New International Division of Cultural Labour in the Context of Outsourcing of Hollywood Film and Television Production

New International Division of Cultural Labour in the Context of Outsourcing of Hollywood Film and Television Production

The New International Division of Cultural Labour (NIDCL) comes from the idea of the New International Division of Labour (NIDL) which is a result of the movement of industries from advanced first world countries to developing ones such as India and China. This is of course, is a result of globalisation across many platforms throughout the world, as advances in technology, transportation and infrastructure allow developed countries to relocate to developing ones in order to benefit in lower manufacturing costs and cheaper labour. Globalisation is a term used to describe the move of businesses, products, manufacturing and aspects of culture to an international scale, therefore, the NIDL refers to the globalisation of labour. The NIDCL however is more to do with the cultural industries across the world, such as television and film production, and essentially refers to the globalisation of Hollywood. “The idea of New International Division of Labour (NIDL) derives from re-theorizations of economic dependency theory that followed the inflationary chaos of the 1970’s.” (Miller, Ledger, p102, 2001). Despite the term being called the “New” International Division of Cultural Labour, it is far from a “new” concept. Hollywood has been availing of foreign production for decades now, in fact since the 1920’s (Mosco, Schiller, pp208, 2001) and between 1950 and 1973 a mere sixty percent of Hollywood productions were actually being produced in Hollywood itself and half of the revenue that Hollywood makes comes from overseas, with fifty-five percent of this coming from Western Europe (Miller, Ledg...

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