dhartley

“Avoiding Proper Work for 41 years”: Probe Plus Records and Transition away from Formalised Space in Commercial Narratives

2012-02-13T20:02:00.000Z

Paper abstract prepared for Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, Barcelona 2012

Thepaper discusses redescription (Shackle 1979; Sarasvathy 2008; Ricouer1990) of entrenched entrepreneurial narratives and the emergence ofnew images (Penrose 1959/1995) of musical opportunity that challengetheir usual transition into formalised space. It begins by examiningpop music history and bands like The Beatles whose commercialnarratives nearly always suggest celebrity musical entrepreneursdiscovering opportunity through the help of global corporations anddraw them as epic entrepreneurial heroes (Hamilton 2002) very few canimitate. The usual narrative transition has likely entrepreneurs thatare rare “bombastic showstoppers” able to marshal theirenvironment into submission or passive stargazers awaitingidentification from above before ascending. These narratives areenduring central isolating mechanisms in musical business today.Using ethnographic study of a new beginning (Shackle 1979) calledProbe Plus Records in Liverpool the paper then turns to examine newspace and images emerging in which opportunity plots in contrast havethem being created. It focuses on Probe Records omitting boundaries(Certeau 1984) usually defining musical product and the protagonistusing his own travelling experience to orient purchases of so-calledworld music and other “hippy paraphernalia” that connect deeplywith our musical experience. Probe mutated into a label but stilllacked material resources and used money saving tactics (Certeau1984) as coordinates in a story of entrepreneurial versatility(Penrose 1959/1995) in which the agents are revealed imaginativelyrecomposing constraint as incentive and style. Albums were folded byhand, adverts took swipes at nearby better endowed Virgin Records,King Kong was drawn tearing down Liverpool music. By referencingflesh and blood musical experiences usually excluded, installingfilmic references and engaging with local humour the brand becamefirmly embedded in the nation's musical consciousness. While thenormative commercial narrative, then, has entrepreneurs transitioningaway from audiences to take up positions of withdrawn observationProbe Plus and its protagonist in contrast remain human, less epicand heroic. By taking citations from commonplace musical experienceand eliciting social value through revealing the intense struggle ofopportunity experience spaces open up in Probe's story we can readinto and imagine ourselves as entrepreneurs. The connections with usremain intact and though Probe Plus celebrates its busiest year since1986 does not transition into formalised space, have the ability norwant to look down and try and discover. Concluding note pauses on theinstitutional desire to identify opportunity from the point ofsuccessful organization when stories of creation and so many thousands oftourists still travel to hear remembered have been effaced.

Certeau,Michael de. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, (Rendall, S.Trans.), University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hamilton,E. (2006). “Narratives of Enterprise as Epic Tragedy”, ManagementDecision,Vol. 44, no. 4, (pp. 536-550).

Penrose,E.T. (1959/1995). The Theory of the Growth of The Firm, OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford.

Ricouer,P. (1990). Time & Narrative, Vol. 1, The University of ChicagoPress, Chicago.

Sarasvathy,S. (2008). Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise,Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham.

Soundtracks: Music, Tourism, Travel - "Stolen Memories": Nostalgia in Liverpool Music and the (re)emergence of Tactical Space

2011-11-20T17:26:00.001Z

Abstract

This paper narrates a contemporary image (Penrose 1959/1995) of musical entrepreneurship in Liverpool city centre in the hope of challenging nostalgic reminiscence of previous ones. It takes the almost illegal, dirty, rat infested example of Don't Drop the Dumbells and counterposes the tactic (de Certeau 1984) against a similar unsanitized space of play (Hjorth 2005) and decision (Shackle 1979) known as Eric's Club active in Liverpool during the mid 70s and early 80s. Both 'alternative', 'underground' tactics drew their symbolic presence against local formalised spaces of musical business and touristic commerce that eventually absorbed them. They created space amidst a city often backwards and inwards looking, too conservative to step away from musical entrepreneurs of the past. Though also the spaces were dirty and riddled with health and safety defying issues punters felt some strange, rare inimitable value there unmoderated by the more dominant order. People didn't complain about their clothes getting dirty, instead they tend to insert the spaces into folkloric myth. Yet despite such strong connections neither found the resources nor tactical capacity to fend off more powerful entrepreneurs and departed prematurely. Fast forward to today and the latter is being commoditized by well-resourced 'suited' business people (who perhaps never even went 'back in the day') that hope to sell the repackaged memories to unsuspecting musical tourists. Looking back at the experience of active participation (Holstein & Gubrium 1995; Freire 1990) with Dumbells in 2010 and 2011 it does then become easy to take refuge in the past. One might dream of Dumbells being another Eric's, taking its place within this backwards looking culture, commoditizing the memory when unable to conjure new images. Yet to do so likely provides us musical tourists with only a paradoxical simulation, rather than the new beginnings (Shackle 1979) redescribing history (Ricouer 1990) and inventing new lines of flight from nostalgia centred around things that no longer exist. To add concluding note, the paper disrupts the normative narrative of musical business in one of the world's most musical cities by identifying two original sources of musical memory and their potential commoditization into formalised consumer experience.

