Creative aspiration and the betrayal of promise? The experience of new creative workers

The promise of ‘doing what you love’ continues to attract new aspirants to creative work, yet most creative industries are so characterised by low investment, shifting foci and ongoing technological innovation that all promises must be unreliable. Some would-be creative workers negotiate their own pathways from the outset, ‘following their dream’ as they attempt to convert personal enthusiasms and amateur activities into income-earning careers. Others look to the proliferation of available training and education options, including higher education courses, as possible pathways into creative work. This chapter reviews recent research from the USA, Australia and the UK on the effectiveness – or otherwise – of higher education as preparation for a creative career. The chapter discusses the obstacles that many creative workers, including graduates, encounter on their creative pathways, for instance, as a result of informal work practices and self-employment. The chapter also looks at sources of advantage and disadvantage, such as those associated with particular geographic locations or personal identities. The chapter concludes by introducing the subsequent chapters in the collection. These critically explore the experience of new creative workers in a wide range of national contexts including Australia, Belgium, China, Ireland, Italy, Finland, the Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom

Making art work: Creative assessment as boundary work

Conflict in creative work is sometimes thought to emanate from the contentious personalities of creative workers. Drawing on several months of ethnographic field work at an advertising agency and semi-structured interviews with advertising professionals, I propose an alternate explanation for this antagonism, grounded in creative workers' and their market-oriented colleagues' competing definitions of good work. As an illustration of this larger struggle, I focus on the tension that arises during creative assessment. I find that while creative workers designate ideas as "creative" based on novelty and relevance, not all sources of novelty and relevance are considered legitimate. Sources that originate from outside their professional domain are dismissed as not novel (e.g., "overused") or irrelevant (e.g., "constraints"). Consequently, I suggest that creative assessment can be understood as a form of professional boundary work, a conceptualization with implications for our understanding of conflict in the creative workplace and the evaluation of creativity more generally

Will We Ever Meet Again? The Relationship between Inter‐Firm Managerial Migration and the Circulation of Client Ties

A large body of research shows that the migration of managers from one professional service firm to another weakens the old employer's relationship with its clients, because migrating managers remove their relationship-specific knowledge and expertise - i.e., human and social capital - from their old employers, redeploying it to their new employers. This study extends this research by introducing a bi-directional perspective of social capital in which both firms and managers may exploit these relationship-specific resources. We use theory on social capital to build arguments about how one form of manager mobility, manager migration between two service providers in a single market, can both lead and lag the movement of client ties between those providers, and signaling theory to hypothesize the conditions under which this is likely to occur. Analyses using longitudinal data on New York City advertising agencies generally support our arguments. Our findings contribute to theory and research on manager migration, social capital, and signaling, and raise new questions for how the portability of relationship-specific social capital shapes markets.12 month embargo; published online: 6 July 2019This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]