560134

research-article2014
MCS0010.1177/0163443714560134Media, Culture & SocietyNewsinger

Crosscurrents

Media, Culture & Society

A cultural shock doctrine?

2015, Vol. 37(2) 302­–313
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0163443714560134
state and the creative mcs.sagepub.com

industries discourse

Jack Newsinger
University of Leicester, UK

Abstract
A number of writers have made the argument that the development creative industries
policy discourse in the United Kingdom and elsewhere represents the articulation of a
politics that is neoliberal in character. The marginalisation of Blairism in the United
Kingdom, and the Liberal Democrat-Conservative Coalition Government’s adoption of an
ever more explicit neoliberal dogma in its radical restructuring/dismantling of the welfare
state, provides the opportunity to evaluate this argument. This article summarises the
creative industries policy discourse and the main research paradigms that have been used
to interrogate it. From there, it explores a number of discursive positions that have placed
pressure on policy actors and explores their institutionalisation in policy structures since
2008. It is argued that the major institutional policy frameworks of the creative industries
discourse have proved remarkably durable through the current phase of neoliberal
restructuring of the state. At the same time, discursive pressure is being exerted from a
reactionary cultural conservatism that seeks to further undermine and delegitimate the
socially and politically progressive elements of the creative industries discourse.

Keywords
austerity and culture, coalition, creative industries, cultural industries, cultural policy,
neoliberalism, political economy

Introduction
A number of writers, myself included, have made the argument that the adoption of the
‘creative industries’ as official policy and structural organisation in the media, cultural and
technology sectors in the United Kingdom and elsewhere represents, in a number of

Corresponding author:
Jack Newsinger, University of Leicester, Bankfield House, New Walk, Leicester LE1 7JA, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Newsinger 303

concrete ways, the articulation of a politics that is neoliberal in character.1 While there are
important variations in this argument, it essentially suggests that in the post-1997 period,
the British New Labour and other governments (particularly Australia) followed, at least in
part, a political trajectory first embarked upon by the Thatcherite New Right in the 1980s.
In the United Kingdom, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s adop-
tion of an ever more explicit neoliberal dogma in its radical restructuring/dismantling of the
welfare state provides the opportunity to evaluate this argument. If it is correct, we might
expect little qualitative variation from the overall trajectory of creative industries policy
since 2010, accounting for external factors. On the other hand, variation and transformation
in the Coalition’s approach to the institutional and organisational structure, the funding
models and the wider discursive field of the creative industries can reveal much about this
new conjuncture in political economy and the wider social and cultural forces that have
come into play to shape cultural production and participation in Britain.
A broad definition of cultural policy would include ‘the promotion or prohibition of
cultural practices or values by governments, corporations, other institutions and indi-
viduals’ (Throsby, 2010: 8). This article explores continuity and transformation in cul-
tural policy through an analysis of the creative industries policy discourse after the great
financial crisis of 2008 and the change of government in the United Kingdom. It begins
by summarising the creative industries policy discourse and the main research paradigms
that have been used to interrogate it. From there, it explores a number of discursive posi-
tions that have exerted pressure and explores their institutionalisation in policy struc-
tures. Finally, conclusions are drawn as to the lines of continuity and transformation in
the creative industries discourse. It is argued that the major institutional policy frame-
works of the creative industries discourse as established and refined during the New
Labour period have proved remarkably durable through the current phase of neoliberal
restructuring. At the same time, discursive pressure is being exerted from a reactionary
cultural conservatism that seeks to further undermine the socially and politically progres-
sive elements of the creative industries discourse.

