Table Of Contentsociology of the arts
Persistent Creativity
Making the Case for Art, Culture
and the Creative Industries
PETER CAMPBELL
Sociology of the Arts
Series Editors
Katherine Appleford
Kingston University London, UK
Anna Goulding
University of Newcastle, UK
Dave O’Brien
University of Edinburgh, UK
Mark Taylor
University of Sheffield, UK
This series brings together academic work which considers the pro-
duction and consumption of the arts, the social value of the arts, and
analyses and critiques the impact and role of cultural policy and arts
management. By exploring the ways in which the arts are produced and
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It highlights the important relationship between individual, social and
political attitudes, and offers significant insights into the ways in which
the arts are developing and changing. Moreover, in a globalised soci-
ety, the nature of arts production, consumption and policy making is
increasingly cosmopolitan, and arts are an important means for building
social networks, challenging political regimes, and reaffirming and sub-
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Peter Campbell
Persistent Creativity
Making the Case for Art, Culture
and the Creative Industries
Peter Campbell
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK
ISSN 2569-1414 ISSN 2569-1406 (electronic)
Sociology of the Arts
ISBN 978-3-030-03118-3 ISBN 978-3-030-03119-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03119-0
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The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done
is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is
there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already
of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things;
neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with
those that shall come after.
(Ecclesiastes 1:9–11)1
1 “Extracts from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which
are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge
University Press.”
To my first reader
Preface
This book mirrors my academic career thus far. I first encountered the
recently established UK government ‘Department for Culture, Media
and Sport’, and its stated concern of developing ‘creative industries’,
whilst studying a module on ‘Leisure in Modern Britain’ as an under-
graduate in the late 1990s. A decade later as a PhD student, I found
myself researching cultural policy and the development of these creative
industries in more detail. Another decade on, as a full-time academic
continuing to research this field, I now lead an undergraduate module
of my own on ‘Culture, Economy and Cities’, attempting to explain
such matters to students mostly unborn when I began my own stud-
ies. This book considers how over the course of this twenty year period
the concept of ‘creativity’, and attempts to leverage its apparent power,
became increasingly prominent. Whilst a range of critiques have been
made of this concept, and whilst at points it seemed vulnerable to crisis,
creativity has shown a remarkable persistence.
This book therefore attempts to understand and explain this persis-
tence. It considers the development of an ‘agenda’ around creativity and
looks into how this agenda is validated and applied. It demonstrates
that although this ‘Creativity Agenda’ became particularly prominent
ix
x Preface
during the 1990s, it is not an entirely new phenomenon, but rather
represents the intensification of a range of historical precursors. Once
established, this agenda deploys the idea of creativity in myriad ways,
which are examined here in terms of their mutual coherence. Given
that this era also saw an increased concern with the notion of ‘evi-
dence-based policy’, this book considers how the case is made for art,
culture and the creative industries, the challenges this evidence-making
task presents, and the role of specific actors in establishing forms of evi-
dence which substantiate and shape the Creativity Agenda, enabling its
persistence.
In addition to considering the persistence of certain conceptions of
creativity, and the role of evidence in this, the book also considers the
application of the Creativity Agenda in the specific site of Liverpool,
England, demonstrating how the city draws on this agenda, and in so
doing has helped to further its development. Despite a dominant ‘suc-
cess story’ around creativity, however, it is argued that there is a need
to consider this story more precisely, and to continue to question the
nature of policies and methods in this field, lest the more problematic
aspects of the Creativity Agenda also persist, as they have to date.
~
The completion of this book has relied on a range of support. Firstly,
the support of the UK Research Councils has been vital. My doctoral
research, during which I first explored some of these issues, was funded
as part of an AHRC/ESRC Impact Fellowship in Cultural Policy and
Regeneration, and I was able to develop these ideas—particularly those
considered in Chapter 4 on the nature of the methods used to make
the case for arts and culture—due to funding from the AHRC Cultural
Value Project. Some material in this chapter has previously been pub-
lished as:
Campbell, P. Cox, T. & O’Brien, D. (2017) The social life of measure-
ment: how methods have shaped the idea of culture in urban regeneration.
Journal of Cultural Economy, 10(1), 49–62.
The material from this article has been revised and is reused here
under the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 License. This book
would also not exist without a period of research leave generously
Preface xi
provided by my academic home, the Department of Sociology, Social
Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool. I would not
wish to set myself the mammoth task of listing all my colleagues, both
within the University and elsewhere, who have been of support in the
completion of this book, so I will restrict myself to singling out for spe-
cial acknowledgement those with whom I have been fortunate enough
to collaborate with directly in publishing work on these subjects so far:
Tamsin Cox, Stephen Crone, Dave O’Brien, Mark Taylor and Stuart
Wilks-Heeg. I cannot fling enough appreciative adjectives in your direc-
tion, but these names represent simply the tip of an iceberg of academic
support: if you are reading this, you know who you are. Finally, my par-
ents indicated that they deserved some acknowledgement for helping
me to cart my belongings into the house in which this book was mostly
written, but I owe them thanks for much more than that, as they surely
know.
Liverpool, UK Peter Campbell
