Cultural And Creative Industries Research Articles

Contribution of the Cultural and Creative Industries to Regional Development and Revitalization: A European Perspective

Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) have emerged as powerful drivers of regional development and revitalization in Europe in recent years. This study explores the impact of CCIs on European regions, focusing on their economic, social, and cultural contributions. Drawing on extensive literature review and empirical research, this study examines the role of CCIs in job creation, GDP growth, innovation, social cohesion, cultural identity, urban regeneration, and the revitalization of declining areas. Data were collected using questionnaires distributed to 345 key players in the Cultural and Creative Industry of Greece. The findings reveal that CCIs significantly enhance job opportunities in European regions, with 74.4% of participants acknowledging their role in reducing unemployment and underemployment. Moreover, 71.4% recognized the substantial contribution of CCIs to regional GDP, highlighting that their economic importance is comparable to traditional industries. CCIs are seen as catalysts for social cohesion and cultural identity, as 75.6% of respondents attested to their role in uniting diverse communities. These results emphasize the sensitivity of CCIs to the existing cultural and historical context of these areas. Furthermore, this study identifies outcomes of regional development and revitalization, including improved education facilities (21.7%), preservation of regional cultural heritage (14.6%), and enhanced business relations (26.7%). Regression analysis demonstrated a strong association between CCIs and regional development and revitalization. This study provides comprehensive insights into the contributions of CCIs to regional development and revitalization in Europe. Policymakers, practitioners, and stakeholders can use these findings to harness the full potential of CCIs for sustainable and inclusive regional development.

Cultural and creative industries and theatre praxis in a digital epoch

Culture is closely related to civilization and all observable civilizations are derived from one form of culture to the other. The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) usually takes advantage of the vast cultural heritage of a given people as sources of inspiration for their artistic enterprise to thrive. At the heart of creativity in every pluralist society is culture. This is evident in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, among others, where the cultural market offer muse for artists. This paper examines the ways through which the creative industry can tap from the rich resources inherent in the cultural market. It uses the Concept of Cultural and Creative Industries as a theoretical anchor to argue that the CCIs are valuable assets capable of instituting development ethos which can move a state from nationhood to civilization. The study gets its data from the instrumentality of documentary observation a la desk review of books, journals and other bibliotheca. It concludes that the theatre possess the innate ability to make Nigeria relevant in terms of soft power diplomacy in world politics and development.

Revisiting the CCIs-tourism nexus: insights from Smart Specialisation Strategies

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the importance of interrelationships between cultural and creative industries (CCIs) and tourism for cross-industry innovation and sustainable local development. The purpose of this study is to deepen the understanding of the role and relevance of the CCIs-tourism nexus for innovation-driven socio-economic transformation of territories through regional policy design and implementation in Smart Specialisation Strategies (RIS3). To this end, a thematic analysis has been conducted to explore the links between CCIs and tourism in RIS3 prioritization choices and whether and how it has been revisited from the previous programming period (2014–2020) to the current updates of strategies (2021–2027). The findings provide insights into the focus and evolution of this nexus to address the role of CCIs in enabling innovation-led regional development for the triple transition.

Promoting Green Tourism Synergies with Cultural and Creative Industries: A Case Study of Greece

Green tourism is part of the global effort to create a more sustainable living environment, taking into account the needs of both the industry, the tourists and the local communities. CCIs are considered trustworthy ambassadors of authenticity and life values, and can therefore effectively promote and/or strengthen the ecological value. This paper focuses on the role that cultural and creative industries (CCIs) can play in the implementation of sustainable development, especially in regard to green tourism, focusing on their role as communicators of green messages. The methodological tools used for the collection, analysis and interpretation of data for this research include semiotic analysis in a number of CCIs’ products, coding their ecological messages; content analysis of the CCIs’ digital posts for a one-year period in order to examine the form, types and content of the communication; and a digital ethnography of the users’ comments in order to study the perception and interaction of the receivers of such messages, focusing on past, present and potential tourists. Through the case study of Greece—a well-known tourist destination with rich cultural resources—the author tries to answer to the following research questions: (a) Could green tourism be promoted as a life value through CCIs’ products and messages? (b) Are there any good and innovative practices for such promotion through the synergy of the tourism industry with CCIs that could be used as models for further cases? This paper concludes that CCIs can promote sustainability as a life value through role modeling, educational programs, and subconscious or more straightforward messages, using both their products and formal communication channels. The more successful way for Greek CCIs to promote green tourism is through synergies with official tourism promotion mechanisms. The research shows that in many cases, this linkage has been successful in a number of ways.