The creative industries and neoliberalism

There are many useful discussions of the emergence of the creative industries as a flag-
ship cultural-economic initiative from the New Labour policy incubators whilst in oppo-
sition in the 1990s. One recent account describes it in the following way:

Creative industries as a concept was consistent with a number of touchstones of the redefining
of the British Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, as it was spearheaded by Tony Blair and his
supporters within Labour, with its recurring concerns with economic modernization and
Britain’s post-industrial future. Its focus on the role of markets as stimuli to arts and culture was
consistent with the notion of a ‘Third Way’ between Thatcher-era free market economics and
traditional social democracy, which was nonetheless more accommodating of the role of
markets and global capitalism than traditional British Labour Party philosophy and doctrine.
(Flew, 2012: 14)

The newly formed Department of Culture, Media and Sport established the parame-
ters of the creative industries and situated their significance as key drivers within the
304 Media, Culture & Society 37(2)

wider British economy. Of particular importance to the development of government

interventions in the form of policy was the perceived ‘spill-over’ relationship between
core creative activities (the creation of cultural expression in books, paintings, films,
plays and so on), the industries of commercialisation and reproduction (publishing, gal-
leries and museums, DVD distribution, the West End, etc.), and the wider economy (see,
for example, Throsby, 2001; or more recently Hopkins, 2010).
The main consequence of this innovation was that it foreground the perceived eco-
nomic role of what used to be called ‘the arts’, which in turn allowed a range of public
subsidy mechanisms to be seen as investment into the commercial economy, and to a
lesser extent, into social welfare. It also allowed the values and practices of the private
sector to increasingly determine the organisation and management of the cultural sector,
with the market assuming a much greater proportion of the role of cultural commission-
ing and authority than had been the case previously, and a much greater role in the man-
agement and regulation of productive capital in the form of ideas and labour (‘creativity’),
which fitted well with New Labour’s political investment in neoliberal capitalism and
big business.
On one level, this represents a further step along the ideological road begun in the
1980s towards the disarticulation of cultural production from romantic and idealist con-
ceptions of art (see Garnham, 1990) which many commentators would view as welcome.
Indeed, most research on this process identifies the major incoherence in the creative
industries policy discourse as the unresolved tensions between the traditions of the arts
and culture, and those of media and communications; the tensions between romantic
idealism and economy, or between aesthetics and instrumentalism (see, for example,
Hesmondhalgh and Pratt, 2005) – the very stuff of academic debate, particularly from a
cultural studies perspective.
There have been a number of trenchant critiques of creative industries as a policy
concept. For example, Philip Schlesinger (2007) has characterised ‘creativity’ as a par-
ticularly banal doctrine increasingly hegemonic across a number of policy fields;
Eleanora Belfiore (2009) has critiqued the claims made about the economic and social
value of the creative industries in New Labour cultural policymaking as having no rela-
tionship with empirical reality (‘bullshit’); and Kate Oakley (2006) has questioned the
instrumental use of cultural policy to combat inequality.
There are also a number of responses that investigate the creative industries policy dis-
course in relation to political economy, particularly the globalisation and neo-liberalisation
of national economies from the 1980s (Freedman, 2008; Garnham, 2005; Hesmondhalgh,
2005; McGuigan, 2005; Miller, 2004). For example, Nicholas Garnham’s influential dis-
cussion situates the creative industries as an unconvincing attempt to artificially link the
arts and culture to information and communication technologies:

This is important because the shift to the terminology ‘creative industries’ has taken place, and
can only be understood and assessed, in the context of a wider debate about the impact of
information and communication technologies (ICTs) and digitalisation and the relationship
between the deployment of new communication networks and the products and services carried
over them. In short, policy towards the ‘creative industries’ can no longer be separated from
ICT policy in its various forms and the wider information society perspective within which that
policy is formulated. (p. 20)
Newsinger 305

