Verified
THE CORRUPTION OF CREATIVITY:
“Creativity” has become a fashionable term in the contemporary managerial and political lexicon, signalling generalised approval in education, business and the arts. In Britain, “creative industries” has replaced “cultural industries” as the umbrella term for artistic and cultural production and distribution, and “creativity” has been incorporated into the national tourism brand. In business, managers and academics use “creativity” to indicate an organisation’s capacity for innovation, ?exibility and autonomy; these “creative” values are seen to have replaced operational ef?ciency and strategic planning as the primary source of “competitive advantage” in business. In education, creativity has spread beyond its original context of arts based subjects and is used to refer to a generalised ability to solve problems and generate new concepts across the entire curriculum. The term creativity has become so all-embracing as to lose any clearly de?ned meaning and value. Ask any organisation, industry or individual whether they would ever admit to being “uncreative” and the corruption of meaning is only too apparent. It seems that we are all creative now. Creativity has become both the language and currency of today’s knowledge economy.
The lack of a precise de?nition of creativity becomes especially problematic when governments attempt to frame effective policy interventions in “the creative industries” or “the creative economy”. The British government’s “Creative Industries Mapping Document” de?nes the creative industries as “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. Yet this de?nition does not really explain what is distinctive about the “creative” industries. Every industry would surely lay claim to some measure of individual creativity, skill and talent; equally it is dif?cult to think of a product which does not exploit some intellectual component in the form of patents, design elements or other intangible, symbolic properties which make that product unique. The mapping document goes on to provide a (non-exhaustive) list of those industries it considers to be “creative”. The list rounds up the usual suspects (music, the performing arts, television and radio) as well as some more contentious candidates (software and computer services). Pragmatically, such a list signals the possible existence of a discrete “creative industries” sector, but the failure to de?ne clear boundaries or distinctive characteristics means that an effective creative industries policy will remain elusive.
For the purposes of this article, we will adopt an alternative de?nition of the creative industries based on “symbolic goods”. “Creative industries” produce “symbolic goods” (ideas, experiences, images) where value is primarily dependent upon the play of symbolic meanings. Their value is dependent upon the end user (viewer, audience, reader, consumer) decoding and ?nding value within these meanings; the value of “symbolic goods” is therefore dependent on the user’s perceptions as much as on the creation of original content, and that value may or may not translate into a ?nancial return. It would accordingly be unwise to place too much emphasis on their “potential for wealth and job creation”, since any such outcomes will remain highly unpredictable and “value” in this case does not necessarily equate with “commercial value”. Furthermore, those who produce “symbolic goods” are not necessarily or not primarily motivated by ?nancial outcomes; if they were, as Anthony Storr (1972) suggests, they might decide to give up being artists and become stockbrokers.
Admittedly, this alternative de?nition is itself a little unsatisfactory. In the end, the distinction between those “creative” industries which deal in symbolic goods and those which deal in material, functional goods is more a difference in degree rather than in kind. As branding becomes an increasingly important factor in consumer purchasing decisions, the balance shifts from function to symbol; for most consumers in the rich Western countries, the most signi?cant (and expensive) part of a training shoe is the logo, not the shoe. By outsourcing material production to underpaid workers in Asian sweatshops, Nike and other sportswear “manufacturers” are able to focus their core business on symbolic production through branding and advertising. As Lash and Urry note, “ordinary manufacturing industry is becoming more and more like the production of culture”. Nevertheless some distinction can still be made between products where value depends almost entirely on symbolic meaning (books, ?lms, plays, music) and products where there is still some residual functional value (we still expect our Nike trainers to function as footwear).
Given this notion of “symbolic goods” this article will focus on those businesses which are primarily in the business of symbol production as opposed to material manufacture – design businesses, ?lm and television production companies, theatre companies. Furthermore we will focus on those businesses which actively produce the symbolic content, as opposed to those which distribute and market it; this means concentrating on cultural production rather than cultural distribution or, in the language of the British government, “generation” rather than “exploitation”. For reasons which will become apparent, such creative businesses tend to be quite small, individualistic and highly risky; by these criteria a group of musicians ?ts our de?nition of a creative business better than a major record label such as EMI.
Within these creative businesses, we intend to explore how notions of creativity are squared with managerial practice. We will argue that the dominant view of creativity in Western managerial and political discourse is based on a one-sided de?nition, summarised in Robert Weisberg’s phrase, “the myth of genius” (Weisberg, 1986). This partial de?nition has led to an arti?cial separation of “creative” and “managerial” functions within organisations and a stereotypical and limiting view of both. This managerial discourse originated with manufacturing industry’s attempt to drive innovation and new product development; the same set of assumptions have subsequently been applied to the management of “creative businesses”. We will propose an alternative view of creativity based on “creativity brokering” and consider some of the implications of this alternative approach for the management of “creative businesses”.