Value Construction in the Creative Economy

Negotiating Innovation and Transformation

Rachel Granger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030370343
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030370350
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The book provides a critical and integrative analysis of value as it pertains to different aspects of creative and cultural industries. The notion of 'value' – a frequently used but rarely considered term – is deconstructed and considered as a spatial and structural impact, an active resource and process, and as soft institutions and embodied forms which collectively create a space through which value is constructed and negotiated. This book consists of three main sections: normative valuation, value and transformation from interactions and process, and embodied value. Together the contributions assess what value means in the creative and cultural industries, how it is constructed and added through process, and the way in which it is embodied in people and shaped through and by social space. Especially relevant for postgraduate study and research in the creative and cultural industries where critical studies are key, this book is also relevant for multiple disciplines which occupy the creative and cultural fields.

Part IDefining the Creative Economy Through Value

© The Author(s) 2020

R. Granger (ed.)Value Construction in the Creative EconomyPalgrave Studies in Business, Arts and Humanitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37035-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Exploring Value in the Creative and Cultural Industries

Rachel Granger¹

(1)

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Rachel Granger

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

The creative and cultural industries as the primary focus of this book constitute the most distinct area of economic growth of the new Millennium, and are increasingly viewed as an emerging paradigm in their own right (see Lazzeretti and Vecco 2018). Recognising and exhorting their early economic potential, UK and Australia under the Blair and Keating governments began to commercialise the creative and cultural industries in earnest during the 1990s, and in so doing, invested heavily in public and private flagships, which were to become key international demonstrators, (for instance, London’s Tech City, Manchester’s Northern Quarter and Media City, Brisbane’s South Bank and Creative Precinct). These early demonstrators drove fascination and spawned creative projects throughout much of the western world, drawing on Florida’s (2001) assertions of the creative city and creative workers as an economic panacea, and producing a ‘serial replication’ of investment (McCarthy 2005) in creative infrastructure. As such, the first decade of the new Millennium could be characterised as a period of creative consolidation in the UK and Australia, with new international creative cities and clusters emerging in regional capitals such as Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Glasgow in the UK, and in Australia, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Elsewhere, cities have invested in new creative bases to replicate these early successes in the UK and Australia, developing meandering creative quarters in metropolitan areas across both Europe and North America (e.g. New York, Portland, Austin, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver).

The resilience of the creative city form in the face of a global downturn has been especially notable, perhaps acting as one of the few truly expansionary areas of the global economy, and the most recent spatial fix under capitalist conditions (see Harvey 2001; Jessop 2006). In the Global South, especially in South East Asia, there has been a concerted effort over the last decade to develop internationally competitive creative cities to match those of the Global North, and as a result, considerable investment has been directed in recent years into the creative industries in world cities such as Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Bangkok, and, more recently, the Middle East. This globalisation of the creative and cultural industries has been underpinned especially in South East Asia by new digital technologies, and a landscape of mature multinationals and global investment.

At the heart of this growing policy attention is the remarkable growth and economic potential of the creative economy, which in some countries has offered a route out of long-term structural decline of deindustrialisation. In these countries, creative industries now account for one in ten jobs in the economy, and one in four new jobs (DCMS 2018). For example, between 2011–2014 and 2015–2016, the creative industries in the UK grew on average by 11 per cent, twice as fast as in the rest of the economy (Nesta 2018a). In a climate of continued economic and political uncertainty, where the effects of the Global Financial Crisis are still being meted out a decade on, and the risk of a further downturn ever present, the potential for employment and income from new areas such as the creative economy acts as a centripetal pull on policymakers. In this sense, the value of the creative and cultural industries can be seen in terms of jobs and wealth, and this provides one view of value construction in the creative economy. This cursory view of what the creative and cultural industries are, and what value they have, is a recurring theme of this book.