Certeau, Michael de. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, (Rendall, S. Trans.), University of California Press, Berkeley.
Hjorth, D. (2005). “With de Certeau on Creating Heterotopias (Or spaces for play)”, Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol. 14, No. 4, (pp. 386-398).
Holstein, J.A. & Gubrium, J.F. (1995). The Active Interview, Sage Publications, London.
Freire, P. (1990). Education for Critical Consciousness, (Ramos, M. Trans.), Continuum Publications, New York.
Penrose, E.T. (1959/1995). The Theory of the Growth of The Firm, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Ricouer, P. (1990). Time & Narrative, Vol. 1, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Shackle, G.L.S. (1979). Imagination and the Nature of Choice, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Ogadimma: Yves St. Laurent - Process, Fame, Time

2011-09-07T11:59:00.002+01:00

a.P.A.t.T. Ogadimma Promo

2011-08-15T12:35:00.000+01:00

a.P.A.t.T. Narrative Rough Intro

2011-06-01T15:43:00.009+01:00

Emerging late 1997, a.P.A.t.T is a collective of multimedia artists based in Liverpool whose releases and performances are a melange of musical genres, citations of commonplace musical experience, and often disrupt expectations as to how bands should behave. Difficult to categorise, their songs often juxtapose genres, insert awkward samples that are sometimes difficult to listen to, and their performances seek to disrupt audience expectations of the function and value of music just as much as they desire to create beautiful compositions.

Multiple sessions over a year and a half period were spent with a.P.A.t.T. for research purposes. Beginning late 2009, early encounters remained more formal affairs with unstructured in-depth narrative group interviews being conducted with 4 out of the 5 members. Convened in the relaxed settings of a.P.A.t.T H.Q. (the shared flat of General MIDI and Dorothy Wave- from now on G.M. And D.W. respectively), a friendship then quickly developed as the researcher offered what resources he had (i.e. time, energy and enthusiasm) and as the collective invited him to film a performance in the formal settings of Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery. It then became increasingly feasible to use active participation as a.P.A.t.T. continuously invited the researcher to film other performances and public events staged around Liverpool, an Eastern European styled death metal music video staged in a local church, and as more time was spent with members outside the context of research (most notably G.M. And D.W.), at clubs and performances, in the pub or (alas) in the Krazy House after events. Over time the researcher became a non-musical 'member' of a.P.A.t.T. and was invited to don a moniker for public use (still unconfirmed but currently operating as 'Doctrine')- at a performance in August 2010 then being kidnapped from the audience and trapped in a potato sack for the final song. Field notes were taken continuously, to the point of saturation or anxious obsession, and a.P.A.t.T. repeatedly suggested the year and half long period be documented and incorporated in their ongoing 'archiving' project. In total 26.5 hours of interview and meetings were recorded and transcribed, with much more out of hours contact and participation tempering insight gained via these more formal mediums. Round at a.P.A.t.T. H.Q. members would be busy editing video sections, learning screen printing “in between” pressing performances, drinking cups of tea and coffee, and smoking cigarettes and cannabis late into the night. Interviews and meetings with specific purpose would meld imperceptibly with everyday dialogue as members went about managing a.P.A.t.T. on a day-to-day basis. It seemed there was no option but to allow oneself to be drawn into this space of intensity and reflect on the experience of again becoming 'member' of a group of musical entrepreneurs. Data collection and membership in a.P.A.t.T. continues to develop today.

