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CULTURES OF MANAGEMENT: CULTURAL POLICY, CULTURAL MANAGEMENT
AND CREATIVE ORGANISATIONS
Dr Chris Bilton, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick,
Coventry CV4 7AL Tel: 024 765 72535 Email: c.bilton@warwick.ac.uk
Abstract: This paper proposes that creative organisations have developed distinctive
management cultures, based on the special demands of creativity and creative work.
Since the late 1980s, cultural policy interventions have taken little account of these
distinctive management cultures. Policy interventions in cultural management have been
driven by public sector accountability (‘New Public Management’) and neoliberal models
of commercial growth. Neither of these approaches has offered much value to the
cultural sector. As an alternative, this paper examines three distinctive aspects of
cultural management which respond to the needs of creative thinking and creative
people: self-management and entrepreneurship; restructuring of the value chain; the
influence of non-commercial values. This leads to a discussion of the distinctive
strengths of management in the cultural industries, which amount to a ‘creative’
approach to management. The strengths of ‘creative’ management have been neglected
by the discourses of business development and cultural policy; one of the challenges for
the future will be to recognise and acknowledge the distinctive cultures of management
in creative organisations and reframe the values and assumptions which lie behind
prescriptive models of management ‘best practice’.
DISCLAIMER: Please note that this is a draft not a finished paper. If you wish to
obtain an updated / final version of this paper, please contact the author.
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CULTURES OF MANAGEMENT: CULTURAL POLICY, CULTURAL MANAGEMENT
AND CREATIVE ORGANISATIONS
The culture of management
Organisational culture has been recognised as a significant research topic in
management studies. From an international perspective, Geert Hofstede (1992)
attempted to classify national cultures and their influence upon organisational cultures;
while his methodology and assumptions have been criticised, Hofstede nevertheless
played an important role in challenging the universality of Anglo-American business
models. In organisational studies, a research methodology derived from anthropology
has identified organisational culture as a key to understanding organisational behaviour
(Turner 1990, Schein1991). Indeed it has been argued that the covert, symbolic aspects
of organisations, manifest through folklore, myths and stories, might hold greater
significance than their overt strategies and policies. This in turn has contributed to an
acknowledgement that management practice must take into account the diversity and
complexity of organisations as organic, living systems.
In this context, the ‘culture’ of creative organisations has received surprisingly little
attention1. One reason for this may be that organisational culture has been associated
with the accumulated orthodoxies and codes developed through shared systems of
governance and accountability; so public sector organisations are especially rich
repositories of organisational culture (Meyer and Rowan 1977). In contrast creative
organisations – organisations which deal with ‘culture’ as their product – are very diverse
and individualised. It is difficult to find common ground between a film maker, a record
label and a theatre company in terms of their markets, products and systems of
governance.
Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to draw out some general observations regarding
the ‘culture’ of management in creative organisations. I base these observations partly
on my conversations and observations of a diverse range of creative businesses (an
‘anthropological’ approach which is often justified in relation organisational culture) and
partly on theories of creativity and creative work. I am aware that there is a danger here
of replacing one set of generalisations with another. Creative organisations, no doubt, do
not fit the template of management in other types of organisation; but we should be
equally wary of assuming they all share common characteristics. My tentative
suggestions towards a ‘creative’ management approach are based on frequently
observed characteristics of creative processes and creative individuals. I believe the risk
of overgeneralising is a risk worth taking. Recognising a distinctive ‘creative’
management style, however contentious that may be, is a necessary corrective to the
rather clumsy interventions of cultural policy in the creative sector. It has also become an
area of growing interest to management theory in general as managers seek to adapt to
the challenges of a creative economy; in this respect, managers in the creative
industries may have developed strategies and approaches which other sectors can learn
from.
Cultural policy and cultural management
1
See for example Negus, Keith (2000): ‘Music Divisions: the recording industry and the social mediation
of cultural production’ in James Curran (ed.), Media Organisations in Society (London: Arnold), pp. 240 –
254); Negus, Keith (1999): Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London: Routledge)
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The management and organisation of the creative industries has become an area of
concern for cultural policy, driven by a perception that management (or leadership) in the
cultural sector is currently underdeveloped or unsatisfactory (Hewison 2004).
