[ecrea] Diversifying the creative: Creative work, creative indus tries, creative identities: Call for papers—Special Is sue for Organization

Kia ora friends and colleagues – please circulate:

Diversifying the creative: Creative work,
creative industries, creative identities

Call for papers—Special Issue for Organization - Deadline 1 December 2015

Links to full call: Via Organization
http://org.sagepub.com/content/22/4/617.full.pdf+html

Or
https://migrantacademics.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/call-for-papers-special-issue-proposal-for-organization-diversifying-the-creative-creative-work-creative-industries-creative-identities/

NOTE: Workshops for those planning to submit papers in Edinburgh: : As
well as a workshop in early September we will be offering a skype
workshop in September, date to be advised. See more below.

Introduction

To diversify the creative is to ask how certain bodies, certain work
practices and certain identities come to be counted as ‘creative’, while
others are excluded. Creativity and creatives have become desirable,
socially and economically, as creativity has been rebranded as the
engine of post-industrial ‘creative economies’ over the last decade or
so. The rhetoric of creativity encompasses specifically designated
‘creative industries’ and ‘creatives’ (Caves, 2000), as well as a much
wider idea of ‘the creative’ at work in all kinds of organisations and
occupations (Bilton, 2006). Creativity is conceptualised in a wide range
of forms, in which traditional and new are spliced together. For
instance, a romantic framing of arts and artists, based on a distinction
between the creative and the industrial, is linked with ideas of art as
a vocation and of the artist as a distinctive kind of individualised
genius (Becker, 1974). A more recent, 21st-century vision is linked with
the idea of innovation as the key to economic success so that workplaces
are specifically designed to attract and affirm creative talent
(Hesmondhalgh, 2012). Here, the ideal ‘creative’ may be imagined as a
member of smoothly functioning team of passionate and diverse talents, a
member of a new, ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002). Contemporary
governmental policies—national, regional, industry-driven—have set out
to extend, evaluate and monetise it (Department of Culture, Media and
Sport (DCMS), 2001; Flew, 2012).

Creative work has increasingly been recognised as /work/, with
governmental technologies accounting for creative subjects—artists,
technicians, entrepreneurs—in data sets where earnings and occupations
can be surveyed. In oppositional mode, critical scholars have
increasingly paid attention to creative labour and have raised questions
about the forms of exploitation and exclusion with which it is
associated (Nixon and Crewe, 2004). They frame creative work in relation
to other kinds of exploitative or precarious work, while maintaining a
focus on the distinctive features of the creative (Gill, 2002). In
particular, such research recognises that struggles over the creative
are also struggles over the control of cultural production (Dean, 2008;
Hesmondhalgh and Saha, 2013). But people working in creative fields
often refuse such analyses. Identifying as artists with a vocation, they
often work in what they see as non-creative jobs, perhaps part-time or
intermittently, to fund their creative practice (Menger, 1999). The
distinctions between paid and unpaid work are blurred (Hesmondhalgh and
Baker, 2011), and unpaid positions such as internships may be
institutionalised as a way to get a foot in the door of a creative
industry (Siebert and Wilson, 2013). The language of workplace rights is
frequently marginalised or silenced altogether, and forms of collective
organising such as unionisation are often unavailable or rejected (Blair
et al., 2003). Some government initiatives to develop creative
industries also attempt to address social diversity in terms of equal
access to work and of cultural inclusion and exclusion, but there is not
much evidence of success (Proctor-Thomson, 2013).

In this context, it can be very difficult to articulate claims about
diversity and (in)equalities within creative work. For example, it is
nearly impossible for women to find a forum or space to raise issues of
creative work and gender equality, such as pay, status, recognition or
acknowledgement of family responsibilities (Thynne, 2000). Even if they
are in paid creative work, creatives may accept low pay, extremely
demanding working conditions and precarious employment (Haunschild and
Eikhof, 2009). Such patterns are also seen within established
professions such as architecture, where members often reflect on
architecture as a lifestyle and persona rather than as a job or career.
The construction and negotiation of personal and professional
identities, as well as the performance of creativity through dress and
demeanour, bodily comportment and body art, compound the complex
understanding of what it means to be a creative ‘worker’.

