REVIEW ON CULTURAL INDUSTRIES IN WESTERN GEOGRAPHICAL CIRCLES
QIAN Zi-hua1, YAN Xiao-pei2
1. Chongqing Planning & Design Institute, Chongqing 401147, China;
2. Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
Abstract The research on cultural industries in western geography circles includes two stages which are the infant stage, from 1980s to mid-1990s, and the developing stage, from mid-1990s to present. At the infant stage, the geographical scholars preferred "high and new technology" to "cultural industries". Researches on cultural industries just focused on transformation of the Fordist factory into the Post-fordism social factory. At the developing stage, more researches were conducted on "cultural industries". There are seven aspects which greatly interest western geographical scholars including geographical characters of employment in cultural industries, impacts of cultural industries on regions and cities, globalization and development of cultural industries, cultural production agglomerations or cultural clusters, developing mechanism of cultural industries, impacts of IT on cultural industries and management of cultural industries. Meanwhile, economic geographers played a great role in cultural industry studies in western world and cultural industries including film industry, music industry, and audio-visual industry which became new economic growth sources. The authors point out that although the researches on cultural industries have greatly developed, they are still limited. Therefore, this paper put forward several solutions on this issue. Firstly, as cross-disciplinary studies, the researches on cultural industries should integrate the perspective from cultural and political geography besides economic geography. Secondly, the theoretical study should be enhanced. That means based on the empirical work, geographical theories of cultural industries are necessary to be developed. Thirdly, the researchers should improve the researches in developing countries and regions in order to change the Europe and North America standardized situation. Furthermore, the authors suggest that the future researches should focus on (1) microscopic characteristics of employment in cultural industries, (2) consumption and distribution chain of cultural products, (3) empirical work on diverse cultural production agglomeration, and (4) empirical work on government in cultural industries.
2010, Vol. 25 