Opportunities for promoting societal inclusion through higher education cultural and creative industries courses: Evidence from UK business schools

The Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI) workforce is reportedly highly skilled yet lacking diversity, with higher education institutions playing a key role in developing graduates and their capacity to contribute to positive societal change. Consequently, this contribution explores how inclusivity is embedded and promoted via collaboration with businesses and communities in undergraduate and postgraduate CCI courses offered by UK business schools, where many of these courses are based. This is addressed via a qualitative content analysis of public-facing course materials commonly used by students when deciding on their course of study. Findings showcase how inclusive practices feature in curriculum design and delivery, assessment and feedback, engagement with businesses and the community, and employability support for graduates. These inform recommendations for higher education institutions on how to contribute to broadening inclusivity in the CCI labour market and beyond.

Covid-19 and Exposed to Vulnerabilities in The Creative Economy: Get Up Or Give Up

Academic literature extensively acknowledges the fragile character of creative and cultural activity. However, it has frequently been invisible to policymakers and decision-makers. As soon as Covid-19 began affecting local and national economies worldwide, numerous business and policy organizations hastened to research the impact of Covid-19 on the creative and cultural industries (CCIs) and their workforce. The report provides insight into these organizations' primary issues through a meta-analysis of the current survey and research programs in the United Kingdom. The findings shed light on prevalent concerns regarding visible and unseen challenges that require attention in this area. The study continues by debating if Covid-19 represents a watershed event for the sector or merely reveals the unsustainable cost of creative and cultural activity.

Crafting digital business ecosystems for cultural and creative industries

The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) thrive on innovation and creativity, necessitating robust cross-domain collaboration among diverse stakeholders. However, the current state of CCI co-creation mechanisms is marked by inadequacies. The primary objective is to provide practical and effective strategic guidance for co-creation endeavors within the dynamic CCI landscape. This study employs the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) method to identify and analyze critical elements for industrial co-creation, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding the intricacies of co-creation processes. The Cultural and Creative Industries Digital Business Ecosystem (CCI-DBE) model is then developed to encompass four foundational pillars: participation of multiple stakeholders, mechanism of co-creation, uniqueness of consumer experience, and output of co-created value. Participation of multiple stakeholders recognizes the importance of integrating perspectives from content creators, other companies, suppliers, and customers. The mechanism of co-creation delves into the necessity of a robust platform, supported by technological infrastructure, to facilitate seamless resource and knowledge exchange. The uniqueness of consumer experience emphasizes the need for tailoring offerings to meet consumers' unique experiential and meaningful needs. Output of co-created value focuses on enhancing product novelty, resource sharing, communication efficiency, information interaction, and cross-domain integration. This CCI-DBE model not only contributes to academic discourse but also provides actionable insights for practitioners seeking to navigate and enhance the co-creation process within the evolving CCI landscape. It stands as a valuable guide for fostering innovation, collaboration, and strategic alignment in the CCI sector.

How do CCIs contribute to regional innovation?

