Careers in Creative Industries

Chris Mathieu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136486272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

Comprising original empirical studies of career-making in the creative sector, this book takes in theatre, music, film, TV, visual arts, fashion design, and architecture as creative industries. This format facilitates comparative analysis of central features of career-making within as well as across both specific industries and national contexts.

The book is at the forefront and intersection of contemporary career research and research on work in creative industries / the cultural economy, intertwining both subjective and objective approaches to and dimensions of career. The contributors move beyond the dichotomies that have characterized recent career theory and work on creative industries to examine factors that facilitate and restrict horizontal and vertical mobility.

Spanning a diverse range of case studies, from German theatre to Danish fashion, this book is a valuable reference for scholars of the creative and cultural industries and important reading for thoser interested in careers more generally.

Part I

Overviews

1 Careers in Creative Industries

An Analytic Overview

Chris Mathieu

FOUNDATIONS OF THE BOOK

This volume collects empirical studies of aspects of career-making in several creative industries from around the world. These studies focus on what are often referred to as the ‘creative’ roles, jobs, and occupations in creative industries, leaving largely aside the essential and numerous roles, jobs, and occupations in creative industries that Caves (2000) calls ‘humdrum’ and Becker (1982) refers to as ‘support.’ The reason for this focus is that the primary and general interest in creative industries is usually associated with understanding the creative work, workers, and careers found in these industries. These are the roles and work that draw our attention to creative industries, as researchers and potential or active participants in these industries. A second reason for this choice is that there frequently are important differences in the manners in which ‘creatives’ versus ‘humdrums’ are employed in creative industries, with creatives more often hired on a project or freelance basis, whereas humdrums (from lawyers and accountants to cleaners and caterers) are often more stably employed by durable companies in creative industries or the companies that they contract with. This choice by no account underplays or marginalizes the importance of these roles in the production processes in creative industries—they are vital and in many respects no less interesting—it merely sharpens the focus of this book to one, albeit broad and often difficult to precisely define, class of occupations and activities. We return to definition issues below, and Chapter 2 by Bille is largely devoted to them.

The reason for compiling empirical studies from several different industries in different national and institutional contexts is to facilitate the contrasting of both common and unique factors and processes, and the identification of specific, easily overlooked, and even nascent processes and mechanisms that usually are sacrificed at the level of theoretical generalization. This does not sacrifice theory-building ambitions but rather provides theory building with further empirical foundations to construct ‘deep analogies’ (Stinchcombe 1978). Another reason for collecting empirical studies is that 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 an attractive spectrum of material and intrinsic rewards. These initial pronouncements were met with critical backlashes emphasizing the negative or dark sides of boundarylessness and work in creative industries (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). At the moment we are at a more or less reasoned reconciliation between the positive and negative portrayals of both, where most parties admit both positive and negative dimensions of creative industries work and boundarylessness. Work and careers in these industries are not unequivocally positive or negative, and these dimensions are often inextricably intertwined. Empirical studies give us the opportunity to examine the mixed and ambiguous manners in which these things converge in practice and how such judgments or assessments are made.

The studies found here not only examine a wide variety of creative industries in several national and institutional contexts, they also do so from a variety of methodological and disciplinary informed styles, spanning management and business, organizational theory, work and career studies, to the classical disciplines of sociology and anthropology. This diversity includes wide methodological variation, as well as theoretical traditions, concepts applied, and levels of investigation. This means that the authors seek to accomplish different goals by different means. What they do have in common is an ambition to increase our understanding of general career issues and problems by drawing out the complexities and intricacies of particular cases or processes (Stolte et al. 2001). The selections in this volume open up new avenues of research, as well as contribute to more sophisticated understandings within established areas of research, contributing to theory building, concept development, and question framing via empirical analysis that can be transferred to other and broader contexts. Here, the words of Stinchcombe (1978, 115–116) are again relevant: ‘the dilemma between synthetic reasoned generality, tested against the facts, and historical uniqueness, a portrait of the facts is a false dilemma. The way out of the dilemma is that portraits of the facts, combined with an intellectual operation of carefully drawn analogies, are roads to generality.’ Keeping with the creative and artistic tone of this book, we recommend putting the ‘portraits of the facts’ found here on larger theoretical and paradigmatic canvases and see how they reinforce or alter the images that come forth. The various authors assist in this process of overlaying their findings on some relevant canvases, but there naturally are several other canvases on which these findings and questions can be fruitfully applied.