Government interventions in cultural management are typically channelled through two
separate policy streams, cultural policy and economic development; in the UK for
example, these two streams would be represented by DCMS and DTI respectively.
Cultural development agencies at local, national and regional level have introduced
various initiatives to improve the quality of cultural management. These cultural policy
interventions can be understood in the context of a larger attempt to make the public
sector more accountable to customers and markets (Leys). In the UK, the emphasis on
accountability and efficient use of resources in the public sector through the 1990s
encouraged a bureaucratic managerial approach based on the setting and monitoring of
targets, enforced from the top down by funding regimes. This approach to public sector
management has been described as ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) and is
characterised by a laborious emphasis on quantitative targets and outcomes with little
understanding of the non-quantifiable, qualitative aspects of cultural work (Power 1997).
Such initiatives have consequently increased the quantity of management and managers
in the public sector, but have done little to address its quality.
The second policy stream, focusing on business support for new and growing
enterprises in the cultural sector, is a more recent development. Interventions from
business development agencies have focused on the economic potential of the creative
industries as a growing sector in the global economy. In the UK this perspective can be
traced back to the economic impact studies of the late 1980s and 1990s, but really
became prominent at the national level when the new Labour Government set up of the
Creative Industries Taskforce in 1997, leading on to the publication of the DCMS
Creative Industries Mapping Document in 1999. At regional and local level, business
support services have highlighted opportunities for entrepreneurship, business
expansion and employment in the cultural sector. Whereas cultural policy had
previously placed the arts and culture in a passive, defensive role outside or against the
market, economic development policy relocated the newly designated creative industries
to a more aggressive role in an increasingly competitive leisure market. If the logic of
cultural management in the 1990s was New Public Management, control and
accountability, since 1997 the logic has been one of neo-liberal faith in the market,
deregulation and enterprise (McGuigan 2005). An injection of new cash from National
Lottery funds and from central government encouraged cultural organisations to be
ambitious; meanwhile official reports talked up the economic success stories of the
creative industries, often overlooking the mess of informal creative activity which lay
beneath.
Clearly there is a tension here between ‘New Public Management’ and ‘Neo-liberalism’.
After a decade and a half of being bullied by funding agencies and taught to follow a
bureaucratic, public sector approach to management by targets, now the UK creative
industries are being encouraged to be imaginative, entrepreneurial and ambitious. Many
of the longer-serving cultural organisations, still entangled with NPM systems of control
and accountability not surprisingly lack the energy and resources to launch expansive
new initiatives. Consequently, policy makers have switched their attentions to new
businesses. Business advice is increasingly targeted towards new and emerging
businesses. The rhetoric of the regional development agencies refers to new talent and
clusters of new business activity regenerating the regional economy. Meanwhile the
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needs of established or ‘mid-career’ enterprises are less prominent, and the failure rates
for new businesses remain alarmingly high2.
These two approaches to cultural management, one based on public sector control and
accountability, the other based on new business formation and enterprise, do not
amount to a coherent policy. They might even cancel each other out. More importantly, I
contend that neither approach has adequately grasped the realities of management in
the creative industries. Cultural policy initiatives fail to account for the ways in which
culture and management have evolved in the commercial creative sector. It is my
contention that the management of the creative industries is actually far more
sophisticated than its detractors and would-be improvers assume. In this paper I aim to
outline three distinctive characteristics of management in the creative industries, and
address some of the implications of this distinctive approach to management for policy
and development.
Cultural management and the creative industries
In this section I will consider three distinctive features of management in the creative
industries. Management in the creative industries has evolved its own autonomous
tradition which does not conform to the ‘best practice’ models imposed by wellintentioned policy-makers. In order to come up with a more effective approach to cultural
policy interventions, we need first to understand the special challenges of managing
creative processes, people and products. While every organisation has its own unique
culture, I believe that creative organisations have some points in common based on the
nature of creativity and creative work.
