Page 20 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

8 Design Meets Business
Recognizing the inherent tensions between the world of creativity and business (Caves 2000), I decided to further explore the changing work and occupation of creatives as a result of collaborating with business.
1.1. Increasing Collaborations between Creatives and Busi- ness Professionals
There is a growing importance of the creative industries in today’s society. Attention for the creative industries especially emerged in the early 2000s. In 2002, Howkins argued that we live in a ‘creative economy’ in which most economic value is derived from creativity. In the same year, Florida (2002) published a book on the rise of the ‘creative class’, a group of workers employed in the creative industry. He argued that as of today, crea- tives “make up roughly a third of the workforce and accounted for approxi- mately half of all wages and salaries, even more in large cities and metros” (Florida, Mellander & Adler 2015: 97). Not only scholars, but also popular media outlets like Business week (Coy 2000) and Harvard Business Review (Florida & Goodnight 2005), alarmed the rise of the creative industries and its implications for business.
The term ‘creative industries’ is broadly defined and covers diverse activities (Jones et al. 2015), as becomes visible in the lists of for example UNESCO (1986), Americans for the Arts (2005), and UNCTAD (2008). What these lists suggest, is that there is no simple definition of the crea- tive industries. Over the years, the definition of creative industries has been broadening. Whereas first it spanned only the traditional artistic and cultural sectors, now it also covers more modern sectors like adver- tising, digital media and design. A common feature of the two lists is that in all sectors of the creative industries, ‘creativity’ is the primary activity through which value is derived. Here, I define creativity as a process of creating novelty through (re)combining what already exists, such as ideas, resources, technologies, networks and so on (see the work of Amabile 1996; 1997; Jones et al. 2015; Hargadon & Bechky 2006). Hence, building on the work of Jones and colleagues (2015), in this dissertation I define the crea- tive industries as individuals and organizations that are both temporary and permanently involved in work that is oriented at developing ‘creative products’. Actors in the creative industries include, among others, architects (Jones, Maoret, Massa, & Svejenova 2012; Jones & Massa 2013), dancers (Harrison & Rouse 2014), film crews (Bechky 2006a), chefs (Stierand et al. 2014), designers (Stigliani & Ravasi 2012; Fayard, Stigliani & Bechky 2017) and video game developers (Cohendet & Simon 2016). The majority of this dissertation focuses especially on the work of ‘designers’ (Chapter 2 & 3).