One thing to emerge is the importance of the creative industries discourse to the man-
agement and organisation of labour in the cultural and media sectors, with the resultant
contradictions of freedom, exploitation and inequality, and this has proved a particularly
fruitful line of research (Banks, 2007, 2010; Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Deuze,
2011; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; McGuigan, 2010).
My own contribution emphasises the symbolic function of the SME and the small
independent producer as central to wider processes of casualisation and marketisation in
the creative industries discourse, in turn part of a shift of material and cultural authority
from labour to capital that is at the core of the neoliberal project (Newsinger, 2012).
On this level, the discourse of the creative industries is an example of the centrality of
the state to the actual processes of neo-liberalisation, with culture and the arts being
increasingly incorporated into the market economy. The creative industries are, then, one
of New Labour’s key legacies and the major contribution of Blairism to culture, the
residual architecture of Cool Britannia.
The debate on New Labour’s record raises important questions. To name a few: how
to understand the political economy of neoliberalism in relation to contemporary cultural
policy? How to characterise the New Labour (and other Third Way Left-of-centre par-
ties) phenomenon in relation to culture? How to locate a progressive politics within
contemporary cultural policy and practice? Answers to these questions are important
because they inform a response to the radical Right restructuring and dismantling of
public services, including cultural provision, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
How has the discourse of the creative industries faired since the great financial crisis
of 2008, the change of government in the United Kingdom and the most drastic and far
reaching reductions in state spending for a generation? The remainder of this article will
outline and critique the development of an austerity cultural policy, in terms of the dis-
cursive construction of the role of the state in culture by policy actors and the right-wing
press, and then in terms of concrete policy interventions. The aim is to explore some of
the forces shaping cultural policy and practice in the United Kingdom, and those likely
to do so in the future.

The coalition and culture

Policy discourses are understood as ‘patterns in social life, which not only guide discus-
sions, but are institutionalised in particular practices’ (Hajer and Laws, 2006, quoted in
Flew, 2012: 11). Policy studies often seek to identify and critique the range of accepted
concepts, assumptions, categories, values and so forth, which inform the decisions of
policy actors. However, a policy discourse may display more or less coherence, be sub-
ject to many or few competing claims and there may be significant distance between the
language and narratives used to discursively construct certain actions as legitimate and
their subsequent institutionalisation in official or corporate structures.
If the creative industries is an example of a particularly robust, successfully institu-
tionalised and increasingly global policy discourse – even as its efficacy and integrity is
disputed – the question becomes, to what extent and in what ways have its central themes,
values and practices been contested, modified and transformed since 2008? What does
this tell us about the adaptability of the discourse to austerity?
306 Media, Culture & Society 37(2)

Prior to the 2010 General Election, Conservative Party Shadow Culture Secretary
Jeremy Hunt went to lengths to demonstrate continuity between his approach and that of
New Labour:

People have had an assumption about Conservative governments partly because of some of the
things that happened in the 1980s and partly because of the tone of some of the debate around
the arts in the 1980s, which appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you
might progressively want to reduce, which isn’t where the modern Conservative party stands.
We recognise the critical importance of public funding. (Quoted in Higgins, 2010)

Upon entering government, however, official rhetoric began to shift, placing less
emphasis on the role of the state in the creative industries. For example, the Coalition
‘Programme for Government’ booklet notes that ‘Government believes that a vibrant
cultural, media and sporting sector is crucial for our well-being and quality of life. We
need to promote excellence in these fields, with government funding used where appro-
priate to encourage philanthropic and corporate investment’ (HM Government, 2010:
14). Most importantly, it is emphasised that the

deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement,
and the speed of implementation of any measures that have a cost to the public finances will
depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending Review. (HM Government,
2010: 35)