Self-management
The creative and media industries are characterised by high levels of self-employment
and micro-enterprise (businesses with less than 10 full-time employees). This is
especially true of cultural production. Most of the larger enterprises in the creative and
media industries concentrate on the more profitable business of cultural distribution,
exploiting the intellectual property rights generated by cultural producers. On the other
hand most of the ideas which drive this system of intellectual property are actually
generated in an invisible world of informal networks, sole-traders, informal or semiprofessional micro-businesses3. Indeed much of the creative work of the creative
industries is not undertake by organisations at all, rather by temporary partnerships
assembled from a loose federation of like-minded individuals on a project by project
basis4. Cultural production in the creative industries is thus driven by networks of small
enterprise or individual cultural entrepreneurs; the results of this entrepreneurial culture
2
Reliable statistics on business failure rates are extremely difficult to find, not least because of the lack of
clear definitions of the creative industries. But given the high failure rates for small business in general and
the high risks associated with creative business in particular, the prognosis is hardly encouraging. John
Bates at London Business School’s Centre for Creative Business recently claimed that the majority of
creative start ups fail within 24 months (Presentation to Creative Clusters Conference, Belfast 2005).
Conversely, a high failure rate in the creative industries can also be presented as positive evidence of risktaking and creativity; in 2002 the government Select Committee on Science and Technology appeared to
commend NESTA for its ‘fascinating failures’ and its willingness to take risks evidenced by failures in its
Invention and Innovation Programme (UK Parliament Select Committee on Science and Technology Sixth
Report: National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts: a Follow-Up (October 2002).
3
This has led to an interest in local sub-cultures and ‘scenes’ which lie behind creative hot spots such as
London’s Soho or …
4
This is the classic modus operandi of the film and television industries, for example.
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are then picked up and exploited by larger enterprises concerned with publishing,
dissemination, investment and marketing.
What this means in practice is that the cultural production sector has had to develop an
entrepreneurial style of ‘self-management’ in which managerial and operational tasks
overlap. This multi-tasking culture is driven partly by necessity and partly by a reluctance
to delegate creative or managerial responsibilities. For a games developer or a filmmaker, creative and managerial tasks are inseparable. Compared to traditional
organisational structures, creative and media enterprises are characterised by loose
demarcation of roles, flat hierarchies and multiple roles and responsibilities.
This multi-tasking culture can also be seen as highly creative, according to
contemporary theories of creativity. Psychological and sociological theories of creativity
suggest that the creative process is characterised by multiple intelligences, switches
between ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ thinking styles, transitions between different
sometimes apparently contradictory frames of reference (Koestler 1976; Bilton and
Leary 2003; Boden 1994). Frank Barron described ability to tolerate tensions and
contradictions as ‘ego strength’, and found this capacity to be especially pronounced
among artists (Barron 1968). Multi-tasking and self-management can thus be seen as a
creative choice as well as a structural accident.
The ability to handle different modes of thinking and to switch between different ways of
seeing and points of view allows creative people to solve problems. When it comes to
organisational structure, it is not surprising to find that creative organisations share a
similar capacity to accommodate apparently contradictory qualities, and allow and
encourage individuals to exchange roles and pursue tasks which cut across the
functional divisions of a more traditionally structured firm. Indeed, this entrepreneurial
capacity to tolerate overlapping tasks and functions might be a more reliable index of
creative capacity than the possession of technical or artistic skills. For a design agency
or architectural practice, the ability to manage expectations, interpret a brief and handle
the flow of work across a multi-talented team is arguably at least as important as the
technical or artistic abilities of individual members. A designer with excellent
communication and project management skills is likely to produce a better result than a
technically gifted designer. Not surprisingly, a majority of design and architectural
practices are constituted as partnership or federations of self-managing individuals
rather than as traditionally structured hierarchical firms with clearly defined horizontal
and vertical divisions of responsibility.
The implications for policy here are firstly that simply imposing a model imported from
big business onto what is still predominantly a small business sector is unlikely to work.
