This article improves our understanding of visibility in relation to gender equity policy in the film and TV industries and beyond, where visibility is typically imagined to be positive or beneficial. Drawing on new empirical data from an internationally comparative study of gender equity policy in film and TV in the UK, Canada and Germany, we identify three imaginaries of visibility in relation to gender equity policies: visibility is imagined as evidencing problems, as providing a solution and as demonstrating action. We show that imagining visibility in these ways limits the scope of gender inequities considered for policy intervention and creates the potential for counterproductive unintended consequences. We argue that advocating for, developing and implementing effective gender equity policy requires challenging and complicating current ideas of how visibility works in policy making. As the visibility of marginalised groups is so central to gender equity, yet rarely approached critically by policy makers, this article makes an important contribution to the literature around equity in public policy broadly.

This paper explores how gendered perceptions of risk drive gender inequality. It does so by applying an Intersectional Risk Theory (IRT) framework to new empirical data on gender equality initiatives in the Canadian screen industries. The paper shows (1) that gendered risk perceptions constrain women directors' work opportunities; (2) that the construction of gendered risk perceptions ("doing risk") is shaped by the screen industry context and social inequalities generally; and (3) that practices of constructing risk perceptions can be disrupted and changed, which creates opportunities for a "re-doing" or "un-doing" of gendered perceptions of risk and offers new analytical perspectives onto the efficacy of gender equality initiatives. By interrogating how perceptions of risk inform decision-making, the paper contributes new understandings of the drivers of systemic and intersectional inequality as a defining characteristic of work and labor markets in the screen industries and in the creative industries more broadly.

This article analyses the lived experience of writers and musicians in order to examine the relationship between motivation and creative work in the creative industries. Moving beyond understandings of creativity as a discrete task or competence, it demonstrates the role of motivation across different stages of a creative process, projects and career stages. It finds that (1) creative workers' intrinsic motivation is often intertwined with extrinsic motivators and relationships; (2) creative workers recognise the value of intrinsic motivation, but are also suspicious that it might isolate them from external realities and internal self-criticism; (3) the experience of creative work processes can be painful and dissatisfying, rather than intrinsically fulfilling; (4) creative workers are aware of these complexities and self-manage their environment to optimise their creative process. We consider the implications of these findings for cultural policy and management, especially when addressing questions of autonomy, power and control in creative work.

This article adapts Jeremy Ahearne's conception of explicit and implicit cultural policy for a novel analysis of contemporary diversity policy in the British film and television industries. It demonstrates how distinguishing explicit and implicit diversity policy enables a better understanding of the policies, practices and strategic actions that impact workforce diversity outcomes. We provide an in-depth analysis of the different types of intervention that have been used to increase workforce diversity in the film and television industries in the UK since 2012. We then examine the arguments used to justify increased workforce diversity, focusing on the 'business case for diversity' and the logics which underpin it. Drawing on our own research as well as on industry reports and secondary literature, we examine the explicit and implicit workings of these policies and how they affect workforce diversity outcomes. We argue that the implicit/explicit dichotomy nuances and improves our understanding of the competing and contradictory forces that shape strategic courses of action regarding workforce diversity in the film and television industries, and provides a more nuanced conceptualisation of diversity policies and their outcomes.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the cultural economy poses a significant threat to inclusion and workforce diversity. This article combines pre-COVID-19 research with emerging industry and policy evidence to identify where key impacts on inclusive practice and, consequently, workforce participation and advancement in the cultural economy are likely to occur. The article demonstrates how considering the cultural economy's typical business models and resultant work and employment practices allows understanding that the inclusion and diversity impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be driven by more than workers' differing abilities to buffer short-term income insecurity. The article highlights four areas relevant to inclusion and workforce diversity that research and policy responses to COVID-19 should attend to in revising existing and designing new responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The creative media industries are incredibly influential in shaping twenty-first-century lives, but their workforce fails to reflect the diversity of societies overall. Using the creative media industries in the United Kingdom as an example, this chapter examines the ambiguous reality behind the glossy, attractive image of media work. It discusses how social inequalities in media work arise and what might be done to tackle them.

