Abstract
This book is a welcome addition to a growing field of evaluation studies. Edited by Brian Moeran and Bo T. Christensen, both at Copenhagen Business School, Exploring Creativity: Evaluative Practices in Innovation, Design, and the Arts brings a wealth of empirical research on evaluation practices of creative work. An understanding of these practices, and their manifestation in cultural forms, is detailed in ten chapters on a wide range of ethnographic studies in the creative industries: from publishing (Clayton Childress; Alačovska), fashion (Vangkilde), music (O’Donnell), pottery (Moeran) and technology (Krause-Jensen) to advertising (De Waal Malefyt), film festivals (Mathieu and Bertelsen), the culinary field (Christensen and Strandgaard Pedersen) and the art market (Faurholt Csaba and Ger). The book’s main contribution is to situate creativity as an ongoing process subsumed under different forms of evaluation. The various chapters explore a set of key questions: what types of evaluation are carried out, who is in charge of such evaluations, and why these need to take place. In the end, all chapters agree with the same line of enquiry: evaluations are crucial in creating distinctions and cultural hierarchies, differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ creative work. The book starts with a preface by Howard S. Becker, followed by an editors’ introduction, ten chapters and an afterword by Keith Sawyer. Becker’s preface raises a number of points in the study of evaluations of creativity. Thinking about how creative work emerges from within organizational contexts, he asks, who are the individuals empowered to make decisions about its value? This leads on to the related question: what are the factors that can potentially block positive evaluations? As the various chapters show, a brand’s image, someone else’s judgements within the organization or outside it are some of the factors that facilitate or block the emergence of positive evaluations.
The editors’ introduction goes some way towards exploring these questions in some detail. It is well structured and provides a useful summary of all the chapters. How do individuals in the creative industries describe their work? How are creative ideas generated and developed? An important point the editors refer to is the intricate link between creative production and the evaluation of creativity. Creative work is a ‘product-as-process’, constantly assessed and subjected to evaluations, sometimes contradictory, in a variety of settings and organizations. Material, temporal, representational, spatial, social and economic conditions influence the ongoing process of creative work. As a collective activity, it is embedded in struggles over what counts as legitimate evaluations. Novel ideas are put to the test by hierarchically ranked individuals, managers, editors and reviewers, and by consumers. But the ultimate arbiter of evaluation is ‘symbolic consecration’: an array of judges, evaluators, who engage in the creation and distribution of awards, prizes, forms of symbolic consecration that lend further legitimacy to the process of evaluation. How these award mechanisms operate, and the extent to which they influence the consumption of creative products, is a key question addressed by a number of chapters in the book. A couple of chapters are illustrative of how these questions are pursued, and exemplary of the detailed, varied methodological designs used to answer such questions.
Moeran’s own chapter on the Ursula faience series – named after its designer Ursula Munch-Petersen – is particularly interesting for its thorough analysis of the various forms of evaluation of the Ursula dinnerware series. Drawing upon a range of interviews with the designer, managers and engineers, Moeran’s account reveals how evaluations of the conception, design, manufacture, distribution and sale of the Ursula dinnerware series are ultimately shaped and framed within conflicting corporate cultures and styles of management. The initial idea to produce the Ursula series occurred while the designer was working for Bing & Grøndahl; after its takeover by Royal Porcelain Factory, the company became what is now known as Royal Copenhagen. In the new company, management could not make a decision as to whether they agreed or not with her suggestion to produce ‘a simple series of pots’ for serving food. This was a sharp contrast between the corporate culture of Bing & Grøndahl where management kept in close contact with artists, even though their work would not necessarily sell well. Conversely, in Royal Copenhagen there was a lack of contact between artists and management, and the selection of artists’ works took place in their creators’ absence. In management teams that consisted of individuals coming from two different corporate cultures, there was disagreement over the evaluation of Ursula’s work. Those from the former Royal Porcelain Factory described it as a ‘little primitive’, while the team from Bing & Grøndahl saw it as ‘really exciting and imaginative’ (p. 124). In fact Royal Copenhagen’s management did not want Ursula to go into production (p. 133), partly because they had trouble envisioning how the series was to be positioned vis-a-vis the company’s other products. The chapter demonstrates how evaluations of the Ursula series were shaped by different corporate cultures.
The creation of a fashion collection by five young designers working under the supervision and evaluation of the creative director of Hugo Boss’s Orange, the more experimental and casual brand in Hugo Boss, is the topic of the stimulating chapter by Kasper Vangkilde. The data presented here is based on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in the working environment of the designers, which allows him to describe in detail the evaluation processes they were subjected to in their task to translate an intangible idea into a concept and tangible fashion collection. How the designers come to terms with the ‘representational conditions’ of Hugo Boss’s Orange brand in their various exchanges with the creative director, and how the worth of these exchanges and evaluations are shaped by different, and unequal, structural positions occupied by the designers vis-a-vis the director are some of the findings revealed in this chapter. I particularly enjoyed the author’s comment on trying to make sense of some of the work the designers presented to the creative director: ‘I simply could make neither head not tail of when the designers were talking about imagined human consumers and when non-human brands…’ (p. 74). The author explains his initial confusion by resorting to anthropological theory and the notion of animism to elaborate on how the Hugo Boss Orange brand, a non-human entity, can take on human dispositions such as intellectual, emotional and spiritual attributes.
Keith Sawyer’s afterword is particularly welcome in a discussion of some of the general characteristics of creative evaluation studies. The issue of where ‘evaluative regimes’ come from is mentioned, as he notes, in some of the chapters. For example, O’Donnell’s analysis of a new type of music performance, four string quartets performing simultaneously, describes how players collectively develop a new evaluative regime. Similarly, the creators of acclaimed Danish gourmet restaurant NOMA are attempting to create a new evaluative regime, the natural and local movement also called ‘the wild kitchen’ (Christensen & Strandgaard Pedersen). Sawyer concludes that despite the fact that all chapters are dealing with evaluative practices that have a history, they do not ‘provide a historical and situated context for the evaluative practices observed’ (p. 291). This is particularly the case, he adds, for the chapter on NOMA where this ‘historical trajectory is not discussed … giving the impression that NOMA appeared de novo, and that the founders came up with the idea for natural, local, and Scandinavian cuisine on their own’ (p. 291). I do not see the lack of historical contextualization of this particular form of evaluation in the culinary field as problematic, as the aim of the chapter is to capture a specific and current stage in the formulation of evaluations. However, I concur with Sawyer’s argument about the need for research investigating the origins and changes of evaluation regimes over time.
This book is exemplary in presenting a wealth of data on the processes of value creation and its evaluation, diffusion, assessment and institutionalization across a range of creative industries settings. At the same time, it sets the ground for further work on interdisciplinary theorizing of the causal relationships, the specific mechanisms that lead to the acquisition of an evaluative regime and, most importantly, of what is particularly distinctive about the acquisition of evaluative regime(s) in the field of creative production.