Conclusion: Future Directions?

Abstract

Many ideas reach a tipping point and then they escape the person who first came up with them. When people talk about the ‘theory of evolution’, Darwin’s authoritative voice is still resonant in the concept but researchers who have followed him have taken the initial ideas he proposed and developed them, elaborated on them, changed some basic concepts and carried those ideas forward until the propositions he originally put forward have taken on a life of their own. A similar process has occurred with the idea of ‘the culture industry’, a concept originally designed to shock. It was introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer ([1944] 2002) to express their concerns about the problems of developing a commercial imperative by putting art and industry together — two seemingly incompatible things. Others such as Bernard Miege (2004) and David Hesmondhalgh (2013) picked up the idea of a culture industry and presented empirical and well-reasoned evidence to support it, at the same time modifying and critiquing the central idea in the process. In undertaking the research necessary to confirm or reject what were initially theoretical propositions, these researchers lent their work to a steady evolution of them. We make a similar but more limited claim here. The systems approach to creativity, as described more fully by Fulton and Paton in Chapter 3, owes a lot to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1997, 1999, 2014) but, as this book demonstrates, the idea is beginning to break free of its moorings.