Creative participation in construction firms: bridging creativity and innovation

An intricate evolution of mainstream theories follows the growing need to explain employees’ commitment and engagement. Our understanding of these work-related phenomena and behaviour has improved but creativity and innovation as desired indicators are still often treated as coexisting constructs with very little attention given to a state of willingness of an individual to even consider contributing ideas. In this research we investigate the influence of knowledge and understanding, perceived radicality, personality dimensions, and favouring of ideas on employee willingness to creatively participate in order to trace its existence in propagation of ideas. A total of 76 construction and non-construction professionals participated in between-subject quasi-experiments. We also proposed IPO-based radicality of ideas construct from the viewpoint of employees involved in the processes of transformation. The research findings show that experts with deep understanding of the work are more likely to contribute highly radical ideas to decision-makers than less knowledgeable employees. Furthermore, personal factors that impact employee willingness to creatively participate have been valued higher than organisational factors. Personality dimensions by The BigFive Inventory have shown no effect on willingness to contribute ideas, while favouring of ideas showed a significant effect. In general, the findings show similarities with some studies of consumer willingness to participate in co-creation processes and thus indicate that firms may be studied as dynamic internal markets of ideas.

'Love me or kill me’: Sarah Kane & the theatre of extremes

Monograph on the playwright Sarah Kane

‘Getting known’: Beckett, Ireland and the creative industries

In the context of national and global trends of producing Beckett’s work, this essay will investigate recent productions of Beckett’s drama which originate in Ireland and tour internationally, examining how these relate to the concept of national identity and its marketability, as well the conceptual and material spaces provided by large-scale festival events. In the last few months, Pan Pan has toured its production of All that Fall from Dublin to the Beckett festival in Enniskillen to New York’s BAM. The Gate Theatre, always a powerhouse of Beckett productions, continues its revival of Barry McGovern’s adaptation of Watt; after the Edinburgh festival, the show will play London’s Barbican in March 2013. While originating in Ireland, these productions – those of the Gate in particular – have an international, as well as domestic, appeal. Examining these and forthcoming Gate productions, I query to what extent a theatre company’s cultural origins and international profile may create a perceived sense of authenticity or definitiveness among critical discourses at ‘home’ and abroad, and how such markers of identity are utilized by the marketing strategies which surround these productions. This article will interrogate the potential convergence of the globalized branding of both Beckett’s work and Irish identity, drawing on the writings of Bourdieu to elucidate how identity may be converted into economic and cultural capital, as well as examining the role that the festival event plays in this process.

Interregional migration 'wage premia': the case of creative and science and technology graduates in the UK

We analyze the migration behavior of graduates from UK universities with a focus on the salary benefits they receive from the migration process. We focus on sequential interregional migration and specifically examine the case of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and Creative subject graduates. Our analysis differs from previous studies in that it accounts explicitly for migrant selectivity through propensity score matching, and it also classifies graduates into different migration behavior categories. Graduates were classified according to their sequential migration behavior first from their pre-university domicile to university and then from university to first job post-graduation. Our results show that ‘repeat migration’, as expected, is associated with the highest wage premium (around 15%). Other migration behaviors are also advantageous although this varies across different types of graduates. Creative graduates, for instance, do not benefit much from migration behaviors other than repeat migration. STEM graduates, on the contrary, benefit from both late migration and staying in the university area to work.

Embedding arts and humanities in the creative economy: the role of graduates in the UK

The recent change in funding structure in the UK higher education system has fuelled an animated debate about the role that arts and humanities (A&H) subjects play not only within higher education but more broadly in the society and the economy. The debate has engaged with a variety of arguments and perspectives, from the intrinsic value of A&H, to their contribution to the broader society and their economic impact, particularly in relation to the creative economy, through knowledge exchange activities. The paper argues that in the current debate very little attention has been placed on the role that A&H graduates play in the economy, through their work after graduation, and specifically in the creative economy. Using Higher Education Statistical Agency data, we analyse the performance of A&H graduates (compared with other graduates) and particularly explore how embedded they are with the creative economy and its associated industries. The results highlight a complex intersection of different subdisciplines of the A&H with the creative economy but also reveal the salary gap and unstable working conditions experienced by graduates in this field.

