Kunnskapsverkets litteraturdatabase

After hosting the 1994 Winter Olympics, the Norwegian national and local authorities expected a ‘big boom’ in tourism; the actual effects have been less than, and different from, the predictions, and 40% of the full-service hotels in Lillehammer have gone bankrupt. This paper compares ex ante theories and predictions with the ex post reality. Reference areas and time-series analysis are used to clarify the counterfactual and internal validity. International comparisons among Olympic hosts identify general patterns. The aim is to help planners of mega-events and other rare projects to improve their forecasting and decisions. Ex post studies can improve the quality of future ex ante impact assessment of unique projects, but it is important to clarify partial, interaction and cumulative effects. Also, much more careful market and cost-benefit studies are needed.

The article departs from empirical studies of two competitive firms in an organisationally thin region in Norway. The main question in the article is how these firms have achieved global competitiveness. The article focuses its inquiry on how the firms organise their innovation activity, giving special attention to the firms’ organisational learning and absorptive capacity. It is found that find that workplace learning enables the firms to utilise knowledge in uncommon ways. The learning rests on specific organisational traits in the firms, such as broad participation, long-term on-the-job training, the use of practice-based knowledge in innovation projects, and links to national and global knowledge sources. The characteristics of thin regions indicate that these traits make up a generally applicable strategy in such regions. 

In this paper, I draw attention to the complexities and confusions in the shift in discourse and praxis from “culture industry” to “cultural industries” and then “creative industries.” I examine how this “creative turn” is fraught with challenges, highlighting seven issues in particular: (i) the dif- ficulties in defining and scoping the creative industries; (ii) the challenges in measuring the economic benefits creative industries bring; (iii) the risk that creative industries neglect genuine creativity/ culture; (iv) the utopianization of “creative labour”; (v) the risk of valorizing and promoting external expertise over local small- and medium-scale enterprises in the building of “creative industries”; (vi) the danger of overblown expectations for creative industries to serve innovation and the economy, as well as culture and social equity; and (vii) the fallacy that “creative cities” can be designed. I suggest that the move towards creative industries discourse represents a theoretical backslide, and raise the possibility that a return to “cultural industries” would be more beneficial for clarifying our theoretical understanding of the cultural sectors and the creative work that they do, as well as enabling better policymaking. 

The concept of scene has long been used by musicians and music journalists to describe the clusters of musicians, promoters and fans, etc., who grow up around particular genres of music. Typically, this everyday usage of scene has referred to a particular local setting, usually a city or district, where a particular style of music has either originated, or has been appropriated and locally adapted. Examples here would include Chicago blues, New Orleans jazz and Nashville Country music, as well as numerous lesser known instances of local musical innovation and production.

Since the early 1990s, the concept of scene has also begun to acquire currency as an academic model of analysis. Scene’s significance in this respect has resulted partly from the criticism and rejection of prior theoretical frameworks used in research on music, and the local, notably subcultural theory (see, for example, Clarke, 1981; Bennett, 1999), and also due to the influential work on ‘‘art worlds’’ and cultural industries (Becker, 1982). Peterson and Bennett (2004) observe as an academic research model that the concept of scene can usefully be subdivided into three categories: local (Cohen, 1991; Shank, 1994), trans-local (Kruse, 1993; Hodkinson, 2002) and virtual (Kibby, 2000; Bennett, 2002). The purpose of this paper is to assess the different ways that scene has been conceptualised in academic research as a means of understanding music as a ‘resource’ in contemporary everyday life. 

This article introduces a new form of collaborative web-based editing which has become increasingly popular in recent years. It involves web users as reporters and co- roducers for specialist news sites by allowing them to submit their own news reports and pointers to relevant articles elsewhere on the web, and sometimes even hands over editorial control to the online community altogether. Websites of this type move on from traditional journalistic gatekeeping approaches, where editors publish only what they regard as 'fit to print', to what is here termed gatewatching, where almost all incoming material is publicised, but with varying degrees of emphasis. Gatewatching sites frequently become major repositories of specialist information, turning into resource centre sites for their interest community, and are particularly common on the fringes of the open source software development movement. Some of these sites can be seen to directly apply open source ideals (direct involvement of the community, open access to all aspects of the development process) to the reporting of news, in effect making news itself an open source

This paper aims to explore the spatial and organisational dynamics of innovation activities in the evolution of cultural industry using Taipei’s music industry as a case study. The existing literature has emphasised that innovation and creativity are driving the evolution of the cultural industry as a result of the spatial proximity effect gener- ated by production systems. However, few studies have examined the innovation prac- tices of the cultural industry resulting from interactive relationships between the urban cluster environment and the mobilisation process of project networks. An evo- lutionary perspective is used to illustrate how the cluster and network elements of the music industry are intertwined in innovation practices within the Taipei context. As a contribution to the cluster–network debates, this paper argues that the innovation dynamics of Taipei’s music industry are a hybrid feature of Taipei’s cluster environ- ment and the strategic competencies of music project networks rather than the local cluster effect. In conclusion, a different trajectory for the evolution of Taipei’s music industry is presented. Additionally, this dynamic process between cluster and network makes Taipei a hybrid creative platform that is an active element in the cultivation of the innovative competencies of Taipei’s music producers and related workers. 

Instead of exploring the global/local logic of glocalization, this case study specifically concentrates on a form of local-to-local spatial dynamics. The spatial history of Hong Kong underground bandrooms is exploited to illustrate the translocal reproduction of spatiality. While the construction of this space was translocally inspired by music subculture from abroad, local spatiality absorbs transborder subcultural energies and re-channels them to become discursive resources for resisting local governmentality and the work- and-spend culture of transnational capitalistic discourse. Translocally inspired and locally accomplished, this underground site becomes a heterotopia in which very different spatial functions are set in juxtaposition. Beside inward heterotopian compression, it also connects outwardly to other translocal spaces of clubs, discos, hip-hop fashion shops and other localized spaces. This web of interconnected spaces provides and organizes the lifeworlds of a community of local graffitians, DJs and musicians, who mobilize transborder hip-hop and rock culture to construct and maintain a radically translocalized spatiality. 

Gjennom et unntak i konkurranseloven kan norske forlag via en bransjeavtale bestemme prisen på nye bøker, og hindre at bokhandlerne konkurrerer på pris. Kritikere av avtalen hevder at dette fører til at prisene blir høyere enn de ellers ville vært, og at bransjeavtalen derfor bør avskaffes. Imidlertid er det hverken empirisk eller teoretisk grunn til å tro at bokhandlerkonkurranse i seg selv fører til lavere priser. Vi argumenterer for at avtalen bør opprettholdes, og at den både av bedrifts- og samfunnsøkonomiske årsaker bør være bransjeomfattende for å løse vertikale og horisontale problemer av kollektiv art. 

This article attempts to define and measure cultural industries in Sweden. It starts with a discussion of the definition and delineation of the term "cultural industries," arguing that a large range of goods and services can be considered culture industry products and that it is important to place the production and exchange of such products in the context of an industrial systems approach. The concept is then operationalized using Swedish data on employment and the activity of firms. The results suggest that the overall growth in both employment and the number of firms has been especially strong in the cultural industries. However, the number of active firms has been growing at a much faster pace than employment in these industries, indicating a quickly changing business environment. With regard to regional dimensions, Swedish cultural industries have a strong attraction to urban areas but an even stronger propensity to agglomerate. It is suggested that the spatial dynamics observed may be key to the development of the industries' competencies and success. In summary, the article presents the results of an extensive data analysis that found that cultural industries make an important contribution to the Swedish economy and labor market. It concludes by suggesting issues that need further quantitative and qualitative study.