As historical context to these encounters, contact was made with a.P.A.t.T. a year and a half ago after collecting a free 'zine from FACT in Liverpool- the final issue of 'Slacker Sounds' - that had a short interview and discussed their emergence and early 'manifesto'. Other than hearing of them on the grapevine, the odd (but unacknowledged) encounter in the past, insight is also taken from secondary sources (press clippings, newspaper articles, online and offline reviews, even friend's experiences of performances), as well as from reflection on all releases available (musical: 'e.p.', 'fr(e.p.)', 'l.p.', 'Black and White Mass', and their upcoming album 'Ogidimma', 'Paul the Record', etc., and non-musical such as the a.P.A.t.T. film, their rockumentary, and so on), and regular trawls of the online space that revealed the growing intensity of a.P.A.t.T. online and offered numerous Youtube videos and other free releases and writings by the collective, citations of which pepper the narrative. The first image draws from a series of meetings organised between the researcher and a.P.A.t.T. for the purpose of rewriting the a.P.A.t.T wikipedia entry as the G.M. and D.W. imagined how they might subvert its parameters, as well as from other secondary sources and personal experience. A more structured and concentrated trajectory was recollected from this that coordinated their emergence and release of musical products and performances up to the present day. Conducted over the space of 6 months these meetings eventually culminated in the researcher writing the wikipedia entry and taking charge of its updating, the entry at first being deleted by disgruntled wikipedia users upset with the disrupted conventional format (as D.W. repeatedly inserted disorienting past tenses and as the entry was given the same treatment most things are by a.P.A.t.T.). The second image departs from a.P.A.t.T. to focus more deeply on two of it's members in the settings of 'Don't Drop the Dumbells' as they go about collaborating on organising an alternative 'creative space' in Liverpool city and hence coordinates something of the culmination of 'becoming member' in this milieu of musical entrepreneurs.

Score X

2011-05-13T18:01:00.007+01:00

Score X: Learn

Invite The17 to stand up and divide themselves into two opposing lines.

Ask The17 to look each other in the eyes and start clapping.

To clap until their opposing number becomes weak, laughs.

Or their hands hurt.

And forget music. The singer at the front of the classroom.

Think of Something else.

What is missing. Or we have forgotten.

What else there could be.

And can't be found. Or recovered.

Keep clapping. Stop clapping.

Sit down.

The performance will not be recorded.
This score like metaphor amplifies the visibility of power relations and panoptic devices embedded in classrooms and musical spaces. Written in the form of scores composed by Bill Drummond of The17, the music itself recomposes boundaries and territories embedded in these pedagogical experiences. Score X will be performed in Istanbul 14-17 July @ the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism. Taking the conference's theme of 'recovery' the score draws parallels between the two spaces and suggests resisting one's tendency to indulge in nostalgic reminiscence of childhood experience- the school, the choir, camp fire sing-a-longs - might elicit new spaces where music can feel like 'playing' and making decisions unmediated by a more powerful order or 'other'.

Score X: No Recovery. No Finding. No Stopping ... Entrepreneurial Images of Drummond and The17

2011-05-13T17:58:00.005+01:00

"Ethnographic Throwness":Geoff Davies, Probe, Probe Plus - Case Study Narrative (Draft Introduction)

2011-03-01T16:59:00.005Z

The Ordinary Entrepreneur

2011-02-15T19:04:00.000Z

Imagine a musical entrepreneur. Imagine her growing up listening to music, going to watch and listen to it performed or played, enjoying it, or maybe hating it, buying more nonetheless, and getting “screwed over by the record business”. Imagine her learning to play some instrument, maybe even wanting to become a pop star, and going on Pop Idol, or imagine her getting involved with the 'underground' of local Do-It-Yourself musicians. She might then take it upon herself to organise musical performances, club nights, or compose, sell, distribute, and perform music, or perhaps, she might have to imagine witty ways of using this or that technology, or 'getting around' “that law”, or institution. These images and operations involve her being someone, somewhere, some-when, and operating, learning, and imagining amongst others in an exchange society. She might likely have to borrow and buy things, maybe make money, probably lose money, inherit meaning, and change meaning. She will have to go to different spaces, meet different people, exchange ideas, and move through time to learn about herself in the world, and to learn the things other people like, dislike, and find valuable. Her speech and actions then reverberate against the social backdrop constituted by judgemental others; she connects with why others might or might not like what she does, and why they might want to pay money to see or hear more. People might then start coming to see her play; they might support her because they know her, or because she enriches their understanding of social life, and it's possibilities; composing together sound and meaning in complex ways. Her songs relate to this or that dead musician, her modalities invoke lost images of Liverpool when music landed on the Albert Dock, in crates, or her polemics might conjur up figments of what might play out the retirement of recorded music. Sometimes she operates alone, solely in a particular geographic business space, other times she works closely with friends, or real businesses, and at other times, she becomes enraged, disaffected with it all, and then actively participates in forming a counterpoint to the prevailing commercial strategies of music business. Without music, her life might not be worth living; apart from, and within, the mundanity of everyday labor, she insinuates it into her life; through concealed headphones, through the crackle of overamplified workplace speaker systems, on the train, through the outdated hand-me-downs her mother used to charm her with, to the aurally discomforting gigs she parries workmates with. She grafts new meaning to her everyday life by giving it a sound track; playing such and such an artist or genre when happy, that one when depressed, and her body responds, with a desire to consume, listen, discover, create, and compose new leitmotifs of social living.

