Creativity: from discourse to doctrine?

This article reports on work in progress on UK government policy on the creative industries. It argues that the central, animating idea of ‘creativity’ has moved centre stage over the past decade, as Labour Party policy has evolved during its period in power since May 1997. The central contention is that from being a discourse that itself emerged from an earlier discourse on the cultural industries, ‘creativity’ has subsequently been elaborated to become a virtual doctrine, and is now uncritically reproduced across government reports and the wider policy community, including most academics. To illustrate the argument, reports dealing with the reengineering of business, the refocusing of education, and the next stage of firing up the ‘creative economy’ are all analysed. Indications of forthcoming work on this research project are given in conclusion.


Introduction
This is a short report on work in progress. It centres on the idea of 'creativity', which is of presently of key importance for current UK government thinking about the 'creative economy'. 'Creativity', I shall argue, has established itself as a hegemonic term in an increasingly elaborated framework of policy ideas. Although my focus is on the UK, we are addressing a body of thought that is now increasingly international in scope.
The ideas in question are influential and set the terms for thought and action across a number of policy fields. Not for nothing has David Puttnam, a key 'New' Labour figure, said that 'the importance of the creative industries was quickly enshrined as an article of faith'. ii An analysis of New Labour discourse reveals an underlying credo -itself a fit subject for the critique of ideology. A concerted effort is under way to shape a wide range of working practices by invoking creativity and innovation. These attributes are supposed to make our societies and economies grow in a fiercely competitive world.
At present, official thinking circulates in a dominant culture of largely uncritical acceptance. Alongside the elaboration of the doctrine of creativity by the government policy apparatus is a specialist discourse of academic analysis. If it is now fashionable to see the creative economy as pivotal to the wider economy, this view is certainly not limited to policy makers. iii As creativity has moved centre stage, it has also become extraordinarily banal. The mark of its present hegemony is that it is also increasingly ubiquitous. 'British creativity', for instance, ensures market success for Thornton's, the chocolate manufacturers, so their advertising tells us. Not on its own, to be sure: cocoa and sugar are added ingredients. In a district nearby to mine in Glasgow, there is a 'creative hairdresser'. We who stay without must ponder what wondrous transformations occur under the stylists' hands. My inbox is regularly assaulted by spam offering courses to explore my creativity (and temptingly, to develop my ludic qualities) in New York City and various European locations. So far I have managed to resist. Such examples could easily be multiplied.

The creative economy as a discourse
In the UK, the discourse of creativity has been developed by government for the past decade and is currently being bound into a conception of the 'creative economy'. Official thinking is a discourse in the sense that it is a self-sustaining outlook increasingly driven towards consistency. It has become a doctrine by virtue of being an object of unceasing advocacy by its proponents. It is now an obligatory starting-point for those who wish to enter into dialogue with policy-makers.
In an astute analysis of 'New' Labour's political language, Norman Fairclough has demonstrated how it embodies a particular worldview, linking 'assumptions about the global economy that lead to an emphasis on competition between Britain and other countries, which foregrounds a project of "national renewal" designed to improve Britain's competitive position'. 'Creativity' -like 'knowledge', 'skills' and 'enterprise'have been key tropes from the start. iv Although the formal beginning was marked by the installation of Tony Blair's 'New' Labour government of May 1997 -much of the ground was prepared well in advance.
As Jim McGuigan has noted, there were two dimensions to the incoming Labour government's approach to cultural policy. v One was symbolic -a projection of a new mood but in reality a kind of regressive modernisation whose key symbol (until it became manifestly absurd and discredited) was the Millennium Dome at Greenwich. vi This aspect, associated with marketing and public relations, treated the nation as though it were a brand. The other face was that of 'cultural policy proper', which promoted creative industries not only as an assertion of national identity but also as a key form of economic competition. In part, these ideas reflected an earlier phase of Labour Party thinking, which had taken 'cultural industries' to be a central instrument of economic and urban regeneration -a line to some extent also pursued by the Conservative Party. vii It was at this moment that tropes were coined that -with minor modifications -have survived for a decade of Labour rule. For instance, the idea of the UK as a 'creative hub' for the whole world economy is still very much in play.
