Creative enterprises

It follows from the ambitiousness and scope of understandings of the nature of creative industries that there is a corresponding diversity in the nature of creative enterprises. If garage rock bands and weekend craft stalls through to some of the world's biggest 'content' multinationals – AOL TimeWarner, News Limited, Bertelsmann, Vivendi and the rest – equally fit the 'creative enterprise' bill, any examination of the way their modes of activity and enterprise work is bound by necessity to be nimble, while needing at the same time to set out the ranges and types of enterprise across the sector. This Section's approach to the field is not principally through organizational studies of different types of business (for which see Hesmondhalgh 2002: Ch 5; and see Section 6). Instead it looks at how creative enterprise has been and might be viewed through a policy and industry development perspective. Taking both a descriptive and analytic approach, it divides the policy and industry development perspective into 'culture', 'services', and 'knowledge'. These approaches are beginning to serve as possible rationales for state support of the creative industries, as well as the sector's own understandings of its nature and role. Creative enterprises benefited from a cultural industries and policy 'heyday' around the 1980s and 1990s, as the domain of culture expanded. But this moment is being transformed by the combined effects of the 'big three' – convergence, globalization and digitization – which underpin a services industries model of industry development and global regulation. This model, despite dangers, carries advantages in that it can mainstream the creative industries as economic actors and lead to possible rejuvenation of hitherto marginalized types of content production. But new developments around the knowledge-based economy point to the limitations for wealth-creation of efficiency gains and liberalization strategies that operate only at the micro-economic level; the classic services industries strategies. Recognizing that such strategies won't undergird innovative, knowledge-based industries, governments are now accepting a renewed intervention role for the state in setting twenty-first century industry policies. Creative enterprises are beginning to be seen, and to see themselves, in the light of these new frameworks for innovation and knowledge-based industries, which may be the most likely to advance the sustainability and positioning of the cutting-edge end of the creative industries into the future. This Section therefore includes both a descriptive account of the diverse nature of creative enterprises, seeking to create a useful taxonomy of their activity, and also a normative argument about policy frameworks and strategies that are or could be used to advance the viability and growth of creative enterprises.