade 16, 132, 143–56, 161; see also event; festival; prize fame 90, 152, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 174, 175; see also name; reputation fan 90, 137–8, 154, 159, 164; Chinese 90, 166; Hong Kong 135 fashion 10: accessory 94, 94, 98, 102, 103, 146, 148, 150, 174; East Asian 105–7; blogger 103–4, 107; capital 24, 45, 93, 96, 98, 105; catwalk 24, 48, 49, 98, 99, 99, 105, 139, 143, 166; Chinese 106–7; collection 13, 14, 17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 36, 39, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 57, 59, 65, 98–101, 130, 157, 158, 161; fast 93; field of 61, 93, 96, 98, 105, 127, 140, 146; house 45, 59, 66, 79, 92, 93, 95, 96, 102, 103, 104, 140, 145, 151, 158, 163, 174, 175; image 59, 73, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 102, 104, 146; industry 10, 11, 45, 60, 73, 92–109, 124, 133; Japanese 105–6; model 14, 15, 24, 39, 45, 49, 59, 62, 97, 98, 100–3, 107, 130, 139–40, 161, 164, 166, 172; organisation of 93–5; show 14, 24, 48, 54, 58, 96, 97, 98–102, 104, 107, 108, 123, 127, 152, 164, 170, 173; stylist 50, 59, 60, 97, 102, 104, 106; system 93, 95, 104, 105–7; week 14, 24, 79, 143, 145, 146, 148, 151, 173; world 15, 46, 49, 73, 94, 96–108, 139, 141; see also fashion designer; fashion magazine ; photographer; style fashion designer 1, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 24, 26, 28, 30, 39, 43, 45, 48, 49, 59, 60, 61, 68, 69, 73, 92, 93–8, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 137, 140–1, 161, 163; Chinese 105, 106–7; Japanese 105–6; Korean 105, 106 fashion magazine 8, 59, 96, 102–4, 107, 172; advertising 45, 59, 103; as

182 Index commodity 14–15; as cultural product 14; cover 103; editor 45, 68, 100, 104, 139 festival 127, 143–56, 161; see also fair; film; music; prize field 21, 56, 57, 66, 68, 70, 127, 132, 133, 144, 145, 147, 153, 154, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176; configuring event 16, 127, 149, 150, 151–2, 157; of cultural production 1, 56–71, 76, 80, 82, 89, 107, 108, 110, 117, 122, 144, 151, 153, 155, 159, 161–2, 164–5, 171, 173, 175; structure of 57–62, 70; of values 132–6, 141; see also advertising; art; fashion; film; incense; music; publishing; value fieldwork 17–18 film 10, 11: actor 12, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 47, 51, 53, 61, 108, 130, 133–4, 151, 152, 153, 158, 160, 162, 164, 174, 175; cameraman 12, 46; Chinese 31; costume designer 12, 31, 133; credits 12, 100; director 1, 12, 13, 29, 31, 34, 39, 44, 61, 69, 96, 129, 134, 152, 153, 155, 175; East Asian 143; festival 48, 108, 137, 143, 147, 148, 151; field of 152, 175; industry 31–2, 152, 163, 175; Japanese 28, 29, 30, 31, 96, 171; Korean 31; producer 26, 28, 159; studio 28, 30, 56, 65, 66, 107, 124, 162, 164; stuntman 12; see also Bollywood; genre; Hollywood; star frame 47, 48, 49, 54, 73, 110, 144, 145, 158, 170: analysis 1, 73, 98, 107–8, 127, 158; functional 145–7; social 148–50; spatial 147; symbolic 145, 150–1; temporal 49, 147–8; see also Goffman, E. Frankfurt Book Fair 147, 148, 149 geisha 111, 164, 167 gender 14, 27, 50, 155, 166; inequality 16 genre 27, 29–30, 36, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 54, 165; in art 53; in film 27–8, 31, 52–3, 61, 153; in music 30, 47, 49, 61, 75, 76, 84, 86, 89, 95; literary 27–8, 46, 49, 61 Goffman, E. 1, 73, 98, 110, 127, 145, 158, 170, 171 gossip 14, 103, 145, 149, 163, 171 government 1, 4, 5, 8, 12, 21, 25, 43, 51, 90, 144, 163; British 3, 6; Chinese 4, 11, 166, 171; Hong Kong 11; Indian 114; Japanese 4, 11, 63, 122, 131; Korean 4, 88, 168; Malaysian 9; policy 6, 7, 9, 11, 16; policy maker 4, 5, 7, 12,

