> CALL FOR PAPERS
> 
> The Management of Creativity and the Creative Industries
> 
> A Stream of the 2nd International Conference on 
> 
> Critical Management Studies: Manchester, July 11-13 2001.
> 
>  
> 
> This stream is concerned with the organisation and management of
> cultural production and consumption in knowledge-based societies. This
> concern spans a range of interdisciplinary and interprofessional
> research interests; from the analysis of the working practices of the
> Creative Industries, to the web of textual relationships between Culture
> and Industry, the Arts and Management. The rationale for this stream is
> that these complex interfaces raise questions that have considerable
> significance for the contemporary development of Management and
> Organisation Studies.
> 
> The Creative Industries, formed from convergence between the
> media/information industries and the cultural/arts sector, have become a
> significant (and contested) arena of development in knowledge-based
> societies. The recent merger between Time/Warner and America on Line, to
> produce the world's 4th largest company, exemplifies the growing
> significance of this convergence. The UK Creative Industries Task Force
> has defined the Creative Industries as follows, "those activities 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". These have been taken to include
> the following key sectors; advertising, architecture, art, crafts,
> design, fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the
> performing arts, publishing, software, television and radio in close
> inter-relationship with tourism, hospitality, museums and galleries and
> the heritage sector.
> 
> Creative Industries are thus working at significant contemporary sites
> of cultural production and consumption. However, in spite of sustained
> interest in the culture and symbolism of organised life, these diverse
> sites have not been adequately addressed within Management and
> Organisation Studies. Such work has tended to concentrate on the
> creative and aesthetic 'subtext' within formal organisations, rather
> than on sites explicitly organised for the production/consumption of
> aesthetic goods (ie. workplaces where creativity is the enterprise).
> Distinguished by their contemporary influence, value and hybrid
> organisational forms, such sites are explicitly engaged with matters of
> intellectual property, aesthetics, improvisation, creativity and
> commodification in a developing economy of 'signs and space'. 
> 
> The intellectual context for this stream is similarly diverse and
> multi-layered. The term 'culture industry' was coined in 1944 by Adorno
> and Horkheimer to depict the industrialisation of leisure time (in the
> same way that mass-production had organised working life). Exploring the
> complex relationship between 'culture' and 'industry' necessitates
> engaging with a longstanding heritage, including the romantic movement
> of the 19th Century (eg. Coleridge and Arnold) and critical theorists
> from the 20th Century (eg. Williams and Bourdieu). From this basis, the
> problematic textual connections between Culture and Industry have become
> interpreted in diversity of ways; as oppositional, deterministic,
> sympathetic, subversive and hyperreal. The theoretical territory for the
> stream thus extends to a range of recent work (often informed by
> post-structuralism) from the arenas of organisational analysis, media
> and cultural studies, cultural policy, critical anthropology and
> consumer behaviour. Characterised by its heterogeneity and
> transdisciplinarity, this range of work is linked by its critical
> analysis of the cultural production/consumption interface, exposing key
> concerns for discourse, spatiality, technique, representation and
> identity. 
> 
> The complex arena of interdisciplinary and interprofessional activity
> covered by this stream presents challenging questions without easy
> answers. A core process is the management of creativity and innovation
> in complex knowledge flows between cultural production and consumption.
> As Leadbeater and Oakley (1999) argue, this core creative process is
> sustained by inspiration and informed by talent, vitality and commitment
> (ie. a need to create rather than consume). This makes creative work
> volatile, dynamic and risk-taking, shaped by important tacit skills (or
> expertise) that are frequently submerged (even mystified) within domains
> of endeavour. At the same time, the Creative Industries span an
> organisational terrain with a very mixed economy of forms - from
> micro-businesses, through SME's to trans-national organisations -
> encompassing the range from sole artists to global media corporations. 
