Title: Project management in the culture industry: balancing structure and creativity

Authors: Alexander Styhre, Sofia Borjesson

Addresses: Department of Business Administration, School of Business Economics, and Law, University of Gothenburg, SE-405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden. ' Department of Technology Management and Economics, Chalmers University of Technology, Vera Sandbergs Alle 8, SE-412 96, Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: culture; cultural industries; plays; Sweden; openness; emergent properties; routines; bureaucracy; complementary qualities; duality; rule-adherence; collective creativity; individual creativity; rules; temporal productions; concerts; drama; uncertainty; complexity; temporality; arts; ideologies; ideas; emergent conditions; play; rule-governed procedures; project organisation; project management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPOM.2011.038862

International Journal of Project Organisation and Management, 2011 Vol.3 No.1, pp.22 - 35

Published online: 14 Jan 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article