The creative industries after cultural policy : a genealogy and some possible preferred futures

How can we most usefully appropriate the rhetorics of the new economy to advance a contemporary understanding of the production and consumption of creative and informational content? Can the concept of creativity be broadened, but not so much that it becomes everything and nothing ? the newest business lit fad and just as ephemeral as the rest ? such that claims for its role as a driver of economic growth can be sustained? Can the analytical and research context for ?experiential? or ?cultural? consumption ? core business for cultural, communications and media studies academics be helpfully developed through new economy models? This piece takes an explicitly policy orientated line and tendentiously tracks a genealogy and some possible preferred futures for the creative industries beyond their framing within a cultural policy problematic. I track the fate of creative and informational content as it passes across three grids of understanding: ?culture?, ?services? and ?knowledge?. These grids also serve as historical and/or possible rationales for state intervention in the creative industries as well as industry?s own understandings of their nature and role.