Regional economic development agencies aim to increase employment and economic
growth by encouraging businesses to expand. Yet very few small businesses
successfully make the transition to become large or even medium-scale businesses
(Storey 1994). For small creative and media enterprises, the barriers to growth are often
structural. The multitasking culture described in this section is integral not only to the
management of the creative enterprise, but also to its creative capacity. This culture is
hard to sustain as the business expands. Inevitably, the loose demarcations of roles and
responsibilities has to become tighter and more rigid as the organisation grows.
Managers and creatives shrink into their respective zones of expertise and cease to
engage with each other as equal partners. The immediacy and intimacy of one-to-one
communication is replaced by hierarchical systems which route ideas and information up
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and down through key intermediaries and superiors, instead of allowing information to
flow horizontally and without intervention.
Rethinking the value chain
What is cultural entrepreneurship? One way of theorising the distinction between artists
and cultural entrepreneurs is that whereas artists are concerned primarily with cultural
production, cultural entrepreneurs are more likely to extend their activities along the
value chain into cultural distribution as well (Rae 2005). According to this argument, the
cultural entrepreneur rejects the idea that art is an inherently self-fulfilling and selfsufficient sphere. Cultural entrepreneurs are not satisfied with generating content, they
also want to get involved in the process of marketing and exploiting the content they
create.
Historically, it is possible to identify entrepreneurial tendencies in numerous artists and
cultural producers, from the craftsmen’s guilds of medieval Europe to the actormanagers of the early nineteenth century or the showmen and impresarios of nineteenth
century Boston (Dimaggio 1986). What is perhaps striking is the extent to which cultural
entrepreneurship has become the dominant mode of discourse in contemporary cultural
production. More precisely, the artists who are vindicated and supported in the discourse
of the cultural industries and cultural policy are those who recognise their work’s
potential as a commercial commodity (DCMS 1998, Howkins 2001, Casey, Dunlop &
Selwood 1996). Artists have traditionally relied on patronage to protect them from the
market. But as subsidies to the established art forms become less generous and as the
catalogue of legitimate cultural forms which qualify for official sanction extends ever
wider, the line between officially subsidised ‘art’ and commercially viable ‘popular culture’
has become blurred to the point of invisibility. In today’s creative economy no artist can
afford to turn a blind eye to the market; in the discourse of cultural policy, all artists are to
some extent at least cultural entrepreneurs.
The idea of the cultural entrepreneur challenges the romantic idea of art as an
autonomous form of self-expression. It also challenges the classic notion of a value
chain in management theory. Porter’s value chain forms the basis for his theory of
competitive advantage (Porter 1985). One of the first questions any management
student will ask about a commercial enterprise will be where the business sits in the
value chain. This leads to an analysis of competitive threats from upstream and
downstream, as well as from immediate rivals. Cultural entrepreneurs do not ‘sit’ in the
value chain, they range along it. The processes of production and distribution are likely
to overlap and interact with each other.
This capacity to encompass both production and distribution fits with the ‘multi-tasking’
culture referred to earlier. By extending along the value chain, cultural entrepreneurship
bridges the supposed opposition between ‘creatives’ and ‘suits’; cultural entrepreneurs
are responsible for both ends of the process, from the generation of creative content to
the management and exploitation of outcomes.
Cultural entrepreneurship’s fusing of production and distribution can be seen in the
disintermediation of the value chain in digital media, notably in the music industry. Using
online distribution, cultural entrepreneurs are adding value to products by developing
new modes of delivery and consumption. This is not to say that content is no longer
important in the music industry. But the emphasis has shifted away from the selfsufficient quality of the music to the total package of benefits, including the way in which
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the music will be used by the listener, the purchasing experience (choice, cost,
accessibility) as well as the listening experience (sound quality, transferability between
formats and devices). The recent success of ringtones, which sell for up to six times the
price of a straightforward download of the same piece of music, indicate the extent to
which customers value customisation and an individualised experience as much as the
core musical product. Cultural entrepreneurs have recognised this change in the
relationship between producers, consumers and products. In the UK the independent
music labels were notably faster than the major labels in exploiting these new forms of
purchasing and consuming music. One possible explanation for this is that the
entrepreneurial culture of independent labels brought them closer to their customers and
made them more alert to the relationship between production and consumption of music.