CAREERS AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

This volume draws on and integrates two areas of research and literatures—research and theorizing on career, and research and theorizing on creative industries. In the following section both fields are introduced. As two theories or conceptual points of departure—‘boundaryless careers’ and ‘art worlds’—regularly recur in the following chapters, both are briefly introduced in this section as well. Both theories and concepts have two qualities that make them appealing to empirical researchers. One is a spaciousness that allows for broad interpretation and application, and the other is that they make juxtapositions that lead understanding away from hitherto conventional understandings.

Career studies is the more established field, broad and multidisciplinary, extending back to at least the 1930s as a distinct field of academic study (see Abbott 2005; Barley 1989 for concise, insightful analyses of the development of the sociology of work, occupations, professions, and careers; and Moore et al. 2007 on the historical origins of career theory from an organization studies perspective). Rather than review this historical development, which as noted is done insightfully elsewhere, it should suffice to set the stage for the studies presented here by contextualizing some of the most relevant current career theories for the studies in this volume. First, it is important to acknowledge that there are both academic and popular definitions of career, and that the latter are influenced by the former, often with a significant time lag. This means that a widespread current popular conception of career as a planned, linear, sequential escalation from well-defined position to well-defined position based on training and skill development with corresponding increases in authority, prestige, and remuneration within a single firm corresponds well with the classic academic concept of the ‘organizational’ (Kanter 1977) or ‘orderly’ career that Wilensky (1961, 523) defines as ‘a succession of related jobs, arranged in a hierarchy of prestige, through which persons move in an ordered (more-or-less predictable) sequence.’ Worth noting here is that in this sociological definition, the career as a structure is prior to the individuals who move through them.

As actual careers or ‘work histories’ have changed, academic definitions of career have also changed. They have tended to go from strong or rich conceptions such as the ‘organizational’ or ‘orderly’ definition of career to leaner definitions that can encompass the increasing heterogeneity of how work sequences actually play out in the contemporary world. We also see a shift from an emphasis on career structure to career agency (Tams and Arthur 2010), emphasizing the activities and strategies of individuals in accomplishing careers in less stable and traditionally structured environments. The leaner or more stripped down definitions of career drop the previous stipulations of ‘succession,’ ‘order,’ ‘predictability,’ and even ‘related jobs.’ This can be seen in the highly influential definition of career by Arthur et al. (1989, 8) as ‘the evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time’ that fits well with the ‘boundaryless’ or ‘new career’ paradigm. Worth noting here is the notion of ‘work experiences’ that can be interpreted in terms of both concrete, objective experiences (i.e., what one has done), as well as with subjective experience (i.e., how it is felt), and that it privileges neither structure nor agency by avoiding the question of what governs the ‘evolving sequence.’

On this topic, Barley (1989) speaks of the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of career, which simultaneously regards the ‘objective’ features of work or job history, such as holding various positions and turning points, and the ‘subjective’ dimension, which has to do with ‘the meanings individuals attributed to their careers, to the sense they made of their becoming’ (p. 49). The subjective and objective inhere in each other at the individual level, with subjective understandings ‘enabl[ing] individuals to align themselves with the events of their biographies’ (p. 49). This dual approach to career mitigates an either/or in favor of a both/and perception, which links concepts of the one dimension with concepts of the other in mutually constitutive pairs: objective-subjective, structure-agency, institution-individual, role-identity, history-experience, and so on. Tracing this approach back to the Chicago School of Sociology, Barley (1989, 50) elaborates on one of these conceptual pairings, role and identity: ‘Whereas roles referenced the setting’s interaction structure, identities referred to the stable definitions of self that enabled persons to enact their roles. Role looked outward towards a pattern of situated activity, whereas identity looked inward toward the actor’s subjective experience of that situated being.’ Barley succinctly sums up this perspective in the following passage:

To be sure, careers remained something that only individuals could experience, but they were not solely of the individuals’ making. Persons might willfully choose between different courses of action as they progressed through a career…. But the options they foresaw and the choices they made were always limited by contextually defined possibilities. Careers, then, were pieced together from the string of alternatives and the set of interpretive resources offered individuals at any point in time by the collectivities to which they belong. (Barley 1989, 51)

Thus, changes at the industry or societal levels provide the contextually defined possibilities, or what Abbott (2005) calls the ‘labor opportunity structure’ for individual careers. A means whereby the labor opportunity structure is seen, interpreted, and made subjectively relevant is via identification with reference groups that provide actors with models of career paths available, with cues for judging career progress, and with a terminology for staking down one’s identity and making sense of one’s position. In periods of stability, the identification of relevant reference groups is easier, as is the identification of both career patterns and the mechanisms that contribute to these patterns. In periods of instability, the opposite is the case, but the search for and identification of guiding reference groups or individuals is arguably equally, if not more, important under periods of instability for the processes of identifying career paths based on the histories of others, judging progress, and identity creation, as the resources for these largely socially based activities are less institutionalized. I will now turn to one theory that focuses on careers under the latter conditions.

BOUNDARYLESS CAREERS

‘Boundaryless careers’ is a nonsensical and absurd term but a meaningful and significant concept. Taken literally and applied to empirical reality, the term is nonsensical. As Gunz et al (2007) argue, work and career, as social life in general, is shot through with boundaries and only possible through the existence of boundaries. Even in its initial formulation and use by its originators (see the following quote by Arthur and Rousseau 1996), what is highlighted is the transcendence and permeability of boundaries rather than the non-existence of boundaries. Why then does the ‘boundaryless career’ concept continue to be so influential, even among its theoretical and empirical critics (Rodrigues and Guest 2010), and especially in creative industries research? Inkson (2006) argues that the concept serves well as a metaphor and a label. As a label, it allows us to conveniently and selectively refer to a number of phenomena and tendencies at once. If we look at the full, early exposition of the concept, we can see why it has resonated with analyses of careers in creative industries.

Within the general meaning of boundaryless careers—as being the opposite of organizational careers—lie several specific meanings, or emphases. The most prominent of these is a case where a career, like the stereotypical Silicon Valley career, moves across the boundaries of separate employers. A second meaning occurs when a career, like that of an academic or a carpenter, draws validation—and marketability—from outside the present employer. A third meaning is involved when a career, like that of a real-estate agent, is sustained by external networks or information. A fourth meaning occurs when traditional organizational career boundaries, notably those involving hierarchical reporting and advancement principles, are broken. A fifth meaning occurs when a person rejects existing career opportunities for personal or family reasons. A sixth meaning depends on the interpretation of the career actor, who may perceive a boundaryless future regardless of structural constraints. A common factor in the occurrence of all these meanings is one of independence from, rather than dependence on, traditional organizational career arrangements. (Arthur and Rousseau 1996, 6)

The first and most obvious point is that in industries where it is readily apparent that careers play out far more often across, rather than within, organizations (Jones 1996), the ‘boundaryless’ notion seems readily applicable. Two common conditions in many creative industries lead to careers across, rather than within, organizations. One is that even when employed in a durable organization, such as a theatre company, contracts are frequently of short duration (see Eikhof et al., Chapter 3, this volume) and that promotion or vertical mobility is usually not secured by progression but open competition (see Faulkner 1973 for an example from sympho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Part I Overviews
• Part II Theatre, Television, and Film
• Part III Architecture
• Part IV Music
• Part V Visual Arts and Fashion Design
• Contributors
• Index