Cultural Policies in East Asia: An Introduction

Abstract

Cultural policy is an emerging field of research that attracts scholars in many disciplines ranging from cultural studies, cultural sociology, public policy studies, and media studies to cultural economics. More recently, with a growing interest from policy makers and academics on the creative industries and creative economy, the scope of and themes within cultural policy research have been broadened further. As a new and interdisciplinary field, the research makes use of conceptual and theoretical tools drawn from various disciplines. The difficulty in clearly defining key subject knowledge and theoretical frameworks, however, indicates that perhaps cultural policy is closer to a theme shared by those disciplines than a discrete area of study (Kawashima forthcoming). This implies that there are multiple, sometimes independent, sets of keywords and analytical approaches to studying this area. For instance, cultural economists (Peacock and Rizzo 1994) and critical cultural theorists (McGuigan 2004) provide two very different ways of understanding culture-state relations. As cultural policy research advances and matures, we expect that there will be more calls for it to develop its own language and theoretical perspectives.