Ana Alacovska

Free time, Free lunch, Free Labour: Produsage of Travel Guidebooks

Based on ethnographic research, the paper examines the complex interplay between the production and consumption of travel guidebooks as cultural artifacts capable of socializing labour. Travel guidebooks are not ordinary consumer products fully controlled by the producers that exist as defined, fixed and complete versions and reversions on the market. On the contrary, in their attempt to be reliable and trustworthy representation of the ever-changing reality of the travel destination travel guidebook became palimpsest, increasingly amorphous and protean artifacts, continuing and continuous work-in-progress.

To adequately curb complexity of such a hybrid, intertextual and knowledge-intensive protean genre, guides are being produced by a network of cooperating people – ‘travel experts’ who work together and organize the work around joint knowledge of genres’ conventions (writers, editors, cartographers, photographers). However, no matter how strenuously a handful of in-house ‘experts’ tried to represent the morphing reality of travel destination, the printed guidebook remained bound by the ontological limitedness of the language and the narrative to sustainably capture the versatile multifaceted reality. A built-in obsolescence is intrinsic to the guidebook, which becomes out-fashioned, out-dated and therefore defective and unnecessary, as soon as a new print edition hits the market. To make up for the ontological boundedness and live up to the self-professed reputation of objectivity and immediacy, the guidebook industry has traditionally striving to harness the all-encompassing and panoptic knowledge, ‘mass intellectuality’ of a multitude of readers.

Within the digital gift economy, where commodities and gifts exist not in antagonism but in symbiosis, the free exchange/potlatch of time, ideas and services is a precondition for commodification of information and content. The freebies and free gifts are the central pillar of the guidebook economy that kept travel writers/editors motivated for constant professional, ‘alienating’ cultural production and provided a method for tackling the ontological gap between the reality and the language.

Trine Bille

Labor Market and Education for Artists and the Creative Industries

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the labor market for artists and in the creative industries more broadly: How important is the wages for the supply of labor in the creative industries? How is wage elasticity compared to other industries? How important is a formal education for job and earnings in the creative industries? How are the careers of people with a creative education?

Alper and Wassall (2006) present an overview of the economic, mainly empirical research concerning the labor market of artists. Different types of studies can be distinguished: theoretical models of artistic career processes, qualitative interviews and data, retrospective surveys and panel data based on surveys (either true panel studies or quasi panel studies).

Some of the most extended studies on artists’ earnings are done by Alper and Wassall on American census data, where data comes from peoples self-reporting in surveys, and peoples’ occupation is based on time spent at work during a single reference week. This do obvious have some drawbacks. Register data from Statistics Denmark representing true panel data, makes it possible to overcome some of these problems and gain new knowledge on the career patterns of artists, their income, the importance of education, multiple job-holding etc.

The register data used in this paper includes a lot of variables on socio-economy (age, gender, family, education), income (annual personal income, household income, earning per hour), employment (industry, job function, primary job, secondary job, degree of employment) etc. for the Danish population in the period 1994-2003.

Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt

Performative Work: Mobility and Place in Everyday Life

Work in tourism and culture industries plays a significant role on labour markets, also in peripheral areas, such as Lolland in Denmark. Performative work is here used for a continuum of job types, from the temporal service work of youngsters to the professional, creative work of presenters and enactors, all of which aim at making experiences with visitors. How are performative workers coping with the challenges of performative work, while also embedded in broader paths and modes of life? And what are the ways in which mobility and place come together in their everyday lives. The paper draws on a recent investigation, mainly based in 29 qualitative interviews with employees in three flagship attractions on Lolland: The Lalandia water park and holiday centre, the Knuthenborg Safari park and the Medieval Centre. Across the obvious differences between these three businesses, commonalities are found. Among the themes analyzed are how workers cope with the temporality and seasonality of performative work, when there are also emotionally depending on the work; how engagements in performative work transcends the limits of the business; what kinds of networks are enacted; how work accessibility is evaluated compared to place of living, and not the least, across these themes, what are the different life modes played out with performative work. Five modes of life are suggested: ‘Locals’, ‘Young locals on the move’, ‘Local project makers’, ‘In-moving specialists’ and ‘Settlers’. The paper draws on both recent developments of performance approaches in tourism research and in older Scandinavian traditions of studies of life modes and everyday life.

Peter Cox

Voyeur, Flâneur or Kinaesthete? Cyclotourism and the Production of Experience

Recent discussion in the social sciences has explored the activity of cycling as an experiential and embodied process, generating identity through both internal and external recognition. The act of cycling can be read simultaneously both as an act of cultural consumption and of cultural production.

This paper takes a cross-sectional study of actor-narratives and combines them with a series of analytical frameworks developed in the literature on cycling identities. The contrasting images of voyeur, flâneur and kineasthete have all been recently proposed as explanatory models through which to understand the mundane experience of the cyclist as they move through social and cultural spaces. However, these must be combined with recognition that the act of cycling is itself a spectacle and that the participant is also therefore productive of a form of self-performance in reflexive relation to their surroundings. Furthermore, the agentic nature of cycling in social space itself helps to creates new forms and experience of social space contrasting with the alienation produced by automobile traversing of landscape.

By interrogating actor’s own perceptions of their experience, we can begin to investigate the potential for recognising the cultural creativity inherent in the mundane act of cycling, together with the key relations between the two processes of consumption and production inherent in a single activity.

