Part III - Entertainment Industrialised
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2009
Summary
The preceding part investigated the take-off of the film industry, the subsequent quality race and the shift in the geographical and industrial structure of international film production. This part will examine the consequences. It will do so in three ways. First, Chapter 9 investigates how tradeability – the one-off qualitative change that cinema technology brought about – affected the international trade in entertainment and how it constrained firms' strategies. Second, Chapter 10 investigates how modern market research techniques, pioneered by film companies, institutionalised the entrepreneurial discovery process, but at the same time standardised, automated and made tradeable the knowledge that entrepreneurs obtained about the market.
Third, Chapter 11 aims to quantify the impact of productivity growth in spectator entertainment on the wider economy, using growth accounting and social savings. In addition, the chapter explores qualitatively to what extent cinema provided a model for the industrialisation of services and pioneered business and organisational practices later used elsewhere, most notably in other high-sunk-costs service industries. Finally, Chapter 12 evaluates how the developments discussed in all the preceding chapters influenced the international film industry after 1945, and where the evolution of entertainment production that started with the liberalisations of the nineteenth century has brought the Western world today.
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- Entertainment IndustrialisedThe Emergence of the International Film Industry, 1890–1940, pp. 315 - 318Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008