Introduction: Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries

This introduction considers those situations when popular artists and cultural workers collaborate at a time when creative production is being reconfigured as an increasingly business-oriented process. Noting how recent research into creative labour and cultural work has tended to address the politics of production in these fields, it argues that socio-technical and aesthetic dimensions have not been subject to the same kind of sustained enquiry. What happens now that boundaries between 'art' and 'business' are blurred? How has work in the creative industries been reshaped by the managerialised emphasis on collaboration that characterises the current landscape? This introduction also asks in what ways might cultural production be transformed by the convergent dynamics of digital intermediation and consumption in the contemporary creative economy? It highlights two prominent strands of discussion – the growing body of work that investigates the diverse forms and functions of media production and also research concerning the political economy of creative labour. Detailing how attention has focused on the rise of 'collaboration' as the buzzword of the creative economy (alongside its sibling buzzword 'sharing’), the article explains how contributions to the book Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries individually contribute to a deeper understanding of the field.