Deadline: 30 September 2024
Candace Jones, University of Edinburgh and Associate Editor, Academy of Management Discoveries); Noah Askin, University of California, Irvine; Frédéric Godart, INSEAD, France; Sarah Harvey, University College London; and Damon J. Phillips, University of Pennsylvania.
In 2023, the Hollywood writers (Writers Guild) and actors (SAG-AFTRA) unions engaged in strikes against major global film and television producers. These strikes had far-reaching repercussions, affecting individual creatives who lost employment and income, studios that saw drops in revenue and share prices, and the U.S. state of California—a prominent hub of creation and production—which lost $5 billion during the first few months of the strike period (Koblin, Sperling & Barnes, 2023). At the core of these union disputes lies the thorny question of whether Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) will be used to displace creative workers. The union movement echoes calls, notably in the European Union, to regulate AI and address some of its major challenges, particularly those concerning Intellectual Property (IP) rights (Satariano, 2023). Questions about the need for regulation and IP protection in creative industries extend well beyond film and television. Authors are discovering that their books are being used to train large language models (LLMs) like those that power ChatGPT, and which are, in turn, increasingly capable of writing their own books based on those original inputs (Reisner, 2023). Musicians’ voices are being “deepfaked” and put in songs and collaborations that the musicians themselves never actually wrote or performed (Donahue, 2023). Artists’ work is being used to build algorithms that generate images, drawings, and other visual output (Chen, 2023).
GAI and Machine Learning (ML) offer the potential to generate substitutes for human-created content in all creative industries and may upend existing practices, current knowledge, and potential employment for creatives. Although we know quite a bit about how new technologies shape industries and work generally, creative industries have been immune because creativity is the one thing that technology traditionally has not been able to replace. For instance, prior technological disruptions still relied on humans to create content but engaged digital production to reduce costs and digital distribution to generate new rents, whether from streaming or television rights (Jones, 2001; Jones, Lorenzon & Sapsed, 2015). The dynamics of GAI are being paralleled by new types of digital creative products, such as blockchain-based Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in visual arts, which are transforming what a creative product is in the art world. Similarly, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and the emergence of the metaverse offer new contexts in which creative endeavors can be deployed (see, for example, Chalmers, Fisch, Matthews, Quinn, & Recker, 2022).
These dynamics are ricocheting across creative industries and raising critical challenges, such as:
Current research has limited existing theory and knowledge that aids creatives, creative organizations, cities, and governments in addressing these challenges. Moreover, these challenges offer fruitful avenues for empirically exploring the dynamics of creative industries to generate new theories and frameworks to advance knowledge and practice. We call for submissions to explore these dynamics in creative industries and take full advantage of the mission of the Academy of Management Discoveries (AMD): to publish and promote exploratory research of management and organizational phenomena that are not adequately explained by existing theories or understood by existing research.
Before further developing illustrative research questions and themes for the special issue, we unpack the definitions of creative industries and approaches utilized by prior scholars and policymakers to empirically explore creative industries.
Scholars have defined creative industries in different ways. Sociologists initially focused on industries that offered cultural products for audiences serving “esthetic or expressive rather than utilitarian purposes” (Hirsch, 1972: 642) and the roles, rules, and relations needed to bring these cultural goods and services to market (White & White, 1993; Peterson & Anand, 2004). Economists also identified creative industries as offering “cultural, artistic or entertainment value” (Caves, 2000: 1), while emphasizing the contracts between art and commerce that define who benefits from intellectual property and which key roles in the value chain not only identify creative products, such as gatekeepers, but also promote creative products to audiences, such as critics. When management scholars define creative industries, they usually focus on industries organized to generate and capture economic value from the expression of creativity and cultural values (Jones, Lorenzon & Sapsed, 2015; Jones & Maoret, 2018; Godart, Seong & Phillips, 2020).
Most management scholars who study creative industries take one of three paths. The first focuses on a specific industry and its capacity to reveal important theoretical insights, such as the influence of social structure on innovation in the Jazz world where isolation seems to promote innovation while connectedness prompts adherence to the prevailing canon (Phillips, 2011); musical artists enacting optimal distinctiveness by balancing novelty and familiarity to engage audiences and gain advantage (Askin & Mauskapf, 2017); and the embeddedness of fashion houses in personnel mobility networks predicting which collections are rated as most creative (Godart, Shipilov & Claes, 2014). The second path involves comparing industries, such as visual arts, music, dance, and fashion goods, to reveal more general insights, such as managing tensions or dilemmas that arise from competing goals, pursuing exploitation versus exploration, focusing on individual creativity or establishing creative systems, and constructing new markets or responding to existing markets (e.g., Lampel, Lant & Shamsie, 2000; DeFillippi, Grabher & Jones, 2008; Jones, Svejenova, Straandgard & Townley, 2016). The third path involves studying how work unfolds within creative industries to glean new insights about the way that creators and collaborates generate, elaborate, refine, store, discard, and implement novel and useful ideas (Harrison, Rouse, Fisher, & Amabile, 2022), and the social and psychological factors shaping those processes (Elsbach & Kramer, 2003). Key findings include: deep attachment to ideas and creative identity drive creative processes (Ananth & Harvey, 2023); collective creativity entails synthesizing novel perspectives (Long-Lingo & O’Mahoney; 2010; Harvey, 2014); and the success of novel ideas is difficult to forecast and is influenced by creators’ experience and role (Berg, 2016).
