MAPPING CULTURE

5.3 Mapping of cultural venues by value chain role—all
villages
We experienced difficulty when mapping venues by value chain role, in part because a
given venue’s primary industry is often not conspicuously related to the roles of
creation, production, dissemination, use or education in the value chain. Another
related problem is the lack of specificity of ANZSIC codes. For example, in ANZSIC 6940
(advertising services), there is no clear indication from the ANZSIC code whether an
advertising company engages in concept design (creation), produces advertising
materials (e.g., a TV commercial) (production), or conducts an advertising campaign
(dissemination) alone, or is engaged in some or all of these activities. Consequently,
the research team had to check each venue (mostly through desktop online searching
and analysis of official websites or facebook pages) and manually assign these value
chain roles to each venue.
We mapped a total of 6,329 value chain roles for 3,106 cultural venues in the City. As
noted in Section 3.3, we allow multiple roles for each venue and, therefore, the total
number of value chain roles is larger than the total number of cultural venues. As
shown in Table 10, the value chain roles are distributed quite evenly: ‘creation’ (18.0%),
‘production’ (25.3%), ‘dissemination’ (26.0%) and ‘use’ (21.4%). Only ‘education’ failed to
reach 10% of relative frequency. Despite the difficulty mentioned above, our findings
suggest that the mapping does a reasonable job of identifying a range of distinct value
chain roles, as the table clearly shows that the roles of ‘production’ and ‘dissemination’
are more prominent in the City. This finding can be attributed to the high percentage
of cultural/creative businesses (44% of venues belong to the commercial and
enterprise category) in the City and the majority of them engage in ‘production’
(85.1%) and ‘dissemination’ (66.5%) of cultural products or services (see Table 12).
Value chain role Count Count %
Creation 1,137 18.0%
Production 1,604 25.3%
Dissemination 1,643 26.0%
Use 1,353 21.4%
Education 592 9.4%
Total 6,329 100.0%
Table 10. Breakdown of cultural venues in the City of Sydney (all villages) by value
chain role
Table 11 shows the percentage of cultural venues involved in the value chain role(s).
The table demonstrates a similar result to that of Table 10, with ‘production’ and
‘dissemination’ featuring more prominently in the City, as over half of the cultural
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