Cultural Industries

Cultural industries and other aspects of the commodification of culture in the global era are important areas of investigation for global studies. At the outset, however, it is difficult to define the term cultural industries with any precision. Raymond Williams famously remarked that culture was one of the most complex words in the English language. And the term cultural industries has also had a long history, with many twists and turns. Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), used the term culture industry to excoriate what they saw, in mid-20th-century American popular culture, as (in Craig Calhoun's words), "the merger of culture with big business (quintessentially the movie studios) and the abolition of the pleasure and emancipatory impulses that once characterized art in favor of palliating entertainments" (Calhoun, 2002, p. 106).