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Academic publishing as ‘creative’ industry, and recent discourses of ‘creative economies’: some critical reflections
Author(s) -
Gibson Chris,
Klocker Natascha
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
area
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1475-4762
pISSN - 0004-0894
DOI - 10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00242.x
Subject(s) - creative class , creativity , sociology , normative , publishing , creative industries , creative city , narrative , politics , relation (database) , social science , media studies , political science , law , philosophy , linguistics , database , computer science
This paper continues recent discussions on the (geo)politics of the production of academic knowledges, in relation to the recent rise of narratives of ‘the creative economy’. Creativity and the ‘creative industries’ are increasingly common components of urban economic development discourse, especially following the release of a set of key books – most notably Charles Landry's The Creative City (2000), and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) – that have become popular among economic development planners and cultural policy makers. This paper focuses on the traffic of these books, and their authors, beyond the Anglo‐American core. It also briefly discusses policy discourses interpreted from these texts. It is principally, though, a critique of the ways in which academic knowledges circulate, stemming from theorization of academics as creative producers, and of knowledge production as part of the creative economy. The article seeks to critique the means by which particular northern economic knowledges become normative, framed as universal and ‘global’, and are distributed and absorbed via intellectual ‘scenes’ and an academic ‘celebrity’ circuit.