Terry Flew, Global Creative Industries

scholar Terry Flew draws on a breadth of literature to gauge the degree to which it would be possible to conceive of the creative industries as truly global in scale.This examination is undertaken through six chapters: 1) Industries, 2) Production, 3) Consumption, 4) Markets, 5) Places, and 6) Policies.Throughout the book, Flew draws upon a wide range of concepts and traditions, as well as various case studies, and attempts to pool them coherently under the umbrella of the global.In "Industries," the first chapter of the book, Flew compares the various categorizations of creative industries, such as Hesmondhalgh's Symbolic Texts Model, the UK DCMS model, Throsby's Concentric Circles model, the WIPO Copyright Model and the UNCTAD model for Creative Industries.He uses this comparison to assert that "creative industries sit within a complex ecology of activities, which have elements that are connected and those that are profoundly different" (p.15).Flew considers various case studies of fields within the creative industries: by looking at the fashion industry, for example, he examines the baggage that comes with labelling an industry creative.He considers the creative work involved in the fashion industry, such as the designing of fashion goods; but also the not-so-creative dimensions of the industry, namely the global distribution of fashion items.He refers to the latter type of work as constitutive of the ecology in which creative work is embedded.Flew is critical of the fact that existing social scientific studies of the creative industries tend to approach these on a national scale.As an alternative, he promotes more global-scale frameworks such as the UNCTAD model and the UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics.Having dealt with mainstream theoretical frameworks on the creative industries (national/global in scale), Flew's subsequent chapters examine, always with a global outlook, creative production and then processes of consumption.His main focus in the second chapter, "Production," is the "blurring of lines between producers and consumers" (p.33).His discussion of production is two-levelled: first he focuses on the conditions in which creative workers operate, the drivers of creative

Economic geography · Economics · Media studies · Sociology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development