17, 21; Taiwan 11; see also creative industry and government habitus 56–7 hair stylist 47, 50, 59, 60, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103 haute couture 92, 106, 107, 145 see also fashion; ready to wear hierarchy 104, 148, 149; symbolic 144 Hollywood 13, 31, 52–3, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168 Hong Kong 1, 4, 11, 31, 48, 67, 104, 119, 129, 134, 147, 154, 167, 170, 174; fashion 106, 151; film 34, 143, 146; music 58, 84 identity 4, 89, 98, 106, 173 idol see celebrity image 15, 34, 46, 58, 85, 96, 106, 121, 141, 151, 160, 164, 165; alliance 129; symbolic 96, 151; see also brand; fashion; music improvisation 43–4, 54, 100, 125 incense 110–2; in East Asia 110–11; field of 117, 119, 122, 123; functions of 110–12; industry 18, 70, 117, 122, 124–5; market 112–3; marketing of 120–2; materials used in 111, 114–5; production of 73, 112–25; ritual uses of 110–1; subcontracting 117–8 India 2, 13, 15, 110, 111, 114, 119, 129, 154 Indonesia 13, 15, 58, 111, 114 industry 1, 4, 8, 58, 110, 127, 133, 139, 143, 144, 146–7, 148, 151, 152, 159; fashion apparel 92; garment 92–3; sector 4, 17, 23; structure 1, 81; textile 92; see also advertising; animation; clothing; creative industry; cultural industry; fashion; film; incense; K-pop; media; music; publishing infinite variety 27–9, 33, 36, 39, 50, 59, 80, 89, 90, 110, 124, 130, 137, 158, 172 information 83, 104, 138, 145, 148, 163; economy 7; goods 16; sharing 1; see also exchange innovation 6, 7, 43–4, 82, 93; see also technology institution 15, 40, 47, 57, 59, 61, 65, 66, 69, 105, 107, 127, 130, 132, 144, 145, 168; economic 171; educational 35, 40 integration 86; horizontal 81; vertical 81, 85, 88, 89

Index 183 intellectual 16, 39, 45, 56, 58, 176; content 66; imperialism 15; property 4–6, 7, 9, 49, 56, 158; see also capital; rights investment 24, 25, 64, 66, 79, 139, 164 Japan 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 25, 58, 76, 85–7, 118, 119, 121, 123, 164, 166, 167, 170; made in 105 Japanese 13, 16, 110, 111, 166; aesthetic 105; civilisation 110; cuteness 166; economy 105, 117; kimono 167; language 26, 84, 148, 173; magazine 64; newspaper 63; popular culture 129; pottery 47, 52, 155; television 16, 49, 63– 4, 161, 162; women 114, 161; see also advertising; corporation; fashion; fashion designer; film; incense; government; market; music jazz 22, 27, 28, 30, 38, 49, 85, 137, 138; J-pop 13, 15, 58, 84, 85–7, 90, 129; see also pop keiretsu 131; system 168 Korea 1, 11, 13, 15, 16, 34, 76, 84, 87–9, 106, 110, 129, 167, 170 Korean 110, 129, 131, 165; author 35; civilization 110; culture 87; distributor 148; entertainment house 88, 89, 90, 154, 168; film 29, 31, 143; language 26; singer 84; society 173; television 77, 87, 129; wave 87; see also K-pop K-pop 8, 13, 15, 51, 58, 73, 84, 87–9, 123, 129, 171; group 34, 39, 87, 90, 166; idol 89–90; industry 88, 168; production strategies 88–9; singer 14, 157; see also pop labour 7, 92; child 93; costs 52, 132; exploitation 93; manual 97; relations 16; supply 16 landholding 119–120 lifestyle 4, 9, 14, 70, 95, 121, 167

magnetic tape see recording Malaysia 9, 58 Man Booker 152, 153, 154 see also prize Mandopop 15, 58, 84, 129, 163 manga 8, 15, 17, 59, 61, 64, 67, 107, 127, 130, 143, 157, 162 manufacturer 11, 62, 64, 87, 93, 95, 98, 112–13, 117–23, 148; see also clothing manufacturing: cluster 16, 117–120 see also incense