PurposeThis paper aims to understand how cultural and creative industries (CCIs) contribute to regional innovation.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explores the process of CCIs contributing to regional innovation and assesses the accumulated outcome of this process.FindingsThe authors conclude that CCIs contribute to a city’s innovation involving five dimensions (time, space, tangible, intangible and division) and four phases (people, tool, collaboration and brokerage) and the contributions are accumulated into positive innovation outcome; however, a highly developed economy is relatively unsupportive of CCIs contributing to regional innovation.Originality/valueThe main contributions are that the authors configured the detailed process of CCIs contributing to regional innovation and the authors quantitatively measured the impact of CCIs on regional innovation, using the Porter diamond model and Shannon entropy to construct the CCI index.

“Why and how higher education is so important for cultural and creative industries’ sustainable development?”

Considering the role played by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), we recognize that more knowledge is needed to provide a better understanding of their relationship, collaborations and work in relation to sustainable development. The aim of this article is to highlight why and how Higher Education (HE) is key to CCIs’sustainable development. Academic research in this specific field is scarce and we aim at soliciting more attention towards this niche research sector, given the potential positive spillovers that it could originate. Through retracing the arising of interest towards the CCIs in general and recently towards sustainability issues linked to the CCIs facing the challenge of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we show how these matters are inextricably associated to the essential role played by HE and HEIs. Thanks to the strong link between HEIs and CCIs’ sustainable development, we can expect that a sort of mimetic isomorphism process will happen in the coming years, with a choice of a strategy of imitation instead of differentiation.

Toward Music-Related Sound Control and Hearing Conservation in the Leisure Soundscape

Music-Induced Hearing Loss (MIHL) affects both musicians and participants of leisure soundscapes. Noise Risk Assessment and Hearing Conservation Program have been practised in the manufacturing and construction industries; however, these are rarely implemented in Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) that are also exposed to excessive sound levels. This paper includes an example from the Rainforest World Music Festival, Malaysia where data were collected from 2015 to 2017, through sound pressure level (SPL) measurements, semi-structured interviews (60 participants) and a survey (1,194 respondents). Despite SPL measurements showing levels exceeding the recommended noise limit, the study reported a majority of 68% perceived the loudness of the music festival as "perfect" whilst 21% as "loud but acceptable". In leisure soundscapes, sounds are featured aural products in demand and encapsulated in cultural meanings with voluntary listening behaviours. Thus, some of the existing guidelines in occupational noise exposure may not be transferable. As recommendations, it is essential for an extensive study on the development of a focused framework to incorporate music-related sound control and hearing conservation in reducing the risk of MIHL while preserving the social-cultural value, creativity in arts and rewards in the hearing experience of a leisure soundscape.

‘Getting in’ or ‘moving on’? On internship experiences and representation in the popular music festival sector

ABSTRACT The cultural workforce has previously been described as pre-dominantly white, male and middle-class. Internships are often seen as a solution as they would function as a ‘democratising path to launch careers’. Nevertheless, previous research has also suggested that there is no smooth path from an internship to paid work for anyone, and even less so for some than for others. Moving beyond previous research, which often neglects the production perspective on music festival organisation altogether or exclusively focuses on individuals ‘getting into’ the cultural and creative industries (CCI), we also include those who are ‘moving on’. We question the (non)diverse composition of the popular music festival sector in Rotterdam, focusing on why and how people are excluded from working in it. Semi-structured interviews were collected in two phases: 1) workers who did an internship and moved into the sector (n = 11) and 2) former interns who left the music festival sector after their internship (n = 13). Findings indicate the force of the somatic norm of maleness and how related experiential differences affect sectoral demographic inequality. Moreover, internships are not an ‘easy fix’ for a non-diverse workforce because of how work is, experienced, organised and rewarded.