Nicholas Garnham has argued that Labour Party policy was deeply influenced by the Thatcherism that preceded it. viii He also sees creative industries policy as an outcome of earlier 'information society' thinking and has suggested that arguments about international competitiveness and deregulation characteristic of the Thatcher period have been carried through from the 1980s to the present day.
New Labour made the creative industries part of their pre-election economic strategy in the run-up to the May 1997 general election. What was then labelled the 'cultural economy' was seen as a key and growing segment of the national economy and as offering comparative advantage. In the earlier idiom, the 'cultural industries' were touted as offering a 'creative base' for the UK. This transitional period foreshadowed the melding of these ideas into 'creative industries'. The range of activities then identified as relevant was to be formalised by what came later -the 'mapping' of the creative industries.
After the 1997 election, the UK government set up the Creative Industries Task Force. It was intended to secure collaboration between government and industry, thereby producing a context for sustainable growth in the newly designated creative industries. ix The Creative Industries Mapping Document was published in 1998. x In a formulation that has lasted a decade (and, as we shall see, only now being openly rethought) creative industries were defined as 'those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation though the generation and exploitation of intellectual property'. xi The text went on: 'These have been taken to include the following key sectors: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio.' The core purpose of the Task Force was 'to recommend steps to maximise the economic impact of the UK creative industries at home and abroad'. xii The logic of economic policy has prevailed.
The pursuit of a creativity policy became a national project, 'branding' the UK as at the global cutting-edge. Two key policy nostrums have been continuously in play. First, the UK is imagined as a competitive nation for which developing a 'knowledge economy' is key. This line has become particularly emphatic with the realisation that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), present an increasing threat to high-end 'creative' activities. Education and training therefore become key policy arenas. Second, government intervention in the market, and also in establishing conditions favourable to enhancing company performance, is justified as helping to secure the knowledge base. Increasingly, the elaboration of a policy framework to enhance the performance of the creative industries is leaching into other sectors, as 'creativity' becomes a generalised value in itself.
Official reports: elaboration of a doctrine 'Creative industries' discourse has been shaped gradually into a doctrine. Although there has been a division of labour between several departments of the UK state over the creative economy, there is increasing consistency in the elaboration of ideas and arguments, as well as extensive cross-referencing between reports currently being published. This process accord with Fairclough's observation that the New Labour project 'is constantly talked into being, new language is constantly being found to bring these elements into a coherent whole'. xiii The key ministries have been the Treasury, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). The Treasury is the UK government's key spending department. For a decade, its direction was in the hand of Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer; he subsequently succeeded Tony Blair as Labour Prime Minister in June 2007. Garnham has noted the importance of 'so-called "endogenous growth" theory which attributed the relative international competitiveness of nations and industries to the institutional structures supporting innovation, part of which was the provision of suitably trained human capital'. This has been Brown's approach. xiv Surrounding -and in this case supporting and legitimising -the efforts of government is a wider apparatus of 'governance'. As Jean-Gustave Padioleau (2003: 183-184) has argued, this is the space in which the so-called policy community deploys arguments and makes interventions, entering the game of influence through the production of reports, the setting up of committees, contributing to the media agenda, and so forth. xv This is the terrain of what Padioleau calls the 'practical arts', where the meanings produced for public consumption are meant to be common, accessible, transmissible, and able both to guide and constrain conduct. It is a world in which the formula prevails. Those conscripted into the policy intelligentsia don't simply air opinions but provide evidence that aims to convince and seek to install a new architecture for public action. xvi The production of the discourse of creativity fits into this analytical model. In what follows, I briefly consider three cases.

Re-engineering businesses
It was no accident that Chancellor Brown commissioned The Cox Review, published on 2 December 2005. In his foreword, Sir George Cox, chairman of the Design Council, states that the key issue for 'the UK's long-term economic success' is 'how to exploit the nation's creative skills more fully'. xvii The Review was shaped by an awareness of the competitive standing of the 'emerging economies', reflecting another spin of the creativity wheel eight years on from its first public outing.