market 129–141; demand 51, 85, 158; East Asian 129, 131; economy 130; gaming 3; Japanese 131; Korean 131; mass 139; singularities 130–1; symbolic 139–41, 175; see also consumer; incense marketing 120–2, 126–7; resources 80; see also creativity; incense materials 12, 32, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46–7, 51, 52, 53, 54, 95, 111, 116, 117, 121, 124, 127, 132, 145, 146, 157, 158; raw 93, 113–15, 117, 118–19, 122, 144, 146 media 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 24, 27, 30, 59, 63, 64, 66, 75, 76, 80, 86, 95, 99, 100, 104, 105, 127, 131, 138, 143, 146, 147, 151, 163, 165, 167, 168, 171, 173, 174; broadcast 4, 62; franchise 3; industry 166; new 2; organisation 62–3, 65; outlet 107; platform 9, 35; product 64, 65; social 9, 29, 39, 57, 90, 131, 138, 161, 163–4, 167; see also advertising; digital merchandising 10, 64, 67 motley crew 16, 32–3, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 44, 50, 59, 66, 76, 90, 100, 124, 125, 133, 157, 158, 160, 171, 172; see also network movie see film MP3 82–3 museum 4, 10, 68, 99, 130; curator 51, 68, 108 music 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 23, 24, 27, 29, 39, 40, 42, 44, 52, 53, 58, 75, 76, 77, 82, 92, 94, 98, 99, 108, 112, 123, 127, 131, 136, 138, 158, 162, 164, 167, 168; album 33, 57, 70, 124, 138, 157, 158; award 152, 154; background 34; business 61, 76, 79, 84; classical 30, 45, 48, 49, 50, 70, 77, 107, 108, 137, 138; concert 67, 86, 136, 137; dance 75; distribution 66, 80, 82–3, 85, 86; East Asian 76, 84–9, 90; economy 75; festival 39, 52, 86, 143; field of 75–6, 77, 80, 81, 83–4, 85, 87, 88, 89–90, 127, 152; gig 54; image 78, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89; industry 1, 3, 7, 8, 32, 35, 47, 70, 73, 75–91, 110, 124, 152; Japanese 84, 85–7; Korean 51, 58, 73, 87–9, 154; performance of 76, 87, 134, 138; producer 78, 84, 159; production of 12, 15, 66, 77–80, 82–4, 86, 89; programme 85, 168; publishing 8, 174; recorded 4, 9; rock 47, 49, 52, 81; school 123; sponsorship 86; studio 78;

184 Index technological innovations in 80–84; see also genre; jazz; J-pop; K-pop; pop; record; recording; video name 12, 14–15, 29–30, 51, 66, 67, 69, 86, 94, 96, 97–8, 102, 141, 149, 158–9, 172, 174–6; brand 165, 174, 175; economy 15, 128, 159, 169–76; family 173; household 62, 129, 159, 165, 176; stage 173 Neo-Confucianism see Confucianism network 59, 75, 79, 82, 195, 145, 147, 148: business 64, 149; distribution 79, 80, 81; of people cooperating 38, 50, 56, 59, 63, 90, 97, 110, 117, 123, 157, 158; personal 1, 23, 54, 123; social 56, 149; television 34, 63; 64, 78, 168 nobody knows 16, 23–7, 28, 29, 30, 33, 36, 38, 39, 43, 52, 61, 62, 64, 66, 70, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 89, 90, 96, 103, 114, 124, 125, 127, 131, 137, 138, 145, 152, 153, 155, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 173; see also uncertainty oligopoly 65, 82, 83 Oscars see Academy Awards patron 50–1, 68; state 57 performance 8, 39, 75, 87, 96, 133; economic 7–8; front-stage 99, 100, 101; indicator 16; see also music performing arts 2, 4, 9, 10, 11 personnel 13, 37, 38, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 62, 64, 87, 90, 97, 99, 101, 123, 145, 153, 157, 172; creative 33, 35, 39, 44, 45, 57, 59, 144, 151, 158; freelance 25, 50, 60, 130, 159; humdrum 12, 26, 27, 39, 45, 56, 59, 78, 90; PR 166; ranking of 31, 36, 69, 163, 174; selection of 33; support 12, 32, 39, 40, 44, 45, 56, 123, 157, 158 photographer 43, 46, 51, 61, 62, 140; fashion 14, 15, 45, 59, 97, 100, 102, 103, 105, 161, 172; news 35; press 100 photography 8, 10, 140; genre 61; studio 47, 52, 54 pop 30, 32, 51, 58, 73, 76, 84, 107, 138; Asian 15, 58; song 76–80 position 56, 61, 62–5, 89, 98, 108, 117, 145, 154; and position-taking 56, 61, 62–5, 66, 70, 81, 83, 85, 88, 90, 104, 118, 120, 122, 163, 172 pottery 18, 30, 47, 52, 107, 114, 125, 172 power 21, 54, 56, 70–1, 76, 77, 90, 104, 150, 152, 155, 161, 165, 173, 175;