Per Darmer

Making Sense of the Art of Business

Sensemaking is an immanent part of the every day life in any organization, and it involves the creation of experiences, strategies and identity in organizations. The paper looks at sensemaking in a Danish film company with special focus on the identity of the company. The purpose of the paper is to look at the sensemaking of this distinction, and how it developed into the art of business in a specific Danish film company through 2007.

The theoretical foundation of the paper is primarily Weick’s sensemaking (1995 & 2001) and organizing (Weick, 1979). The sensemaking of the film company was investigated and analysed to understand, how the company makes sense of itself and its development. The sensemaking is made in relation to other actor like the Danish Film institute, the media, competitors, the film field and the consumers, but it is not the sensemaking of these actors about the film company which has been studied, but the sensemaking of the company about them, and how the enactment (Weick, 1979) of them is part of the sensemaking of the film company.

The analysis in the paper foremost focuses on two (of Weick’s seven) properties of sensemaking: Identity construction and Enacting of sensible environments. The focus on these two properties illuminates how the distinction of art and economy (business) and its development is part of the identity of the company, and how this identity is not constructed in a vacuum but relation to the enacted environments of the company. The focus on the properties identity construction and enacting sensible environments brought two more of Weick’s properties of sensemaking into the analysis, as both identity construction and acting sensible environments are social and ongoing.

The paper is based on an empirical study, where an ethnographic study of the sensemaking of the film company was conducted during most of 2007. The study consisted of observation, desk research and interviews, and it was done in a blend of involvement and detachment (reflection) to capture both the sensemaking of and the process of sensemaking within the film company.

Mads Daugbjerg

From the Native’s Point of View: Investigating the Actual Gazes and Actual Experiences of Actual Tourists

One of the classic doctrines of social anthropology is the effort taken by the ethnographer to ‘grasp the native’s point of view’ in order to ‘realize his vision of his world’, in the celebrated formulations of Bronislaw Malinowski (1922). John Urry’s much more recent coining of the ‘tourist gaze’ (1990/2002) also utilizes ocular metaphors to describe the way people make sense of their surroundings. And Tony Bennett, in his important work on the history of the museum institution, again stresses the eye as the key mediator between subject and object, noting how the early modern museums were ‘primarily institutions of the visible in which objects of various kinds have been exhibited to look at’ (2006: 263).

But how do we go about, as researchers, grasping these allegedly all-important views, gazes and visions? How do the actual gazes of actual tourists work with or against other senses and the imaginative capacity of their subjects? And how does the turn towards a so-called ‘experience’ paradigm alter or challenge the dominantly visual conception of the relation between subject and object?

This paper takes up these issues in the light of the presenter’s doctoral fieldwork at a Danish heritage site. A novel methodological approach, the so-called video specs method (Ingemann 1999), was utilized to allow the researcher to track – through the eyes of the tourist, so to speak – the actual routes taken, time spent, objects looked at and conversations of the tourists. The method is argued to constitute a valuable empirical supplement to theories questioning or wishing to move beyond the idea of the hegemonic nature of the gaze, often based on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. While such critics convincingly argue that ‘gazing at particular ‘sights’ (sic) is inflected by all sorts of other visual, as well as multi-sensual awarenesses’, they rarely base their arguments in solid empirical studies of down-to-earth human practice. The paper discusses the video specs method’s potential in providing such evidence, and aims at refining our understandings of how tourists experience particular sites in practice.

Karin Fast

More Than Meets the Eye: The Marketing of the Transformers Brand

The purpose of my research is to find out how the Transformers brand is being marketed, by different means and to different target groups. The brand has its origin in the popular action-figures that toy manufacturer Hasbro started to introduce to children worldwide in the early 1980s. As time has passed, however, the brand has been expanded far outside the toy industry, and nowadays it is applied to all kinds of products and media. In the wake of the 1st generation of toys, an animated TV series was soon being aired, and from there on comic books, novels, films and other types of media narratives have kept the Transformers brand alive among its fans and users.

When the first live action movie on Transformers premiered in theatres all over the world in July 2007, the brand was once again reinforced and made visible through an ever wider range of products, narratives and marketing efforts. A new generation of toys was followed by a new TV series, DVDs, soundtrack albums, books, computer games, web sites and all sorts of promotional merchandise such as bags, clothing, watches, posters, icons etc.

All in all, the abundance of products and narratives that today carries the Transformers logotype, can be said to form a giant and intertextual network that has the Transformers brand at its very hub. This network gives evidence of the rather sophisticated co-operations that take place between the product manufacturing industry on the one hand, and the media industry on the other. The two types of industries seem to be more dependent on each other these days than probably ever before, not least because of the growing importance of joint marketing efforts and the possibilities that new media technologies offer. As an effect of this over-boundary marketing, it has apparently become more difficult to separate advertising from other kinds of media content, as well as to distinguish media products from other kinds of products on the market. Furthermore, the boundaries between consumers and producers are likewise being affected by this new entertainment environment.

The marketing of Transformers, and the co-operation on which it depends, will be examined through content analyses of advertising and narratives, and through interviews with people involved in the marketing of the brand.