The construction of identities takes varying forms in relation to the
creative. For instance, the creative is typically constructed so that
women do not become the creative stars or geniuses, do not have equal
access to creative work, are not equally rewarded and are subject to
various forms of occupational segregation that reinforce these
inequalities of both recognition and reward (Sang et al., 2014).
Intersecting with gender are constructions of class, ethnicity, age,
disability and sexuality, which complicate and extend privilege and
inequality (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012). However, less is known about
how other marginalised identities experience creative work, and in
particular how gender may intersect with other identities to construct
these experiences. Furthermore, there is poor understanding of how these
intersecting identities may affect who or what is considered creative.
Economic development rhetoric has been influential in claiming that
cities ‘tolerant’ to diversity will attract the ‘creative classes’, but
this claim is frequently undercut by continuing patterns of class,
gender and racial inequalities (Leslie and Catungal, 2012). At the same
time, new creative spaces can operate as sites where claims to cultural
citizenship can be contested by marginalised identities such as sexual
minorities (Yue, 2007) and people with disabilities (Darcy and Taylor,
2009). A critical examination of creativity and diversity therefore
allows us to interrogate and denaturalise both of these concepts: we can
ask how the ‘creative’ comes to be seen as a kind of essence inhabiting
particular kinds of bodies, and also how the ‘diversity’ that is
supposed to generate the creative works seems to rewrite traditional
relations of power.

The special issue invites empirical, theoretical or methodological
papers critically exploring creative work and, in particular, the ways
in which it is diversified. For instance, the gendered construction of
creativity can be seen in analyses of women’s employment within creative
industries and in the ways in which creativity is imagined or
represented in a range of occupations and practices. Intersectional
perspectives regarding how gender intersects with class, ethnicity,
disability and sexual orientation for those working in the sector also
can be explored. Although the special issue is open to any discussion of
diversity in creativity or creative work, explorations of specific work
settings or contexts, for example, architecture, film and television,
comedy, literature, music and design, will be prioritised. An
inter-disciplinary approach is welcome, acknowledging that the
literatures of work in the creative industries, like the sector itself,
have developed in and across a range of disciplines, including cultural
studies, sociology, geography, management and organisational studies.
Contributions also could include explorations of innovative
methodologies for studying and understanding the creative industries,
creative identities and creative labour, such as those employing visual
and ethnographic methods. Research may open up new discourses for
imagining, re-negotiating and managing diversity in creative work,
opening up in turn new opportunities for marginalised groups to lead,
collaborate and develop skills in creative spaces of greater equality.

Scope

·/Embodying the creative/: How is creativity embodied as gendered,
racialised, aged and able? How do organisations do support or discourage
these embodiments, implicitly or explicitly?

·/Imagining and organising diversity in creative work/: What would
decent work in the creative sector look like for women and other
marginalised groups? How do minorities organise in guilds, professional
groups, unions or lobby groups to raise issues of equality in this
sector? How do they organise creative projects with across or within
boundaries of difference?

·/Experiences of women and other marginalised groups in the creative
industries/: Autobiographical and third-party accounts of experiences in
various creative fields can ask questions such as follows: How is
equality approached and negotiated? What challenges have been faced and
what kinds of approaches taken to varying outcomes and successes?

·/Intersectional analyses of working life in the creative industries/:
The complex intersections between different identity categories
sometimes create unexpected effects, both negative and positive. How
does the compounding or intersection of diversity categories in single
cases add to a study of working life in the creative industries?

