DECONSTRUCTING CREATIVE INDUSTRIES IN THE GLOCAL CONTEXT: THE CASE OF CREATIVE LABOUR IN BUENOS AIRES

The urban contemporary economy, led by innovation growth, is grounded on a shift from a manufacturing based to knowledge-intensive and service-based industries. The now globalised process of production highlights the growing role of knowledgeable human capital as a primary driver of growth, where Creative Industries (CI) are often considered as avenues of development of this new economy. This CI discourse was developed as a political-economic project focusing on the economic contribution of the CI associated with the development of official statistics of added-value (creative GDP) and job creation. However, in recent years, some academics have started to question CI’s benefits as only being one side of the coin. Problems such as gentrification, exacerbation of inequality, dislocation, labour precariousness, ownership and wealth concentration, are being more and more associated with CI’s impacts; backlashes that oppose of that claims made during its original political conception. Creative Labour (CL) studies -a subdiscipline of cultural studies- have grown as one of the most critical approaches to the CI. Precariousness, social inequality, gender and race discrimination, informality and individualisation are some of the ‘troubles’ that creative workers face according to these line of theories. Interestingly, both arguments have built their argumentations taking the same Western examples. On the one hand, the policy alleges that CI are sectors that contribute to social and economic development, and on the other hand, the critics from the academia led by CL studies that questioned this same capacity of development and the CL’s undesirable social impacts, both argumentations have historically centred their assumptions in case studies notoriously produced in Euro- and North American creative-hubs. These two opposing positions have taken a universalist approach assuming the status of general truth, despite being generated from regionally limited empirical evidence. Through a combination of a theoretical review, and a qualitative and a quantitative approach to the case study in Buenos Aires, this thesis hopes to contribute to the de-Westernisation of the CL studies, as well as to the deconstruction of the CI rhetoric by focusing on the creative labour in the city of Buenos Aires. This empirical study may suggest that the global theories may actually have different socio-economic impacts in different local contexts. CI are neither critical, nor can be disregarded, for social and economic change; and a call to a more nuanced perspective is much needed both in policy and academia to understand the specific contexts in the creative sectors.