‘Enterprise, employability and identity: Researching Artswork Media’

(Creative Enterprise Conference; 18th May 2011)

Dr Dan Ashton

Bath Spa University

Researching Artswork Media

• Artswork CETL at Bath Spa University 2003-08

• Media production company opened September 2008 in the Paintworks ‘creative quarter’

• Approx. 12 students on 3rd year of BA Creative Media Practice working with established industry workers

• 120 credits all linked to time at the studio

Research/studio context

• Ongoing research (2008-) with staff and students at Artswork Media.

• Participant observation(following production projects, observing briefing meetings and guest sessions with industry professionals)

• Interviews with staff and students and focus groups with students

• Today - limited to ‘piece to camera’ comments for overview/promotional film …

Insights from the studio

• Short films produced by the AWM team

• “… a way of testing and exploring different ways of teaching”

The studio experience

• “Artswork media is a professional environment• “Graduate/professional”• “Professional = credibility”• “Working as professionals with professionals on a

professional contract’• “Ownership of projects”

“Good networking, creativity and problem-solving are characteristics ascribed by students to entrepreneurs and characteristics they value in themselves” (Creating Entrepreneurship, 2007: 65)

• “Entrepreneurial attitudes, skills and behaviours are developed through direct engagement with industry” (Creating Entrepreneurship, 2007: 15)

• AWM and direct enactment as industry

• “A free standing subject-focused module or components for entrepreneurship education aimed at delivering knowledge and skills for and about entrepreneurship” (Creating Entrepreneurship, 2007: 15)

• Immersive nine month experience aimed at performing entrepreneurial activity.

Sustainability

“The assumption that the work environment is naturally entrepreneurial is untenable. Many students in placement projects will not be exposed to the situations where entrepreneurial activity occurs and, even when they are, they may not recognize it as such” (Creating Entrepreneurship, 2007: 54)

Questions about what students are exposed to in placements …

Current issues of facilitating ‘valuable’ experiences

• Jeremy Dear (General Secretary, National Union of Journalists); letter to the guardian (July 2009):

“While on-the-job experience is an essential part of media training, bogus work experience placements are increasingly being used to fill long-term staffing gaps with free labour. The result: only those with the financial security of well-off families or a willingness to build up massive debts can get into careers in journalism. Just when we should be nurturing and supporting the people coming into the industry, media employers are exploiting dreams and excluding new talent”

What can AWM offer?• Practical Issues

Ball et al.: “as the creative sector is fragmented and there are few large employers with the resources to provide work placements and experience, new models for employer engagement and partnerships between HE and the creative sector are required (Creative Career Stories, 2010 p.70)

• Engagement beyond employer-led demand for certain skills to be met(“a lack of understanding of the purposes and aims of higher education” - Creating Entrepreneurship, 2007: 76)

Entrepreneurship as a way to reflect on career goals and aspirations?

• Mark Banks (2006: 466), highlights that, “beyond the caricature of the individualized, desocialized creative, some entrepreneurs may be recast as progressive, motivated actors that pursue varied ends in the context of place-embedded cultural work”

(Banks, M. (2006) ‘Moral Economy and Cultural Work’, Sociology 40(3): 455-472)

AWM and ‘place-embedded cultural work’ focused towards pursuing ‘varied ends’.

Entrepreneurship, ethics and values

• ‘The Student Voice’ in Creating Entrepreneurship (2007: 58):

“Broadly, they were uncomfortable with a narrow model of entrepreneurship focusing entirely on commercial success [and] propose that a ‘true entrepreneur’ is financially successful and delivers social and cultural benefits to society”

AWM, and emerging and innate values

• “They’re setting up businesses, so they’re supporting an area; there’s a social enterprise element to it. That’s an interesting thing to consider in a place like this - to what extent you want to impose some sort of value?

I think that could be quite appealing to students because [they] are very interested in issues of environmental, social, community etc. It’s interesting that actually quite a lot of the stuff we’ve been doing already has had an environmental angle.”(Studio Director)

• Resonates with Banks (2006: 465) research:“A number of our entrepreneurs revealed themselves to be self-reflexive and sensitive actors, acutely aware of the embeddedness of their firm within a particular geographical and social milieu, and concerned to achieve a balance between the pursuit of instrumental goals and the articulation of moral-political values of socially useful character”

Adopting Banks’ comments and recognizing the engagement with social concerns already evident, how might students articulate moral-political values?

Summary• AWM presents an example in which ‘networking, creativity

and problem-solving’ are central.

• Tension between ‘industry placement’ and ‘industry experience’ is perhaps an opening for considering the limitations of placements and recognizing the varied ends and approaches that may be pursued.

• I would gratefully receive any comments, suggestions, etc. - d.ashton@bathspa.ac.ukAcknowledgements - Bath Spa University for research fellowship funding.

Thanks