Management and Creativity: From Creative Industries to Creative Management by Chris Bilton

Author:Chris Bilton [Inconnu(e)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-09-24T07:18:00+00:00

The Rules of the Game

Managing creativity requires a balance between release and control. This chapter began with a critique of the neo-liberal management style which equates creativity with a removal of all constraints. By liberating creative individuals from bureaucracy and hierarchy, it is assumed that the latent creativity in organizations will be released. This stereotype of creative individuals and strict managers fits with an oversimplified, individualistic model of creativity. It may serve to legitimize corporations and neoliberal ideology as inherently liberating and creative, but it bears little resemblance to the reality of creative practice in the creative industries, nor to creativity theory. The promise to `release' creativity simply unleashes the private demons of obsession and compulsion or the paralysing blankness of too many possibilities. At the same time, the emancipatory rhetoric of the new management style belies a steady accumulation of strategic control by and within a handful of corporations, notably so in the creative industries.

Difficulties occur when the managerial setting of parameters is abstracted from the creative process and regarded as a self-sufficient and independent system. This removal is one consequence of the specialization of management, a problem discussed in the opening chapter of this book. In the creative industries management decision making has been elevated to a separate plane in the organizational hierarchy and distanced psychically and geographically from the creative decision making on the ground. This asynchronicity between managers and creative teams is not resolved by withdrawing managers from the creative process and adopting a laissez-faire management style, or by `buffering' the creative team. On the contrary creative managers need to find ways of drawing managers and creators closer together.

One of the consequences of the new managerialism in the cultural sector has been to elevate management as a specialist discipline and to reinforce the importance of measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. Without any specific knowledge or experience of the messy business of cultural production (and possibly without much interest in it either), the new generation of cultural managers have concentrated on what they know best: the control and monitoring of inputs and outputs in pursuit of centrally agreed strategic targets, measured through financial data and performance indicators. This retreat into a strategic core indicates a bunker mentality in cultural management - make sure the figures are right, and let the art manage itself. As a consequence of the structural divisions between managers and creators in the creative sector and the specialization of managerial and creative expertise, targets and strategies have been abstracted from the cultural context in which they must be delivered. The growing split between operational reality and strategic vision is in turn reinforced by the physical and psychic distance of the strategic core of decision-making from the rest of the workforce.

At the same time creative work is excluded from the strategic processes and outcomes which give it value and purpose. Autonomy and freedom are meaningless if that freedom does not extend upwards and outwards into the setting of targets and evaluation of outcomes.

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