The creative industries definitional discourse

Successive United Kingdom (UK) national governments and their agencies have defined and redrawn boundaries. This has resulted in continuous public cultural policy and practice turbulence since 1945, commencing with the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain (Pick and Anderton, 1999). The pragmatic determination of these boundries - that is definitions with no obvious rationale for inclusion or exclusion- lends itself to an interpretation of a public sector domain engaged in restrictive cultural practice, wherein boundaries are constrained enough to match the level of available resources at any given time. It is the government administrative machinery responding to national policy by providing manageable and controllable categories, classifications and frameworks for the allocation of public funds, rather than a rational, inclusive and empirically informed (and hence measurable) system that conforms to the requirements of evidence-based policy (Solesbury, 200.1). Urban regeneration (Roodhouse and Roodhouse, 1997) and the creative industries policy (Roodhouse, 2003c) by the New Labour administration exemplify this practice