The major labels were more concerned to defend an established and successful
business model, which initially led them to define digital music in legalistic terms as a
threat rather than in commercial terms as an opportunity. It took a player from outside
the music industry (Apple’s i-Tunes) to stir the major labels into a serious attempt to
develop new business models for digital music. Apple recognised that the future of the
music industry is only partly concerned with music; the way that music is packaged,
formatted and delivered have become increasingly important.
According to this perspective on cultural entrepreneurship in the creative industries,
many creative enterprises succeed in combining multiple functions across the industry
value chain. Rather than specialising in one particular phase in the production process,
creative enterprises and cultural entrepreneurs are multiple specialists with a holistic
approach to their work extending from origination and development to realisation and
dissemination. This has been described as a characteristic of the entrepreneurial
approach to business (McGrath et al., 1992). It is also a characteristic of the creative
process, which according to the classic definitions extends across multiple phases
(Boden, 1994). Business advisers need accordingly to recognise that narrow
specialisation may not always be desirable for creative businesses, and a portfolio of
products and projects is not only a useful way of dealing with risk and unpredictability,
but is also integral to the entrepreneurial and creative cultures of the creative enterprise.
Extending beyond the individual business, creative enterprises are embedded in
networks of like-minded collaborators which extend both horizontally and vertically along
the value chain. Rather than a value chain, the creative sector depends upon a value
network of horizontal collaboration between content creators and vertical collaboration
between suppliers and distributors. Temporary projects emerge from this pattern and
project teams are assembled and redistributed within the wider project ecology (Grabher
2002, 2004). This yields a complex interlocking set of relationships in which the key unit
of analysis is not the individual firm, but the network or system of which the firm is only a
component part. Large parts of this network may exist in an invisible world of informal
relationships and non-commercial transactions which are difficult to record in official
statistics and mapping documents. Business development agencies have begun to
address this characteristic of the creative industries by initiating and identifying clusters
and hubs of business activity, through which creative networks and systems can be
supported and sustained. But all too often the extent and range of contacts and
exchanges which underpin commercial creative work is only dimly recognised. Policy-led
interventions in the creative industries tend to oversimplify the network dependencies of
the creative industries and risk stripping out or isolating parts of the system in the name
of rationality and efficiency.
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In the end then, cultural entrepreneurship challenges not only the linear model of the
industry value chain and the separation of phases from production to distribution.
Cultural entrepreneurship also challenges the separation between businesses and
individuals, between commercial and non-commercial creative work, and the idea of an
‘organisation’ as a static, permanent entity. An ‘organisation’ in the creative industries is
more likely to be a temporary pattern of communication than a permanent fixture, and
policy-makers struggle to lock on to this moving target.
Motives and values
The final distinctive quality of management in the creative industries is perhaps the most
obvious. Managers of creative organisations have to reconcile commercial objectives
with non-commercial artistic, social and personal priorities. As the term suggests,
‘creative industries’ are a hybrid activity pulling together competing and sometimes
contradictory traditions and priorities. In a recent policy review, a regional arts centre
drafted two different mission statements. This was an organisation with a thirty year
history, yet it still had not decided on its core values and principles; such hesitancy in
articulating core motives and values would be unthinkable in a purely commercial
organisation.
This complexity of motives is intensified by the individualised structure of the creative
industries. The small scale of many creative organisations has already been noted.
Creative work relies upon highly skilled individual specialists converging on specific
projects. Even organisations with a relatively stable membership are pulled in different
directions by individual desires and the project-based nature of creative work. At the
individual level, intrinsic motivation (task fulfilment and personal satisfaction) is likely to
outweigh extrinsic rewards (remuneration, external approval) in creative tasks (Amabile
1988). With a few high profile exceptions, creative work is not especially well paid, and
personal convictions, beliefs and ambitions become the driving force; even if they do not
love their work unequivocally, creative workers are driven by complex, personal motives
(Storr 1979). Managers must find a way to stitch these disparate personal drives into a
coherent sense of direction and purpose.
