Exploring Value in the Creative and Cultural Industries

Abstract

As a mainstream construct the ‘creative economy’ has become part of the daily vernacular of the policy and praxis of economies, cities and regions, the workplace, and even society. The drive to become creative is to adopt a productionist lens in which the primary objective is to harness—or more literally, to convert—cultural capital for economic (capital) gain. Reducing complex aspects of the creative economy into simple, economic configurations is to at once restrict the focus of analysis to fewer mainstream activities and, in doing so, to restrict our understanding of this complex but important area of economic and social activity, producing a definitional and operational deficit. In this chapter, the imperative for policy and academia to prioritise new ways of thinking about what value means in the context of creative and cultural industries opens up new sectors and areas of social activity. When the experiences and techniques of other disciplines are brought into the frame, new approaches to enriching the evidence base follow. In a firm rebuttal of the mainstream productionist literature, this chapter sets out an alternative approach, which frames the creative economy through a performing lens, and prioritises creative activities over creative ownership—that is, performance as doing, as an art form, as an expression, as power, as a process, and as an experience.