·/Claiming the creative/: How are ‘creative’ identities allocated and
recognised? How is the ‘super-creative core’ constituted in relation to
the ‘below the line’ people, that is, the ‘crew’, support workers and
administrators? What systems are there of awards, grants, training and
networks, and how are they diversified? Who are the gatekeepers to these
resources and who receives them? Who in a profession or occupation
actually gets to be creative at all, and why?

·/Personal branding and the benefits of difference/: In the creative
industries, standing out as distinct from peers can sometimes be
advantageous in the construction of a creative persona, even when this
difference stems from being part of a marginalised group. How can it
sometimes be beneficial to be in a minority? How does difference link
with constructions of originality and uniqueness in such cases?

·/Authorship, attribution and credit in collaborative work/: Creative
work is very often collaborative, yet the credit is often attributed to
one individual. This is not just a case of unscrupulous individuals
stealing credit, but publications and awards and organisations insisting
on a single creative figurehead. What implications and effects does this
practice have in terms of equality?

·/Exceptionalist discourses/: How do some creative professions frame
themselves as unlike any other profession and entirely incomparable?
What are the unequal consequences of this framing?

·/Anti-management/: There are tendencies in creative professions
actively to resist perceived managerialism, including any kind of
official equity initiatives. How is this resistance exploited by
employers to increase their own profit at the expense of their workers
or to prevent equity interventions?

·/The creative profession as cult/: Colleagues may become the creative’s
only friends, romantic and business partners and family. How does this
exclusive culture engender inequalities?

·/Creativity and vocation/: There is often a sense of ‘calling’ to the
creative professions. What are the effects of such quasi-metaphysical
ideas? For example, are people willing to put up with exploitation and
precariousness because they are dedicated to a larger ideal, one which
frames economic and business imperatives as dishonourable and low-minded?

·/Methodologies for studying gendered creativity/: Explorations of
innovative methods for studying and understanding the creative
industries and creative labour. What methods are most appropriate or
interesting (e.g. visual, ethnographic) for understanding diversity and
creative labour?

Submissions

Papers for the special issue must be submitted electronically between 31
October and 1 December 2015 (please note dates) to SAGETrack at
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/organization. Papers should be no more
than 8000 words, excluding references, and will be blind reviewed
following the journal’s standard procedures. Manuscripts should be
prepared according to the guidelines published in /Organization/ and on
the journal’s website: http://goo.gl/Ukuor0

Workshop

The special issue editors are planning a writing workshop for authors
interested in submitting papers to the special issue to be held at
Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh (Scotland) in the first week of
September 2015.  We will also be offering a skype workshop in September,
date to be advised.  Please contact Kate Sang: (K.Sang /at/ hw.ac.uk)
<mailto:(K.Sang /at/ hw.ac.uk)>  for details.

Early abstract submission

The editors have requested that if posibel authors send them the
abstracts of their proposed papers *by 31 October 2015*. This will
ensure that potential reviewers for these papers are identified prior to
paper submission.

Special Issue Editor contact details

For further information, please contact one of the guest editors:

Deborah Jones: (Deborah.Jones /at/ vuw.ac.nz) <mailto:(Deborah.Jones /at/ vuw.ac.nz)>

Kate Sang: (K.Sang /at/ hw.ac.uk) <mailto:(K.Sang /at/ hw.ac.uk)>

Naomi Stead: (n.stead /at/ uq.edu.au) <mailto:(n.stead /at/ uq.edu.au)>

Rebecca Finkel: (RFinkel /at/ qmu.ac.uk) <mailto:(RFinkel /at/ qmu.ac.uk)>

Dimi Stoyanova Russell: (StoyanovaRussellD /at/ cardiff.ac.uk)
<mailto:(StoyanovaRussellD /at/ cardiff.ac.uk)>

DJ

Deborah Jones, School of Management, Victoria University of Wellington,
P.O. Box 600, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND \ Te Whare Wânanga o te Ûpoko o te
Ika a Mâui, Pouaka Poutapeta 600, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, AOTEAROA \ RH930,
Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Wellington 64-4-463-5731


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