Abstract
ISBN 978073918806-4 (hbk), 9780702249556 (pbk), 9780702250989 (pdf), 9780702250996 (ePub), 980702251009 (kindle): Listing the ISBN identifiers for Stuart Cunningham’s book is a powerful reminder that today is a day of transition. The 600-year-old printed codex form – the customary subject of reviews in publications like the European Journal of Communication and for which scholars customarily write – has lost its monopoly. Now journals exist only online, and others (not least the EJC) are usually accessed online; scholars publish through blogs, personal and institutional websites and other novel and hybrid forms of publication; books (like Cunningham’s) come out in various forms and commentators (like me) reach back to the age of incunabula, the late C15th, for an analogous instance of fluidity, experimentation and incoherence in publishing. But while form in the age of digital incunabula is (re)newly protean, content remains locked in a rather conventionalised idiom. Curriculum vitae (CVs) cite books; research audits count refereed journal articles and careers thrive (or not) on the basis of these familiar, and somewhat reified, outputs and on the evaluations and enumerations which authors score.
Cunningham’s book not only exists in a variety of forms but starts to break with the familiar scholarly content forms. It evokes some of the range and richness of C18th writing where sermons, essays, letters, notes, queries, table talk and so on provided writers with a range of discursive forms and strategies, and, consequentially, readers often had/have to make their way through splintered, fragmentary and aphoristic texts. True, //hidden_innovation//policy,_industry_and _the_creative_sector is no Tristram Shandy or Tale of a Tub, but the writer is not well served if his text is enumerated and evaluated as if it were what we – reviewers and readers – are accustomed to when using (reading, evaluating and enumerating) a scholarly monograph published by a well-reputed university press. Rather, Cunningham’s text, which is centred in the author’s heartland competence of screen studies, mixes the idiolects and modes of the textbook, the blog, the list, the scholarly monograph and the sermon.
The overt structure of Cunningham’s ‘book’ is the familiar one of the scholarly monograph in codex form securely topped and tailed with the (well done) finding aids of contents, index and bibliography (the latter particularly notable) and, in a rather unconvincing gesture to the scholarly form, a couple of pages of endnotes. And the meat of it comes in six chapters (The Policy Journey, Creative Enterprise, Public Service Media, Creative Labour, Creative Cities, Policy and Research Praxis), an introduction and a coda. In and through these, the author (for I, quaint old-fashioned thing that I am, still believe there are such people) declares his intention to ‘peel back the veil’ (p. 4), which has obscured our understanding of the relationship between the creative industries and innovation.
The peeling back of the veil works well when Cunningham is in expository mode (when //hidden_innovation// reads like a textbook): his book will be mined as a guide to the construction of the field in the anglosphere (with, echoing an Australian official policy stance, gestures towards accounts in English of practice around the Baltic and Yellow seas) and as a review of much relevant scholarly and policy literature. Cunningham is also good on telling the story of how the creative industries/innovation discourse has been mobilised by social-democratic governments as a legitimising politico/economic narrative. But here, there are intriguing gaps – though Cunningham is far from alone in leaving these particular gaps as his story unfolds. Non social-democratic threads in the creative industries/innovation story are left unpulled – Marc Porat and Daniel Bell figure in neither narrative nor bibliography. And though Schumpeter appears in one of these, his take on innovation, the central role he attributes to entrepreneurship (and he was neither new nor alone in this – Mill, Weber and Baumol might also be adduced 1 ) in generating and implementing innovation hardly figures. This matters because the paradigm Cunningham advances and inhabits downplays the role, impact and effectiveness of what is labelled as neo-liberalism in fostering innovation generally and constructs the creative industries as a paradigmatic case in which the rejection of neo-liberal nostrums (at least in the instances on which he focuses) have been beneficial. This proposition may (or may not) be true, but the framework on which Cunningham’s analysis is constructed is not put to any rigorous test. Is the putative link between innovation and the creative industries necessary or contingent? Is intervention generally beneficial? And, for me, the chief disappointment of //hidden_innovation// is the lack of rigour in the way its argument is constructed.
In The Theory of Economic Development (Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung) Schumpeter claimed that ‘the fundamental phenomenon of social development [is] the carrying out of new combinations we call “enterprise”; the individuals whose function it is to carry them out we call “entrepreneurs”’ (Schumpeter, 1961: 74). These are, precisely, the activities which neo-liberalism seeks to foster and which require (in that narrative) stripping away the deadweight imposed by an over-active state. Yet Cunningham considers neither the relative importance of innovation under neo-liberal and statist regimes nor the character and extent of innovation in the creative sector as compared to others. And no more is the relative incidence and fertility of innovation in the creative as compared to other sectors. What of the claims of Schumpeter and Baumol that innovation is general (is the creative sector special in advance of or behind a general game?), that entrepreneurs are the key agents (of course, these can be in publicly owned as well as privately owned institutions)? and so on – unfortunately, Cunningham seldom enables the reader to get outside conventionalised wisdom which rosily conjoins, as an ensemble of mutually supporting hurray terms, the concepts of the creative sector: innovation, enlightened social-democratic state patronage with neo-liberalism as a powerful reinforcing boo term.
All this is a great pity for it limits the utility of //hidden_innovation// to that of a well-constructed compendium of, and source of reference to, the course of development of the conventional wisdom of the anglosphere’s scholarly mainstream on the matters under consideration. To be sure, there are sharp local insights offered as this problematic is narrated but I found, to my regret, scant evidence of an overall analytical skeleton, of critical interrogation (whether to confirm or refute matters not) of the central cluster of propositions advanced by the author or of consideration and rebuttal of ‘awkward’ data and analyses that might limit and qualify the power of the central, somewhat taken for granted, tenets and propositions of the doctrine to which Cunningham ably provides an exposition.
At this point in all reviews, the reviewer should turn to reflection and reflexivity: is the review of the book written or of the book that he or she would like to have been written? Like most reviewers, I have to plead guilty to falling to the latter temptation and invoking a spectre of the book I had hoped had been written. Refocusing on what Cunningham has actually written, I think what is provided is a rich mix of blog, textbook and breviary. Breviary? Yes, much of //hidden_innovation// (and here the chapter on Public Service Media is canonical) reads like the penultimate draft, produced by the talented amanuensis (already storming to empurpled heights) of a latter day Bishop Duckmanton, for a cathedral address to ordinands in St Reith’s seminary. It puts the party line lucidly and backs it up with relevant (if selectively chosen) arguments and instances. //hidden_innovation// is thus misrecognised if read as a scholarly monograph – rather it should be read as if it were an 18th-century sequence of sermons authored by a master of doctrine. It will work surpassingly well with the faithful and the elect (not necessarily the same of course) – and the rest can, and will, go to hell. And now it is you, the reader, who must determine whether Collins or Cunningham is navigating via By-Pass Meadow and which of these pilgrims are on the right route to the Wicket Gate of scholarship. Reading //hidden_innovation// is the only way you will be able to tell so, give it a go.