Contributing to the creative economy imaginary: universities and the creative sector

Simon Moreton

doi:10.1080/09548963.2018.1534575

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relationship between the creative economy and universities. As funders, educators and research bodies, universities have a complicated relationship with the creative economy. They propagate its practice, ‘buying-in’ to the rhetoric and models of creative value, particularly in teaching, research and knowledge exchange. Third mission activities also play a role, seeking to affect change in the world ‘outside’ academia through collaboration, partnerships, commercialisation and social action. For arts and humanities disciplines, these practices have focused almost exclusively on the creative sector in recent years. This paper asks how the third mission has been a site where universities have modified their function in relation to the creative economy. It considers the mechanisms by which universities have been complicit in propagating the notion of the creative economy, strengthening particular constructions of the idea at the level of policy and everyday practice. It also briefly asks how a focus on alternative academic practice and institutional forms might offer possibilities for developing a more critical creative economy. The argument made is that the university sector is an important agent in the shaping and performance of the creative economy, and that we should take action if we wish to produce a more diverse, equitable space for learning, researching, and being under the auspices of ‘creativity’.

Highlights

This paper explores the relationship between the creative economy and universities
My focus in this paper is on how the creative economy, as both policy object and performative discourse, has impacted upon the role that the state, funders, stakeholders, and universities themselves are asking their staff to play in the commercialisation of academic knowledge and practice
I write this paper from the point of view of a researcher who has spent the last seven years actively involved in the research, evaluation, and production of ‘knowledge exchange’ projects that sit at the interface between universities and the creative economy

Summary

Introduction

‘Creativity’ has represented one of the defining preoccupations of many economies for over twenty years, visible in a range of connected debates about commercialising cultural practice, industrial classifications, new business forms, education, urban regeneration, and many other areas of everyday life. My reflections come from both research and daily professional practices This includes the analysis of over 150 interviews with academics, administrators, and practitioners involved in collaborative R&D projects, many hours spent on boards at all levels of project management in this field, participant observation at events, alongside bid-writing, project promotion, event planning and policy advocacy. As such the paper, reflective and theoretical, emerges from a long period of empirical work which has left me questioning precisely what our role as researchers is in this field – critical researchers, or problematic policy advocates? Reflective and theoretical, emerges from a long period of empirical work which has left me questioning precisely what our role as researchers is in this field – critical researchers, or problematic policy advocates? my analysis largely addresses academics working in university ‘third mission’ contexts, I hope the arguments made here will have a wider resonance within the sector by calling us to consider our complicity in the reproduction of ‘creative capitalism’

The emergence of a creative economy

Knowledge economies and Higher Education

Flows and counter flows as resistance

Conclusion