couple 161; field of 64, 68, 170; market 168; soft 88 prestige 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 86, 97, 100, 123, 139, 172; corporate 64; economy 172, 175; symbolic 67; see also status prét-à-porter 71, 92 see ready to wear price 26, 34, 46, 52, 62, 69, 97, 119, 121, 127, 130–1, 133–4, 135–6, 161, 172; see also retail; value; worth prize 48, 69, 143, 152–5 promotion 14–15, 45, 50, 78, 79–80, 96, 98, 102, 103, 104, 138, 146, 153, 168 publisher 2, 24–5, 28, 35, 56, 61, 66, 68, 69, 76, 79, 103, 124, 140. 144, 147, 148, 149, 153, 163; academic 25, 149; East Asian 25–6, 28; see also music publishing 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 23, 24, 26, 49, 56, 59, 61, 62, 94, 127, 144, 157, 158, 159, 174; academic 24, 25, 107, 149; field of 62, 65, 68, 145, 149; genre 61; house 28, 59, 69, 164; industry 18, 24, 64, 67, 124, 133, 149; Japanese 35, 64, 112, 149; magazine 59, 62, 64, 139; rights 168; trade 107 ranking 30, 31–2, 37, 69, 70, 123, 147, 155, 158, 163 ready to wear 92, 94, 106, 107 see also fashion record 24, 45, 78, 79–80, 81, 90 album 23; company 28, 35, 59, 66, 78, 81, 163; label 35, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86, 88, 89, 124; producer 77, 161; sales 82, 87; store 27; vinyl 78, 79, 80, 83 recording 10, 75, 77, 157: artist 81; industry 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89; in Japan 85–7; magnetic tape 80–2; studio 78, 82, 84, 124, 157, 158–9, 170 relations 17, 47, 59, 79, 117, 120, 150, 161; exploitative 3; employment 17; interpersonal 131; labour 16; power 54, 165, 171; social 45, 61, 127, 132, 145, 147; subcontracting 92, 117, 119–20; vertical 119, 155 reputation 30–1, 33, 53, 54, 66, 67, 68, 71, 75, 130, 152, 154, 155, 171, 172, 175; management 147; system of 29; see also A list/B list, name resource 27, 54, 57, 66, 88, 150, 152 retail 60, 93, 107, 119; outlet 24, 25, 63, 69, 78, 92, 114, 120, 123; price 96, 132; sales 79, 114; store 87, 107 rights 7, 24, 35–6, 64, 76, 83, 89, 151, 164; digital 35; industry 73;

