The Reflection on Whether Gender Influences Cultural Work
Introduction
The term culture industry was first put forward by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1944), the philosophers of Frankfurt School. In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944: 94-95), Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the mass culture in capitalist society can be treated as an ideology factory which producing the standardized cultural products, such as magazines, radios, films and so on. Under this assumption, Horkheimer and Adorno supposed that the mass society can be manipulated by these homogenous cultural goods and services, and became more docile and passive (1944: 94-95). About 20 years later, since the 1960s, the business activities and employments in cultural industries – art, music, fashion, graphic design, film, radio, television, advertising, gaming, software production and leisure – have been showing a strong trend of expansion. According to Hesmondhalgh, ‘the cultural industries have moved closer to the centre of the economic action’ (2007:1). Western governments expect that the cultural industries can become a solution of deindustrialization, in order to deal with the systemic crises (Smith, 1998; Seltzer and Bentley, 1999; DCMS 2001; DCITA, 2005). As a consequence, cultural industries arouse concerns from the academic world. However, the definition of cultural industries was still fuzzy until 2007, Mark Banks defined it as:
‘those involved in the production of ‘aesthetic’ or ‘symbolic’ goods and services; that is, commodities whose core value is derived from their function as carriers of meaning in the form of images, symbols, signs and sounds. (2007: 2)’
Along with the profits in the area of ‘cultural economy’ has rapid expanded, the discussions about the cultural work has been widely debated by an increasingly number of scholars. The enthusiasts of cultural economy insist