[Daniel Hartley, 2011]

A Restricted Map of Musical Places and Spaces in Liverpool

2011-02-14T18:02:00.009Z

This map plays role in introducing my thesis. It coordinates journeys I have made around Liverpool, and the spaces and places I have encountered, made, combined, and learnt from. Major places named are The Beatles Story, and the Echo Arena. Spaces of multiplicity (Hjorth 2005), are Don't Drop the Dumbells, St. Brides Church, and the moving itineraries traced by operations like the a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra's Relay, that combined properly named creative places together in a musical tour. Impracticalities like this and Dumbells emerge in fleeting imaginary spaces invented in makeshift ways, on the back of itineraries that combine knowledge, people, places and spaces, power relations, etc., Salford, the Isle of Lewis, and Preston, are not included. Road names might be added at a later date, as it seems people find it confusing to orient themselves around. The rest of the introduction will be uploaded once it is properly re-drafted. Click image to enlarge.

Don't Drop the Dumbells

2011-01-15T23:31:00.000Z

Don't Drop the Dumbells in Liverpool is now properly named as an unincorporated association.

You can become a member of this private members association.

We exist to develop & maintain our members' existing involvement within Liverpool’s thriving underground creative arts community.

We promote ourselves, and friends, locally, nationally, and internationally.

Find us at 22-24 Hardman Street (Big green gates).

Friday night experimental drumming legend, Charles Hayward, and local hoodlums Beast, and Barberos, filled the gym.

Come see.

http://postmusicshow.blogspot.com/p/dont-drop-dumbells.html

Probe Plus

2011-01-09T18:49:00.000Z

Just over a month ago, Geoff Davies from Probe Plus invited me to participate more with the label. This was after travelling to Preston to a Half Man Half Biscuit gig to help on the stall and participate and observe. So me and Geoff had a meeting about that a couple of weeks ago, and this active participation is the evolution of a year long engagement. One of our concerns is the website and general online services. General MIDI and me had a meeting last week about the website, and I've developed a basic website to introduce to Geoff some of the functions possible, and also how he and me/others might be able to manage developing the online side of the business.

The first draft for the blogspot, which will be transferred into a proper domain name once it is developed much more thoroughly, is here: http://probeplusrecords.blogspot.com/

a.P.A.t.T. Wiki Re-Do

2011-01-03T17:52:00.005Z

a.P.A.t.T. is an experimental organizational form best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. They are notable for compositional and organizational philosophies that value purposive change, bricolage, contradiction, personal challenge and discomfort tomembers of a.P.A.t.T. and audiences, inclusiveness and participatory action, and an imaginative attention to musical and social conventions, and this is visible throughout all a.P.A.t.T. operations, public performances and releases^[1]. The letters a.P.A.t.T. seemingly stand for nothing fixed, but might be related to the compositional and organizational philosophies involved in a.P.A.t.T. Music composition by a.P.A.t.T. generally falls into two categories: deconstructions of Western popular music, or complex conceptual pieces, composed around a theme,theory, plot, or event. They are noted for surrealistic lyrics and sound, strange and unsettling behaviour on stage, a disregard for conventional musical composition, and modes of music business, and an unflinching relationship to aesthetics, often embodied in challenging musical pieces^[2]^[3]. Every a.P.A.t.T. performance involves the individual members seemingly attempting to disarm themselves in front of audiences through the use of a white uniform dress code. From 2002, a.P.A.t.T. performed regularly and worked on releasing ep's and albums through various labels and distributors, and has in more recent years initiated and collaborated on a wide range of public performances and other multimedia works. Albums like 'Black & White Mass', released in 2008, and other formative releases, involve the collective samplingvigorously from popular culture, everyday life, and musical and social imagery, often incorporating samples and re-compositions of common musical life in musical pieces^[1]. 'Black and White Mass', an album described as a "Mad hatters tea party for avant-rock heads"^[4], wasRadio 1 DJ Huw Stevens' 'Album of the Week' in 2008. a.P.A.t.T. has been associated with the endurance of an alternative musical scene inLiverpool, being named alongside bands such as Ladytron, Clinic, Hot Club de Paris, and Kling Klang. They tour about once a year, recently in France, Germany, and Switzerland, and premiered at the opening of a performance based arts initiative in Lille, France, in December 2010^[5]. A new album is rumoured to be nearing completion for release in 2011.

