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15 1 The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policymaking in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States t R A d e d e R e G u l At i o n h A s brought down barriers to the movement of capital and jobs, but it has not freed up movement of people in pursuit of a better livelihood. The upshot is that work is allowed to circulate around the globe with impunity, but workers themselves are not—in fact, many are criminalized if they cross borders (Bacon 2008). The higher up the skills curve, the less strictly this rule applies, if only because it has not proven so easy to separate skills from employees. Nonetheless, corporate strategies loosely known as “knowledge transfer” have been devised to migrate brainpower from the heads of well-paid employees to a cheaper labor pool offshore. Increasingly sophisticated work-flow technologies can now slice up the contents of a job into work tasks, assign them to different parts of the globe, and reassemble the results into a meaningful whole. Most recently, trade liberalization, in India and China in particular, has enabled large amounts of skilled, professional work to be performed in discount offshore locations. As more and more countries strive to enter the upper reaches of industry and services, the competition to attract high-tech or knowledge-rich investment has intensified, and so these skillintensive sectors are now seen as key to the game of catch-up. In response, new trade policies are being rolled out in the global North to keep wealthy nations ahead of the game. Most readers will be familiar with how this contest is played out in the technology industries. First Japan, then Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and, most recently, China, have all taken their place, whether by invitation or by self-propulsion, in the hierarchy of global production chains for advanced technology. In the meantime, the United States has strained to preserve its traditional dominance in innovation and top-end design, in 16 nice Work if You can Get it large part by manipulating property law, tax codes, patent procedures, export controls, and immigration regulations. Brainpower is now organized on an international basis, with engineers and their knowledge circulating between Silicon Valley and East Asian nodes: Hsinchu, Penang, Singapore , and Shanghai (Saxenian 2006). Managers at each of the Asian locations have to wheel and deal to leverage technology transfers that will maintain their position in the chain, while all are trying to steal the fire from the United States. Software follows a similar pattern, but its cultural character and easy replicability feeds into an economy where intellectual property (IP) and other legal efforts to retain traditional monopoly rents play an ever-growing role in capital wealth creation. In such an economy, the competition to capture value mutates more rapidly. During the dot-com years of the late 1990s, the adolescent surge of Internet-based operations appeared to offer a different model of valuation and innovation from the customary patterns in the technology industries. Internet-based development was rooted in content, ideas, and humanistic creativity, as opposed to purely technical invention. This shift in focus, toward skills that had hitherto been quite marginal to the productive economy, promised to open up untapped sources of financial value. For a while, talk about unleashing creativity was all the rage in managerial circles, giving rise to the folie de grandeur known as the New Economy. The hothouse environment of these years proved to be a heady incubator for the fledgling efforts at creative industries (CI) policymaking. The fiscal windfall promised by the burgeoning new media sector prompted government and corporate managers to imagine that the traditional and emergent creative professions could also be brought into the same orbit of financialization as IT start-ups. The result was a new composite “creative economy”; and because the self-directed work mentality of artists, designers , writers, and performers was so perfectly adapted to the freelancing profile favored by advocates of liberalization, this new arrangement occupied a key evolutionary niche on the business landscape. Cultural work was nominated as the new face of neoliberal entrepreneurship, and its practitioners were cited as the hit-making models for the IP jackpot economy . Arguably more important, the visible presence of creative lifestyles in select city neighborhoods, now designated as cultural districts, helped to boost property value in these precincts and adjacent others in accord with well-documented, and by now formulaic, cycles of gentrification (Smith 1996...

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