Patryk Galuszka

Netlabels: Cultural Production at the Outskirts of Creative Industries

The paper discusses the phenomenon of netlabels, which can be analyzed from two perspectives. The first perspective employs traditional music business terminology, which results in describing netlabels as small record labels that distribute music primarily through digital audio formats (mainly MP3 or Ogg Vorbis) over the Internet. Netlabels are  different from traditional record companies, as most of them distribute music for free, often under licenses that encourage works to be shared (e.g. Creative Commons licenses), while artists usually retain copyright. If we want to understand their activities using traditional recording business concepts, we can classify netlabels into two groups, based on their attitudes towards the music market. The result leads to a conclusion that some netlabels try to employ certain elements of traditional business models of the 'regular' record companies, while other follow the 'do-it-yourself' ideology and try to operate in non-market ways. The question is whether netlabels can be analyzed in the same way as traditional record labels and compared with them.

The second perspective calls for finding new terminology which can be used to describe and analyze netlabels. It should take into account not only artists or music business entrepreneurs but also listeners. Although it can be argued that music which is distributed by netlabels is listened to in the same way as music offered by regular record labels, netlabels have certainly different expectations from listeners. Netlabels usually want their music to be downloaded (for free) and further shared (e.g. in P2P networks). What is more, they often encourage listeners to remix the music. It is quite probable that these attitudes result in building relationships between netlabels, artists and listeners which are different from those known from traditional music business.

Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen

The Afterlife of Tourism

Tourist experiences are often assumed to take place in particular times and spaces detached from people’s everyday lives. Recent ethnographic inspired, social and cultural studies of tourists have shown the many ways in which tourist performances intertwine with tourists’ everyday lives. This paper is part of a wider research project in which we explore the intersections between tourism and the everyday in the performances and practices of ‘ordinary’ tourists travelling to Turkey and Egypt while on holiday and at home (Haldrup and Larsen forthcoming). Although theories and studies have emphasized the habitual character of most tourist performances, the bulk of literature still tends to focus on the roles, norms, habits, imaginations, routines people bring with them and enact at ‘tourist places’ (such as beaches, bars, famous attractions, heritage sites, theme parks and so on). This paper reverses this approach by focusing on the many ways in which the experiences of tourism enters into people’s everyday lives after returning from their holiday and resurrect tourist emotions, dreams, fantasies and social networks. Focusing on the material culture of tourism (Haldrup and Larsen 2006) we acknowledge that tourism is a thoroughly ‘thingified’ form of cultural consumption and argues that research should engage in following the flows of such objects and how they ‘move and change through transposition and translation, transformation and transmogrification’ (Lash and Lury 2007 p5). In doing this we view tourists not only as consumers or/and interpreters of cultural objects but as producers, circulators and users.  Through post-travel ethnographies in people’s private homes we trace out the afterlife of souvenirs and photographs and  how ‘ordinary’ tourists circulate these We examine what happened to their souvenirs and whether they are exhibited, in use or passed on as a gift and explore how photographs are stored, used, exhibited and circulated. By doing this we show how tourist experiences live a long and complex afterlife as integrated parts of people’s everyday worlds.

Kenneth Hansen

Global Experience Design for Development? The Case of Digidi Ghana

Digital Distribution, Digidi, is a global co-operative society, established in Copenhagen in 2003. It is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that has successfully established a global digital distribution net, through which shareholders can sell digital cultural products in more than 60 online shops all over the world. It is currently owned by approximately 500 participants coming from a wide array of fields in the experience economy. Each participant holds an equal share. Digidi Ghana is an attempt to develop this idea into a global fair trade concept within a development agenda.

In Ghana, as in other developing countries, mass production and global distribution of digital cultural products is an often overwhelmingly complex and expensive affair which requires substantial investment beforehand. By instead distributing these products through the Internet, a Ghanaian artist for example, can receive up to 80 % of the income from the sale, since there are no unnecessary intermediate stages between producer and consumer.

The establishment of such a new fair trade concept, with its use of advanced digital media in an unusual context is however, a highly complex and challenging task. Among many things it involves unusual partnerships, intensive and very special experience based PR-work, powerful negotiation skills, and, above all, the skill to navigate immediately and powerfully in an environment in total flux.

The paper presents the case and discusses if, and to which degree, Digidi Ghana can be seen as an example of how value based experience design can be used as a tool for international development within a global experience economy. The discussion will have relevance for coming works in international experience management and experience design and has thematic perspectives for general discussions of, for example, national cross boundary experience design and transnational value based experience management.

The paper is based on the participation by the author in the establishment of a Digidi upload center in Accra, November 2007. Digidi Ghana is funded by The Danish International Development Assistance, Danida, and supported by the World Bank in Ghana.

Margaretha Herrman

Film-Workers: Creative and Artistic Collaborators?

Today´s productions of motion pictures is seldom a work of one “auteur” director, it´s rather a result of a collaborative art, a synthesis of many film-workers efforts and willingness to express their visions.  Production is rarely a purely democratic process, but almost always a collective one that requires the support and cooperation of a large numbers of people.  Whatever, a film project includes a large number of people with different skills, competences, backgrounds and aspirations who must be able to coordinate their efforts, collaborate, accept to be supervised or supervise, all in order to establish the best conditions. The collaborative filmmaking requires also that the persons who work with the script are able to contribute something to the process, creative staff as technical crew. This approach means that those who work with the script – for example the costume designer, the production designer, director of photography etcetera, are involved in the filmic creation in one way or another, even if the final decisions are likely to be made by the director. Even if the film director is the one who attract attention and is mentioned and praised for the film, especially if the film becomes a success, there is no doubt about the importance of collaborators. I would therefore like to hold out the team as co-creators even if their possibilities to influence are dependent of varying reasons, e.g. position, work experience, capital of trust, authority, competition, individual claim of artistic expressions. In context it´s also important to stress that filmmaking is a cultural battleground as well as an economic one. 

