All media organisations have reservoirs of unused creativity, observes Lucy Küng in one of the essays included in ‘Managing Media Work,’ edited by Mark Deuze (www.sagepublications.com).
Liberate innovation
Acknowledging that most creative individuals who have chosen to work in the media want to exercise their talents and will do so in the face of organisational obstacles, Küng notes that an important element of managing creative organisations is not to strew unnecessary obstacles in the path of creativity.
The author assures that the levels of ongoing creativity can be raised through the appropriate management of a range of subtle interdependencies spanning team tasks, job descriptions, feedback, performance metrics, control mechanisms, and even business models.
She reminds established media organisations, which fear they will be outrun by new players in the digital economy, that hotshot new media companies do not have a higher creativity quotient than older ones. “They simply place fewer blocks in the way of their people acting on their creative drive and insight. The ‘old’ media have all the necessary resources to innovate and succeed – they just need to liberate them.”
Content is not king
A chapter devoted to ‘the management of the creative industries’ by Chris Bilton opens by stating that today, with the massive oversupply of content, content is not king. Attention has shifted from the ‘what’ of content to ‘how’ of delivery, branding, and customer relationships – in other words, towards management – explains Bilton.
“New technologies have added a new impetus to the democratisation argument, with commentators like Chris Anderson (2006) describing a democratisation of production and distribution, and corporations from Apple to Sony selling commercial products that promise to make everybody a cultural producer. Open-source software, user-generated content, and social networking sites allow creative roles to be distributed among consumers.”
Marketing and branding
Interestingly, the author finds that marketing and branding have emerged as cultural industries in their own right. He adds that branding and marketing have moved from being the process for differentiating generic products to being a product in their own right; and that in a saturated market, trademarks, logos, and brands require higher levels of investment and deliver higher levels of profit than traditional manufacturing. “The international division of labour means that manufacture is very often undertaken using cheap labour in developing countries, with marketing (and profit) concentrated among a handful of global corporations.”
Over the past about two decades, economic, technological, social and cultural changes have conspired to devalue cultural content and place a stronger emphasis on the services and systems that convert raw symbolic goods into meaningful and valuable experiences for consumers, avers Bilton. “Consequently creativity is closely linked to the management of cultural production and cultural distribution.”
Cognitariat, the new proletariat
An essay on ‘the new international division of cultural labour’ by Toby Miller cites A. Negri for the description that people mired in contingent media work are the ‘cognitariat’ because they have considerable educational attainment and great facility with cultural technologies and genres; and the cognitariat plays key roles in the production and circulation of goods and services, through both creation and coordination.
Today’s ‘culturalisation of production’ may enable these intellectuals, by placing them at the centre of world economies, but it also disables them, because it does so under conditions of flexible production and ideologies of ‘freedom,’ the author cautions.
“This new proletariat is not defined in terms of factories, manufacturing, or opposition to ruling-class power and ideology. Indeed, it is formed from those whose immediate forbears, with similar or less cultural capital, were the salariat, and confident of guaranteed health care and retirement income. It lacks both the organisation of the traditional working class and the political entrée of the old middle class.”
Contingent labour
Miller is of the view that what used to be the fate of artists and musicians – where ‘making cool stuff’ and working with relative autonomy were meant to outweigh ongoing employment – has become a norm across virtually every sector of the economy, with contingent labour as a way of life.
To progressive managers, his counsel is to account for the post-industrial standing of cultural workers and to reject a neo-liberal embrace of casualised labour. “There would be no culture, no media, without labour. It is not X-factor inefficiency. It is the beating heart of creativity and social justice.”
Instructive read.
**
BookPeek.blogspot.com