The status of the creative industries was unsure: were they a superfluous part of the
welfare state and, therefore, to be subject to austerity policies, at the back of the queue
behind health, defence and schools? Or were the creative industries actually part of the
British commercial economy, and therefore to be supported as one of the routes out of
fiscal bankruptcy?
In October 2010, the Comprehensive Spending Review revealed the extent of the cuts
that were to be made to public funding for culture over the next 4 years. These included
cuts of between 15% and 30% to the operational budgets of some of the largest and most
important cultural institutions in the United Kingdom, including Museums and Galleries,
the British Film Institute and the Arts Council. A number of key New Labour institutions
were closed outright: the UK Film Council, the Regional Screen Agencies and the
Regional Development Agencies (see HM Treasury, 2010). This was followed up in
2013 with a further 7% cut to DCMS and a 10% cut to local authority spending, upon
which many smaller, regionally based cultural organisations depend.
These cuts were met with almost unanimous hostility from figures in the cultural sec-
tor. Arguments tended to focus heavily upon the economic and commercial contribution
of the creative industries, in line with the assumptions inherent within the discourse.
Polly Toynbee (2011) in the Guardian newspaper is exemplary of the genre:

Labour brought a golden era to the arts after two decades of drought. A 70% rise in funding
began with that symbolic opening-up of free museums and galleries. In the decade to 2007, 2m
new jobs and £16.6bn in exports were generated by the creative industries […] anyone serious
about rebalancing the economy would look to Britain’s creative industries, the second largest
Newsinger 307

sector after finance. Labour showed how a smattering of state money – in all, about £1bn – has
been enough seedcorn to grow a giant beanstalk of an industry.

The disproportionate effects of the cuts on smaller, less commercial, regional or eth-
nic minority-led organisations, and in turn the narrowing of participation in public cul-
ture, was also noted. For example, Topher Campbell (2011), again in the Guardian:

The real damage of the cuts will be inflicted on smaller companies and individuals and those on
the fringes with fragile balance sheets. This is where a lot of the companies created and run by
black and minority ethnic (BME) artists and producers work […] However, the bigger issue is
the extent to which our country’s cultural and intellectual life suffers. Mainstream institutions
cannot really represent the range and diversity of voices in BME communities.

The cuts to public funding for culture, from this point of view, are both economically
illiterate and culturally conservative. However, the cuts to DCMS funding are broadly in
line with the more general reductions in state expenditure across the public spending
spectrum. They do not, therefore, suggest a transformation in the status of culture or the
creative industries within government priorities and, despite the closure of a number of
New Labour institutions, there has not been restructuring and reorganisation of the kind
undertook by New Labour from 1997.
Arguments on the other side of this debate tended to centre on three themes, which
can be usefully illustrated by the following example. The day after the publication of the
Spending Review, Quentin Letts (2011), writing in the Daily Mail newspaper, bemoaned
the ‘multicultural nomenklatura of senior lieutenants’ at the Arts Council. He continued,
‘Yes, spending on the arts is being given a haircut, but it will be markedly less severe
than in many areas of state spending […] If we are going to blame anyone, we should
perhaps look at the Arts Council and its obsession with political correctness’. Letts asked,
‘Did John Donne have to go on arts awareness seminars in the North-East to show his
devotion to “access”? He did not’. Letts argued that the ‘great creative talents of past
centuries relied on the occasional patron and on naked commercial appeal’. The cuts to
public funding are ‘a spring prune of the kind private companies undergo every few
years, essential to help reduce a disastrous national deficit’. For Letts, the cuts are part of
a ‘wider cultural battle that is far too important to ignore’.
Hyperbole aside, three themes emerge that work to legitimate the cuts to public fund-
ing for culture: first, a right-wing attack on ‘progressive’ or liberal cultural initiatives –
the idea that under New Labour tax payers’ money was distributed to ethnic minorities,
women, and so on, at the expense of ‘quality’; the second closely related theme is as an
attack on unnecessary bureaucracy and ‘red tape’; and the third is that a reduced state
will stimulate private and philanthropic investment. From this point of view, the cuts to
public funding are actually beneficial to British culture, in the same way that the cuts to
welfare spending are portrayed as beneficial to the poor. To understand the plausibility of
these themes, it is necessary to explore their basis in the creative industries discourse in
more detail.
The belief that organisations were receiving public money as a response to employ-
ing a high proportion of ethnic minorities, women or disabled people has no basis in
308 Media, Culture & Society 37(2)

