“Valley co-creation” – exploring the emergence of a cultural product in an entrepreneur-driven value network: Case study: Black Weekend festival

The interconnected domains are attracting interest from industries and academia, although this phenomenon, called ‘convergence’ is not new. Organizational research has indeed focused on uncovering co-creation for manufacturing and the industrial organization, with limited implications to entrepreneurship. Although convergence has been characterized as a process connecting seemingly disparate disciplines, it is argued that these studies tend to leave the creative industries unnoticed. With the art market boom and new forms of collaboration riding past the institution-focused arts marketing literature, this thesis takes a leap to uncover the processes of entrepreneurship in the emergence of a cultural product. As a symbolic work of synergism itself, the thesis combines organizational theory with literature in natural sciences and arts. Assuming nonlinearity, a framework is created for analysing aesthetic experience in an empirical event where network actors are connected to multiple contexts. As the focal case in study, the empirical analysis performed for a music festival organized in a skiing resort in the French Alps in March. The researcher attends the festival and models its cocreation process by enquiring from an artist, festival organisers, and a festival visitor. The findings contribute to fields of entrepreneurship, aesthetics and marketing mainly. It is found that the network actors engage in intimate and creative interaction where activity patterns are interrupted and cultural elements combined. This process is considered to both create and destruct value, through identity building, legitimisation, learning, and access to larger audiences, and it is considered particularly useful for domains where resources are too restrained for conventional marketing practices. This thesis uncovered the role of artists and informants and posits that particularly through experience design, this type of skilled individual be regarded more often as a research informant. Future research is encouraged to engage in convergence by experimenting with different fields and research designs, and it is suggested that future studies could arrive at different descriptive results.

Social class as a factor for the construction of a musician’s identity : The Musician’s social background and identity questionnaire (MSBIQ) – a cross-sectional comparative quantitative online survey research study of music students at two higher education institutions in Finland

There is currently little empirical knowledge regarding the construction of a musician’s identity and social class. With a theoretical framework based on Bourdieu’s (1984) distinction theory, Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) theory of ecological systems, and the identity theories of Erikson (1950; 1968) and Marcia (1966), a survey called the Musician’s Social Background and Identity Questionnaire (MSBIQ) is developed to test three research hypotheses related to the construction of a musician’s identity, social class and ecological systems of development. The MSBIQ is administered to the music students at Sibelius Academy of the University of Arts Helsinki and Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, representing the ’highbrow’ and the ’middlebrow’ samples in the field of music education in Finland. Acquired responses (N = 253) are analyzed and compared with quantitative methods including Pearson’s chi-square test, factor analysis and an adjusted analysis of variance (ANOVA). The study revealed that (1) the music students at Sibelius Academy and Metropolia construct their subjective musician’s identity differently, but (2) social class does not affect this identity construction process significantly. In turn, (3) the ecological systems of development, especially the individual’s residential location, do significantly affect the construction of a musician’s identity, as well as the age at which one starts to play one’s first musical instrument. Furthermore, a novel finding related to the structure of a musician’s identity was the tripartite model of musical identity consisting of the three dimensions of a musician’s identity: (I) ’the subjective dimension of a musician’s identity’, (II) ’the occupational dimension of a musician’s identity’ and, (III) ’the conservative-liberal dimension of a musician’s identity’. According to this finding, a musician’s identity is not a uniform, coherent entity, but a structure consisting of different elements continuously working in parallel within different dimensions. The results and limitations related to the study are discussed, as well as the objectives related to future studies using the MSBIQ to research the identity construction and social backgrounds of a musician or other performing artists.