Creative industries are a growing and globally
important area for both economic vitality and cultural expression of
industrialized nations.  The growth and
dynamism of creative industries depends on “continuous innovation” that must
manage inherent tensions such as novelty to attract consumers and sustain
artistic expression and familiarity to aid comprehension and stabilize demand
for cultural products.  


In this volume, the macro-structural
conditions that shape creative industries – their institutional, categorical
and structural dynamics- are examined to provide an overview of new trends and
emerging issues in scholarship on this topic.  Creative industries offer products and
services that range from the prosaic to the sublime and provide meaning to our
lives, and this volume features a wide range of examples, from advertising, to
architecture, art markets, Champagne wine, fashion and music.  Contributors examine topics such as the micro-interactions
of brokerage relations; how actors transform a brokerage role from control to
co-production to enact creative leadership; how investors provide legitimacy to
the new categories such as abstract art; how technological disintermediation
creates alternative category processes such as authenticity; how social
relations shape social evaluation; how prototypical producers can trespass
categories and avert negative evaluation; how personal styles enable social
evaluation; and how the ambiguity of a category, such as Swing music,
facilitated its adaptability and longevity. 
The volume concludes with an Afterword examining research on creative
industries as a form of cultural product and a category in itself.