“Creative economy” as a native category: economists and the legitimation of a new resource of power

Abstract

In the last decades, the themes of creative economy, creative industries and creative cities served as a technical and operational fundament for the formulation and execution of a series of economic development public policies. The main actors of this profusion and legitimation of power were the economists, managers and business schools theorists in close relation to national governments and UN agencies. This process was possible due to the emergence of post-industrial societies, the expansion of the knowledge economy and the digitalization of cultural markets. The combination of these three aspects produced a structural approximation between the symbolic-aesthetic domain and the economic-technological domain, resulting in the formation of native categories, such as creative economy, creative industries and creative cities. These categories do not have the analytical and descriptive potential which able to comprehend and explain the new relations between those domains, tough they are themselves a result of these new relations.