From the Back Cover
The purpose of this volume is to broaden scholars' analytical perspective by placing the creative industries in frameworks that compare and contrast them with other kinds of entities, organizations, and social forms that mix creativity and production. In other words, this volume aims to set out an emerging agenda for the study of creativity in the cultural and media industries. Although this work focuses on the media and cultural industries, they are investigated in the context of other groups and organizations connecting forms of creativity with an explicit emphasis on turning ideas into concrete practices and products.
The originality of this book lies in (1) presenting a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective that develops a new framework and analytical concepts to understand the notion of creativity in the media and cultural industries, and (2) providing a series of fresh empirically based studies of the process of creativity in fields such as advertising, fashion, animation, and pop culture. This comparative move is taken in order to generate new insights about the particular features of the creative industries and new questions for future analysis.
Nissim Otmazgin is a professor at the Department of Asian Studies the Director of the Institute for Asian and African Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Israeli Young Academy of Science and Humanities. A political scientist in training, his research interests include cultural diplomacy in Asia, popular culture and regionalization in East and Southeast Asia, and cultural industry and cultural policy in Japan and South Korea. His PhD dissertation (Kyoto University, 2007), which examines the export of Japan's popular culture to Asia, won the Iue Asia Pacific Research Prize in October 2007 for outstanding dissertation on society and culture in Asia. As a part of this research, he conducted extensive fieldwork in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul. He is the author of Regionalizing Culture: the Political Economy of Japanese Popular Culture in Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) and coauthor (together with Miki Daliot Bul) of The Anime Boom in the US: Lessons for Global Creative Industries (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2017).
Eyal Ben-Ari is senior fellow of the Center for Society, Security and Peace at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee. He has carried out research in Israel, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. His main areas of research are the sociology of the armed forces, early childhood education, and popular culture in Asia. Among his recent books are Japanese Encounters (2018), (with Zev Lehrer, Uzi Ben-Shalom and Ariel Vainer) Rethinking the Sociology of Warfare (2010), (with Nissim Otmazgin) The State and Popular Culture in East Asia (2012), and (with Jessica Glicken Turnley and Kobi Michael) (2017) Social Science and Special Operations Forces. He has published articles spanning a variety of disciplines including the American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, The Sociological Review, The Sociological Quarterly, Special Operations Journal, and the Journal of Strategic Studies.