reality. The problem has always been the under-representation of certain social groups
in the cultural sector. All the available evidence demonstrates that women, members of
ethnic minorities and disabled people are consistently underrepresented when com-
pared to the working population as a whole (see, for example, Skillset, 2012). Cultural
organisations have consistently failed to reflect the socio-demographics of local com-
munities, audiences and the wider population. Instrumental policies, where they actu-
ally existed, were designed to address systemic ethnic, gender and other inequalities by
increasing diversity to more equal levels. Furthermore, while there may be a percep-
tion of reverse discrimination in instrumental funding policies of cultural institutions,
the extent to which these kinds of initiatives ever informed the actions of organisations
is debatable. For example, a major review of the evidence for the Arts Council in 2010
found that

the received wisdom is that over the last decade government has placed greater emphasis on
instrumental outcomes. While there have been new, targeted initiatives in areas such as
education, there is little evidence that any prioritisation of social or economic objectives has
had any substantial impact on the decisions that have been made about mainstream arts funding,
or indeed on how artists and arts organisations go about their work. (Bunting, 2010: 11)

Richard Hylton (2007) goes even further to describe instrumental initiatives in favour
of multiculturalism as a form of tokenism that ‘have arguably exacerbated rather than
confronted the exclusionary pathologies of the art world’ (p. 131).
The sense that during the New Labour period quality was marginalised in favour of
multiculturalism as part of a politically motivated crusade against the White middle-
classes is a myth. Nevertheless, then Conservative Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt used
his speech at the Media Festival Arts in London in September 2010 to argue that ‘We
must move on from the box-ticking targets approach, saying if you get a certain number
of people from certain backgrounds you can win a certain amount [of funding]’ (Quoted
in Thomas and Dowell, 2010). If, as I have argued elsewhere, one of the key successes
of the creative industries discourse was the mobilisation of a culturally progressive,
politically liberal constituency behind the idea of market-led restructuring (Newsinger,
2012), there is now evidence that this constituency is having its political and cultural
influence withdrawn.
Concerns over instrumentalism and bureaucracy in cultural policy do, however,
reflect a longstanding debate over cultural management and policymaking that devel-
oped during the New Labour period. Belfiore has traced the roots of instrumentalism in
cultural policy to the 1980s and the need for cultural organisations to demonstrate their
value in terms of economic objectives as a response to Thatcherism. These arguments
were then recycled in the late 1990s as part of New Labours adoption of the principles
and practices of the New Public Management across all public policy, producing the
need for organisations and institutions to demonstrate a return on ‘investment’ and a
near-obsessive focus on the methods and practices of monitoring and evaluation (see
Belfiore, 2002, 2004; Hesmondhalgh et al., 2014). There is evidence that many of the
increases in funding during the New Labour period were ring-fenced or restricted for
specific purposes or schemes determined centrally (see, for example, Galloway, 2004),
Newsinger 309

increasing the burden of bureaucratic control and management with its attendant need for
measurement and evaluation (there is a large literature dedicated to debates within impact
measurement and methodology. See, for example, Selwood, 2002).
Finally, philanthropy and business sponsorship are offered as an alternative to the use
of taxpayer’s money. Rena De Sisto, Global Arts and Culture Executive at financial ser-
vices company Merrill Lynch, articulates the case for business sponsorship of culture:

The government proposes that the arts community adopt the US-based approach to arts funding,
with less dependence upon public and more upon private funding sources. In fact, the British
arts community already has a tradition of private philanthropic and corporate funding, so the
difference with the US is really one of degree. And while the US may be further along the
curve, with its longer, more comfortable relationship with private funding for the arts, in both
nations the arts sector can benefit from new approaches to working with corporations. Similarly,
many types of companies can and do benefit greatly from supporting the arts. But some
fundamental changes need to occur to unlock this opportunity. (De Sisto, 2010)

