Listening to the locals: exploring how cultural norms persuade actions of new creative industry entrepreneurs

This research advances the explanation of behaviour of creative art, design and communication practitioners. It uses notions of receiver persuasion and gratification as analytic tools to understand perceptions of people starting businesses in the creative sector. The study shows the importance of the personal perceptions of the cultural message sender and that sender-recipient tensions among creative art, design and communication practitioners are detrimental to the development of the government’s enterprise culture. The entrepreneurially unusual responses of such practitioners to enterprise culture norms indicate that a subculture of entrepreneurial practice might exist.

Blending notions from cognitive anthropology, cultural schemas and audience reception of culture to explore art, design and communication practises makes the methodology and focus of this work original. It borrows multidisciplinary perspectives of communication and enterprise to examine perception themes of creative practitioners. The paper asserts that although individual reception and acceptance of norms in the enterprise culture operates through reciprocal benefits, the basis of that reciprocity differs from mainstream entrepreneurs. Creative and cultural policy issues arise from this paper. This is because people responsible for implementing government enterprise initiatives at a local level need to engage with creative art, design and communication practitioners with support of a very different and specific kind. The paper was presented at the Cultures and Contexts 2007 Conference and appears in its proceedings.

The paper will be developed further for submission for publication in the Creative Industries Journal.