Connecting craft, design and the wood industry in South Tyrol: From clusters to creative ecosystem

Craft work provides unique opportunities to understand connections between artisanal production, innovative design and industrial manufacturing. It also enables us to reflect on the limits of existing research on creative clusters and industry spillovers and variety which misses important connections between the local industrial base, traditional cultural production, and design and innovation-led creative and cultural industries (CCIs). This is particularly relevant to rural economies where CCIs clusters have often been disconnected from local assets and manufacturing. The paper takes an ecological perspective to explore how craft activity diffuses across permeable boundaries of industrial, traditional, and creative production, and contributes to rural regional development by facilitating related and unrelated variety. Using the wood ecosystem of Val Gardena and the region of South Tyrol in Italy as a case study, the paper identifies shared ecosystem-sustaining assets – materiality, locality, and skills/knowledge – and explores how these relationships lead to different evolutionary trajectories and economic opportunities. The paper demonstrates how an ecosystem perspective expands our understanding of creative clusters beyond CCIs and shows how craft is connected to other local industries, contributing to local development dynamics.

Mediations of cultural policymaking during COVID-19: British newspaper reporting of the Culture Recovery Fund

ABSTRACT At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, cultural policymaking frequently came to the fore in media debates about the impact of the crisis and measures to alleviate it. In this article, we present evidence of how newspaper coverage of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) identified and framed competing perceptions of the relative utility of policymaking in this context, while also problematising familiar assumptions about the CCIs among policymakers, journalists and (arguably) the public. Specifically, we analysed British news and editorial items (n.4,162) published from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020. It offers a novel investigation into the ways in which media and policy rhetoric overlap, interact and influence each other. In doing so, this article contributes a unique perspective to the study and practice of cultural policy, bringing to light the typically underexplored role of the news media in shaping the narratives driving cultural policy deliberation and action.

Cultural analytics in the UK: events data potential for the creative and cultural industries

ABSTRACT This article investigates the potential for novel research utilising data generated by the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI) in the UK, focussing on the long tail of metadata associated with the UK’s rich cultural events landscape. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 researchers and related domain experts to ascertain: (1) How cultural data is valued; (2) The landscape of cultural data; (3) How UK research can make better use of cultural events data; (4) The benefits and pitfalls of an evidence-based approach to cultural policy; and (5) The repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic on how data-led work is positioned within the CCI. We advocate for the potential value of cultural events data to academic research, policy and industry, and also for a humanities-led approach. We suggest that a centralised cultural events data service for use in research, industry and policy is one way of supporting this.

The nexus between the cultural and creative industries and the Sustainable Development Goals: a network perspective

ABSTRACT Scholars and policymakers have widely claimed that the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) provide positive knowledge externalities that can help address sustainable development challenges, yet questions remain about the pathways through which this occurs. In this study, we hypothesise that several features of knowledge networks in the CCIs relate to a location’s sustainable development outcomes. We use data of ownership networks between 22,455 cultural heritage-related firms across 292 cities in China to empirically test our hypotheses. We find that the density of the CCI network has a positive relation with a city’s performance in terms of several Sustainable Development Goal measures. Moreover, the scale of local CCIs has an inverted ‘U’-shaped relationship with a city’s sustainability performance. Finally, a city’s degree of trans-local ties has an inverted ‘U’-shaped relation with a city’s sustainability performance.

Italian cultural and creative industries following the Great Recession: an exploration of the local determinants of growth

ABSTRACT The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have variously been seen as a stimulus for urban and regional development. They were also one of the few sectors in the UK and European Union countries to weather the storm of the 2008 Great Recession. Starting from the curiosity aroused by these premises, and given the paucity of studies on Italian CCIs, we analyse the growth trend of the sector following the economic shock of the Great Recession to ascertain whether this trend also held for Italy. We use data from the Aida-Bureau van Dijk database on more than 181,000 enterprises for the period 2010–18. Information on the number of employees from the cultural and creative enterprises is collected for 18 NACE Rev. 2 sectors, with the aim of disentangling the contribution of each subsector to the growth of the industry. While information is available at the firm level, we use NUTS-3-level information. Using a system generalised method of moments (GMM-SYS) approach, and controlling for some socio-economic characteristics, we examine the determinants of the growth of CCIs in the post-shock period, ultimately contributing to the underexplored debate on the resilience of the sector in Italy and accounting for its macro-regional and peripherality effects.

