Managing in the creative industries: Managing the motley crew
Guest editors: Barbara Townley, Nic Beech, Alan McKinlay (University of St Andrews)
The creative industries have been identified as an important segment of the knowledge economy, with high levels of employment growth and generated revenues, as well as playing an important role in economic development and regeneration, and the development of creative clusters. As a sector, however, the creative industries have received less attention within the management literature than have other sectors.
The creative industries present quite specific managerial and organizational challenges. A creative product is what has been referred to as an ‘experience good’, i.e., it does not identify and respond to a pre-existing identified or ‘utilitarian needs’, and its reception is highly dependent on its significance for, and the response of, those who experience it. Thus the risks attached to creative products are quite high. The creative industries thus deal in areas with a high degree of uncertainty in relation to all elements of the productive process: the creation of the product; uncertainty in relation to the recognition of new talent and what constitutes creative production; the control of the production process; the identification of the potential market; the prediction of the response of consumers and potential audiences to creative endeavour; and predicting the potential longevity of the creative endeavour. In all these areas there is an inherent tension between the freedom to be creative and keeping this creativity within manageable and productive bounds. These characteristics make the organization and management of creative industries complex and unpredictable.
This call for papers examines some of the issues that this unpredictability and uncertainty raise, including an exploration of how the discipline of production and the work context required for the successful coordination of activity impinge on the creative process, the organization of creative work and creative talent.
Questions raised include:
How is the creative process and how are creative individuals managed?
How does creativity relate to the demands of production and productivity, and concerns with efficiency and control?
What issues are raised where the product is coterminous with a commissioning or employment contract and attempts are made to manage this through complete, incentive or implicit contracts? How is control exercised in circumstances of self-employment
What are the special constraints raised where the product is dependent on the coordination of diverse skilled and specialist workers, ie where there is a multiple production function?
What are the constraints on the passion and imagination that creative work warrants? What are the compromises forced on creative activity by commercial demands and scarcity of resources?
How may creativity be encouraged? What are the processes that encourage experimentation and creativity? What is the nature of resistance to routinization?
What if any lessons do the creative and cultural arts have for management of other industries? Certainly within the management literature, there has been the move from more hierarchical, functionally differentiated model of work organization to the more flexible, flatter structure that characterizes many creative endeavours. Is there any indication that these are more effective?
Contributors should note:
- This call is open and competitive, and the submitted papers will be blind reviewed in the normal way.
- Submitted papers must be based on original material not under consideration by any other journal or outlet.
- For empirical papers based on data sets from which multiple papers have been generated, the editors must be provided with copies of all other papers based on the same data.
- The editors will select five papers to be included in the special issue, but other papers submitted in this process may be published in other issues of the journal.
The deadline for submissions is 29 February 2008. The special issue is intended for publication in mid 2009.
Papers to be considered for this special issue should be submitted online via www.humanrelationsjournal.org. Please direct questions about the submission process, or any administrative matter, to Alice Gilbertson at editorial@humanrelationsjournal.org.
The editors of the special issue are very happy to discuss initial ideas for papers, and can be contacted directly:
Barbara Townley
bt11@st-andrews.ac.uk
Nic Beech
pnhb@st-andrews.ac.uk
Alan McKinlay
am53@st-andrews.ac.uk
