ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace that labor practises in the cultural industries do not conform to the routines which are typical of work in the modern capitalist economy. On the one hand, cultural goods are made and sold for profit on a mass scale like any other kind of commodity. On the other, special qualities of creativity are attributed to the process of production and to the core workers who make cultural goods – musicians, actors, dancers, script writers, and so on. As the old song goes, “there’s no business like show business.” Raymond Williams couches it in rather different terms, but comes to a similar conclusion about the distinctiveness of cultural production:
[T]he general productive order, throughout the centuries of the development of capitalism, has been predominantly defined by the market, and “cultural production” . . . has been increasingly assimilated to its terms, yet any full identity between cultural production and general production has been to an important extent resisted, one of the forms of this resistance being the distinctions between “artisan,” “craftsman” [sic], and “artist,” and in an important related form the distinction between “objects of utility” and “objects of art.”
