Enumerating sector organisation and industrial arrangements in Cultural and Creative Sector production chains

This CICERONE paper (D3.4) presents an overview of the sectoral organisation of the creative economy in Europe. It does so by considering the distribution of firm size within industries, interactions between firms within the cultural and creative sectors (CCS), and the trends and market dynamics impacting these interactions. When considering these issues, it applies the Global Production Network perspective, thereby trying to explore why production network typologies are changing form and how power structures within these networks shift. The series of which this paper is part is to inform European, national and regional policy frameworks for the CCS (and the wider economy) by grasping the challenges of the new and emergent organisational and governance forms of the creative economy. In this paper, we observe, among others, that CCS in Europe are constrained by their fragmentation (both on the demand and supply sides) to engage in forms of collective action. Constituting a myriad of small and medium-sized players, largely characterised by precarious, short-term, part time working conditions, it is hard for the CCS as a whole to speak with one voice. Next to that, collaborations in the CCS seem increasingly shaped by place-based cluster dynamics, but also sector-based (cross-border) platformisation. While place-based clusters speak to local and national policymaking, making culture and creative sectors an argument for territorial attractivity, platformisation links much more to an European policy agenda, with digital, copyrights and competition policies being particularly instrumental in setting market field for CCS.