Blackwell Reference Online

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Culture industries can be defined, simply enough, as those industries which produce cultural goods. Or, to put it the other way round: Generally speaking, a cultural industry is held to exist when cultural goods and services are produced and reproduced, stored and distributed on industrial and commercial lines, that is to say on a large scale and in accordance with a strategy based on economic considerations rather than any concern for cultural development. ( UNESCO, 1982 ) This definition applies both to cultural forms which depend on “craft production” and “mass reproduction” (as in the publishing industry and, to some extent, the music business) and to media which depend on large-scale capital investment and collective technological production with an elaborate division of labor (such as the film and television industries). There is by now, indeed, a large body of sociological and business studies literature on “the production of culture,” studies which examine in detail the industrial “value-adding” process through which songs, novels, television programmes, films, etc. must these days pass (see, for example, Peterson, 1976 ). The use of the term “culture” in such descriptions means, however, that the analysis of the culture industries is never, in fact, a simple matter of economics or management theory. To describe the film, music, publishing, or television industries as culture ... log in or subscribe to read full text