This paper discusses the research use of creative workers' publicly available self-presentations such as documentaries or social media posts. In so doing it contributes to our understanding of how creative workers might fruitfully be researched. The paper, firstly, argues that self-presentations can provide valuable and rich insights into creative workers' self-understanding, and thus can be of interest to creative industries researchers. Secondly, using the example of a film produced by Austrian product designers, the paper then demonstrates why researchers need to consider the processes through and contexts in which self-presentations are generated. The paper explains why self-presentations may not be treated in the same way as the first person accounts traditionally generated for social science research, and presents recommendations for how self-presentations might form parts of rigorous research designs.

The review systematically evaluates the research on workforce diversity in the United Kingdom’s film, television, animation, video games and visual effects (VFX) industries published between 2012 and 2016. It gives the most complete picture to-date of what is known about the screen sector workforce [Taken from Executive Summary].

This article explores how a knowledge ecology framework can help us better understand the production of gender knowledge, especially in relation to improving gender equality. Drawing on Law, Ruppert, and Savage, it analyses what knowledge of gender inequality is made visible and actionable in the case of the UK screen sector. We show: (i) that the gender knowledge production for the UK screen sector operated with reductionist understandings of gender and gender inequality, and presented gender inequality as something that needed evidencing rather than changing; and (ii) that gender knowledge was circulated in two relatively distinct circuits, a policy‐ and practice‐facing one focused on workforce statistics and a more heterogeneous and critical academic one. We then discuss which aspects of gender inequality in the UK screen industry remained invisible and thus less actionable. The article concludes with a critical appreciation of how the knowledge ecology framework might help better understand gender knowledge production, in relation to social change in the UK screen sector and beyond.

Executive Summary of the Workforce Diversity in the UK Screen Sector Report. The review systematically evaluates the research on workforce diversity in the United Kingdom’s film, television, animation, video games and visual effects (VFX) industries published between 2012 and 2016. It gives the most complete picture to-date of what is known about the screen sector workforce.

This article proposes a new conceptual framework for analysing diversity and opportunity in the cultural and creative industries as outcomes of specific decisions. It suggests the following three analytical foci: (1) the points at which decisions influence an individual's opportunities for workforce participation and advancement; (2) individual workers as objects of decisions, in particular with respect to (a) an individual's likelihood of being considered in a particular decision process in the first place and (b) what individuals present for decision makers to decide upon; and (3) the decision makers and the context of their decision making. Using this conceptual framework, this article reviews and synthesises existing evidence from academic and industry research to ascertain what is currently understood about the factors that influence decisions about workforce participation, promotion and admission into higher education, and which research gaps remain. By focusing on decisions, this article transcends current analysis of diversity and opportunity in the cultural and creative industries, which is largely concerned with how social and economic capital intersects with work and employment practices to shape workers' opportunities. The article argues that a decision-making focus enables an important shift of perspective for understanding diversity and opportunity in the cultural and creative industries and how they might be improved.

Several months ago, when Jakob, Timothy and I were planning this spring's issue of the JBA, we realised that we would probably have two articles ready for publication on professional people-architects and fashion designers-regarded as "creative."So, in an attempt to overcome the randomness of journal submissions and to create a thematic flow for our readers, we decided to seek opinions on creativity and innovation from people in the business world and from academics who make it their business to conduct research on them.The results are here before you.Approach more than half a dozen people from different occupational and cultural backgrounds and request them to write about creativity and innovation, and a journal editor looking for textual coherence is asking for trouble!What follows is an eclectic mixture of opinions about the nature of creativity and innovation in virtually all forms of business life: from organizational management to crowdsourcing, from branding to stardom, from workforce neurodiversity to

Research on creative work typically focuses either on precarious work and employment or on creative workers’ dedication to their work and profession. The account of UK broadcaster and writer Charlotte presented in this article bridges these two foci. Charlotte talks about finding work in the cultural industry she loves, moulding a portfolio of jobs into a coherent creative career, and being a woman and working mother in broadcasting and media. Her account gives rich insight into how creative workers exercise individual agency in the face of their industries’ structural constraints and how they pursue careers both because of and in spite of what the cultural and creative industries offer.