The a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra, an orchestra of no fixed size, style of performance, or mode of production, has recently experimented withparticipatory musical experiences, and with spatiality and musical composition^[6].

Origins

The current members of a.P.A.t.T. originate from Liverpool, England, and North West England. a.P.A.t.T. became a musical entity in 1998 when General Midi and Field Marshall Stackwrote some words on a cassette tape they had recorded sounds upon after becoming disassociated with bands. Their intention back then was to make, find, imagine, and create 'secret music', and to learn more about the anti-compositional experience. For much of the early years, the members concentrated on developing their personal knowledge and public image, developing the performance image/sound that endures today, learning new/old instruments and cutting edge technological systems, and developing their organizational and compositional philosophy. Further down the road, a.P.A.t.T. felt comfortable enough to release music and ideas to the public, in the form of e.p.'s and albums. Around this time they began work on afeature film, and a documentary about a.P.A.t.T.; each of which seemingly embodies the compositional and organizational philosophies involved with a.P.A.t.T. They also performed much more, becoming well known in the U.K. music scene. 'Members' have come and gone since a.P.A.t.T. emerged, and during this time the organizational form has been able to accommodate these changes and continue to diversify into new music and multi-media spaces. Today, the amorphous organizational form of a.P.A.t.T. includes musical and non-musical members, and is involved in multiple projects and collaborations simultaneously, more or less musical in nature.

SCOS 2011: Abstract- Imagine Waking up Tomorrow and All Music has Disappeared: Imagining and Forgetting in Salford [Accepted 21.12.10]

2010-12-14T14:57:00.008Z

Proceedings of SCOS 2010 in Lille.

2010-12-14T09:54:00.002Z

Proceedings of the 28th Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism (SCOS) 2010

Clunn, Rebecca, Hartley, Daniel, Harwood, Susan, Kavanagh, Donncha, Mahy, Isabelle, Schulz, Florian, Sonda, Giovanna andWright, Nevan Proceedings of the 28th Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism (SCOS) In: 28th Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism (SCOS) 2010, 2010, Lille, France. (Unpublished)

PDF - Accepted Version
1177Kb

Official URL: http://www.scos.org/2010/Lille/

Abstract

This is a selection of papers presented at the 28th SCOS conference in Lille, France.

POSTMUSIC SHOW: a.P.A.t.T. presents Terry Riley’s – In C. Live (Ex...

2010-12-09T18:18:00.004Z

"On December 8^th 2009, a.P.A.t.T. took over the Bluecoat, Liverpool, to stage a unique version of Terry Riley’s groundbreaking minimalist work, In C."

This film was the first camera work done for a.P.A.t.T., a year ago.

POSTMUSIC SHOW: a.P.A.t.T. presents Terry Riley’s – In C. Live (Ex...: "Photos:Steve TonerVideo :POSTMUSIC On December 8th 2009, a.P.A.t.T. took over the Bluecoat, Liverpool, to stage a unique version of Terry R..."

Name

2010-12-09T14:58:00.006Z

D: It's funny being named properly for the filming, it kind of differentiates me from a.P.A.t.T. or something//

GM: Well, I think it's about time you had a name... ...it's good if it has a title and references something... ... your's should be a bit different, with what you do and such...

(Conversation between the researcher formerly known as Daniel Hartley, Dot Wav, and General Midi. Fri 26th Nov)

[]

GM: You know when it's right. Dig into your soul...

(Chat on Facebook, 2.12.10)

And from now on, he will be known as Dok One...or Sad Professor...or Maxi Doc... Or I-Doc. ...or something...

Don't Drop the Dumbells: Improper, Almost Illegal, and 'Other' “Creativity” in Liverpool City Centre. Presented at CCRN 2010