The drowned and the saved: shipwrecks and the 'cursus' of Latin love elegy

Throughout the corpus of Latin love elegy, the imaginary tombs envisaged by the elegists for their own personae and for other inhabitants of their poetic world display a striking tendency to take on the characteristic attributes and personalities of those interred within. The final resting-place of Propertius, for instance, that self-proclaimed acolyte of Callimachean miniaturism and exclusivity, is to be sequestered from the degrading attentions of the passing populace (Prop. 3.16.25–30) and crowned with the poet's laurel (2.13.33–4). What remains of his meagre form will rest in a ‘tiny little urn’ (paruula testa, 2.13.32) beneath a monument declaring the lover's slavery to a single passion (2.13.35–6), and the grave is to be attended, or so he hopes, by the object of that passion herself (3.16.23–4), or occasionally (though he is not so confident of this) by his patron Maecenas (2.1.71–8). Likewise the memorial designed by Ovid for Corinna's pet parrot - an imitatrix ales endowed with the most distinctive foibles of the elegiac tradition - in Amores 2.6, comprising a burial mound pro corpore magnus (2.6.59) topped with a tombstone described as exiguus (‘tiny’, 2.6.60; cf. Prop. 2.1.72, 2.13.33), exhibits an elegiac emphasis worthy of the parrot's human counterparts among Ovid's poetic predecessors.

Writers' rooms: theories of contemporary authorship in portraits of creative spaces

This article analyzes two series of photographs and essays on writers’ rooms published in England and Canada in 2007 and 2008. The Guardian’s Writers Rooms series, with photographs by Eamon McCabe, ran in 2007. In the summer of 2008, The Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival began to post its own version of The Guardian column on its website by displaying, each week leading up to the Festival in September, a different writer’s “writing space” and an accompanying paragraph. I argue that these images of writers’ rooms, which suggest a cultural fascination with authors’ private compositional practices and materials, reveal a great deal about theoretical constructions of authorship implicit in contemporary literary culture. Far from possessing the museum quality of dead authors’ spaces, rooms that are still being used, incorporating new forms of writing technology, and having drafts of manuscripts scattered around them, can offer insight into such well-worn and ineffable areas of speculation as inspiration, singular authorial genius, and literary productivity.

Digital technology and creative arts career patterns in the UK creative economy

The creative industries have attracted the attention of academics and policy makers for the complexity surrounding their development, supply-chains and models of production. In particular, many have recognised the difficulty in capturing the role that digital technologies play within the creative industries. Digital technologies are embedded in the production and market structures of the creative industries and are also partially distinct and discernible from it. This paper unfolds the role played by digital technologies focusing on a key aspect of its development: human capital. Using student micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) in the United Kingdom, we investigate the characteristics and location determinants of digital graduates. The paper deals specifically with understanding whether digital skills in the UK are equally embedded across the creative industries, or are concentrated in other sub-sectors. Furthermore, it explores the role that these graduates play in each sub-sector and their financial rewards. Findings suggest that digital technology graduates tend to concentrate in the software and gaming sub-sector of the creative industries but also are likely to be in embedded creative jobs outside of the creative industries. Although they are more likely to be in full-time employment than part-time or self-employment, they also suffer from a higher level of unemployment.

Object-love at the Science Museum: cultural geographies of museum storerooms

The field of museum geography is taking on new significance as geographers and museum-studies scholars make sense of the spatial relations between the people, things, practices and buildings that make and remake museums. In order to strengthen this spatial interest in museums, this paper makes important connections between recent work in cultural geography and museum studies on love, materiality and the museum effect. This paper marks a departure from the preoccupation with the public spaces of museums to go behind the scenes of the Science Museum in London to explore its rarely visited, but nonetheless lively, small-to-medium-sized object storerooms at Blythe House. Incorporating field diary entries and interview extracts from two research projects based upon the museum storerooms at Blythe House, this paper brings to life the social interactions that take place between museum curators and conservators and the objects they care for. This focus on object-love enables scholars to consider anew what museums are and what they are for, the life of the museum object in the storeroom, and the emotional practices of professional curatorship and conservation. This journey into the storeroom at Blythe House makes explicit how object-love shapes museum space.