Nobody Knows

Creative industries are beset by a problem: nobody knows how work will be received. The chapter examines how creative producers manage the pervasive uncertainty of creative work. In classical theories of enterprise, uncertainty is the source of opportunity and therefore profits, with the entrepreneur the market agent willing to organize that uncertainty in pursuit of return. We show that risk and uncertainty in the creative economy are managed through the same processes of symbolic production as give rise to creative goods and creative agency, mediated by the IP/IPR nexus; as creative products solidify into market goods so the uncertainties are transformed—at least in part—into risks, and the management of uncertainty through the social relations of the field develops into the legalistic protection of IP rights and contracts.

IP/IPR and Economic Agency

The chapter considers the construction of economic agency among creative producers in the creative industries. It argues that a form of economic agency, homo oeconomicus, is facilitated by engagement with IP/IPR. This involves understanding work as a means of securing money, as opposed to an obligation ‘to one’s art’; a specific attitude to time, in terms of a relationship to the present and also a control over the future; and action underpinned with knowledge of economic and technical issues, rather than being guided solely by the social milieu and group of one’s fellow creatives and collective cultural habits. IP/IPR introduces a temporal dimension central to economic calculation, and helps agents to distinguish tradable assets while disentangling themselves from them. Chapter 3 also picks up the ambivalences of business and creativity among ‘cultural entrepreneurs’, discussing self-employment and precarity in the creative economy.

Conclusion

We have now completed our journey through the creative economy. Our concluding chapter draws together arguments and elaborates policy suggestions. We examine the value of IP/IPR as an analytical construct and consider how it adds to our understanding of contemporary debates over the creative industries. Our analysis of IP policy and attendant rights issues argues that any evidence-based policy should be based on an understanding of the role of IP/IPR within the valorization process as a whole. We also place our discussion of IP within the context of cultural and education policy, emphasizing the importance of cultural access and support and the development of craft skills that underpin the process of creating intellectual property. We argue both are crucial for the future of creative production and the cultural economy as a whole.

Constructing Value

The chapter invokes recent advances in the sociology of valuation to contend that the IP/IPR nexus is the mechanism through which creative products are constructed as valuable: that it orders and settles the multiple evaluative principles at play in creative production. The chapter’s pragmatist approach suggests that IP/IPR is constituted by valuations as diverse as knowledge, networks, or legal stratagems and game playing, valuation practices that coexist with other cultural intermediaries in the creative industries. Although only temporary, such valuations are vital in the operation of markets for creative products: the business of creative work is the construction and exploitation of value through IP/IPR. Its core is symbolic production and it is this symbolic worth that is traded in markets for cultural goods. The symbolic valuation of worth is contingent upon the slicing of IP/IPR facets into works of all kinds that can circulate in the market and be valued.

IP/IPR as a Market Object

The creative economy is driven by the transfer of property; tradable property is the ‘product’ of the creative industries. The chapter explores how intellectual property (IP)/intellectual property rights (IPR) function to constitute creative work as a market object that can be disentangled and sold. The chapter deals first with the performative role of law in constructing market objects. We examine how law, with its focus on authorship and originality, embodies a particular conception of solitary artistic creation, inherited from nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics; at the same time, the law also mandates property rights as a means of constituting a market object, and these property rights necessitate a creator to whom they can attach. Both aspects seem highly artificial in view of the collaborative and collective processes that produce creative work and it becomes clear that creative producers have to manage this multifaceted, liminal object in the shape of the IP/IPR nexus.

Protecting Value

Our final empirical chapter examines the strategies that are available for creative producers to protect their expressed ideas. We illustrate the ambiguity associated with copying, its being a highly nuanced activity in the eyes of producers, sometimes reflective of the ‘zeitgeist’, pedagogical practices as people become established in the field, or simply ‘business’ practice in the creative economy. The community of producers informs the interpretation of experiences of copying or piracy. Although having had experience of work being appropriated, enforcing copyright and design IPR through the legal process is not a usual practice. Instead producers rely on the development of their IP and practices of the field (social networks, community, tacit knowledge) to protect their claims to property.

Realizing Value

The chapter turns to the realization of revenues in the creative economy, illustrating how the economic value of intellectual property becomes identified and registered. Strategies include work for hire, direct sale, and licensing, often relying on market intermediaries and collecting societies. We illustrate how arriving at prices for singular products in an exchange can be difficult, either because of a lack of ‘equivalence’ or because creative producers must learn what needs to be taken into consideration. We also examine practices of valuation as producers try to maintain control of IPR through licensing agreements. We draw links between the structural forces identified earlier in the book, especially debates over creative labour and entrepreneurship in the creative industries—casualization, precarious labour, the oligopoly of corporations—and the quotidian activities of creative producers as they seek to realize substantial enough returns to allow them to continue in the business of creative work.

Introduction: Creating Economy

The introductory chapter sets the book within the context of the existing literature from the areas of sociology and law as they relate to the creative industries. It notes the long-standing dichotomy between creativity and business that is often reproduced in scholarship on this area of the creative and cultural economy. It draws attention to political reliance on creative industries as a source of value and the reality of precarious labour and structural inequalities that characterize work in the sector. It introduces our theoretical approach, drawn from sociological studies of ‘marketization’ and describes our analytical framing: the IP/IPR nexus. It provides short summaries of subsequent chapters.