Three points follow from this observation. First, strategy formation in the creative
industries is considerably more complex than the equivalent process in other forms of
industry. The strategy process must encompass a disparate set of motives and
personalities; a ‘top-down’ approach is unlikely to work in this context. Accordingly
strategy in the creative industries follows Mintzberg’s model of emergent strategy in an
adhocracy (Mintzberg and Waters 1985, Mintzberg and McHugh 1985), rather than
Porter’s more deliberate, analytical approach (Porter 1985, 1996).
Secondly, non-commercial objectives and activities, together with personal projects and
ideals become an important motivating force in the creative industries. Work that from
the outside might appear irrelevant or self-indulgent can in reality be a necessary tradeoff in order to keep the organisation moving, and the apparently incoherent, unplanned
nature of many creative organisations might in fact be a necessary compromise.
Finally, the unpredictability of creative work means that projects which were initially
driven by non-commercial objectives and motives can in the end produce a financial
return (Howkins 2001). The paradox here is that cultural consumers share the cultural
producer’s ambivalent attitude to commercialisation, and a product which appears
perversely uncommercial might in the end be a commercial hit, whilst a blatantly
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commercial product might fail. Björkegren (1996) has noted the bohemian quality of the
music industry where rebellion becomes a marketable commodity; Negus notes similar
tendency to fetishise ‘authenticity’ in rock music and to treat commercially successful
‘pop’ music with derision. Non-commercial objectives and activities, personal projects
and self-indulgences are thus not only a motivating force for the cultural producer but
can also be a viable commodity for the cultural consumer.
The mixed motives of cultural work mean that a disinterested, purely managerial
approach to cultural organisations is unlikely to succeed. Even the most commercially
successful creative enterprise is embedded in non-commercial relationships which
extend beyond the workplace into local cultural communities, sub-cultures and individual
life-styles. What might appear to the rational eye of a management consultant as
irrelevant or self-indulgent might in reality be an essential source of inspiration or
motivation. The danger here is that ‘rational’ management will attempt to strip out these
irrelevant projects and unproductive relationships in the name of efficiency and strategic
focus. In my conversations with UK business advisers, there is palpable frustration with
the apparently selfish or undirected work of some creative organisations, and their
refusal to take a more ruthless, targeted approach to management. These tendencies
are summarised in the pejorative use of ‘lifestyle business’ to describe enterprises in the
cultural sector which seem more an extension of a lifestyle than a serious business
venture.
Urban geographers like Allen J Scott and Andy Pratt (Scott1999, Pratt 2000) have noted
that the culture of creative enterprises can also take on a specific geographical
dimension. As already noted, creative enterprises are connected into collaborative
networks which extend horizontally across peer groups and vertically into channels of
supply and distribution. In many cases these collaborative connections are clustered in a
specific area or district. It is of course possible to develop a ‘virtual’ network which plugs
the enterprise into global partnerships. But in many cases collaborative cultures are
rooted in face-to-face communities. Much of the business of creative industries like film
or new media is conducted not in offices but in bars and cafes. This network of
sociability is the invisible glue which holds the one-off transactional partnerships
together. Consumers are often part of these local cultural communities and there is a
reciprocal relationship between the fans and the artists. In small scale music venues the
musicians in the audience often outnumber those on the stage; Manchester’s music
scene of the 1990s was driven by a succession of bands who had grown up watching
each other in the same circuit of clubs and pubs.
Implications for policy and management
From the perspective of cultural policy, entrepreneurial cultural management requires
new systems of support and intervention. Cultural policy has traditionally subsidised
production, since this is the most expensive part of the cultural sector. In an
entrepreneurial creative sector, production or product origination is less important and
arguably less expensive than developing and distributing content. Generating ideas is
cheap, and there is if anything an over-supply of ideas and content in the creative
industries. Finding business models to sustain those ideas, connecting ideas into
markets, building infrastructures to support local cultural networks, providing local routes
into markets and sources of investment – all these are more difficult, more important and
perhaps no less creative. Much has been written about the policy challenges of the
creative industries (Bilton 2000, Jeffcutt and Pratt 2002) and I do not intend to repeat
them here. It is clear that cultural policy needs to find a new set of intervention points
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beyond production subsidy, and that these are likely to include education and training,
infrastructure, investment and marketing. The idea that cultural policy can and should
address ‘management’ in the cultural sector can be seen as the latest attempt to
broaden the scope of cultural policy away from its narrower preoccupations.
