Barbara Townley – författare

Creativity is at the vanguard of contemporary capitalism, valorised as a form of capital in its own right. It is the centrepiece of the vaunted 'creative economy', the creative industries, and is increasingly a focus of public policy. But what is economic about creativity? How can creative labour become the basis for a distinctive global industry? And how has the solitary artist, a figment of the romantic thought, become the creative entrepreneur of twenty-first century economic imagining? This book offers a fresh approach to this topic within the creative industries through a focus on intellectual property. It follows IP and its associated rights (IPR) through the creative economy, showing how it shapes creative products and configures the economic agency of creative producers. IP helps to manage risk, settle what is valuable, extract revenues, and protect future profits. It is the central mechanism in organising the market for creative goods. Most importantly, it shows that IP/IPR is crucial in the dialectic between symbolic and economic value on which the creative industries depend; IP/IPR hold the creative industries together. This book is based on a detailed empirical study of creative producers in the UK, extending the sociological studies of markets to an analysis of the UK's creative industries. In doing so, it makes an important, empirically grounded contribution to debates around creativity, entrepreneurship, and uncertainty in creative industries, and will be of interest to scholars and policymakers alike.

Reason, and the need to Be Rational, are essential dimensions of society and the organizations we live and work in. Yet the 'rationalization' of working and administrative processes, or the 'rationality' studied in social sciences, is all too often, used, understood, and interpreted in an extremely narrow sense.Reason's Neglect does three things. Firstly, it argues that rationality is a leitmotif of organization studies, but one that has often been neglected. Secondly, it deploys Foucault's work to recover the neglected dimensions of rationality. In doing this, it allows for a revisionary exploration of key subjects in organization studies: organization theory, bureaucracy, technology, culture, practice, etc. Finally, the book presents the case of new rational management techniques being introduced in an organization, allowing individuals to 'speak for themselves', and examining how they respond to these innovations, and how they make sense of them.Arguing that rationality should be seen as disembedded, embedded, or embodied, each chapter goes on to explore a different aspect of reason, such as economic, bureaucratic, technocratic, institutional, or contextual. Clearly written and structured, yet an engaged and challenging approach to the study of organizations in society, Reason's Neglect is an iconoclastic book.

What are the challenges and opportunities of managing people in creative industries? How are the tensions between creative and commercial pressures mediated? The creative industries are an area of increasing economic importance. Yet creative industries and creative-based organizations are rife with problems such as whether and how control of the creative process should be exercised; the extent to which knowledge of creative production may be made explicit; and how the 'connection' between producer and consumer should be mediated. In Managing Creativity a team of experts from a diverse range of fields - including management, fine art, music, the internet, design, theatre and publishing - discuss these and other problems concerning the relationship between management and creativity. Developing an appreciation of these problems is theoretically productive, not only because it throws light onto our understanding of creative-based organizations, but also because it can be revelatory about organizations more generally.