2019/02/26 by Hye-Kyung Lee, Hye‐Kyung Lee · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Asian Culture and Media Studies #Cultural Industries and Urban Development #Socioeconomic Development in Asia
paper · doi:10.1080/10286632.2019.1577401
openalex publication_date 2019/02/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.