In this paper I want to discuss how some film-workers, among the creative staff and the technical crew, and perform in relation to the film director, talk about their possibilities to contribute to a film and its artistic shape. Are the film-workers given opportunity to claim individual suggestions or are they more likely to gain influence as co-creators through collective efforts and collaborations? This is a question of symbolic boarders and established hierarchies among the team.

Christian Jantzen and Mikael Vetner

How to Model Urban Experiences: The Case of Almere

Urban designers are faced with the challenge of having to create very long lasting sites for urban life. Traditional aspects of urban planning encompass infrastructure, environmental factors and aesthetics. But urban design increasingly also has to aim at generating urban experiences for an unforeseeable future and for a highly diverse public of visitors and inhabitants. This involves designing versatile venues to visit (shopping, leisure or cultural sites), excellent health and educational facilities and good labor environments for creative and knowledge intensive industries in order to bring about a specific “genius loci” typical to urban life: density, intense interpersonal contact and feelings of surprise and security.

This paper claims that insight into the psychological structure of experiencing may serve as a helpful guideline for design practices aiming at the experiential qualities of urban life. By distinguishing 4 different levels of experiencing (a physiological, an emotional, a conceptual and a reflexive level) different aspects of the urban experience can be identified: stimulation and relaxation at the physiological level, spontaneity and tolerance at the emotional level, the dynamics of relevance and interest on the conceptual level, and self-development and innovation on the reflexive level. This model enables the designer to define which physical properties of the urban planning can be utilized to promote such experiential qualities.

To illustrate how this model may contribute to urban design the planning of a new city centre in Almere (the Netherlands) is analyzed. Almere is a relatively new city situated east of Amsterdam. It was founded 25 years ago and currently has 200.000 inhabitants. The ambition is that Almere will grow into one of the five largest cities in the Netherlands over the next 30 years. Creating not only attractive housing and good leisure facilities but also sites for genuine urban experiences is paramount for the future development of Almere. Hence, the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (OMA) was employed to design a new city centre. Our paper will analyze how and to witch degree this design is catering for urban experiences.

Thessa Jensen

The Children’s Library as Room for Experiences

This paper takes its starting point from a study of the changes in the Children’s Library of the Aalborg Hovedbiblioteket (Aalborg Main Library) during the year 2008. The Children’s Library had by then undergone big changes. The paper focuses on the change in experiences for the children and the employees caused by the change from “book-library” to “almost bookless-library”. What kind of experience do the children get? How do the changes affect the employees? How does the experience itself change? The investigation includes interviews with all the employees of the Children’s Library, as well as several hours of observations of the children and other guests of the library. Besides this, there will be held a workshop with the employees, designed to show what ideology lies behind this room of experience.

At this point it seems that a lot of good intentions fail, because neither the employees nor the children know how to deal with the new possibilities. Thus it is quite clear, that the children love the place, spending hours in the library, yet not loaning any material (neither books nor computer games) home with them. The employees on the other hand do not use their knowledge of the materials to give the children more experiences: the idea of contacting children and making them see what oceans of knowledge and possibilities the library consists of. Not being educated in pedagogy some of the observations show that their interference can be counter productive, giving the child more responsibilities than the child can handle.

The paper proposes ideas for stimulating the experiences and conditions for both children and employees.

Antti-Ville Kärjä

What Are Little Children’s Music Videos Made of?

The term 'music video aesthetics' has been used widely when referring to the pervasive impact of music videos on various other forms of audiovisual representation. Arguably, traces of this aesthetic can be found in action movies and operatic arias. Also, children's music videos have emerged.

In my paper I will focus on the last. However, in approaching children's music videos I will stress production context rather than aesthetic ideals, although these two cannot be separated from each other. In other words, I will pay attention to the ways in which children's music videos are executed when comparing to production of 'regular' music videos. I will base my analysis on the comparison of two particular television programs in Finnish television: 3, 2, 1 – Videox!, produced by the Finnish public broadcasting company YLE in 2005, and Kids Top20, aired by the commercial MTV3 ('Advertisement TV3') since 2006. In my examination will lay a special emphasis on the connections of these programmes and the videos aired within them to other dimensions of cultural industries, most notably in relation to issues of immaterial property rights. Also considerations of genre will be central: when, and for what reasons, does a 'grown-up' song change into a 'children's song'?

Francesco Lapenta

The "I" Generation: Remixing, Mediated Life or Life as a Live Creative Performance.

The effects of the momentous evolution of social networking sites, personal blogging and personal broadcasting seem to question Deleuze´s conception of the virtual as a dimension of reality that subsists with the actual but is irreducible to it. New creative practices question the finite definition or artificial juxtapositions of concepts such as, creative class, live vs. mediated, subjective vs. collective, virtual vs. actual, original vs. remixed. When everyone life becomes a broadcasted live production, both subjective act of creation and objectified subject of consumption, individual efforts or remixed product of individual experiences, the lines between live, mediated, subjective, collective, creative, remixed, leisure, labor, artifact, commodity become blurred and call for a new theoretical and practical rearticulation of the debate on the "creative process" and the "creative industry". This paper wants to discuss the opportunity then to rearticulate the debate on the two surviving dichotomies, "paid labor" vs "unpaid labor". If mediated life always generates capital, this capital is moving towards the creation of a more complex economy where money is but one of the products of exchange.

