Volume 1 (2008): Issue 1 (January 2008)

I propose to associate the recent approaches to the economics of identity (Akerlof and Kranton, Davis) with the social network model of creative industries developed by Potts, Cunningham, Hartley and Ormerod. This implies that the latter just highlights a special case of the more general phenomenon that all economic activity is simultaneously involved in the process of agent identity formation. This conclusion is further supported by adding a third theoretical pillar, the theory of status goods. Status orders and agent identities appear to be major determinants of the nature of economic systems, resulting in contingent boundaries between systemic categorizations of production and consumption, or notions of productive processes versus non-productive ones. From that perspective, the major novelty in the emerging creative economy, viewed as a new kind of economic system, is the structural change of the social networks, which become less hierarchical and more integrated, resulting in the endogenization of identity formation. Changes in the agent identity trigger the further evolution of the economic system. This is mainly a move from an elitist and politically controlled system of the production of identities to a democratic and self-organized one, which is institutionally reflected in the increasing “marketization” of culture as a surface phenomenon. This relates to the ongoing debates over the redefinition of fundamental economic activities in the creative economy, such as viewing consumption as an essential part of the production of cultural goods.

This paper argues that the definition of cultural science depends on the definition of creative industries. The problem, however, is that unlike the definition of evolutionary economics, complexity science and new cultural studies, which are also elements of cultural science, the creative industries suffer multiple non-commensurable definitions. These are reviewed and analytic implications for the definition of cultural science are examined.

There is a large and rapidly increasing literature which analyses social networks for which substantial amounts of quantitative data are available. Further, there is a growing and related literature on what is referred to by economists as ‘information cascades’ on such networks.

However, there is little discussion of the specific events which lead to either the creation of a network in the first instance, or of how a network which is latent in terms of its awareness evolves into a network on which individual behaviour/beliefs are actually altered.

In this paper, we describe the process of emergence and evolution of a historical cultural and social network across which the opinions and behaviour of individuals were influenced. We also illustrate how empirical networks can be reconstructed relying principally on information contained in qualitative, historical sources.

The specific example we use is religious belief in England in the 1550s. We describe how the burnings of Protestant leaders by the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558) created a set of martyrs which was decisive in increasing support not just for Protestantism compared to Catholicism, but which led to the rapid disappearance of rival Protestant factions.

The network of awareness of key religious leaders already existed prior to Mary’s accession to the throne. But her actions converted this into a network on which individual beliefs were affected, in this case decisively for English history.