The international transfer of creative industries as a policy idea

Policy mobilities as informal processes: evidence from “creative city” policy-making in Gdańsk and Stockholm

“…. characterized by the intensified and instantaneous connectivity of sites, channels, arenas, and nodes of policy development, evolution, and reproduction" (Evans, 2009;Prince, 2012Prince, , 2014Rindzevičiūtėa, Svensson, & Tomson, 2016). This "fast policy" is a "social condition", a diverse policy-mobility process imbued with power and personal relations which shape the resulting policy (Peck & Theodore, 2015).…”

The politics of temporal sovereignty and the subaltern MA

“…In common with other cases where the global orthodoxy of the cultural economy script is adopted in local contexts, a simple straightforward process of 'policy learning' and mimetic transfer rarely occurs (e.g. Dzudezek and Linder, 2013;Lee, 2016;Matthews, 2015;O'Connor, 2015;Pinherio and Hague, 2014;Rindzeviciutte et al, 2015). That is probably because, as Peck and Theodore argue in their distended case studies of the global shadowlands and 'administrative weeds' of 'fast policy' (2015), policy regimes are not explained by the agency of rational, deliberative actors operating in and between governments, organisations and institutions that can be modelled in diagrams where arrows represent supposedly observable linear relations between cause and effect usually pointing from top to bottom, input to output, or algebraic formulas which balance, that are commonly used to represent policies as transcendent and immediate structures.…”

The securitisation of cultural heritage

“…The financial crisis had particularly deep adverse impacts on cultural organisations and public funding of culture in all European countries, but artists and cultural workers in Eastern Europe suffered most as the available resources were already comparatively scarce (Čopič et al 2013) because governmental spending on culture was generally quite low in all eleven new EU member states (Rius-Ulldemolins et al 2019). On the other hand, this disparity motivated policy actors to secure their institutional anchoring in the West, bolstered by the flow of investment in infrastructure from EU programmes, which stimulated the growth of new entrepreneurs in local creative industries (Vos 2017;Rindzevičiūtė, Tomson, and Svensson 2016). In turn, some countries like, for instance, the Baltic states, responded to the political unrest at the Eastern EU borders by significantly reducing their economic dependency and media contacts with Russia, thus becoming even more West-oriented (Bergmane 2020).…”

“…The essays that form this special issue address this gap by specifically focusing on processes, analysing the cases of organisational agency in state cultural policy. In doing so, the authors draw their inspiration from neo-institutional theory (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Powell and DiMaggio 1991), which has become influential in cultural policy scholarship studying policy processes (O'Brien 2014;McGuigan 2004;Gray 2000;Paquette and Beauregard 2017), policy transfer (Rindzevičiūtė, Tomson, and Svensson 2016;Prince 2015;O'Connor 2004) and policy and cultural work (Khan 2019;Comunian and Conor 2017;Banks 2017). Although the uses of neo-institutional theory in organisation and management studies has been criticised for being vague (Alvesson and Spicer 2019), its usefulness for cultural policy research has not been exhausted yet: the institutional approach enables us to bridge the long-standing binaries of ideology and practice, individual creativity and bureaucracy and, which is particularly important in an East European context, governmental control and freedom.…”