Lars Lilliestam and Thomas Bossius

Music in People’s Lives

What do people do with music? What does music do with people?

These are the main questions in the project Music in People’s Lives (in Swedish: Musik i Människors Liv) which is run by senior lecturer Thomas Bossius and professor Lars Lilliestam at the University of Gothenburg financed by the Swedish Research Council. Work on the project started in 2007 and will be finished in 2010.

We have at the time of writing made deep interviews (lasting 30–80 minutes) with 15 men and 15 women in the ages 20 to 70 years, with differing cultural and social backgrounds and we plan to interview some ten more.

The interviewees are people with both a strong and weak musical interest, musical practitioners as well as people who only listen to music. They are chosen ‘at random’, which means that we have contacted groups of people who are not primarily united by a musical interest – people in a caretaking office, shop assistants (a fish seller, two bicycle sellers, employees in a book store), members of a ‘book circle’, a group of university students, or people who have simply happened to cross our ways. Five of them, however, have been chosen because of their strong interest in music, like record collecting or concert habits. None is a professional musician.

The interviews are based on a loose questionnaire starting with the question ‘what does music mean to you?’ From there on the questions deal with themes like musical preferences and dislikes, listening habits, music making and dance, visiting concerts, record collecting, identity, idols, musical memories, musical education etc. We are also interested in the language that people use to talk about or describe music.

At the conference we would like to present some tentative results. Findings from traditional sociological investigations will be questioned or nuanced. Tendencies that seem to be clear in studies of groups of people (like connections between class, gender, age etc. and musical taste) are less obvious when you study individuals. Few speak of idols or have allied themselves with musical subcultures. These may be exaggerated aspects in previous studies of musical taste. Men tend to be more active than women in buying and collecting records and also as practitioners of music. Combinations of taste for different musical styles are much more complex and varied than implied in many sociological studies. We can detect clear connections between people’s musical activities and their biographies and life trajectories. Another recurring pattern is that people often know very well what kind of music they like but do not remember names of artists or songs. It is also striking that mobile listening devices seem to affect both music listening and conceptions of music.

Gitte Marling, Ole B. Jensen, Per Bruun Madsen

The Implications of Hybrid Cultural Projects on Social Inclusive Urban Environments

This paper takes its point of departure in the pressure of the experience economy on Danish Cities - a pressure which in recent years has found its expression in a number of comprehensive transformations of the physical and social environments, and new event-scapes related to fun and cultural experience are emerging. Many cultural projects and events take place free of charge in the public space. This creates a new form of urban culture, and it creates an opportunity for bringing together different cultures, which is positive in its own right. The cultural and social perspectives of this development, as well as the problems and the new opportunities with which the ‘Experience city’ is faced are discussed in the paper. The paper focuses on the role of hybrid cultural projects and performative urban spaces. “Hybrid cultural projects” are in our definition characterized by a conscious fusion between urban transformation and new knowledge centers, cultural institutions and experience environments. It is the thesis of the research project, that the strength of these hybrid projects is the conscious combination between learning and playing, between public and private, and between artistic quality and the popular. The starting point is a common willingness to include many different groups.

The paper contains two sections. In section one, we present the findings of our ongoing research project analyzing hybrid cultural projects in Denmark. A main question will be if - and in which way hybrid cultural projects can facilitate a social inclusive urban development. In section two, we will discuss urban design strategies and the challenges for architects and artists as well as for managers and public cultural planners.

Per Möller

The Ideology of Creativity in Regenerating the Industrial City; Which Creativity?

In its ideological claims the concept of the ‘creative economy’ appears seemingly totalizing, making every expression of creativity a sign of its own prosperity, whether it concerns artistic creativity or merely risk-taking overall, not least economical. As with Richard Florida’s definition of the ‘creative class’, it seems as everyone whose work is concerned with any form of non-automatic thinking, as opposed to the stereotyped Fordist worker, could objectively be promoted as creative.

This quantification of creativity is notable also in the process of regenerating the industrial city. Evidently one of the first steps in adjusting city policies to this thought transition is through documenting or ‘mapping’ whatever could be labelled creative or cultural production taking place in the local arena.

Hence, a disparate sector is being collectively put forward as one powerful labour force said to represent the ‘new’ narrative of the often exhausted industrial city. Not only does this quantifying practice direct any type of cultural production into a deregulated labour market reliant on individual skill and talent, self-promotion and personal preferences, certain qualitative assumptions regarding the foundations of ‘culture’ is implied as well.

Consequently, the revitalization of the industrial city through creative and cultural policy is without doubt an ideological manifesto. But does it actually set the ground to realize its own assumptions; a progression away from the reified relations of industrialism, towards a more ‘free’, motivated and fulfilling, i.e. ‘creative’ way of production and being? Or is it merely an empty promise; not only justifying the inequalities and constraints of the cultural sector, but of society as a whole, as it, with the words of Marx, “creates a world after its own image”?

Focusing on the city of Malmö, Sweden as an example, these are questions I would like to raise in this paper.