Index 185 management 16, 76, 149; merchandising 64; translation 25, 153 sales 8, 25, 26, 27, 33, 45, 51, 67, 78, 79, 80, 81, 96, 98, 100, 119, 123, 141, 149, 151, 152–3, 175; representative 144, 148; technique 153; see also CD; retail sculpture 12, 111, 140 skill see talent sociologist 16, 17, 21, 38, 54, 56, 58, 70, 73, 98, 131, 133, 163, 171 software 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 39, 46 Southeast Asia 34, 111, 114, 117, 143, 146 space 24, 53, 61, 85, 98, 100, 107, 119, 127, 130, 144, 146, 147, 150, 175; of possibles 57, 58; see also affordance; value sponsor 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 76, 86; -ship 24, 64, 86, 154 stage 40, 48, 52–3, 86, 98–102, 166; back 99–102, 107; front 99–100; hand 39, 133; performer 84; see also name star 103, 153, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164–5; Asian 165–8; attributes of 160–3; Cantonese 84; film 37, 140, 162, 163, 166; Korean 84, 90; music 76, 80, 83, 84, 89, 90; power 52; porn 175; system 80, 123, 158; see also celebrity stardom 97, 123, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 168 status 67, 76, 96, 133, 139, 140, 152, 155, 158, 162, 163, 171, 175; cultural 138; game 174; group 161; hierarchy 155; marital 103; social 136; system 175 style 14, 29, 30, 37, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 68, 70, 71, 81, 87, 94, 104, 122, 138, 164; clothing 92, 94, 95, 135; fashion 92, 95, 98, 102, 103, 105–6; house 140; icon 102; porn chic 95; Western- 85, 88, 114 sunk cost 24, 25, 33, 34, 38, 66, 79 supply 35, 64, 66, 83, 89, 92, 112, 117; chain 90, 93; and demand 131 support 39, 123: financial 147; organisation 63; see also personnel Taiwan 1, 4, 9, 11, 15, 31, 58, 84, 129, 131, 167 talent 6, 12, 27, 31, 36, 69, 75, 78–9, 80, 87, 88, 97, 98, 138, 159, 162, 166, 168; artistic 37, 69; scout 76, 80; show 77, 90, 171; see also celebrity

taste 21, 29, 39, 40, 44, 75, 78, 104, 133, 136, 137–8, 139, 153; uncertainty of 37, 138, 155; see also consumer; nobody knows technology 80–84; digital 46, 82–4; innovation 7, 76, 82, 84, 89, 146; see also recording television 7, 9, 10, 11, 27, 49, 52, 62, 79, 85, 88, 127, 136, 138, 145, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164; channel 131; commercial 33, 49, 63, 86, 168; director 165; Japanese 16, 49, 62, 63–5, 161; network 34, 78, 168; personality 153, 161; presenter 161, 166; programme 16, 65, 75, 78, 85, 144, 148, 151; reality 77; revenue 2; series 67, 90; station 61, 64 textile 11, 92, 95, 105, 146; industry 10, 92; Japanese 92 theatre 4, 5, 8, 15, 34, 39, 42, 47, 100, 164 theoretical approach 21–71 theory 15, 16–18, 21–2, 73, 77, 90, 110, 122, 123, 170–2; bottom-up 17; economic 23–37; macro-level 17; multi-disciplinary 16; of contracts 23; sociological 16, 38–71 time flies 33–4, 36, 37, 39, 42, 44, 48, 90, 110, 124–5, 158, 164 tourism 6, 9, 10, 11, 137 tournament: of values 127, 151–2, 155, 157, 176 training 11, 16, 17, 39–40, 57, 167 uncertainty 36–7, 115, 124, 155, 161, 173; demand 27, 30, 32, 61, 152, 158, 164, 165; market 89, 103, 125, 155; principle 37 UNCTAD 2 UNESCO 2, 4, 5, 9,10 United States 2, 3, 5, 16, 17, 25, 26, 29, 30, 35, 68, 73, 76, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 105, 129, 146, 163, 170, 171 urban 3, 4, 53, 58, 61, 68; development 4; planning 137; society 90; workforce 53 valuation 136, 141, 176 value 68, 69, 81, 93, 96, 97, 124, 133–6, 137, 139, 140, 167, 175; appreciative/ aesthetic 134, 135, 137; artistic 23; chain 59, 66, 78, 79, 82, 83, 150, 174; commodity (exchange) 70, 83, 134, 135, 136, 141, 151; cultural 23, 39, 69, 111; economic see commodity (exchange); entertainment 23; family 14,

186 Index 166; monetary 66, 139, 141; production 138; social 134, 141; spatial 134, 135; symbolic (exchange) 136, 137, 141, 151, 153; techno-material 134, 135; temporal 134, 135; use 134, 135, 155, 157; and values 127, 132–6, 141, 152, 176; see also tournament of values; worth video 9, 10, 11, 34, 83, 85, 88; adult 155; artist 46; game 3, 5; 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 38, 39, 59, 62, 65, 66, 69,

127, 133, 143, 152, 174; music 83, 88, 164, 173; recorder 85; screen 52 wine 42, 48, 130 worth 66, 132–3, 134, 161, 175 WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) 7–8, 10 YouTube 9, 76, 83, 88