Cox identified two key areas: 'building a strong relationship between businesses and creative professionals, and strengthening the links across university departments and with industries'. He focused on small to medium enterprises (SMEs) 'which account for 50 per cent of UK gross domestic product (GDP) and provide much of its entrepreneurial base'. xviii The Review recommended extensive consciousness raising in the boardroom, more networking between diverse sectors, establishing links between universities and SMEs, and also using the media to develop a general awareness of the benefits of creativity and university degree courses to produce new creative specialists.
The Cox Review is unusually clear in its attempt to define the dominant terminology: '"Creativity" is the generation of new ideas -either new ways of looking at existing problems, or of seeing new opportunities, perhaps by exploiting emerging technologies or changes in markets.
"Innovation" is the successful exploitation of new ideas. It is the process that carries them through to new products, new services, new ways of running the business or even new ways of doing business.
"Design" is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end.' xix This conceptual architecture sets out idealised relations between ideas, their exploitation and business practice. Whether this is how things work in practice is a matter for empirical investigation. The slogan about innovation as 'the successful exploitation of ideas' has become the mantra of the Office of Science and Innovation in the DTI whence, I was told, it apparently migrated via the recruitment of senior staff from the global design and business consulting firm, Ove Arup.
Cox's Review is intended as a wake-up call: the UK will not necessarily retain its competitive advantage as an advanced economy when an emerging world is catching up and even overtaking the country in the service industries. The UK's strengths in scientific invention and the creative industries are not being carried through 'into consistently world-beating products and services' because of a lack of awareness, confidence, ambition, risk-taking and clarity. xx Public action is needed, such as new programmes, incentives for R&D, the formation of specialists, and the use of procurement and networking. xxi The Cox Review's discourse combines: -an economic nationalism that recognises certain cultural virtues (considered here as creative capabilities) as key to competition on the world stage; however, this is not a simple essentialist nationalist hurrah as 'it's dangerously complacent to think that the UK's creative capabilities are simply an enduring national characteristic'; xxii -a conception of the state and its various agencies as enablers in creating a business climate conducive to greater competitiveness; -a commitment to creativity as a fundamental attribute that requires the nation to undergo widespread 'cultural change' across the fields of production and consumption; xxiii -a particular vision of an 'enterprise economy' where creativity becomes a general feature of economic life, as summed up in the mantra: 'Creative businesses are creative throughout.' xxiv

Making education 'creative'
Cox's advocacy of cultural change in business has been linked to current official thinking about education, as is shown by my second example.
All Our futures was published in September 1999 by the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. xxv Chaired by Professor Ken Robinson of Warwick University, one of the UK's home-grown creativity gurus, the report was commissioned by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) and the DCMS. The DCMS's then Secretary of State was Chris Smith, an early advocate of the idea of a 'creative Britain'. xxvi The committee's membership comprised educationists, artists, scientists and business people. Focused on provision for under-16s in formal and informal education, the report responded to policy-makers' wish to 'develop "human resources", and in particular to promote creativity, adaptability and better powers of communication'. xxvii Robinson and his committee defined creativity as 'Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value.' xxviii A 'creative education' is therefore intended to develop 'young people's capacities for original ideas and action'. xxix According to All Our Futures, 'All people have creative abilities and we all have them differently. When individuals find their creative strengths, it can have an enormous impact on self-esteem and on overall achievement'. Robinson's report focuses on bringing out the potential that lies within us all. Creativity is not to be identified solely with the arts or the achievements of elites and the gifted. Instead, 'all people are capable of creative achievement in some area of activity'. This is Robinson's 'democratic definition', which sidesteps the question of socially structured inequality. xxx There is a clear affinity between the notion that all are possessed of creativity and the idea that in businesses all personnel should be creative or, at the very least, support the creative endeavour of those specifically designated as 'creatives'. In All Our Futures, the demands of the