The Creative Industries for a Better Society – Editors’ Introduction

The creative industries both shape and reflect the power dynamics within our society. They house the gatekeepers who create the representations which reflect our lives back to us, give them meaning, and in the process can critique or perpetuate social norms, and reproduce or disrupt hierarchies of cultural value. They are also a set of cultural practices, roles, groups and organisations that are of our societies, and as such are built within structures which are always already steeped in social inequalities. The creative industries are frequently examined in relation to social contribution. This special issue seeks to expand how social contribution might be defined. Bringing cultural studies frameworks into dialogue with the ways the creative industries have traditionally been understood opens up avenues to consider these industries as microcosmic demonstrations of power dynamics, as shaped by and embedded in the politics of identity and inequality, as sites of contestation, negotiation, hegemonic reinforcement, or liberation.

Mary Douglas’s seminal work How Institutions Think (1986) opens with the words: ‘Writing about cooperation and solidarity means writing at the same time about rejection and mistrust’ (1986: 1). This might be an epigraph for the creative industries, a diverse sector with a common paradox at its core: the precarious relationship between individual creativity and collective enterprise. The organisational logic of the creative industries has been effectively conceptualised by David Hesmondhalgh (2019), whose economic analysis of contractual relations concludes that businesses large and small share structural inequalities and inherent uncertainty, the unpredictability of market value for cultural products determining instability throughout the value chain.

For employees, the creative industries appear to provide attractive opportunities for creative entrepreneurship and personal fulfilment, but are a commercial sector often reliant upon subsidy and charity, and are characterised by models of apprenticeship and patronage uncommon in other modern businesses. No matter how effective education and training may be in fostering creative talent and shaping it to meet market requirements, increasing reliance on short-term contracts and freelance working practices make life-long careers in the creative industries unsustainable for many. The sector relies on high levels of creative redundancy. Despite their global expansion since the 1990s, and their increasing importance to the vitality of both developing and advanced economies, the prominence of the creative industries has also exposed these structural inequalities: labour-force exploitation, lack of diversity and barriers to inclusion.

However, as Colette Henry notes:

With equality and diversity at the forefront of new millennium political correctness [sic], music, sport, art and dance suddenly become vehicles for promoting social inclusion, encouraging cultural diversity and supporting the needs of minority groups, adding a new and interesting dimension to the creative sector (2007: 1).

So, in Henry’s optimistic view, opportunities abound within the sector to make progress on some of the very areas of existing deficiency.

Within the academy, traditions of cultural studies (rather than purely economic) approaches to the creative industries have come to embody their own set of tensions. As Terry Flew writes:

If it is acknowledged that these sectors are of growing economic significance, and that it is therefore important to better understand their economic dynamics, then the question arises as to whether the purpose of doing so is to advise policy makers and those in these industries how they may work better in terms of economic indicators such as employment, sales and exports, or whether the purpose is to better understand the creative industries in order to more effectively critique their social and cultural impacts (2011: 19).

As we shall see, contributions to this special issue do both. But, as other studies have suggested, debates are not limited to this particular binary opposition.

From a consumer-culture perspective, as Jones and Maoret put it, ‘Creative industries anchor our cultural experience and order our economic lives. They offer products and services that range from prosaic to the sublime and shape what we consume every day, including advertising, art, architecture, music, fashion, and wine’ (2018: 1). Moreover, because the creative industries provide the technologies and competences through which we articulate ourselves in relation to others in the cultural field, their centrality to our own sense of self is paramount, if not always acknowledged. But the consumers of culture are reliant on its producers.

As Chris Mathieu observes:

both creative industries and recent career research have recently gone through similar cycles of celebrating the positive, self-realization, and even emancipatory dimensions of work in creative industries and ‘new’ or ‘boundaryless’ careers, with the promise of self-guided employment in stimulating work and … critical backlashes emphasizing the negative or dark sides of boundarylessness … Work and careers in these industries are not unequivocally positive or negative, and these dimensions are often inextricably intertwined (2011: 3–4).

As the new work which features in this issue demonstrates, attention to both career opportunities and professional development, and their enablers and barriers, are concerns shared across sectoral models of different scale, internationally.

Mathieu was writing in 2011. Ten years later the Coronavirus global pandemic, amongst its other devastating effects, had highlighted some of the contradictions inherent in the creative industries in especially dramatic contrast. On the one hand, the BBC reported that in the first three months of 2020 Netflix subscriptions rose globally by 16 million.¹ Arguably, health and mental well-being were dependent as never before on access to culture and its communal nourishment. On the other hand, large sections of the creative industries effectively shut down and livelihoods were lost (at worst) or put on hold (at best).² Post-pandemic, the paradoxes of the creative industries remain in stark relief. They have the potential to enrich and connect communities, drive growth, and touch individual lives with joy and meaning. They are also constrained by gatekeeping, precarity and competition.

This special issue offers new case studies which explore the often contrary dynamics of the creative industries in specific settings, across a number of international locations. Its contributions are inspired by the question of whether the creative industries can have a meaningful role in helping to build better societies. What part can this sector play in addressing our global grand challenges? And what adjustments might be needed in the years ahead to sustain this important role? In addressing these larger questions, implicitly or explicitly, each case study also employs distinct methodological approaches, rooted in cultural studies and political economy perspectives, demonstrating insights available from mixed-method interventions and applied sectoral research.

