Project management in the culture industry: Balancing structure and creativity
Journal article, 2011
The paper presents a study of the Swedish culture industry and emphasises the ability to structure the projects yet enabling openness for emergent properties in project work in the culture industry. While project management in conventional industry risks being routinised or even bureaucratised, the culture industry is demonstrating a persistent ability to navigate between complementary qualities, thereby maintaining a dynamic project management practice. This virtue is captured by the concept of play, based on the duality of rule-adherence and individual and collective creativity. In the culture industry, structured around a series of temporal 'productions' (e.g., a play, a series of concerts, etc.), uncertainty, complexity, and temporality are factors that influence the work. However, the ideology of the culture industry emphasising expression of ideas and creativity enables a project management practice affirmative of emergent conditions. Thus, the work never ossifies into being merely rule-governed procedures but is balancing the two qualities innate to all play.
rules
ideas
culture
complementary qualities
emergent properties
ideologies
temporality
cultural industries
individual creativity
temporal productions
drama
bureaucracy
duality
play
routines
project management
concerts
rule-governed procedures
Sweden
uncertainty
openness
project organisation
collective creativity
emergent conditions
complexity
plays
arts
rule-adherence
Author
Alexander Styhre
University of Gothenburg
Sofia Börjesson
Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Innovation and R&D Management
International Journal of Project Organisation and Management
1740-2891 (ISSN) 1740-2905 (eISSN)
Vol. 3 1 22-35Subject Categories
Business Administration
DOI
10.1504/IJPOM.2011.038862