In this way, the significance of corporate sponsorship goes beyond a mere funding
source to offer a full reconstruction of the role of cultural organisations, one that sees
cultural production as servicing the perceived needs of companies, as opposed to needs
emerging from civil society. De Sisto (2010), for example, argues that arts organisations
must allow companies to ‘extract sound business benefits, such as access for employees,
brand visibility and client outreach opportunities’.
This has been reflected in policy, albeit in a relatively minor fashion. In 2011, Jeremy
Hunt wrote to dozens of FTSE 100 executives asking them to invest in the arts as part of
his ‘Year of Corporate Giving’ initiative and a new inheritance tax break for those that
leave a legacy to cultural organisations was introduced. There have also been a number
of reports commissioned to recommend ways of improving fundraising and philanthropy
in the cultural sector (for example, Phillips, 2012; Sood and Pharoah, 2011). However,
while business sponsorship and philanthropy might be an ideologically driven aspiration
or ideal, as a policy paradigm it is far from convincing and has not to-date resulted in any
major policy initiative.
Overall, while the attack on bureaucracy and political correctness tap into genuine
debates about the cultural management techniques that became prominent during the
New Labour period, and particularly the instrumentalisation of cultural funding, they
have very little empirical basis. Alongside measures to encourage sponsorship and phi-
lanthropy, the significance of these themes is as much sound and fury without plausible
or authentic applications in policy, so far.
Much more significant to an understanding of creative industries policies under aus-
terity are the interventions made to information and communication technologies policy,
particularly around communications infrastructure, the protection and extension of intel-
lectual property rights and subsidy to creative businesses in the form of tax breaks. These
include interventions into the media regulatory framework, particularly initiatives to
scale back the role of the media regulator Ofcoms and further deregulate broadcasting,
the Digital Economy Act (2010) and the Live Music Act (2012). From 2013, the tax
break system used to stimulate investment in the film industry since 2007 was extended
310 Media, Culture & Society 37(2)

to include television productions, video games and animation. The government

announced investment of £150 million in the Mobile Infrastructure Project to improve
mobile coverage across the United Kingdom, investing £20 million to provide broadband
internet access to rural communities, and £150 million in the Urban Broadband Fund to
equip 10 cities with faster broadband and wifi. In 2013, Ofcom auctioned the 800 MHz
and 2.6 GHz radio spectrum licenses to pave the way for the adoption of 4G mobile com-
munications standard for £2.4 billion. DCMS has also sponsored a major review of intel-
lectual property and copyright by Ian Hargreaves and the Intellectual Property Bill, the
Government’s response, is, at the time of writing, awaiting its first reading in the House
of Commons. Further to this, the Creative Industries Council, chaired by Business
Secretary Vince Cable, was set up in 2011. It undertook a 2-year review of the media and
telecommunications sectors and produced a policy document in 2013 called Connectivity,
Content and Consumers. The report begins by noting that ‘Our discussions with industry
and others demonstrated that the present framework is broadly working well, supporting
economic growth and innovation, and the things that we value as a society’ (DCMS
2013: 6).
Taken together, these measures demonstrate the continued importance of technologi-
cal, legal and regulatory infrastructure to the creative industries discourse with very little
observable variation to the previous regime. We can conclude that the role of the state in
the management and promotion of an appropriate technical and legal framework for the
creative industries continues to be centred on information and communication technolo-
gies, digitisation and copyright to the point of seamless continuity with New Labour. The
institutional structure of the creative industries policy discourse therefore displays a
remarkable similarity and continuity to that described by Garnham in 2005.

