Creating economy: enterprise, intellectual property and the valuation of goods

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’, and within the latter, the creative industries, and 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? Such questions have long provoked scholars interested in law, economics and sociology. This book offers a fresh approach to this topic within the creative industries through a focus on intellectual property. We follow IP and its associated rights (IPR) as they journey through the creative economy, showing how IP/IPR shapes creative products and configures the economic agency of creative producers. We argue that it helps to manage risk, to settle what is valuable, to extract revenues and protect future profits. It is the central mechanism in organising the market for creative goods. Most importantly, we show 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. The 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 precarity in creative industries and will be of interest to scholars and policymakers alike.