ABSTRACT
The concept of creative industries has a close relationship to the British state. As a result of this it is important to follow Vernon’s argument that:
We must… remember that the brevity of social democracy was not confined to Britain. We need better ways of explaining why and how Britain shares much of its twentieth-century history with others across the globe and yet why and how they assumed a specifically British character.
(Vernon 2012: 418) The UK government did much to develop the idea of creative industries by moving it beyond the more arts focused cultural industries and linking cultural activity with technology, for example software design (Garnham 2005, Campbell 2013). However, the ‘Britishness’ of the concept has been underexplored. This chapter uses the close relationship between the concept of creative industries and the British state to open up a new research agenda for the study of creative industries, one that is closely attentive to the parochial aspects of that concept and its related practices. It argues for a new research agenda in two ways. In the first instance it draws on the ‘social life of methods’ approach developed in British sociology by John Law, Evelyn Rupert and Mike Savage (Law et al. 2011) and applied to cultural policy by O’Brien (2014). Second the chapter links the need to see measurement methods as having a ‘social life’ to emerging trends in the historiography and analysis of the British state, suggesting an important supplemental narrative to understanding the creative industries. The chapter argues that the emergence of specific forms of measurement is intertwined with the specific form of the British state. This underpins the argument made in the second half of the chapter that the creative industries are inseparable from the way the British state has been configured since the rise of British modernity in the eighteenth century. Thus the chapter offers an important new area of research in the comparative study of creative industries, building on the work of Ross (2007) and 453Flew (2013), but one that pays more attention to the role of national specificity in shaping this now global phenomenon.