The exemplary economy: a Hunterian reading of the creative industries as educative project

Abstract

This paper situates creative industries discourse in the context of an emerging Higher Education (HE) focus on graduate employability. It draws on Ian Hunter’s genealogy of the ‘aesthetico-ethical exemplar’ in order to highlight how creative industries discourse recalibrates the figure of the artist in order to model an exemplary set of capacities for economic self-management. The article suggests such a project is both; (a) more robust than the broader creative industries policy push, in so far as its educational rationality does not rest on any economic argument for the viability of the cultural sector, and is in fact attuned to a deteriorating job market for arts graduates, and (b) limited, due to the values of the cultural field and embedded moral rationalities of arts education. Such a description encourages critics of creative industries discourse to engage in a wider discussion about what kind of transferable skills arts education provides.

Keywords:

• creative graduates
• creative labour
• creative industries
• Ian Hunter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Noting this should give those who regard governmentality studies as ‘functionalist’ pause for thought. While such a methodology draws on discourse as evidence, as I do here, the premise of this approach is that particular forms of discourse attempt to manage the social in the light of certain forms of knowledge practice, without necessarily determining it.

2. Although I am primarily concerned with the pedagogic role of the ‘creative’ or ‘artist’ in this article, such a role is not confined to subjects taught as the creative arts. It is a general figure I seek to capture who, like the figure of the ‘cultural intellectual’ for Hunter, has broad applicability in the context of arts faculty disciplines, including most directly the creative arts, media communications and the humanities.

3. This is clear from the five criteria defined in a recent NESTA report on identifying the core creative skills that define creative occupations; these being novel processes, resistance to mechanisation, non-uniform functions, the integrity of the creative contribution across contexts, and interpretation/creative judgement (Bakshi et al. 2013, p. 24).

4. The 2009 Survey of Education and Training shows that for those with a first qualification in the Creative Arts, 12.7% will return to study in Management and Commerce, while for those with a first qualification in Management and Commerce, 13.1% will return to study in the Creative Arts (Source Australian Bureau of Statistics. See Fredman 2014, Tables 5 and 6).

5. I have substituted ‘young people’ for McWilliams’ preferred nomenclature of the ‘Yuk/Wow generation’.

6. The founding author of this field was the advertising executive and trust fund manager Alex Osborn whose popular works on the importance of creativity for business professionals launched a genre of motivational primers and training guides. Osborn’s key titles were Your creative power: how to use imagination to brighten life, to get ahead (Osborn [1941] 1991), Wake up your mind: 101 Ways to develop creativeness (Osborn 1952) and Applied imagination: principles and procedures of creative thinking (Osborn [1953] 1993). These titles were followed by the Reinhold Business Reference Series which published the works Creative thinking (Whiting 1958), Management games: a new technique for executive development (Kibbee et al. 1961) and Creativity and innovation (Haefele 1962). The authors were business managers and staff trainers in large US manufacturing companies, and these texts were published as practical reference works on a range of new techniques, such as ‘brainstorming’ and ‘thinking outside the square’, that might instil creative thinking in senior management. A key precursor to this covergence was the simultaneous expansion of college business studies in the inter-war period (Levine 1986) and the ‘creative education’ departments in teachers colleges focused on progressive educational approaches to human training (see Mearns 1941, pp. 194–198).