Utilizing mutual learning in literature and cultural industry finance in order to realise green economic recovery and sustainability

The paper aims to evaluate the impact of cultural and creative industries (CCI) finance on green economic flourishing for 16 European Union countries from 2012 to 2021. The coefficients estimated by the Arellano-Bond dynamic GMM technique confirmed that the market size coefficient of the cultural and creative industries is positive. In the case of green innovation, this variable has a positive coefficient. In addition, a 1% increase in the index of openness of the financial markets improves the green economy index of the European Union countries by 0.015%. With a 1% increase in the volume of cultural goods trade in the studied countries, the green economy index increases by 0.184%. The primary policy implications are developing green financing tools, using green cryptocurrencies in the cultural industry, developing the policy of trade multilateralism in cultural goods, promoting mutual learning of civilizations and cross-cultural literary exchange and innovation, and green government support for small and medium enterprises active in the culture industry.

Cultural policy on the move: between the paradigmatic and the pragmatic

ABSTRACT The extent to which Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), as policy concepts, are globalized, has been a matter of debate. This paper engages with the debate while seeking to move beyond the binary division of global and local scales of analysis. Empirically, it examines the emergence and politics of CCIs in Vietnam, with a focus on its connection with the implementation of the UNESCO 2005 Convention. The paper explores the complexity of the policy translation process, which shows the degrees to which neoliberal ideas can be translated in a post-socialist context. It also examines the role of UNESCO and questions the consistency of its position against the commodification of culture. Conceptually, it brings together different approaches to policy translation from language studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and postcolonial studies. The paper suggests that this interdisciplinary framework can further the understanding of both paradigmatic and pragmatic dimensions of policy travel.

Navigating sustainability in the fashion industry: insights from entrepreneurial perspectives on collaborative approaches

Sustainability is an urgent topic for the global fashion system’s full evolution, although coping with it is not a simple task because of the extensive attention, discussions, and media coverage that sustainability in the fashion industry has received in recent years. This article uncovers common themes, provides a holistic perspective, and offers insights into sustainability from an entrepreneurial standpoint, by investigating the collaborative approaches implemented by five cultural and creative industry (CCI) players that are recognized globally for their strong proactivity in developing sustainable practices. Through semi-structured interviews with these experts, this contribution takes advantage of the knowledge, first-hand experience, and lessons learned from frontrunners in the field, a privileged perspective to observe sustainability’s multifaceted and heterogeneous nature. The insights presented in this article illustrate the interviewees’ perceptions and understanding of the challenges, coping strategies, and factors at play in the process of pursuing sustainable practices in association with other system players. Finally, this work reflects on the tensions arising between the perceived urgency of radical change and the global fashion system’s intrinsic disconnection and complexity. It prompts consideration of the pivotal role that networks can assume within this context and underscores the critical necessity of fostering robust and substantive dialogue between bottom-up innovative sustainable practices and top-down regulatory frameworks.

The challenges of developing sustainable cultural and creative ecosystems and the role of higher education institutions: Lessons from Dundee and Chatham, UK

This paper feeds into scholarly interest on place-based creative industrial development. It considers the creative-led economic development of two UK cities, Dundee and Chatham as emerging through a series of interdependent relationships between locally based higher education institutions (HEIs) and cultural and creative industries (CCIs) that are connected as part of a cultural and creative ecosystem (CCE). The discussion reflects on how interconnecting collaborations foster platforms and networks that support a sustainable CCE. Based on the research findings from qualitative investigations within each city, the paper applies the capability approach as a methodological tool to investigate how resources can be converted into tangible, accessible opportunities for local communities. The approach illustrates the need to focus on the resources that connect HEIs to CCIs within a geographical location for sustainable development. It concludes with a series of policy recommendations aimed at local governments to develop more integrated, ecological leadership models and policies to support sustainable CCEs.