Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work

Stephanie Taylor, Karen Littleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317160809
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Creative workers have been celebrated internationally for their flexibility in new labour markets centred on culture, creativity and, most recently, innovation. This book draws on research with novice and established workers in a range of specializations in order to explore the meanings, aspirations and practical difficulties associated with a creative identification. It investigates the difficulties and attractions of creative work as a personalized, affect-laden project of self-making, perpetually open and oriented to possibility, uncertain in its trajectory or rewards. Employing a cross-disciplinary methodology and analytic approach, the book investigates the new cultural meanings in play around a creative career. It shows how classic ideals of design and the creative arts, re-interpreted and promoted within contemporary art schools, validate the lived experience of precarious working in the global sectors of the creative and cultural industries, yet also contribute to its conflicts. 'Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work' presents a distinctive study and original findings which make it essential reading for social scientists, including social psychologists, with an interest in cultural and media studies, creativity, identity, work and contemporary careers.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315573847-1

Understanding Creativity and Creative Work

‘I left a seven year career in IT Consulting to follow a long-harboured ambition to design shoes’.

‘I went to a very academic school where they thought “art” was a bit of a waste of time. I was always “good at art” but ended up choosing science and got in to study pharmacy’.

‘I decided to pursue art college when I was 27 years old, and am convinced there are other people out there who are also keen to embrace the dream of using their innate creativity’.

‘I did my first degree in Psychology, then worked in management consulting for four years. I was very unhappy with that career choice, and my dissatisfaction grew over the years. I decided I wanted to embrace my creativity instead, but was afraid of making the change. My main obstacle was “I can’t draw!!”’

‘I have always thought that if you have a good grounding in the creative problem solving design process you can apply it to any facet of the design world’.

‘I have just completed six months trying to make a viable business out of painting and failed to make a profit. I’m now trying to find work back in accountancy. It is a confusing time for me. I have always felt pulled in two directions’.

‘I think it is an extremely important question to investigate why people turn to a “career” as an artist or in any creative industry. Personally speaking I had no choice because I wasn’t any good at anything else at school!’

These emails were among many we received around the beginning of 2007. We had sent out a general invitation, circulated on London art college alumni websites and also by word of mouth, for people willing to be interviewed about their creative careers. We received an enthusiastic response. Around this time, creativity and creative work had a high profile in the UK and elsewhere. In central London, they were quite literally on public view during the summer of 2007 because the sculptor Anthony Gormley moved an exhibition beyond the usual confines of the art gallery, placing 31 metal figures on pavements and rooflines where they became the focus of enthusiastic interest. A major art college similarly took its graduate show of students’ work out of the college buildings into a tent in Hyde Park, and visitors packed in to admire innovative designs for jewellery, fabrics and futuristic products using nanotechnology.

Creativity and creative work had become very important economically. A report published by the London Development Agency described London as a ‘creative hub’ (Knell and Oakley 2007: p. 8) and a global city in the new sector of the creative industries. These industries had been officially identified six years earlier in a UK government paper and subsequently became a focus of attention in many other parts of the world, including the USA, Scandinavia, China and the Pacific Rim (Guile 2006, Keane 2009, Power 2009). The industries have been credited with the capacity for exceptional growth and also the potential to regenerate depressed local economies, particularly in urban areas. Their functioning supposedly extends across national borders, linking global cities like London, New York and Los Angeles (Banks 2007). The industries were originally listed as ‘advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio’ (Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) 2001). This list is consonant with an argument, sometimes labelled the ‘culturization’ thesis (Oakley, Sperry and Pratt 2008), which proposes that culture, ‘ideas’ (Howkins 2001) and creativity have acquired a new economic value.

The report which defined the industries attributed their economic success to the ‘individual creativity, skill and talent’ (DCMS 2001) of their workers. The people who emailed us, some of whom became our research participants, were among these workers, currently or potentially. They were part of London’s own creative economy, linked through the city to the creative industries as a global phenomenon. The industries and their workers were perhaps riding on a creative wave which was about to crash in the periods of economic difficulty which began with the 2008 banking crisis: at least one writer has suggested that 2007 was the final year of a ‘creative decade’ (McRobbie 2010). However, the activities associated with the industries continue and remain a focus of attention for policy-makers and others, including academics interested in creative work as a contemporary phenomenon. The research we present in this book was driven by an interest in the workers themselves and a curiosity about what it meant for them to be creative and make creative work. Unlike much of the other research in this area, we consider their experience from the viewpoint of the workers themselves. Our research is interdisciplinary but we bring to it concerns and an analytic approach which derive from our home discipline of psychology, as we discuss in later chapters.