Helene Oldrup

Metropolitan Identities: Performance, Self-representation and Visual Narrative

This paper explores middle class, metropolitan identities in the context of spatial extensification, blurring of spatial boundaries, increasing spatial homogenization and standardization. Metropolitan areas have most commonly been described in cultural terms as conventional, ordinar and anonomous, while concepts of everyday life have been one important analytical perspective particularly in Scandinavian housing studies and geography. However, there is an increasing staging of metropolitan/surburban identities mass media, magazines, TV, adverts, and art. The metropolis/suburb are being aestheticized, and at the same time there is an aesthetic interest in the surburb. This double-bound is also seen more broadly, where researchers argue that there is an aesthetification of social life, as well as an aesthetic concern of the ordinary and everyday. This indicates that place of living increasingly is a starting point for the construction and exploration of identity, and the aesthetic concern with suburbs can be seen in the context of broader shifts from civic society to consumer culture, from traditional forms of life, to lifestyles. The paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding place identity in this context, drawing on concepts of performance and visual narrative. This theoretical framework is used in an analysis of three visual stories produced by informants in selected sites in greater Copenhagen area. The analysis will show how new types of identities are produced, also across well-known divisions between centre/periphery, urban/rural, public/private.

Shinji Oyama

Branded Experience?

Brands have been key driver in the development in culture society, creative industries or experience economy. Yet brands have drawn far less scholarly attention than advertising, which is a brand's significant, but by no means indispensable, component. Advertising, like other privileged cultural texts in media and cultural studies, is usually understood as working through its semiotical structure. The brand on the other hand constitutes and is constituted in the experience we have with them in/through a great number of interfaces such as tactility of products or multi-sensory presentations in retail space. Thus some of the ways in which consumers experience brands can said to be affective occurring relatively autonomous from the semiotical structures. Branding thereby entails managing these spatially dispersed and temporary discrete interfaces in such a way that each relates to the other in a sort of mutual excitation to produce consistent and almost synesthetic branded experience. Drawing on business literatures and the interviews carried out with branding practitioners in major electronic and cosmetics brands, my paper attempts to theorize this designing and management of branded experience and discuss its wider implications for creative industries and globalization.

Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen

The Impact of Film Festivals on Filmmaking

This study seeks to untangle the impact and effect of film festivals (and the subsequent financial success) on the conceptions and action of industry actors. Film festivals receive a lot of industry and media attention (and attendance) and, various actors within the industry participate, report and make sense of the event and related activities in terms of worth and value of self and product. Film festivals are leading events establishing the reputation of directors and producers in the film industry. At the same time, film festivals constitute a well-established field in itself with a quite crystallized structure. Film festivals have been present in almost all the countries with a tradition in the film industry for the last 5 decades (e.g. Venice in Italy, Cannes in France, Berlin in Germany, Moscow in Russia) and thus, constitute a highly institutionalized field (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Scott, 1995; 2008). Structuration and specialization among film festivals appears to be an emerging feature profiling festivals on the basis of the participating films and filmmakers. Such an institutionalized field provides an interesting domain for studying the role such events play on film industry perception and configuration.

The purpose of the study is to explore the role of film festivals as structuring mechanisms and a field-configuring event. Building upon the literature on classification in art, hybrid identities of creative organizations, ‘optimal distinctiveness’ together with and conceptions of rituals as shapers of field configuration and evolution, this study explores the role of these events as a nexus of culture and economy. The empirical setting for this study is film festivals as instances of events and award ceremonies and a prominent example of a creative industry in the experience economy. The study reports findings from a comparative study of the commercial impact of award winning at three premier A-film festivals, celebrated in Europe. The data set consists of more than 600 films covering a ten-year time frame from 1996-2005 with comparable award and performance data. This data will be combined with case studies based on qualitative data (archival data, observations and, interviews with industry actors).

Jacob Dahl Rendtorff

Authentic Experience in the Experience Economy: Sociological and Philosophical Foundations

Modern experience economy is about buying and selling experiences, to make intimate experiences and search for customer satisfaction the driving motor of capitalist economies. The concept of experience and more recently the notion of authentic experience (e.g. Pine and Gilmore: Authenticity: What Customers Really Want) has thereby become central to management and management philosophy. In this paper, I want to discuss some fundamental and foundational aspects of the concept of authentic experience in the framework of the experience economy as a social reality of late modernity.

1) I will start with a phenomenological perspective on the concept of experience and relate this concept to the idea of authenticity. This will be based on comparison between different concepts of authenticity. 2) After this I will analyze this concept of authenticity in the framework of the kind of society that has made experience economy possible. In this context I am strongly inspired by the French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky, who in the book Le Bonheur paradoxal. Essai sur la société de hyperconsommation provides us with a general sociological analysis of the concept of consumption in experience society. 3) Finally, I will pose some critical questions to such a marriage between capitalism, experience and authenticity arguing that there seems to remain an insurmountable tension between these concepts. The aim is to elaborate the problem whether it is possible to create deliberately authentic experience with the somewhat artificial instruments of business organizations that always seem to have the aim of making profits as a part of their efforts to satisfy the search for authenticity.

Sara Malou Strandvad

Collaborative Work and Evolving Products: A Socio-material Perspective on the Development of Films

When sociologists study production of culture, they reveal how social causes affect those elements of culture that are produced. This sociological practice of revealing social causes behind cultural production implies that the evolving products are seen as effects. By this, the products themselves are derived of explanatory power; and thus, they are regarded as unimportant for the sociological analysis of how culture is produced. A recent theoretical strand named ‘the new sociology of art’ rejects this neglect of the product, arguing that the product may not be a passive object but an active part of the social formations around it.  This paper positions itself within that strand and brings this perspective to use in an analysis of the collaborative creative work on developing products.