While more and more is known about the creative economy, in other respects our understanding of it has been constrained by prevailing narratives and a dogmatic orthodoxy tied to the economics of production. Despite the richness of data now available at a variety of spatial scales and places, and across sub-sectors (e.g. Florida et al. 2012; Nesta 2018b; Nathan and Kemeny 2018; Gabe 2011; Lazzeretti 2014), our understanding of what it means to be creative (or cultural¹), how this is constructed, and the wider impact of this remains dictated by the economic lens. Thus, while the last decade has seen advancements in defining creativity (e.g. Cunningham 2002; Landry 2011) and understanding the bifurcation of production and consumption (e.g. Potts et al. 2008a; Anand and Croidieu 2015), and of new genres of creativity (Capdevila et al. 2015; Floriani and Amal 2018; Lorentzen 2013), the same cannot be said for our empirical constructions. We have expanded our conceptual understanding of the role of others in the creative economy through networks (Potts et al. 2008b), intermediaries (O’Connor 2015; Hracs 2015; Perry 2019), users (Di Maria and Finotto 2015; Flowers and Voss 2015), and co-producers (Potts et al. 2008a; Hracs et al. 2018), and we are more aware of the precarities of pay and access to creative work (Banks 2017; Oakley and O’Brien 2016), and yet in all of this, our view of value remains either conceptual or embedded firmly in industrial notions of success (measured by jobs, earnings, investment, and business), as universal values based on the use and functionality of creativity.

Deficits in the Creative Discourse

The corollary of early efforts to commercialise and profit from creative and cultural activities is the primacy of the ‘creative product’ and of the productionist lens in creative discourse, which has reduced value to a narrow set of impacts shaped by the dogma of economic institutions. Framing the creative and cultural industries, and more precisely their products, as central to the expansionary potential of economies is to frame humans (creative workers) and projects as market actors, vying for capital, neoliberal at heart, and imbued with power relations (see discussion by Mould 2018). The overall effect is a deficit in our understanding about this important contemporary economic and social form. There are at least four deficits, pertinent to the discussion about the value of the creative economy, which relate to: (1) the economic returns on creativity and the hegemonic economic lens; (2) the creative city form, premised on capitalist expansion; (3) the inequalities inherent in the creative paradigm; and (4) the dominance of prevailing narratives in the creative discourse.

Within the creative and cultural industries, diverse communities, actors, and interests have voice, and the idea of value itself is multiplex. Much of the definitional basis of creativity and the way society ascribes value to it—or valorises—draw on economic and productionist terms of reference. This is reinforced by the views and practices of a small number of institutions, through and by which our perception of value has become institutionalised over time. The overall pattern has been one of reducing complex aspects of value into simple, often economic configurations, and restricting analysis to fewer and fewer mainstream activities. To qualify, the recent Cultural Value Scoping Project in the UK (Kaszynska 2018) conflates those who actively make, debate, and assess cultural value with ‘people working in arts and culture’ (ibid., p. 3) or those ‘making and influencing cultural policy’ (ibid., p. 5). Yet, a more expansive and discursive approach drawing on ancillary sectors and actions would provide a richer lens through which to conceptualise impact and worth. As we argue in this book, there is an imperative for policy and academia to prioritise new ways of thinking about what value means in the context of the creative and cultural industries, leading to new ways of working across sectors, drawing on the experiences and techniques of other disciplines, and adopting new ways of using the evidence base. Broadening the framework of creative and cultural activities as active production rather than products, and including behavioural change and intricate connections (Glaveanu et al. 2014) as part of ecologies, as well as interrogating how conversations around value are framed, have salience in addressing this current deficit in understanding. Conversations guide definitions, and conversations and techniques confined to established communities of understanding and practice limit new knowledge, as a result of lock-in of ideas and thinking.

It could be argued that prevailing narratives on both the ‘creative city’ and ‘inequality’, which have come to dominate the creative landscape, refer to two sides of the same coin, and emerge from this productionist view of creative and cultural industries. The creative city as a spatial manifestation of the creative economy, neoliberal at its core, results in a homogenised socio-economic model, which Mould (2015) argues is paradoxically devoid of creativity. It is merely the most recent permutation of the neoliberal form, reflecting both cities’ transition to ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ (Harvey 1989) and a ‘fast urban policy’ (Peck 2005) based on conspicuous consumption. As Mould (2015, p. 33) argues, ‘cultural industries soon became an arena, in which a tidy profit could be made’, and leading quickly to the ‘Porter effect’ (p. 67), in which every locale sought to become a creative city, quarter, or cluster.

Inevitably, and following the logic of capitalism, creative cities lead to revanchist approaches as part of the entrepreneurial urbanist project in which they must now operate. Gentrification, precarious working, inequality of access, and poor social mobility are by-products of a system that disadvantages the most disenfranchised in society. And yet the current policy model of creative cities overlooks the original sentiment of the term, which Montgomery (2008) argues is a triumvirate of characteristics based on creative activity and the built environment,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Defining the Creative Economy Through Value
• Part II. The Creative Self
• Part III. Collective Creative Spaces and Processes
• Back Matter