Policymakers have been more likely to take a phenomenon-driven approach to defining creative industries, focusing on capturing value from creative activities. This approach was first expressed in the 1990s by Australian and United Kingdom policymakers, who saw creative industries as the engines for economic growth. Their efforts culminated in the UK’s 1998 DCMS definition (revised 2001, 2013, 2014) which highlights creative industries as having “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.” Despite a broadly shared definition of creative industries, policymakers generated distinct lists of creative industries to further guide other interested parties (See Appendix A). To systematize and empirically anchor these diverse classifications of creative industries, Bahkshi, Freeman and Higgs (2013: 9) integrated creative industries with SOC and SIC codes, asking “where are creatively occupied workers actually employed?” They identified five elements that define creativity in occupations: (1) involves a novel process, (2) resists mechanization (e.g., mechanical process that can substitute for labor), (3) engages non-repetitive solutions and approaches to create the product, (4) offers creative contribution to the value chain, and (5) requires imagination rather than translation of the creative product across time and space. Using these five criteria to measure creative intensity—the proportion of a workforce in creative occupations—Bahkshi et al. found creative industries had substantially higher proportions of creative intensity, ranging from 30% to 90% of the occupations, whereas most industries had a creative intensity around 3%. They also noticed that creative industries tend to cluster geographically, such as advertising, film, and broadcasting in West London. These five elements and dynamic mapping approaches are useful for empirically defining creative industries to enable comparisons across creative industries and over time.
Although important and deserving of additional research, none of these definitional approaches have empirically addressed how emerging digital technologies, such as GAI or NFTs, might challenge existing practices in creative industries, creative work, and creative identities. The advent of emerging technologies, such as GAI and NFTs, has fundamentally altered some core assumptions and basic dynamics. For example, GAI raises questions about whether it generates novelty or is strictly imitative, whether it will be used to replace writers and other creatives, whether it will disrupt the established business models and value chain, and how it may reshape where creative activities take place. A key question is the pace of innovation and how challenges may be resolved, or new challenges created. The future of creative occupations, in a world where GAI plays a key role, is yet to be determined.
In parallel, these emerging technologies represent an opportunity, as well. For example, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have created new types of artists and art, such as Beeple—a digital artist that sells NFTs rather than physical artwork. In addition, NFTs use blockchain technologies that enable artists to establish provenance by defining and tracing ownership, potentially enabling artists to claim a portion of the increases in the value of art over time. In that sense, NFTs may mitigate some of the IP-related risks from GAI. Thus, more scholarly attention and empirical research is needed to understand these new and rapidly evolving dynamics to develop frameworks for guiding practice and theories for enhancing knowledge about how to face and manage fast paced change that fundamentally alter the playing field.
Given current challenges within the creative industries that raise fundamental questions and challenge existing theories, as well as the mission of Academy of Management Discoveries to engage in exploratory research, we invite papers to explore these challenges in-depth. We welcome manuscripts that utilize and engage in dialogue across disciplines, such as sociology, economics, history, strategy, organization theory, urban studies, policy, psychology, law, and others. Below we offer illustrative questions to provide generative insights for studying creative industries, acknowledging that there are other queries and lines of engagement that also address current challenges in the creative industries. Submissions need not be limited to our illustrative questions.
We are excited about this special issue and the possibility of exploring the challenges facing creative industries. As empirical sites, creative industries offer empirically rich phenomena for discovering unexpected insights, developing new frameworks, and challenging existing organizational and managerial theories. We expect contributions to the special issue to enact the mission of AMD: to publish empirical work that addresses unique, puzzling, and intriguing phenomena that are not well explained by existing theories.
We seek to generate dialogue and build cross fertilization that reveals new insights into creative industries. Because creative industries as phenomena engage multiple disciplines, we will prioritize submissions that use a multi-disciplinary approach, using them to offer new insights. In line with a multi-disciplinary approach, we are open to a wide range of approaches and methods that utilize robust evidence to support claims and insights.
Members of the guest editing team and AMD editors will organize a Creative Industries Conference and Workshop for potential authors and reviewers of this special issue at the University of Edinburgh Business School, 12-14 June 2024. The guest editors and other AMD editors will engage with authors who submit their paper to the creative industries conference. To submit to conference and workshop, please send a no-more-than-1000 word summary of your empirical paper that identifies the creative industries being studied and briefly describes the puzzling or intriguing phenomena or challenges to existing theories that your study addresses. Send the material to CICAMD2024@gmail.com by 28 February 2024. The conference will be limited in size for logistical reasons. Attendance at the Creative Industries Conference and Workshop is not mandatory for submitting to the special issue.
Submissions are due between 1 September and 30 September 2024. To submit a manuscript, please visit https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/AMD/. Remember to select Manuscript Type as Special Research Forum: Creative Industries. Manuscripts should be formatted according to the AMD Style Guide.
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Creative Industries in the UK, Scotland, and European Union
U.K. DCMS 2001 | Scottish Govt 2010 | European Union |
---|---|---|
Advertising | Advertising | |
Architecture | Architecture | Architecture |
Audio visual | ||
Art & Antiques Market | Visual Art | |
Crafts | Crafts | |
Cultural education | ||
Design | Design | |
Designer Fashion | Fashion and Textiles | |
Film & Video | Film and Video | |
Heritage | Cultural heritage on separate list | |
Interactive Leisure Software | Computer Games | |
Music | Music | Music |
Performing Arts | Performing Arts | Performing Arts |
Photography | ||
Publishing | Writing and Publishing | Books and Publishing |
Software & Computer Services | Software/electronic Publishing | |
Television & Radio | Radio and TV |