job market are fully in mind. In the 'new knowledge-based economies' what is wanted are workers with creative abilities, people 'who can adapt, see connections, innovate, communicate and work with others'. xxxi Robinson subsequently built on the arguments of All Our Futures, moving the focus to 'a broader and longer view of creativity in business and in education'. xxxii The argument is both socially inclusive and market-orientated and links strongly to the government's competitiveness agenda. Maintaining that 'everyone has creative capacities', Robinson's interest lies in how these become 'the greatest resource available to an organisation' and in how a 'systematic strategy to generate a culture of innovation across the whole organisation' might be pursued. xxxiii For Robinson, creativity in corporate settings means fostering 'an atmosphere where risktaking and experimentation are encouraged rather than stifled'. Like Cox, Robinson argues that 'Corporate creativity should be understood as a systemic function of the organisation…A strategy to promote corporate creativity and innovation should engage all areas of the organisation'. xxxiv Robinson advocates interdisciplinarity, overcoming departmental boundaries, mixing different kinds of knowledge and expertise, and loosening up hierarchies. All of this implies a cultural change 'where creative abilities are valued and harnessed to the organisational objectives'. xxxv In turn, this requires open-mindedness to experimentation and play and a refusal to be governed by short-termism and the bottom line. Change in companies' and public organisations' cultures presupposes changes 'upstream' in the education system, not least recognition of the effects of the categorical systems used in schooling. 'Creativity depends on interactions between thinking and feeling, and across different disciplinary boundaries and fields of ideas. New curricula must be evolved which are more permeable and which encourage a better balance between generative thinking and critical thinking in all modes of understanding'. xxxvi We have to move beyond linear rationalism, Robinson believes, and develop a new ecology of human resources.
Robinson's thinking has been influential. Over 100,000 copies of the summary Of All Our Futures were distributed. His ideas have set the context for the Creative Partnerships programme, officially described as 'the Government's flagship creativity project for schools and young people', which has focused on English schools in selected deprived areas. Established in 2002, this is funded by the DfES and the DCMS and managed by Arts Council England. This programme has spawned its own meta-discourse on what constitutes creativity. xxxvii The emergent doctrine of educational creativity has influenced ideas about how young people might be harnessed to the creative economy. It has led to yet another report, Nurturing Creativity in Young People, published in July 2006 and commissioned by the DCMS and the DfES. xxxviii This took its cue from James Purnell who, as Minister for Creative Industries, spoke at an Institute for Public Policy Research conference in June 2005. As cited in the report's preface, he proposed that the UK become the 'world's creative hub' and asked 'what more we can do to nurture young creative talent' in the educational system, suggesting that work was needed on 'a clear set of assumptions which will help to inform the basis of our future policy on creativity'.
Paul Roberts, Director of Strategy for the Improvement and Development Agency, authored Nurturing Creativity. The report constructs a highly self-referential universe. For instance, its section on 'new pathways to creative industries' is based on the Cox Review's call for UK business to become more competitive. This part was written by Tom Bewick, Chief Executive of Cultural and Creative Skills, the sector skills council set up to develop training and business skills in a wide range of creative industries. Bewick proposes an apprenticeship model and other ways of linking secondary qualifications to the market place but notes the lack of 'a support infrastructure in which creative careers can be enhanced or sustained over the long term'. xxxix The report also bases itself on the DCMS's original definition of the creative industries, cited above, and its conception of creativity is taken directly from Robinson's 1999 report. Key proposals include developing a 'personal portfolio -a creative portfolioincorporating both formal and informal learning, with the learner at the centre. Established by peer review, hosted and promoted by the Creative Industries (sic), physical or virtual in form, it would support personalised learning, assessment for learning and routes into the Creativity (sic) sector'. xl Charles Leadbeater (a noted guru of the creative economy and adviser to the Blair government) contributed the section on the creative portfolio.
Recognition of the range of activities undertaken by young people outside school was connected to a comprehensive set of proposals for embedding creative activity into schoolwork, partnerships with practitioners, pathways to the creative industries and changes in frameworks and regulation to reinforce this shift.

