China has earned a reputation as an economy based on utility: the large-scale manufacture of low-priced goods. But there is no such thing as a utilitarian economy. Useful functionality, fitness for purpose and efficiency (whether of production or use) are only part of the story, perhaps not even...

China has a reputation as an economy based on utility: the large-scale manufacture of low-priced goods. But useful values like functionality, fitness for purpose and efficiency are only part of the story. More important are what Veblen called ‘honorific’ values, arguably the driving force of...

This paper introduces the special issue ?China: Internationalizing the Creative Industries?, describing the Australian Research Council funded ?MATE? project which provides the conceptual background for the questions the issue explores. The MATE project began with the expectation that as China...

China has a reputation as an economy based on utility: the large-scale manufacture of low-priced goods. But useful values like functionality, fitness for purpose and efficiency are only part of the story. More important are what Veblen called ?honorific? values, arguably the driving force of...

Much economic analysis of scholarly publishing has focused on journals as a communication technology. However, the Open Access (OA) movement did not originate from economic calculations, but from user communities. The twentieth-century closed publishing model made economic sense as outsourced...

The importance of design to the UK economy is widely recognised. It is one of the key pillars of the knowledge economy, it plays an important role in the innovation process, and it is one of a number of specialism's that help to set the UK apart from global competition. But despite this...

A new economic model for analysis of scholarly publishing — journal publishing in particular — is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In that model...

This paper examines the industrial dynamics of new digital media from the perspective of consumer co-creation. We find that consumer-producer interactions are an increasingly important source of value-creation. We conclude that cultural and economic analysis might be usefully united about these...