Development system Essay

Over much of the twentieth century, the foremost edges of economic development and growth were mainly identifiable with sectors distinguished by varying degrees of mass production, as expressed in large-scale machine systems and an unrelenting drive to product standardization and cost cutting. all through the mass-production era, the dominant sectors evolved through a progression of technological and organizational changes focused above all on process routinization and the exploration for internal economies of scale. These features are not particularly conducive to the injection of high levels of aesthetic and semiotic content into final products. Certainly, in the 1930s and 1940s many commentators – with supporters of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, 1991; Horkheimer, 1947) being among the most vocal – expressed grave misgivings concerning the steady incursion of industrial methods into the globe of the cultural economy and the concomitant tendency for multifarious social and emotive content to be evacuated from forms of popular cultural production. These doubts were by no means out of place in a framework where much of commercial culture was focused on an enormously narrow approach to entertainment and disruption, and in which the powerful forces of the nation-state and nationalism were bend in considerable ways on creating mass proletarian societies. The specific problems raised by the Frankfurt School in regard to popular commercial culture have in definite respects lost some of their urgency as the economic and political bases of mass production have given way before the changes guided in over the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the new economy started its ascent. This is not to say that the modern cultural economy is not associated with a number of staid social and political predicaments. Although it is also the case that as commercial cultural production and consumption have developed in the major capitalist societies over the last few decades, so our aesthetic and ideological judgments concerning their underlying meanings have lean to shift. The rise of post-modern social and cultural theory is one significant expression of this development. Creative Industries Policy and the Reason of Shift in Terminology â€Å"The idea that cultural or creative industries might be regenerative was the result of changes in the cultural-industries landscape that were themselves in part the product of cultural policy shifts – when cultural policy is understood in the wider sense, to include media and communications† . One other key aspect also goes unnoticed in Hesmondhalgh’s book, which is that the sector itself, the ostensible object of both academic and policy discourse does not distinguish itself in the term â€Å"cultural industries† – at least not instantly. Some are simply unaware of how their activities relay to a range of disparate occupations and businesses. Some are clear in their refusal of the terminology and the company with which they are thus grouped. Certainly, one of the key arguments of the policy advocates is that this sector lacks a essential voice, it needs to convey its demands, needs to become self-conscious as a sector, needs to present itself with the consistency of other economic groups, needs, therefore, to co-operate in its own building as policy object (O’Connor, 1999a). If an necessary part of this discursive operation is the dismantling of fixed oppositions between economics as well as culture then this has to be about the self-perception, individuality (and identification) of cultural producers – the inculcation or adoption of a new kind of what Nigel Thrift calls â€Å"embodied performative knowledge† but can as well be seen as a form of habitus (O’Connor, 1999a, 2000b). â€Å"The notion of culture is constructed through a number of intersecting discourses providing particular means of mobilising the notion and defining its object. These discourses are selectively emphasized to frame cultural (industries) policies† . The cultural industries discourse then is not just policy making but is part of a wider shift in governance, and needs a new set of self-understandings as part of the key skills in a new cultural economy (O’Connor, 2000b). In this sense those apprehensive to advocate cultural industry strategies could be seen as a species of â€Å"cultural intermediaries. â€Å"