The Creative Economy Programme
My third, and last, example concerns the Creative Economy Programme, a series of investigations and reports conducted under the aegis of the DCMS. Government interest was first signalled by a conference on the theme in London launched by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell, in October 2005. Jowell used the occasion to generalise -for the EU as a whole -an argument already exceedingly familiar in the UK. Noting the global competition faced by the EU, especially that coming from China and India, Jowell set out the line echoed only a couple of months later in the Cox Review: 'We need to concentrate our efforts on where our strengths lie -in adding value through innovation and creativity…If we don't increase our pace of innovation and investment, it will only be a matter of time before Europe's position in the global economy is surpassed…Every industry must look to become a creative industry, in the broadest sense of the word.' xli In November 2005, the DCMS launched the Creative Economy Programme, setting up seven working groups. Their composition reflected established practice throughout the development of creative industries policy of relying on a relatively small coterie of advisers. Industry observers believed that the groups were too dominated by public sector bodies and agencies. xlii The Creative Industries Programme (CEP), was described by a DCMS press release issued on 9 August 2006 as 'the first step in achieving our goal of making the UK the world's creative hub'. Its central purpose has been to raise consciousness and assess the value of public systems and programmes. Each working group produced a report. The designated areas were: infrastructure; competition and intellectual property; access to finance and business support; education and skills; diversity; technology; evidence and analysis. The CEP has gone through two phases and (at this time of writing) the DCMS intends to publish a Green Paper in June 2007.
Given the limited space available, I shall illustrate current thinking with two examples, drawing on the reports of the Infrastructure Working Group and the Evidence and Analysis Group.
In the discussion of infrastructure, ideas first mooted in the 1970s and 1980s made a comeback but in a different context. The keywords are 'global competitiveness' (an orientation to the world economy), 'convergence' (making links across separate activities and boundaries) and 'stimulation'. xliii The latter idea refers to the development of 'core cities' -once a nostrum at the heart of municipal cultural policy in an earlier era of Labour Party thinking. xliv 'Creative hubs' have replaced 'clusters' as the 'in' phrase but the fundamental idea is the same. Both underline the 'significance of place as the main driver of creativity in the UK'. xlv London and the South East are seen as the key locus to which all other creative centres need to be more effectively linked. Competition with the BRIC countries -repeatedly signalled by Gordon Brown and other ministers -is presented as the spur to action. The UK 'needs to reposition itself as the knowledge broker of the global creative economy'. xlvi Indeed, to achieve global recognition, London's initiation of a World Creative Economy Forum is bruited.
To bring together the necessary capabilities, a rationalising structure is requirednamely the so-called 'Creative Grid', described early on as the group's key recommendation. This has three elements. First, it draws together 'web-based intelligence' on the entire UK creative industries scene. Second, to secure the strategic goals for culture and creativity in the policy machinery, a 'cross-departmental creativity working group' is needed in government along with a 'core cities creativity working group'. And third, a policy of 'developing a creative milieu in creative places' is advocated (which is highly redolent of the Cox Review). Ensuring 'a ready supply of talent' and acting as the 'world's creative broker' are additional actions proposed, as is ensuring that the various spaces that nurture creativity interact with the agencies that might facilitate development of the creative economy. xlvii Here is a familiar mix of solutions mostly in play for the past two decades. Other working group reports focused on the need to reform business practices, cross-refer to the Roberts report, and emphasise the importance of skills development.
New Labour has incessantly proclaimed the importance of 'evidence-led policy'. Consequently, the Evidence and Analysis Group's work is of particular interest as it reflects government's attempt to assess its own needs for credible data. Creative industries policy has not been able to draw on reliable official sources. xlviii It has taken almost a decade to acknowledge openly that the DCMS's mapping documents have lacked adequate detail for a creative industries policy. xlix The DCMS has tried to conceptualise the creative economy during the course of the CEP. In a first pass, 'production', 'services' and 'arts and crafts' were each distinguished as groupings within the creative industries with their own characteristics, although overlaps were recognised. l And then, in the run-up to publication of the Green Paper, further rethinking occurred. The creative economy was next envisaged as constituted by four concentric circles. li Moving from the centre to the periphery these were labelled as follows. First, core cultural fields with commercial outputs possessed of a 'high degree of expressive value' (such as painting and theatre) that invoke copyright protection. Second, cultural industries such as film, publishing, music and video games that involve 'the mass reproduction of expressive outputs' and are based on copyright. Third, creative industries and activities (such as design and software) for which 'the use of expressive value' is essential, as is the performance of the wider economy. And fourth, there is the rest of the economy, which is 'dependent on the expressive outputs generated by' the inner circles, for instance, the design of the Lexus or the iPod. The re-entry of the 'cultural industries' into government discourse is noteworthy.
