Article summary (thanks Fernando!)
Article Reference:
Banks, M., A. Lovatt, et al. (2000). “Risk and trust in the cultural industries.” Geoforum 31(4): 453-464.
Research goal
How risk and trust are defined, experienced and negotiated by cultural entrepreneurs in Manchester
• How trust facilitates and counters risks
• How the city contributes to business practices and everyday operations
Risk, trust, and the cultural sector
Cultural industries (CI)
• Symbolic and ephemeral goods and values
• Subjective rationalities
• Signs, meanings, and senses of style
• Innovative, entrepreneurial, flexible, ideas driven
• Impact the city economy
• Cheap workspaces; the city fringe
• Cheap rents, short contracts, a lot of sub-letting relying on dense networks
• Networks, clusters, embedded knowledge, informal infrastructures
• Fertile empirical context for exploring risk and trust
Risk (Beck, 1992; Adams, 1995)
• From an objective/scientific rationality to a more plural understanding
• Uncertainties of today paradoxically created by the very growth of human knowledge (e.g. global warming, nuclear disasters)
• Individualization of society as traditional structures dissolve
• Key institutions are losing their foundations
• Forcing individual autonomy, “biography of choice”, or new forms of collective
• Risks impacts as is perceived and handled by different social groups
• Risks are culturally constructed
• People develop systematic ways of dealing with insecurities
• Renegotiation of social structure
Trust (Giddens 1990;1991)
• “Active trust” in new social relations in “post-traditional” society
• New forms of social solidarity replace the old
• Social solidarity amid pressures of individualization
• Reliance on internalized meanings based upon lived experiences
• “Opening out” of the self to the other
• Subjective decisions and consciousness and identity formation of individuals and groups
Methodology
• A single-case of cultural entrepreneurs in Manchester
• Fashion, music, design, and promotion industries
• Interviews with 50 entrepreneurs
• How entrepreneurs handle risk and build trust, and how the social and the spatial relate to a city in transformation
Handling risk
• As CI are in subjective and volatile markets of aesthetic judgements and creative relevance, they operate in a distinct and distinctive level of risk
• Financial risks
• Investment for start-ups come more from subjective knowledge than tangible resources
• Creative risks
• Becoming stale or creatively null
• Firms expansion counters some risks (administrative) but can jeopardize personal and creative control
• Some firms decide to stay small to take advantage of creativity and spaces of leisure
• Awareness of self, product, and market
• Infrastructure risks
• Expert systems (e.g. banks) can be hostile to CI as they are not not prepared for them
• Lack of trust and personal risk is stronger due to lack of formal support structures
• Need to develop informal and social networks of trust
Building trust
• Heavy reliance on personal relations of trust as lack of formal infrastructure makes CI more vulnerable
• Creativity and symbolic knowledge are primary concerns
• Intellectual property is major concern
• Ideas are most the valuable, if not the only, economic resource
• Primary value is symbolic resonance, which is difficult to safeguard
• Dense social relations of trust develop in informal ways
• “Mentors,” friends, word of mouth, networking and interpersonal relation with the clients
• Responses to “detraditionalized” risks
Spaces of risk and trust management
• Constellation of rich culture and small entrepreneurs sharing knowledge and expertise, paying low rents have been crucial to improve the development of start-ups in the cultural sector
• Spatial interaction offset risk and trust
• Dense social and spatial matrices
• Feeling of belonging and cohesive place attracts cultural entrepreneurs
• Sense of place
• “Café forums provide a sort of forum to allow that to breed […] Art graduates find that their first exhibition is not in an art gallery, you know, it’s in a café bar” (Interviewee)
• External, social and professional ties within a small city area
• Consumption spaces, events, alliances favour collectiveness
• “Idea factories” that produce new initiatives and collaborations
• Fabric of the city enables particular forms of creative interaction
Conclusion
• Senses of risk and trust are constitutive of the whole and economic and social basis of cultural entrepreneurship
• In countering risks, new creative forms emerge
• New ties of trust break industry boundaries becoming part of the creative process leading to unforeseen collaborations and and/or new cultural products
• Personal and professional risk lead to new relationship of trust and collaboration
• Risk and trust are embedded within unique working practices
• Negotiated in informal contexts, social networks, and social spaces outside the formal sector
• Central to choices not only in business but lifeworld more generally
• Meanings in urban space can become recognized by others in possession of appropriate social and cultural capital, promoting wider impact
• The city is no longer only vertically integrated but open to MSE in clusters across the city
• Cheap rent districts of the city fringe are seen as indispensable resource to develop ideas, projects, and markets
• CI can offer potential to create employment and help consolidate new product bases essential for restructuring urban economies