2010-12-02T17:54:00.016Z

This short presentation was a polemic. It emphasised the feeling of the moment; the possibility and ways of operating we had to deal with, and the different boundaries we had to get around, it amplified particular relations maybe more than it should have. It has been withdrawn from view for the time being. A proper paper will be written up at a later date, and the powerpoint will likely be put back into view. It was meant to express something of the energy sometimes at the Dumbells, and the kind of historical impracticalities and ideas spaces like the Dumbells and small independent bricolages can invoke. Nobody really ever wanted the Dumbells to operate as a bar. It never really did. Nobody ever wanted anything to be illegal. And nothing ever was. If anything, it was normative images of the kind of business we are involved in; the association of music and buying alcohol, insinuating hegemonic forces and legal boundaries into our private, creative space. We care about our relationships, and this short presentation does emphasise one. But it does so to underline that we had to deal with more proper notions of 'creativity', and the problems associated with that. We never had the economic or social capital to agree licensing; but instead had to operate in a makeshift way, as we learnt what we could do, and what we should do. Though relations are addressed in perhaps a less deferential way than they should, then, these were up for discussing precisely because of their importance to us. We had to deal with them along the way, because Dumbells is nothing without them. A way of life, not made by us but advertised to us, brought problems, and we had to deal with who it might affect, and who cares about what we do. The speech appropriated and presented here wasn't ever really meant to see the light of day either. I have the responsibility of presenting how people operate fairly. My work is partly fictitious; imaginary, amplifying bits and pieces to say something other than is first apparent, or maybe should be said. It was a private meeting, where people were addressed in a jokey, but friendly way. A private, not for airing language game is described, as necessary power relations are negotiated and we authorise what we do. But it isn't getting one over someone; it's a composing together of mutual, but different interests by clever turns, as relations in the business space we operate in changed. Transposed onto the screen, the meaning of our speech is lost in the sharpness of the words and letters. People are everything to something like this. Don't Drop the Dumbells is about love, friends, people, making friends, keeping friends, making music, developing, having fun, moving, never stoppin'

[Daniel Hartley 10.2.11]

The powerpoint can be seen on my Scribd.com account: Reno Radioaction

a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra presents Sound Relay Film with Orchestra 10/ 10

2010-11-26T13:30:00.004Z

Join the magnetic relay of sound as musicians including Ensemble 10/10 and the a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra take you on a cumulative journey of musical happenings from Hope Street to the Albert Dock.Inspired by the Tate Liverpool Touched exhibition as part of the Liverpool Biennial, and taking composer Jennifer Watson’s Reflections as its focus, dozens of musicians test the limits of their own practice to create a series of surprising, experimental and reflexive happenings.Follow the Long Night trail as the procession gathers pace, picking up new musical material along the way and culminating with a finale in the galleries, including in and around the installation of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Embryology (1978–1980).

This film is a montage of said incident.
Filmed by Daniel Hartley
Edited by GM

http://itsapatt.blogspot.com/2010/11/apatt-orchestra-presents-sound-relay.html

a.P.A.t.T. Presents Meeting Points by Richard Harding Live at Walker Gallery, Liverpool

2010-11-24T14:56:00.003Z

Earlier filming for a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra:

http://itsapatt.blogspot.com

a.P.A.t.T. Sound Relay Rehearsal Video

2010-11-24T13:18:00.002Z

The product of filming and rehearsing every night last week. The video was filmed by me, for/with a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra. The video for the Sound Relay itself, held last Thursday night around Liverpool city centre, and which was marvellous, is in process and will be ready soon.

a.P.A.t.T. Sound Relay Rehearsal from aPAtT on Vimeo.

James Barton and Cream Group Ltd. Case Study Narrative. Complete Draft Copy

2010-11-16T13:34:00.013Z

Culture and Creativity Research Network Symposium- "Don't Drop the Dumbells: Improper, Illegal, and 'Other' “Creativity” in Liverpool City Centre". Abstract

2010-11-08T11:58:00.012Z

Don't Drop the Dumbells: Improper, Illegal, and 'Other' “Creativity” in Liverpool City Centre

Daniel Hartley

Paper presented at Culture and Creativity Research Network Symposium: The Nature and Value of Creativity, The University of Liverpool , 8^th December, 2010

Abstract.

This paper fabulates a narrative of participatory active (Freire 1990) ethnographic research undertaken with musical entrepreneurs in Liverpool city centre over a year long period and imagines culturally creative itineraries that contribute to the local economy yet often fail to be identified as productive, ethical, or valuable. It exploits Michel de Certeau's (1984) distinctions between 'strategies' and 'tactics' to help underscore some ways this happens, describing practices that interact awkwardly with the 'proper spaces' of cultural regeneration; illegal activities that operate around/with/through 'proper' authorities; and 'other' images of musical entrepreneurship that operate 'outside' and 'within' the properness of cultural regenerators. The paper, then, imagines a narrative backwater in which musical entrepreneurs flourish despite, and often, in spite of initiatives that intend to appropriate their itineraries for short sighted cultural regeneration ends. It concludes by asking “What/Whose kind of “creativity” are we talking about?”