> 
> Yet there exists a lack of strategic knowledge about the Creative
> Industries (Jeffcutt 1999), and in particular the crucial relationship
> between creativity and innovation (ie. the process of development of
> original ideas towards their realisation/consumption) remains unruly and
> poorly understood. Hence, three main arenas of knowledge application can
> be identified:
> 
> i) Analysis of the process and craft of creative activity in different
> 'industries', concentrating on what is distinctive about these
> activities in each domain of endeavour (ie. situated knowledge) and what
> could be identified as catalysts for creative invention and its
> translation into innovation. This encompasses the complex and dynamic
> nature of such work and workplaces; including convergent expertise,
> project-based jobs, creative (portfolio) careers, identity and
> lifestyle.
> 
> ii) Comparative analysis, across domains, of what enables and supports
> innovation in its (unruly) interface with creative invention;
> concentrating on these dynamics in relation to key intermediary factors
> across the Creative Industries such as organisation, networking,
> technology and media. The nature of managerial work (and power) within
> and across domains provides a key issue, particularly in network,
> project and virtual organisations. 
> 
> iii) Comparative analysis within and across the 'sector' of the
> relationship between Creative Industries and socio-economic development
> in knowledge-based societies; addressing the role of key environmental
> enablers/inhibitors such as intellectual property rights, cultural
> diversity, skillsets and access, entrepreneurship capabilities, ICT
> capabilities, governance, institutional partnerships, labour markets,
> regional and national development policy and funding. 
> 
> The purpose of the stream is to further explore the major
> interdisciplinary and interprofessional themes outlined above, as well
> as the three main arenas of knowledge application. Papers are invited
> which relate imaginatively to this work, where sensitivity to the
> diversity of the Creative Industries, the conceptual territory and the
> complex relationships between arenas of activity and analysis is
> particularly important. 
> 
> As we have seen, the energy, value and complexity of this field of
> concern derives from the convergence of formerly more discrete arenas of
> socio-economic activity and of understanding. This produces a complex
> and rapidly shifting 'contact zone' (Pratt 1992) made up of ragged
> boundaries between different disciplines and communities of practice.
> The very dynamic nature of this contact zone means that it is
> experienced as blurred, unstable and unmanageable; hence it is often
> subject to processes of oversimplification, idealisation and
> decontextualisation. Symptomised, for example, by the view that either
> successful management practices can be abstracted and transplanted into
> creative organisations (eg. 'arts management' as yet another
> sub-specialism for the MBA curriculum) or that creative practices can be
> abstracted and transplanted into bureaucratic business organisations
> (eg. cultural/meaning management techniques for the transnational
> business). However, such moves to conventionalise these significant
> relationships (ie. creativity/innovation) are hardly likely to be
> fruitful, since they effectively misunderstand the interface they are
> seeking to address. 
> 
> Instead, this stream is seeking flexible, dynamic and hybrid approaches
> to the convergent, unruly but vital interfaces of the Management of
> Creativity and the Creative Industries. In other words, a process of
> boundary crossing in this 'contact zone' which values dialogue and seeks
> a complementarity made up of fruitful variety. Consequently, the
> relationship between Management and the Creative Industries cannot be
> assumed as only functionally or strategically manipulable (eg. as a
> medium for socio-economic development) but rather as a flexible and
> fruitful interface which is both more challenging and less manageable
> (eg. as a medium of inspiration, improvisation and critique).
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Submission of Abstracts
> 
> Please send an abstract of 750-1000 words to the stream convenor by 31
> October 2000. The programme for the stream will be reviewed by an
> international panel of experts. Selected papers will also be considered
> for an issue of the Journal of Creativity and Innovation Management.
> 
>  
> 
> Convenor
> 
> Paul Jeffcutt
> 
> Centre for Management Knowledge
> 
> Queen's University Belfast 
> 
> Belfast BT7 1NN 
> 
> United Kingdom
> 
> Please send materials by email to  <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> [log in to unmask]
> 
>  
> 
> Conference Website
> 
> Further information about the 2nd International Conference on Critical
> Management Studies is available at
> http://www.dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/cms2001
> <http://www.dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/cms2001> 
> 
>  


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