We know that the people who became our research participants were at different career points and had a wide variety of interests and experiences. What they had in common, in one view, would be that they had all gone to art college because they shared an aptitude or talent for being creative. Seen as the distinguishing attribute of an individual artist or creative maker, creativity is associated with a personal drive or search for fulfilment which will not be satisfied by a supposedly uncreative career in IT consulting or pharmacy. Such creativity has been described as ‘a rare and special gift’ and also, by the same writer, Howard S. Becker, as a ‘romantic myth’ (1982: p. 14). He famously proposed that ‘art worlds’ are shaped less by the talent or inspiration of individuals than by social conventions: what counts as creative will depend on the context.

Although most people inside the art worlds, including in art colleges, would presumably disagree with him, the emails we received did indicate, on a closer reading, some varied and conflicting assumptions about the nature of creativity. For example, if people can be given a ‘good grounding in the creative problem solving design process’, presumably through the right training and education, then it seems that creativity is not just an ‘innate’ ability they are born with. And if some people are ‘pulled in two directions’, perhaps it is possible to be both creative and not creative; it is not an exclusive or defining attribute. Most prosaically, there is a suggestion that being creative or artistic might be a default option, chosen because there was no apparent alternative, because you ‘[weren’t] any good at anything else at school!’.

The phenomenon of the creative industries raises further questions. If creativity is an individual talent, why were there suddenly more creative people? What had changed? Perhaps at the end of the twentieth century societies like the UK had reached a point of affluence where the satisfaction of material needs could give way to a celebration of the spirit. Maybe there had been some erosion of barriers (of class, or gender, or race and ethnicity) which had previously kept some categories of people out of art college and creative careers. Were our participants part of a gifted few who had become more visible in the creative decade than previously because they had more opportunity to use their ‘rare and special gift’ and escape from less creative occupations? Or was the epochal change not one of spiritual fulfilment or greater equality but a shift in the requirements of capitalist industry? Were there just more job opportunities for creative workers because, having sold people everything that fulfilled their practical needs, producers were now having to court demand with products and services associated with lifestyle and luxury, branding and clever advertising, original and superior design, beauty and whimsy, in which case the contributions of creative people were now needed to open up these new markets? If so, should creativity be regarded as not so special, but as a relatively common attribute which is shared by many people and was being promoted and cultivated as it achieved a new economic value?

Another possibility was simply that creative work was being redefined more broadly, to include activities not previously associated with creativity (McRobbie 1998, 2002a). This is in line with Becker’s argument that ‘artistic work’ and ‘art’ should not be linked to individuals but understood as social labels which come into play in certain situations and institutions, so that old activities and the people who carry them out may be re-labelled, thereby acquiring new recognition and status. Certainly the 2001 list of the creative industries not only embraced the conventional specialisms of art colleges (such as architecture, fine art and design) but extended into many other areas, including work in new media and the knowledge economy. At the time we began our research, art college prospectuses illustrated this expanded reference of the creative, offering courses in advertising and animation, marketing and sports journalism. The buzzword of creativity had also been taken up in so many different contexts that it was described as ‘a term so over-used it is in danger of becoming meaningless’ (Knell and Oakley 2007: p. 14). New books discussed creativity as a tool for business and a necessary technique for personal development. However, not all of the discussion was celebratory. Commentators noted that the new employment supposedly generated by the creative industries tended to be short-term and ill-paid. Many creative workers were expending huge effort for little reward and no job security, apparently tolerating this precarious employment in the expectation of creative fulfilment (Gill and Pratt 2008, Knell and Oakley 2007, McRobbie 1998). Should we therefore see them as deluded, drudging in old jobs which had acquired new glamour under the fragile umbrella, or parasol, of the creative industries?

This book takes these questions as its starting point, addressing them through empirical research with people for whom art college was an entry point to a creative career. Our aim is not simply to recount participants’ experiences in the style of academic or journalistic research which treats interview material as reportage. The book is grounded in a qualitative analysis of interview material which follows an approach based in narrative and discursive social psychology (Taylor 2009, Taylor and Littleton 2006a). The purpose is, uniquely, to explore the complex discursive negotiation of the possibilities and constraints and conflicts around a creative identification. We investigate how our participants’ aspired to and achieved identifications involve a future orientation, the personalization of work and the postponement of closure in life-work narratives. We explore such an identification as a form of (partial) subjectification and consider the implications for who creative workers are and how they live.