De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, (Rendall, S. Trans.), University of California Press, Berkeley.

Freire P. (1990). Education for Critical Consciousness, (Ramos, M. Trans.), Continuum Publications, New York.

Draft introduction to case study and longitudinal narrative of James Barton, Cream, Creamfields, and Cream Group Ltd.

2010-09-24T18:52:00.008+01:00

5th Annual Ethnography Conference, Queen Mary, University of London, September 2010: Working Paper

2010-08-19T18:28:00.020+01:00

aPAtT Wikipedia Entry, Draft Intro

2010-08-18T00:12:00.013+01:00

a.P.A.t.T. (pronounced however you want) is a growing group of people and a growing idea. Most of the things aPAtT do are related to passion, music, art, each other and new people, travel, time, 'learning', 'archiving', and imagination. a.P.A.t.T. is a Positive Approach to Totality. aPAtT has recorded and released 'music' that is probably best described as Serious Progressive Pop, Titty Pop, slap stick, noise, and sound. True to 'pop' in a truer sense of the word, aPAtT has and does 'produce' 'music', 'sound', and 'images' that cite commonplace experiences of consumption and 'music'. Categories of 'music' are not very applicable to aPAtT because their albums and singles can range so much, within and between 'songs'. They treat 'performance' as space to perform, play, experiment, joke, and be serious, and are recognisable through their unique and awkward choice in clothing: white T-shirts, white shorts, white skirt, with the 'aPAtT' logo printed on the front. Members of aPAtT, 'musical' or otherwise, have left and others have come. Today, the members of aPAtT who play musical instruments and wear the outfit are General Midi, Dorothy Wave, Field Marshall Stack, Master Fader, and The Count In. Allegedly, that look, and the output, 'musical' or otherwise, has the purpose of binding those involved and pricking people's ears as to who aPAtT are, who they are not, and what they might be. If there needs to be a point to aPAtT, then it might be to absorb everything aPAtT can, in a positive way.

History

In 1997, Field Marshall Stack and General Midi scribbled a Positive Approach to Totality on a cassette tape which they produced after leaving other bands they had been members of to imagine, and learn more about themselves, their knowledge, and resources. The output on that cassette challenged limitations as they then knew them, recombined their resources and knowledge for new purposes, and made do with other resources at hand. Since then, aPAtT has remained independent, not signing to a label and instead preferring to learn and develop their own knowledge and resource base.

PMTV: aPAtT Perform Gorgoth with Sack Man, Static Gallery, May 2010

2010-08-04T12:14:00.002+01:00

http://postmusicclub.co.uk/

5th Annual Ethnography Conference, Queen Mary, University of London, September 2010

2010-08-03T18:22:00.014+01:00

Lying under stones and listening to Skylarks 'sing high above': Images, Participation, and Re-Presentation

Daniel Hartley. The University of Liverpool Management School

Paper presented at the 5^th Annual Ethnography Conference, Queen Mary, University of London, September 2010.

Abstract

This paper discusses ethnographic research that wants to understand what musical entrepreneurship in North West England is. It concentrates on one musical entrepreneur who has a history in Liverpool, Bill Drummond, and narrates some images of an encounter with his current project, The17, which is a radical musical collective usually only performing for themselves, not recording anything, and making what Bill sometimes calls 'year zero' music. To meet and talk to Bill and learn about The17, the only way was to take part: “to hear The17, you must become a member”. That meant sitting under a stone circle on an island in the Outer Hebrides and listening to Skylarks singing at 7am, for 17 minutes. The trip was the track, the performance, the venue, and the audience. The paper also involves attending to the notion of independence as it is commonly presented in discourse of musical entrepreneurship, and some similar concerns expressed in strands of entrepreneurship study. The way in which The17 operates and how it was encountered in research practice, through participation, are, then, presented as 'images of being-in-business'. The paper draws from Edith Penrose (1959) to outline what these 'images of being-in-business' are and suggests that considering how Bill Drummond and The17 operates and the different phenomena of images of being-in-business expressed involves a deep questioning of the traditional understanding of 'independence' in musical entrepreneurship and the associated tension between commercial interest and musical creativity assumed to be experienced by musical entrepreneurs. For Bill, The17 is oriented by artistic interest in commercial modes of operating, rather than competitive advantage, arresting us with images and ways of operating that are in stark contrast to the wider blanket of musical enterprise, expressing a curiosity and attentiveness to more common images and memories of what musical entrepreneurship might be. The paper calls what The17 does an act of 're-presentation', and draws on Henri Bergson's (2002) 'duration' and Michel de Certeau's (1984) 'strategies' and 'tactics' in order to frame the interpretation of Penrose and hang the image of The17 as an act of re-presentation. The indefinable boundaries to The17 and the invitation from Bill to become a member evokes a similar kind of pedagogical attentiveness to notions of independence and commercial interest in the wider milieu of musical entrepreneurship and which re-presents the traditional notion of independence. The paper concludes by suggesting that, in the case of The17, musical entrepreneurship involves a kind of pedagogical attentiveness to shared histories, memories and images of musical entrepreneurship and that it is through re-presenting those common images that unique 'services'- services that question the very nature of musical entrepreneurship – are imagined and brought into being.

