Creative industries are a growing and globally important area for both economic vitality and cultural expression of industrialized nations. The growth and dynamism of creative industries depends on "continuous innovation" that must manage inherent tensions such as novelty to attract consumers and sustain artistic expression and familiarity to aid comprehension and stabilize demand for cultural products. In this volume, the macro-structural conditions that shape creative industries - their institutional, categorical and structural dynamics- are examined to provide an overview of new trends and emerging issues in scholarship on this topic. Creative industries offer products and services that range from the prosaic to the sublime and provide meaning to our lives, and this volume features a wide range of examples, from advertising, to architecture, art markets, Champagne wine, fashion and music. Contributors examine topics such as the micro-interactions of brokerage relations; how actors transform a brokerage role from control to co-production to enact creative leadership; how investors provide legitimacy to the new categories such as abstract art; how technological disintermediation creates alternative category processes such as authenticity; how social relations shape social evaluation; how prototypical producers can trespass categories and avert negative evaluation; how personal styles enable social evaluation; and how the ambiguity of a category, such as Swing music, facilitated its adaptability and longevity. The volume concludes with an Afterword examining research on creative industries as a form of cultural product and a category in itself.

The cultural industries have been considered unique and out of the mainstream, not a subject for developing general theory, and therefore relatively understudied by organizational scholars. We argue it is no longer the case that cultural industries are so unique representing small markets and industries of little matter to research in the sociology of organizations. Cultural industries are now one of the fastest growing and most vital sectors in the U.S. and global economies (U.S. Census Reports, 2000). This growth is fueled in large part by the nature of the symbolic, creative, and knowledge-based assets of cultural industries. In this volume, the manuscripts recognize that the functions of the symbolic, creative, and knowledge-based assets of cultural industries are also characteristic of the professional services and other industries as well. The manuscripts illustrate how the boundaries become blurred between cultural and other related industries that also rest upon the endeavors of and knowledge of creative workers. These dynamic interactions in the commercial landscape between the cultural, professional services, and other industries provide a richer context for the authors in this volume to examine changes in a specific market or industry, and also to advance our understanding of the institutional transformation of organizations.

Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets shines unprecedented light on the activity of talent representatives and production professionals in the American and French film and television industries. Agents and other talent brokers, studio executives, independent producers, casting directors, and film offices-all operate and interact behind the scenes in ways that are consequential to the making of artistic careers and cultural products. But even as these professionals play a crucial role in the entertainment industry, their activity is usually invisible and relatively unknown. This collection of empirically grounded contributions by established and up-and-coming American and French scholars reveals their day-to-day reality. It presents how entertainment industry professionals work and what they experience, demonstrates the ways in which they build relationships with artists and other counterparts, and examines the role they play in shaping the content of film and television projects. Taken together, the chapters put the brokerage of talent and content in comparative perspective. They also challenge taken-for-granted approaches to the study of cultural industries and explore the complex intertwining between commercial and artistic logics.

The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries is a reference work, bringing together many of the world's leading scholars in the application of creativity in economics, business and management, law, policy studies, organization studies, and psychology. Creative industries research has become a regular theme in academic journals and conferences across these subjects and is also an important agenda for governments throughout the world, while business people from established companies and entrepreneurs revaluate and innovate their models in creative industries. The Handbook is organized into four parts: Following the editors' introduction, Part One on Creativity includes individual creativity and how this scales up to teams, social networks, cities, and labour markets. Part Two addresses Generating and Appropriating Value from Creativity, as achieved by agents and organizations, such as entrepreneurs, stars and markets for symbolic goods, and considers how performance is measured in the creative industries. Part Three covers the mechanics of Managing and Organizing Creative Industries, with chapters on the role of brokerage and mediation in creative industry networks, disintermediation and glocalisation due to digital technology, the management of project-based organzations in creative industries, organizing events in creative fields, project ecologies, Global Production Networks, genres and classification and sunk costs and dynamics of creative industries. Part Four on Creative Industries, Culture and the Economy offers chapters on cultural change and entrepreneurship, on development, on copyright, economic spillovers and government policy. This authoritative collection is the most comprehensive source of the state of knowledge in the increasingly important field of creative industries research. Covering emerging economies and new technologies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of the arts, business, innovation, and policy.