Serving the culture: Spatial interactions between cultural industries and advanced producer services in mainland China

The location patterns and organizational networks of both advanced producer services (APS) and cultural industries have attracted extensive attention in geography and other related disciplines. However, most research on these two sectors has examined each one in isolation, without paying attention on how they are engaged with each other. Drawing on a network analysis of the inter-firm service provision relationships between 245 cultural firms and their APS providers during the firms’ public listing processes in mainland China, this paper presents a pilot study of the functional interactions between cultural industries and APS from a geographical perspective. Our purpose is to expand the research on these two economic sectors from the simple mapping and ranking of their individual industrial activities to an investigation of the city-based spatial relationships between them. The outcome reveals that while the leading cultural firms and their APS intermediaries have demonstrated similar location patterns across major Chinese cities, the spatial interactions and connections between them are much more complicated than their co-location tends to suggest. This paper enriches our understanding of the functions of local clusters and trans-local networks in the establishment of inter-industrial linkages between the different sectors of knowledge economies. The paper also sheds light on the impacts of institutional context on the (spatial) development of cultural industries in a transitional economy.