The conception of the economy outlined above connects ideas about creativity in the global economy as a necessary attribute both of competitive businesses and of an educated workforce.

Taking one's distance
This report has sought to demonstrate how several distinct objects of policy have become interrelated by the emergent doctrine of creativity. In addition to this, I have sought to show how, as policy thinking unrolls and the machinery of government gathers up wider circles of adherents by involving them in consultations or in conscripting them to the cause, the system of ideas has gained further currency and has become more fully elaborated. If the doctrine has undergone refinements, these have been conducted from within the tent.
Few voices are presently being raised in public even in mild criticism (although our initial fieldwork has suggested that some of the key actors in the sector well understand the expedient nature of needing to sign up to creativity as a mobilising clarion-call). A dissenting note has been sounded by Professor Geoffrey Crossick, Warden of Goldsmiths College London, a creative arts university. Crossick was the Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and brought its predecessor body into the UK government's overall science policy apparatus. With this change of status, the arts and humanities became more explicitly governed by ideas of 'knowledge transfer' -and closer to the priorities of the science policy machinery -than before. Crossick, against this current, has argued that a simplistic and uniform model of knowledge transfer has been imposed on how universities relate to businesses. What is needed, he suggests, are not models for 'knowledge transfer' but rather proper recognition of how creative networks operate and how knowledge generation is not linear. Instead of knowledge transfer, we need 'spaces in which something can happen'. lii Whatever his reservations, Crossick does not disavow the language of creative industries. Rather he replaces the top-down attempt to regulate and manage the conditions for creativity with the liberal-romantic idea of a happening-space. Such circumscribed dissent shows that it remains exceedingly difficult to escape the tentacular embrace of current doctrine and this compulsion the underlines the need to produce a radical critique of the origins and impact of the discourse of creativity. Two financial journalists, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, have made a vigorous start. Britain, they argue, is being deluded by 'top-notch exponents' of 'bullshit' about the significance of the creative industries. The size of the 'knowledge economy' has been inflated and hyped. Key industries -film, television, music, and games -have lost ground in global competition. The scale of employment in the creative industries has been overblown. In their refusal to take claims about the creative industries seriously, they combine economic argument with a blunt dismissal of 'government propaganda'. liii However, others have undoubtedly absorbed the government's line and this has practical implications.
That is because the doctrine of creativity is now an animating ideology for the so-called digital age. The Creative Economy Programme may be seen as a the latest attempt to rationalise inter-departmental cooperation, to make effective the flow of business intelligence, to encourage networking, to bring together dispersed creative clusters and to foster talent. All of this is geared -in the approved lingo -to making the UK a global creative broker.
Of particular interest for my own research is in what form ideas about creativity and innovation become organisationally embedded and to what extent they shape the actual management of creative practice. Several distinct elements need to be analysed and related. Amongst these are first, the broad sweep of policy thinking and its origins; second, the new solutions offered by policy-makers as they encounter obstacles; and third, how ideas about creativity are actually interpreted in the practice of production.
As the work proceeds, the aim is to analyse this process by focusing on two key organisations operating in the broadcasting and film sectors whose strategies are differently framed by government policy -namely, the BBC and the UK Film Council. liv Initial findings suggest that the doctrine of creativity is open to -what shall we say?creative interpretation.

Bionote
Philip Schlesinger is Professor in Cultural Policy at the University of Glasgow, where he directs the Centre for Cultural Policy Research. He is currently working on an AHRCfunded study of 'creativity' policy and practice in the UK. His most recent book, coedited with John Erik Fossum, is The European Union and the Public Sphere (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).