But what can cultural policy do for management? In this paper I have argued that
management in the cultural sector has evolved its own distinctive style, based on
entrepreneurship, self-management, a multi-tasking culture which challenges traditional
supply chain specialisation, and an economy of mixed motives which defies the classic
incentive-based rationality of economics. Management in the cultural sector is
essentially entrepreneurial and individualistic, dealing with risk and unpredictability by
embracing diverse and apparently random processes from which coherent strategies
and business models might eventually emerge. It seems clear that the two cultural policy
streams which began this paper are unlikely to support such a management approach.
Bureaucratic public sector accountability and no-nonsense managerial rationality are the
Scylla and Charybdis of entrepreneurial creative management. Caught between wellmeaning but heavy-handed interventions from cultural policy bureaucrats and economic
development consultants and experts, the creative, ad hoc approach to management in
the cultural sector is being squeezed at both ends.
All this happens at a time when ‘creativity’ is the new buzzword in management theory
and business schools are seeking out alternative models of strategy and marketing,
often by reference to the cultural sector. Improvisation, story-telling and orchestration
have all provided rich sources of inspiration to management theory (Gabriel 2004, Hatch
1999, Barrett 1988, Wallin 2006). At a more practical level, the management of risk and
uncertainty in the creative industries, in areas such as film finance and art auctions, are
being presented as a source of practical techniques and models for managers. It is
surely an irony that the one place the value of creativity in management is not being
recognised is in the creative sector itself, particularly in the sphere of cultural policy.
Cultural leaders are being encouraged to take basic MBA-style management courses at
a time when business schools are moving away from the one-size fits all MBA towards
specialist programmes and ‘creative’ alternatives.
What are the distinctive features of creative management? Firstly I believe that creative
managers need to be good improvisers and adapters (Bilton and Leary 2002). Creative
processes are unpredictable and draw upon multiple individual contributions and
external contingencies. Trying to place these within a pre-planned format or system is
unlikely to work. Instead managers need to observe and build upon the emergent
outcomes of processes, allowing the strategic direction to emerge out of these events
and individuals rather than the other way round. Many cultural entrepreneurs (filmmakers, designers, music promoters) claim not to have a business plan. Yet in reality
they do have a business direction and are instinctively future-oriented in their outlook.
They may not call it a business model or strategy, but their attitude and culture serve a
similar function (Bilton 1999).
Secondly, creative managers need to play multiple roles and to tolerate and encourage a
multi-tasking culture among others. Precisely because the ideas and technologies of
cultural work are highly specialised and individualised, cultural organisations cannot
afford to allow individuals to become overspecialised, isolated or locked into
hermeneutic codes of professional language and specialist technology. Informal
channels of communication and overlapping tasks are easier to manage in smaller
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organisations. This is one of several strong reasons that cultural organisations may be
reluctant to grow. As organisations grow, communication becomes more formal and
tasks and responsibilities become more fixed. Business expansion increases overheads
and imposes routines and expectations on what is traditionally a sporadic, project-based
business. But of equal importance, business expansion limits the possibilities for
individuals to break out of existing projects and mindsets; as the organisation grows, the
stakes are higher and the possibilities for individual rediscovery and collective
regeneration become more remote.
Thirdly, creative managers need to think outside the rationality of economic incentives.