Conclusion
Flew (2012) has argued that ‘the future of the creative industries hinges to a significant
degree on the view taken towards them by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition’
(p. 30). A clear point that emerges from the above is the degree of space opened up in the
discourses of cultural policy between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘industrial’, or between the
core creative activities of cultural expression and the industries of commercialisation and
reproduction, and the wider economy. It is the former that have come under ideological
pressure from the Right at the same time as bearing the brunt of the cuts to public fund-
ing, while the latter occupy primacy within the creative industries discourse, enjoy con-
tinued investment and attention at a high level within government. The question is: does
this represent a qualitative change in the creative industries?
The key driver of change in the post-2008 period is the austerity agenda, an overarch-
ing programme of cuts that has very little nuance, but informs all areas of public policy.
Once this factor is taken into consideration, the accepted concepts, assumptions, catego-
ries and values of the creative industries policy discourse remain remarkably durable.
This is evident across the key areas of institutionalised activity: the tax regime subsidy
to creative businesses, telecommunications policy and copyright, and the subsidisation
of core cultural activities through the arms-length bodies, albeit at lower levels than pre-
2008. At the same time, cultural policy in a broad sense is subject to contestation from a
Newsinger 311

range of reactionary forces that seize the opportunity to further delegitimate the role of
the state in distributing resources towards politically progressive practice. This is evi-
denced across the discursive themes of red tape, multiculturalism and equality, business
sponsorship and philanthropy. These forces have to-date lacked authentic or convincing
applications in policy initiatives. The cultural landscape under the Coalition is not, there-
fore, being fundamentally shaped or reshaped by any coherent central initiatives or pro-
grammes of cultural policy.
Susan Galloway and Stewart Dunlop (2007) have described the discourse of the crea-
tive industries as ‘rather like a Russian doll; once the layers are discarded at heart, it
appears an amorphous entity, with no specific cultural content at all’ (p. 29). This is an
appropriate metaphor to explain the transformation in creative industries policy in the
age of austerity: The layers are being pulled away, further sheared of cultural content.
This is in line with the neoliberal state as it emerges from the 2008 crisis: an accelera-
tion of the process of dismantling the social democratic welfare state and its associated
discourses under the disguise of austerity; the continued strengthening of the values and
practices of the market as the only legitimate mechanisms for social and cultural action.
This analysis suggests that the narrative of the creative industries discourse can be accu-
rately understood as part of a trajectory of the commodification of culture, the continua-
tion of trends that go back to the 1980s.
The ‘shock doctrine’ is a term coined by Naomi Klein to describe a strategy employed
to mystify the restructuring of national economies along neoliberal lines during periods
of crisis, and therefore to circumvent democratic scrutiny (Klein, 2008). Is this a useful
way to understand cultural policy in the age of austerity? Actually, the dominant policy
discourse of the creative industries required very little ‘shock therapy’ in order to adapt
to the current phase of neoliberal crisis management. It was there already.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Note
1. Neoliberalism has become a problematic term. Terry Flew, for example, describes it as par-
ticularly elastic, ubiquitous, almost entirely pejorative, and often confused with neo-conserva-
tism. It ‘has come to be a much-abused term that too easily lends itself to a poorly theorised
condemnatory stance that too easily lends itself to whatever happens to be a particular author
or presenter’s bugbear at that point in time’ (Flew, 2012: 191). In contradistinction to Flew,
neoliberalism is used in this article in the way that Des Freedman understands it, as ‘a pro-
foundly contradictory phenomenon where free-market enthusiasts who sing the praises of
open markets subsequently impose tariffs to protect domestic industries, usually for electoral
gain’. In these terms, neoliberalism is best understood as a project of upward capital redis-
tribution as opposed to a fundamentalist theoretical conviction in the natural ubiquity and
efficacy of unfettered markets. Neoliberalism is therefore a political/ideological project in
which the state can play a significant role in creating and preserving an institutional frame-
work appropriate to the purpose of capital redistribution (Freedman, 2008: 39–40). This is an
important distinction if the term ‘neoliberalism’ is to have analytical power.
312 Media, Culture & Society 37(2)

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