INTRODUCTION

It is generally acknowledged that one of the earliest attempts to define the creative industries was made by Tony Blair's 1997 New Labour government. The then newly established Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) founded a Creative Industries Task Force in order to map and measure the contribution of these sectors to the performance of the British economy and social and cultural life. The DCMS defines creative industries as, ‘those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (DCMS 2020). In 1998, the DCMS Task Force produced its first report, and claimed that the UK's creative industries employed 1.4 million people and made about £60 billion a year for the economy (Flew 2012: 9; see also Schlesinger 2016: 192). In 2020, the DCMS estimated that by 2018 the creative industries had contributed £111.7 billion to the UK economy. Advertising, architecture, arts and antique markets, crafts, design, fashion, film and video, electronic games, music, performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, and television and radio are among those sectors listed by the DCMS as being part of the creative industries.

Creative industries are also said by some to be better equipped to weather economic storms because of an in-built flexibility in creative jobs and markets that enable these sectors to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. Indeed, a number of academics, politicians and policymakers optimistically claim that the creative industries represent a qualitatively different set of socio-economic practices to others, which are characterised by their greater immunity to the crisis tendencies of capitalism. One of the most well-known champions of the so-called creative class is the American public academic, Richard Florida. He argues that creative sectors – arts, film, music, museums, advertising, high-tech and financial services, legal firms, poets and so on – have laid the foundations for collaborative learning in specific regions and sectors. Indeed, economic value is built in to these sectors through creativity, according to Florida, and through that very intangible quality, ‘ideas’ (Florida 2012: 37).