The empirical basis for the paper is a study of the development of film projects in the Danish film industry. More precisely, this study consisted in following film projects during their development process; from the idea is launched until the project is either ready to go into pre-production or is given up. Over a one-year period, in 2006-2007, I followed the development of five film projects in various Danish film companies. I tracked these projects by means of interviewing the participants, observing meetings in the project groups and reading case material; funding applications, internal and external correspondence, plus synopses and editions of the script for the film.

This paper will address the topic of creative development processes by raising the question how the emergent product and the collaborative work are interrelated.  The paper looks at how the course of development is linked to the emergence of the product. That is, the paper asks how the product affects the collaborative work, including the success or failure of this work. The paper aims to contribute to our understanding of creative development processes from the perspective of the new sociology of art by proposing how the analysis of creative development processes can include the emerging product as an important factor. 

Jon Sundbo

Experience as a New Class Factor

The phenomenon of experience

In Scandinavia, the Netherlands, to some degree the USA and other countries there has recently appeared a discourse in social science and humanities and in political and business life about experiences (not culture, leisure, tourism or other well-known notions). Why is that?

The claim is that the focus on experiences not only is a social superficial phenomenon - a short-termed interest for firms to earn money or for the mass-media to increase the public. It is also an expression of a more fundamental sociological phenomenon.

The paper will also argue that the phenomenon is not about culture in the meaning art (while everything is culture in the ethnographical meaning). It is about power and position in society – quite another sociological discipline than the studying of art.

The status theory

One explanation of the increasing interest from citizens in experiences could be that the experience gives status and position in the society. Previous class and status theory has emphasized money, power (over other people) and knowledge as factors the gives prestige and high social position in the society. One may argue that “notoriety” has become a status factor as well. It can be argued that status factors have some relation to the production system and the political system in a broad sense. It may also be argued that experiences is becoming a central part of the economic production system and that personal notoriety of politicians as well as managers and other power persons are becoming more important in relation to riches.

Do experiences solve our problems? Yes, to some degree. They give us an interesting life. They cannot ensure the fundament of life – food, clothes and so forth. However, the industrialization has ensured that. Now the citizens want an interesting and meaningful life. Experiences ensure that.

How is experience and “notoriety” connected? The experience industries do not only content critical artists (as Adorno emphasized), but also stars. Actors, football players, even alcoholic and narcotized rock musicians and eminent computer game players become well-known and admired in the whole world. They get high prestige and many people want to be like them.

Empirically we have some indications of experience jobs (football players, actors etc.) increase in social prestige while for example knowledge based positions such as professors and top administrators decrease.

Exposure as the core concept

The factor that gives the social drive for people to be occupied by experience and the prestige of experience positions may be termed exposure. To be a well-known star, you need to exposure yourself. Then the world will know you. Mass media are decisive in this process. They distribute and to some degree create the prestige factor exposure. Just as the financial system distributed and to some degree created the prestige factor wealth, the labour market and the political system the prestige factor power and education institutions the prestige factor education.

Lisbeth Thorlacius

Experience Communication and Aesthetics

In this article the term "experience communication" will be introduced and discussed. It will be illustrated how different concepts of aesthetical experiences are an integrated part of experience communication and how these concepts are produced within the industries of cultural consumerism, branding and entertainment. With a point of departure in Kant's "the sublime"; Burke's "the sublime"; " Lyotard's "the sublime"; Csikszentmihalyi's "flow"; Barthes' "punctum," and Favrholdt's "the inexpressible experience", a survey of different forms of aesthetic experiences in connection with the field of experience communication will be presented. In addition to the more established concepts of the aesthetic experiences this article introduces a new term " the interference" which is relevant in regards to some of the aesthetic experiences produced within the industry of experience communication. The term "interference" can be described as a kind of “intrusion,” capable of creating a certain type of beauty in the form of a new aesthetic expression and denotes the space that may exist between what we know and what we don’t know. With a point of departure in empirical studies it will be illustrated how these different concepts of aesthetic experiences are produced within the field of experience communication.

Viveka Berggren Torell

Football and clothing – Connections in consumer culture

Clothes are important for football today as carriers of sponsor brands, as income generating supporter-items and as functional working clothes to make players perform their best at the pitch. Football is also important for fashion. Football kits influence everyday clothing design and football-stars spread the image of the new fashion-conscious man.

The paper will present my post doc-project, which aims at investigating such connections between football and clothes in Sweden today, with some historical retrospects furthest back to the 1920s. The research will have started shortly before the conference. Therefore my paper will mostly inform about the thoughts leading to the choice of the following themes and questions:

•Football and fashion – What do players think of connections between football and fashion today? How have relations between football and the ready-to-wear-industry been constructed earlier?

•Football kits and clothes for training – How do players experience their clothed bodies? What happens when the traditional dress code of football (shorts and loose jersey) meets new textile developments like new supporting materials and “smart” conducting fibres?

•Supporters’ clothes – What functional and symbolic meanings respectively do clothes have for supporters?

The theoretical starting point for the project is a critical interest for theories about post modern-conditions: How far can talk about post modern tendencies explain experiences of connections between football and clothes in Sweden today? The project is also aimed at “making fashion material” by focusing on experiences of the material properties and tactual sensations of clothes.

The study will have an ethnographic approach. To make a broad picture of the subject various sources are interpreted through different methods. Short participant observations and interviews with kit men, players and supporters will be combined with studies of magazines, photos and preserved clothes. Both male and female players will be interviewed.