This issue features six articles by ten creative practitioners, creative sector umbrella bodies, and interdisciplinary scholars from across three continents in the fields of film and television studies, business studies, media and communication studies, art history, curatorial studies, Slavonic studies, economics, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race studies. Papers respond to grassroots development work in precarious socio-economic settings, the dynamics of individual creativity in terms of minority access to crafts practices and creative arts entrepreneurship, and the challenges of nurturing and managing talent in mature industries. Case studies range from individual practitioners to large-scale industries across regions including Panama, the Balkans, the UK and the USA. Each paper takes a different perspective to the cultural politics that surround the creative industries and how social contribution can be defined.

A team from Oxford Brookes University led a project in 2022 in partnership with Creative UK, a non-profit organisation that supports the creative industries in the UK, to examine the function and effectiveness of workplace mentoring within creative enterprises. Mentoring has been established as not only an important part of continuing professional development within the sector, but also conducive to widening access. This study, reported on here by Cateridge, Dibeltulo and Gannon, found that while mentoring schemes of different kinds were commonplace across the sector in the UK, and often formalised in larger organisations, the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis had impacted negatively on the effectiveness and sustainability of many schemes, in circumstances when it was arguably most needful. But the rich data gathered from online surveys demonstrates the range and value of different kinds of mentoring relationships and makes policy recommendations for better funding and sustainability.

Personal development of a different order and in a very different economic context is the subject of Javier Stanziola’s article about Sandbox, a non-accredited training programme in the performing arts and digital technologies for young people which was established in four blighted neighbourhoods of Panama in 2020. Stanziola reflects on his own role as the designer of the programme and assesses its contribution to economic development. Eschewing the prescribed key performance indicators of the scheme’s funders, Stanziola instead adopts a social capacities framework to evaluate the value added by the programme in human development terms, drawing on interviews conducted with participants and organisers. The article concludes that programmes such as Sandbox are more effective in developing the skills and capacities of participants to discover themselves within their own social contexts, helping them come closer to the labour market, rather than when looking to create jobs and income. The methodology employed thus captures value beyond standard economic metrics.

Black and Asian communities in inner-city London and Birmingham were the subjects of a multi-dimensional research project led by the UK’s Crafts Council in partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University’s London campus funded in 2022 by the Centre for Cultural Value’s Collaborate programme. Adopting a Living Lab approach, the team investigated the meanings and cultural value of craft and specifically the impacts of race, racism, immigration and migration on cultural production, making and value grounded in the reality of individuals’ and local communities’ lives. In this article, Radclyffe-Thomas et al. document their collaborative process, reflecting on the findings of their Participatory Activist Research project in order to better understanding craft’s potential cultural value, the structural omissions of the experiences of makers of colour from the cultural space of craft, and the contributions craft can make to sustainable development.

Grassroots activism of a different kind is examined by Dimitra Gkitsa in the creative and cultural sector of the Balkans, a diverse region that has experienced significant socio-political shifts over the past three decades. Comparing case studies from Athens (Greece), Prizen (Kosovo) and Tirana (Albania), this article records collective actions to restore, co-opt, revitalise and sustain cultural sites (a theatre, a cinema and a cultural centre) outside and in defiance of state or commercially sanctioned cultural provision. These examples, Gkitsa demonstrates, emerge as counter-spaces in response to inadequate cultural infrastructure, limited funding and investment and scarce resources. At the same time, they exemplify alternative, more inclusive and communal working models capable of generating positive change in their local communities by developing support networks.

The working models of the UK television sector come under scrutiny from Christa van Raalte and Richard Wallis. They argue that the structural precarity attendant upon the deregulated TV landscape and the demand-driven pursuit of content generated largely by an independent production sector has resulted in poor working conditions across the value chain. Their particular emphasis is on the role of the middle manager whom, they argue, is so pressured by project goals that staff development, career guidance and support are negligible or ineffective. Moreover, they found that most managers have received no direct training or support in the people skills necessary to manage human resources well. While their interviews show that most subjects aspire to be ‘good managers’, and many are aware of their own shortcomings, production schedules and organisational structures mitigate against the provision of quality support for junior colleagues. The authors ask how such deficiencies can be addressed in a sector whose priorities and pressures are content-driven.

The final article in this special issue focuses on the self-starter as creative entrepreneur. Jaleesa Wells is an artist-entrepreneur who reflects through an autoethnography on how the knowledge and practice of entrepreneuring intersects with creative practice, process, and production in the development of a creative social enterprise. Her work examines the praxis of creative social entrepreneuring as a vehicle for creative emancipation. The study investigates the processes by which entrepreneuring may create more sustainable opportunities for creative freedom within the context of the arts and cultural industries.

This reflexive contribution returns us to the positioning and self-expression of the creative artist-as-entrepreneur without whom the creative industries could not function. It brings the individual into relation with the industrial through the praxis of entrepreneurship. And it embodies the ethical dimensions and social values through which cultural production revitalises social relations and upholds common goals of equality, aspiration and inclusion. Despite the challenges that are manifest across the range of enterprises that constitute the creative industries, the dynamism and vitality of this diverse sector still has the power to make the world a better place, but that starts at home.

James CateridgeOxford Brookes University, UK
[email protected] Hannah YelinOxford Brookes University, UK
[email protected] Justin Smith
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
[email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Netflix gets 16 million new sign-ups thanks to lockdown – BBC News.

2 How coronavirus has hit the UK’s creative industries (theconversation.com).