In the latter half of the 20th century, many countries, especially economically advanced countries, have experienced an increasing cultural turn of the economy. Culture, specifically, information and knowledge, becomes commodities produced, distributed and consumed in the market, while the economy is more and more based on information and knowledge. This is what Thrift calls “capitalism’s cultural turn.” According to him, today’s capitalist economy is becoming “soft or knowledgeable capitalism”, where “business is about the creation, fostering and distribution of knowledge” (Thrift, 1999: 136). He argues that because of the massive increase of information and the increasing emphasis on innovation, soft capitalism is on the rise. At the core of soft capitalism there are cultural or creative industries which have recently expanded greatly not just in size but also in influence.
The cultural industries have continuously evolved, and have undergone remarkable transformation since the early 1980s. Until the 1980s, cultural industries were mostly small and economically insignificant. The major function of cultural industries was regarded to be less economic, but more contributing to “nation-building and protecting local identity in the face of globalizing” (Oakley and O’Connor, 2015: 2). In other words, the cultural side rather than the industrial (or economic) side was emphasized in the cultural industries.
Since the 1980s, however, the cultural industries in many countries have advanced to the center of the national economy. Not only organization and ownership of them have changed, but also they have been globalized in the sense that more and more cultural products and texts are produced, circulated and consumed across national borders. In addition, one can find proliferation of new communication technologies, increasing cultural activities and texts, more complex tastes and habits of audiences, and cultural policies and regulations emphasizing economic values (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 1-2).