The Digital Economy and the Creative Industries

Abstract

Debates about the seeming shift in the economic structure of societies away from agriculture and manufacturing, and towards service industries, have been taking place, in the USA at least, since the early 1970s. Daniel Bell’s 1973 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society is widely regarded as the seminal text, but it was preceded and succeeded by others, including Machlup (1962), Drucker (1992/1968), Touraine (1969), Toffler (1970), Porat (1977), Toffler (1980) and Naisbitt (1982) (Cavanagh 2007: 156–157; Chadwick 2006: 29–30; Hesmondhalgh 2007: 87–88; Lister et al. 2003: 192–197; Miller 2011: 49–54; Qiu 2013: 110–113). While Miller (2011: 52–53) is keen to make a subtle distinction between the concepts of post-industrialism and the information society, the differences between the two are more temporal than philosophical in orientation. This is exemplified in the development of Bell’s own work, whose post-industrialism morphed into the ‘information society’ thesis over time (Miller 2011: 52-53). Post-industrialism described a period in the 1970s where service industries were becoming more prominent without there being the technology available for them to fully exploit the new opportunities for growth. Later theories of post-industrialism in the 1990s had the advantage of being able to incorporate the development and use of advanced forms of digital communication as well as the rise of neo-liberalism into their analyses.