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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Audiences are transforming from 'effects of media' into 'agents of knowledge.' Digital literacy has implications not only for teenage consumerism but also (simultaneously) for the growth of science, imagination and innovation, using the creative capital of whole populations. Instead of the...

China’s Creative Industries explores the role of new technologies, globalization and higher levels of connectivity in re-defining relationships between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ in 21st century China. The evolution of new business models, the impact of state regulation, the rise of...