ABSTRACT
The sets of processes and relations that we refer to as ‘the economy’ are no longer quite as taken for granted as once they were. Many of the old certainties – both practical and academic – concerning what makes firms hold together or markets work, seem less clear cut and our knowledge of them less secure. Yet, among these proliferating uncertainties has emerged – or re-emerged – a belief that something called ‘culture’ is somehow critical to understanding what is happening to economic and organisational life in the present. This ‘cultural turn’ takes many forms depending on context and preferred project. In this chapter we want to focus on just one aspect. This is the claim, often associated with terms such as ‘economies of signs’, ‘the network society’, ‘the knowledge economy’ and so on, that we are living through an era in which economic and organisational life has become increasingly ‘culturalised’ (Lash and Urry 1994, Leadbeater 1999, Castells 2000). So what does it mean to make such a claim?