The cultural industries deal in symbolic goods – ideas, images and experiences which
do not have any fixed value, only a valuation placed upon them through the perceptions
of the end consumer. Consumers do not behave ‘rationally’ in the economic sense –
their perceptions of value are highly subjective and personal. Demand for cultural goods
is inelastic, meaning that it is not much influenced by price; we are not going to buy a CD
or attend a performance just because it’s cheaper than another one. Cultural producers
are similarly irrational; their motives are mixed, and external factors such as
remuneration, reputation, peer recognition or approval from a superior are less
significant than intrinsic motivation or ‘task satisfaction’ – the feeling of a job well done to
our own personal satisfaction (Amabile 1988). In this context, measuring success and
setting targets needs to take account of the different perspectives at play. In the end,
what is valuable for the customer and what is desirable for the organisation can emerge
only through a gradual consensus. This is difficult to plan or pre-empt, so managers
must follow the emergent notions of value inside and outside their organisation and
attempt to adapt their products and services accordingly. Working to a preconceived
format, as evidenced by ill-fated film sequels or ill-judged follow-up albums, is unlikely to
be a viable strategy.
Finally, creative managers need to distinguish between sustainable development and
growth. The fascination with the creative industries as a fast-growing sector of the global
economy is backed by impressive albeit inconsistent statistical data. This has
encouraged a ‘growth is good’ mentality among investors and business advisers which is
not always in the best interests of the creative enterprises themselves. One of the most
important lessons of the dot.com crash was not just the management failures of the
dot.com entrepreneurs (Porter 1996), but the disastrous attempt to impose unrealistic
growth targets on fledgling businesses by investors. Creativity and innovation do not
equate to business expansion; indeed, opportunistic, unplanned growth may undermine
an organisation’s creative capacity (Bilton 1999). Up until very recently many small
business advisers have seen growth as the primary goal of business, implying that every
small business is simply a large business which has not yet fulfilled its potential. Today
small businesses are seen to have their own distinctive structures and competences
(Sykes 2003); growth may not be a desirable outcome (Storey 1994) and may in the end
be destructive (Miller). Given their individualised structure and project-based modus
operandi, creative businesses are more likely to develop their businesses by expanding
their networks of contacts (Grabher 2004) or investing in the quality of their products and
services than simply growing the business. Rather than focusing on the individual firm as
the unit of analysis, a more productive way of analysing the expansion of the creative
economy is to consider the scale and scope of the networks and systems which lie
behind the single firm. Growth of the creative infrastructure may be a more useful
measure of a sustainable creative economy than growth of the firm (Bilton 2006).
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I find traces of all these forms of creative management among cultural entrepreneurs –
film-makers, arts centre managers, artists and musicians. In many cases, they would
probably not consider their decision-making processes and their ways of doing business
as ‘management’. One of the problems here is that of perception; the traditional models
of management and leadership have been imposed from the outside and artists have
been told that their approach to management is ‘wrong’ or invalid. As management
theory begins to rewrite the discourse of management to include traditionally creative
concepts such as improvisation, innovation and performance, there is an opportunity to
challenge this self-perception of the cultural entrepreneur as a poor manager.
Postmodern theories of organisation and management argue that prescriptive models of
management are simply another language game, imposing one version of ‘management’
instead of acknowledging the pluralism and diversity of management styles (Cova 1996;
Gergen 1992). From a theoretical perspective this leads organisational studies away
from practical prescriptions into the murky waters of discourse analysis and
organisational story-telling (Gabriel 2004). At a more pragmatic level, business advisers
are beginning to use mentoring and networking to legitimise and build upon existing
organisational practices and cultures rather than imposing a preconceived template of
‘best practice’ from the outside. For creative enterprises such an approach to
management development is more likely to be effective and relevant than importing best
practice from outside the sector.
In this paper I have argued that top down interventions to improve the quality of
management in the cultural sector risk further alienating and undermining cultural
managers. Artists and cultural entrepreneurs are surprisingly adept as managers.
Management practices in the creative industries have evolved to deal with discontinuous
change, intangible assets, individualised organisations and intellectual property and to
accommodate new modes of work and productivity (Ellmeier 2003). As these
organisational challenges spread from the cultural sector into mainstream business, we
should perhaps not be trying to teach artists to be better managers, but seeking to learn
from them. The organisational culture of creative organisations thus becomes an
important area for future research.
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