 

Chris Wharton and John Fenwick

The Spectacle of Culture in Newcastle

This paper explores the Capital of Culture programme. This includes bidding for the event, the impact on cultural policy, and manifestations of culture and community identity. ‘Culture’, thus conceived, is a policy product of local government, regeneration partnerships, government agencies and business interests. This can be contrasted with culture as a way of life or lived urban experience.

The paper will be framed by the experience of Glasgow as city of Culture in 1990 and competition between French cities to hold the event in 2013. However, the central focus is upon the post-industrial city of Newcastle upon Tyne in north east England which, in partnership with its neighbour Gateshead, launched a joint Capital of Culture bid in 2001. Liverpool was ultimately declared European Capital of Culture, along with the Norwegian city of Stavanger. During the bidding process Newcastle-Gateshead underwent highly visible changes, including widespread building and regeneration projects, notably the Baltic art gallery and Sage music centre both situated on the redeveloped Quayside. Clearly the area and its local governments were responding to fundamental socio-economic changes. Yet this rebranding has resulted, essentially, in culture as display: a visible ‘spectacle of culture’. The extent to which the public has been a real participant is questionable.  

The city’s identity shifted from production to consumption. The city centre was re-imagined as a place of youthful leisure and entertainment. In adopting ‘party city’ imagery much existing regional culture was overlooked. The experience of Newcastle can be compared to that of Liverpool, and the UK process may usefully be compared to the current bidding process in France. The question is posed of whether the ‘spectacle of culture’ is reflected in international experience.

Rodanthi Tzanelli

"Sign Industries" and the Production/Consumption Nexus: The Case of “Cinematic Tourism”

This paper proffers some theoretical reflections on the nature of some new forms of cultural industries. It singles out a specific case in which the contingent generation of interdependencies (of economic interest) between Hollywood film-making and the tourist industries that emerge from Hollywood screening of exotic locales leads to the production and consumption of new understandings of culture and identity in different parts of the world. The ensuing commodification of these locales by various agents of global tourist and Hollywood networks suggests that film and tourist industries are bound together through the circulation of the same cultural ‘signs’. These ‘signs’ are constantly interpreted - not only by cultural industry agents and consumers (film audiences, tourists) but also by the native populations and nation-states unexpectedly faced with this unprecedented commodification of their histories, identities and environments. The hermeneutic potential that such ‘global circulations of the sign’ carry, suggests that we examine the communication of different cultural industries as what I will term and analyze as ‘global sign industries’.

Reactions of localities and nation-states to this phenomenon encompass both hostility and submission to cultural commodification. This ambiguity, inherent in what I shall term ‘cultural intimations’ of identity, both reveals these ‘sign industries’ as unintentional makers of the ‘public sphere’ and presents the disenfranchised of late modernity as poetic agents of culture. Bringing together classical critical theory, social anthropology, cultural studies, literature on the creative industries and sociology of culture, this paper aspires to:

•Explore the nature and function of new creative/culture industries that produce, circulate and shape ‘cinematic tourism’

•Contribute an understanding of the nature of globalization and its impact on cultural specificity from the standpoint of those who are often excluded from academic debates on cultural production and experience

•(And therefore) re-think ‘cultural production’ by juxtaposing its formal and informal regimes and practices and suggesting that the two run parallel lives

Anu Valtonen and Soile Veijola

A Visitor’s Night: Sleep in Contemporary Experience Economy

The topic of the paper is sleep: an under-explored yet socially, culturally and economically significant facet of contemporary experience economy. Recent developments in tourism offerings signal a rapid increase in both productivization and consumption of sleep and the night. More and more tourists wish to experience how it feels like to, for instance, sleep in an igloo made of ice or snow, and, if one gets lucky, under the Northern Lights. In prior tourism research, however, the topics of sleep and the night have been reduced to a phenomenon to be measured, with the number of overnight stays as the cornerstone of tourism statistics.

Here we aim to offer a more sophisticated theoretical understanding of visitors’ nights by elaborating a wide range of cultural meanings appropriated and reshaped in the process through which the night is being experienced, produced and consumed in contemporary economy. In concrete terms, drawing from cultural theories, for instance Marcel Mauss, and the (scarce) socio-cultural literature on sleep, we develop a theoretical framework for exploring visitors’ nights and divide it into three thematic sections. First, we investigate the temporal, spatial and sensual features of the night and sleep which we call sleep-scapes. Second, we focus on the embodied and material practices related to sleep so as to offer an understanding of the minute yet necessary body techniques and equipments related to sleeping. Third, we quiet down to reflect upon the state of being asleep, the landscapes of dream travellers. Our empirical data consists of ethnographic fieldwork in a tourist resort in Finnish Lapland and of the marketing and media material of the companies offering extreme sleep experiences in the area.

By introducing the topic of sleep and the night in the research agenda of tourism studies, and by offering a cultural analysis of a neglected topic, we wish to advance theoretical, methodological, and practical understanding of the workings of the experience economy. Importantly, by taking this particular standpoint, we hope to unsettle and flesh out the predominant ways of framing and researching the phenomenal world of tourism. This far, the production of knowledge and development of theory in tourism seems to be, implicitly or explicitly, based upon daytime experiences for tourists and upon the ideas of those who are awake. The implications of this exclusion are elaborated in the hope of stimulating further debate, research and eventually also customization of visitors’ nights.