15.7: Conclusion – Creative Industries With or Without Creativity
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The three modes of cultural labor discussed in this study reveal key differences in the working conditions and lifestyles of game company employees in Asia. Of course, the reality is more complicated than the theoretical constructs. The positions of cultural labor, the changing nature of the creative industries, the political atmosphere, and the degree of urbanism in which the creative industries operate could change the nature and relative positions of the three modes of cultural labor.
The findings showed that the concept of creativity is relative. As long as the political economy of transnational corporations is robust and stable, the global division of labor remains. However, there must be locales in which creativity is highly valued and protected for global cultural production; at the same time, there must be dependent satellite locales in which creativity is less valued, as they are serving the center of production. If creativity industries are ideally meant to foster cultural diversity, social inclusion, and a wider development pathway—as clearly indicated in UNESCO’s 2013 report on the creative economy—the Asian cases indicate that conditions on the ground are more complicated. 22 Given the existing economic structures, the creative economy in some Asian countries is deemed dependent and secondary, and their creativity, if any, is derivative of the transnational corporations.
Besides the impact of global hierarchies, we have also seen that the internal dynamics within a nation greatly affect the conditions of cultural labor. Where governance is top-down and state-driven, cultural workers subscribe to ideologies of development ranging from capitalist democracy and neoliberalism to socialist economy, cultural nationalism, religious economy, and state corporatism. For example, for China and Korea, national cultural policy basically dictates the development of creative industries, the content produced, and the products exported, whereas in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore, cultural workers are still immersed in the illusive gaiety of prescribed creativity. The different philosophies of cultural policy nourish two very different modes of cultural labor. Cultural policy also varies according to the regime, the regional economy, and the relative competitiveness of creative industries in the region. Taken as a whole, these forces and influences encourage us to consider the cultural valences and the theoretical implications of concepts such as precarity, creativity, and creative labor.