Is it Possible, Even Advisable, to Try to be Interdisciplinary When Studying the Creative Industries? A View from the Edge

This working paper reflects upon the difficulties of being interdisciplinary when studying the creative industries. After outlining the basic premises behind the ©reative Encounters research programme, it brings into play two editing activities in which the author has been involved over the past six months. One of these is a four volume set of readings in the creative industries which shows that, even though most writing on ‘creative’ industries stem from various governments’ national policies promulgated from the end of the 1990s, there is plenty of material ‘out there’ from the late 1940s onwards. The other is an edited book on the role of fairs, festivals and competitive events in the creative industries which also revealed the extent to which history tended to be overlooked in a specific context by contemporary scholars in different disciplines. The paper concludes by asking what enables and what hinders interdisciplinarity, suggesting that institutional structures and the publishing industry in many ways are designed to prevent innovation in intellectual fields. It is these, therefore, that need to be reconsidered if we are to be successful in crossing over from one discipline to another.