assumption of much of this debate is that management implies planning, organising and controlling processes of production and marketisation whereas working creatively requires freedom from tight schedules and space for imagination, unpredictable developments and play (e.g.Bilton and Leary 2002, Davis and Scase 2000, DeFillippi et al. 2007, see Thanem and Vaerlander in this volume for a discussion of whether office design can help provide such spaces for creativity).Where creativity is to be managed in an at least partly economic context, i.e. in relation to markets for product, finance (be it venture capital or public funding) or labour, the allegedly conflicting logics of management/business on the one hand and of creativity, artistic ambition or cultural innovation on the other tend to be the focus of the discussion.But while management and creative practice do follow different logics (Eikhof and Haunschild 2007), a growing number of studies shows that their relationship is by no means one of pure antagonism.As for instance Barrett (2004), Eikhof (2010) and Grabher (2002) show for software production, theatre and advertising, deadlines, finite budgets and management control can provide the boundaries that condense creative practice and facilitate innovative explosions and progress.Consequently, in their introduction to this volume, Bilton and Cummings expose dichotomist conceptualisations of management and creativity as too reductionist and as limiting our understanding of the real-life complexity in both management and creative practices.They call for conceptual and empirical approaches that capture the complexity of management and creativity.This chapter heeds the call for an appreciation of such real-life complexity by analysing the work and production context that creativity and management are embedded in.The analysis focuses on a sector in which creativity is the key resource: the creative industries, or those industries 'supplying goods and services that we broadly associate with cultural, artistic, or simply entertainment value' (Caves 2000: 1).In these industries, constraining, let alone crushing, creativity would endanger the success of the respective creative enterprise, be it for-or not-for-profit.These industries therefore provide a particularly useful empirical setting for analysing the management of creativity in relation to its complex context of work and production.Focusing on work and production uncovers an important aspect of managing creativity in the creative industries that has so far not been systematically addressed: the transorganisational character of work in these industries.In various ways, work and production in the creative industries transcend organisational boundaries and link the individual directly with structures at the macro-levels of field and society.Similarly, organisational practices link directly into such macro-structures, for instance where individual performance appraised in industry-wide processes of reputation-building rather than in intra-organisational exercises.The implications of transorganisational work and production in the creative industries for the management of creativity have so far not been explored, and the chapter will use the examples of recruitment and retention to discuss them.In so doing the chapter demonstrates how understanding the management of creativity requires understanding much more than an allegedly antagonistic, or at least ambiguous, relationship between management and creativity.In order to analyse the real-life complexities of managing creativity in the creative industries, this chapter, firstly, focuses on the organisation of creative work and production.Drawing on an extensive range of empirical studies, work in the creative industries is characterised as transorganisational: as happening in and in relation to, but simultaneously transcending, organisations.Secondly, the chapter discusses how the transorganisationality of creative work and production influences the management of creative human resources.The chapter concludes by identifying avenues for future research and by discussing how findings from the creative industries can inform our understanding of creativity and management more widely.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to critically explore media representations of opting-out and how these present particular professional identities as appropriate career choices for women. Through an examination of a UK women's magazine the paper looks at how opting-out in favour of work based on traditionally female housewifery skills and attributes is communicated and justified in the texts.Design/methodology/approach– The paper adopts a social identity approach to a qualitative content analysis of 17 consecutive monthly magazine features.Findings– While the magazine frames women's career choices as unlimited, identity is presented as gendered, biologically fixed and therefore inescapable. The magazine presents opting out as an appropriate route for women based on a “female identity” grounded in traditional female attributes of caring, hosting, baking, etc. However, this leaves women's work open to potentially negative interpretations of these traditional female attributes. The texts appeal to a post-feminist discourse and imply that problems experienced by women in public sphere careers are partly the outcome of the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s.Research limitations/implications– Future research should study how readers interpret the texts.Originality/value– The paper demonstrates the explanatory potential of using of a social identity approach in the analysis of media texts.