The psychologist Vera John-Steiner (2000) has suggested that the ultimate act of creativity is the making of the self. Somewhat similarly, the cultural theorist Angela McRobbie (1998) has famously connected contemporary creative working to ‘self-actualization’, noting the congruence between conventional characterizations of the artistic or creative, and recent theorizations of contemporary identity or subjectivity, particularly in the work of Anthony Giddens (1991). Following these writers, we suggest that creative working can be linked to a very contemporary identity project and its difficulties are to some extent an example of identity trouble for our times. We approach a creative identification as ongoing, complex and incomplete (see Burkitt 2008b, Hall 1996, Wetherell 2003), in contrast to depictions of a worker as wholly subject to the larger interests of industry and neo-liberal capitalism. Many researchers have noted the apparent paradox that creative workers are extremely positive about what they do, despite facing excessively hard work in precarious and even exploitative employment conditions (Gill and Pratt 2008, Oakley 2007), with attendant problems around managing any home and private life. Part of our project is to consider these affective associations of creative work. We are also interested in the trajectories of a creative career, lived and interpreted. We explore these points through the data analyses presented in the central chapters of the book.

One focus of the book is on aspirants and novices. Not only do they exemplify the project of becoming and asserting oneself as creative, but they are also positioned, we suggest, at a point of maximum claim on potential and the yet-to-come which have been linked to the economic value of contemporary work (Adkins 2008). As a point of contrast, we consider the situation of creative workers who are mature in working years, if not in status or their own identification. Another important concern of the book is exclusions, including the under-representation of women in the contemporary creative workforce. Going beyond the obvious childcare issues which have been cited by other authors, we look at the implications for women of managing intimate and familial relationships within life courses which (seek to) escape age-stage progressions. We consider the issues for women creatives around personalization and the connections with others which both sustain and threaten a ‘selfish’ attention to the creative’s own work.

Overview of the Empirical Work

The empirical work on which this book draws was conducted in three separate projects which all employed a similar approach. For the first, in 2005, we went to a central London art college noted for its competitive entry and international intake of students. In a project funded by the college, we invited postgraduate students to be interviewed about their personal ‘journeys’ to study the creative arts and design; their courses; the people or events which had influenced them; their thoughts and feelings about creativity; the connections between their creative work and other parts of their lives; problems and obstacles which they had encountered, and their plans and hopes for the future. Prompted by our interviewer, they also talked about the creative work they were making.

The participants’ areas of specialism included fashion, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, animation, ceramics, glass, product design, industrial design and engineering. Following Becker, we avoided imposing distinctions such as ‘fine art’ or ‘applied’, or ‘art’ or ‘design’ since in his terms such categories, like the distinctions between ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘technical work’, would be socially constructed, varying according to the particular socio-historic and art world context. Interestingly, our participants themselves challenged some of the conventional distinctions, for example, by discussing how different colleges could present the same named specialism with either a ‘fine art’, ‘commercial’ or ‘technical’ focus. We adopted the term ‘creative’ without imposing any particular definition on it, because in our view it is broad enough to bridge such distinctions as well as having the particular contemporary usage with reference to the creative industries which has already been discussed.

Like the art college student intake, our sample of participants reflected the international context of creative work. They came from the US, continental Europe and other parts of the world, including India and Korea, as well as from different areas of the UK. They had studied and worked across the world and most expected that their future careers would take place within international rather than national contexts, even though, as later discussions will show, this orientation to mobility and multiple contexts carried its own difficulties. Many of them had been attracted to studying in London because of its status as an international city, including its general ‘art scene’, the interesting work taking place there in a particular field, such as animation, and the associated possibilities for obtaining freelance work.

The participants in the first project included people whose study and work careers had been relatively conventional, in that they had successfully completed school-level and undergraduate courses and then either worked in their chosen fields or else moved directly onto the postgraduate courses on which we encountered most of them. However, there were others who had been unsuccessful at school, or had studied and worked in quite different careers before coming to art college at undergraduate or postgraduate level. For most, whatever their previous experience, their current courses seem to function to ratify their decisions to follow creative careers, as we discuss in later chapters.

For our second project, funded by our own university, we returned to the original participants and interviewed as many as we could contact. They were invited to talk about their work, again, and their circumstances as they completed their studies or attempted to establish themselves. Some had already achieved more success than they had anticipated (Taylor and Littleton 2008a). Others were still struggling to establish themselves and escape a student identity. Some of those who could not be interviewed again were in other countries, indicating once more the global context in which most of them saw themselves working.

The third and largest project has already been referred to. It was funded by a body dedicated to promoting careers in Art and Design, to ‘contribute to the Creative Industries by providing a workforce of qualified and continually up-skilled practitioners’. In particular, the funding organization wanted to support ‘non-traditional entrants’ to creative careers, for example, by ‘creating clear and transparent vocational progression routes’, ‘offering continuing professional development for all its students’ and developing ‘additional qualifica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theories of Creativity and its Contexts
• 3 Theorizing a Creative Subjectivity
• 4 Aspirants
• 5 The Shape of a Creative Career
• 6 Mature Views
• 7 Attractions, Exclusions and Self-Repair
• 8 Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work
• References
• Appendix
• Index