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Life in a Cultural Economy. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Oct 2009, Pages: 140
The concept of culture has been increasingly utilized in discourses on development and progress. It has been cast frequently as a political resource, a constituting agent of human wants and desires, a collective social good, or a resource for economic development. This book is about the latter of these roles that culture has been asked to fill, but it is intensely cognizant of the other three as well. The author questions the logic of recent moves to foster development through the creation of markets for music. Through a thorough theoretical discussion and empirical study, it is argued that markets for music, once created, tend not to function as economists would like. Thus, the study casts doubt on the logic of making a commodity of culture in the first place. Further, it is argued that due to culture's social and communicative nature, we are ill-served by evaluating related policy using economic criteria. Cultural goods, it is argued, must be analyzed with more complex sociological methods. Furthermore, if all goods are cultural in nature, as the author suggests, the usefulness of the discipline of economics also comes into question.
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