Bergson, H. (2002) Henri Bergson: Key Writings, Keith Ansell-Pearson, John Mullarkey (eds.), Continuum Publications, London.

De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Vol. 1. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Penrose, E. T. (1959/1995). The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

SCOS Full Paper

2010-07-29T15:34:00.002+01:00

a Positive Approach to Totality: Musical Image-Workers in Liverpool

Daniel Hartley. The University of Liverpool Management School

Paper presented at The Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, Lille, France, July 7-11 2010

Abstract

This paper develops a novel interpretation of experience-based entrepreneurship and management from an encounter with the things that Edith Penrose (1959) said about the growth of firms. It presents epistemology invoked from that encounter with Penrose through which the paper suggests learning-oriented entrepreneurship studies and other scholars interested in experience-based learning might approach the 'subject'. That theory work will be talked through with the help of two stories about some friends of mine, aPAtT, who are a band of musical entrepreneurs from Liverpool in North West England. The way aPAtT are developing a musical single for release and the development of aPAtT's own record label, Post Music, will be used as phenomenal attractors that help think through the kind of experience-based learning processes that Penrose described. Some phenomenological made up terms will help make out the intent of the paper, phrases like 'images of being-in-business' which formalises Penrose's evocation of reality being an image in a person's mind and her associated epistemological concerns. Identifying a kind of 'pedagogical attentiveness' at (or as) the hearts of being-in-business and experience-based learning processes and the kind of image-work processes that aPAtT express then leads to a questioning of the notion of independence associated with musical entrepreneurship and the assumed tension thought to exist in the lives of musical entrepreneurs between commercial interest and musical creativity. The paper suggests that aPAtT expresses a novel way of thinking about the notion of 'independence' in musical entrepreneurship that challenges traditional images of musical entrepreneurship as either performed by isolated individuals and business entities or resulting from 'social authorship' and equilibrium inducing forces in markets and industries. aPAtT's images express a kind of management that is everyday and experience based- they actively subtract from and make questioning replies to the wider context of musical entrepreneurship, like a curiosity for the commerce of others and for the shared sociocultural milieu and a will to bring ideas and images into being. That description sits uncomfortably between notions of isolation and social authorship. Daydreaming, the paper then turns to invite other researchers to accept Penrose's invitation to research entrepreneurial learning as experience-based image-work and for researchers to imagine themselves what they can do with the epistemology and image-work the paper describes.

Introduction

The history of musical entrepreneurship is muddied with notions of 'independence' and different tensions thought to exist in the lives of musical entrepreneurs that are understood very little. Fox Film Corporation was one of the first 'Independents' back in the 20^th Century and from around the late 1970s there has been an 'Independent' movement in UK music and the wider Creative Industries explicitly labelled 'Independent'. It is uncertain what that was back then and what it became over time: was anything really independent of anything else and if so how did it emerge, did it then evolve into something else, did it disappear, might it have eaten itself up because cultural traditions associated with music were unable to be reasonably harmonized in people's lives, what is the significance of popularization and commercialization of those notions and the subsequent 'everydayness' of those terms- what was and is 'Independence' in musical entrepreneurship? However people can experience it, that so-called 'Independent' movement seemingly contrasted against the more global 'mainstream' record business found on the capturing of sound in the phonograph and the subsequent potential to sell products to audiences. The aesthetic value developed by 'independent' musicians and 'independent' music can be seen to be directly related to the more mainstream industry (Stratton 1982) and, more often than not, the industrial procedures undertaken by the Independent movement back then and today seem strikingly similar to those formalized by the more mainstream characters. In some senses, then, the commerce of the Independent movement only makes sense when understood in relation to the wider industrial milieu of musical entrepreneurship. They don't seem to make much sense apart- independence is always relative to something, even if the case is one of ignorance or negation. Still, though, the notion of independence remains tweaked very little, and its currency is so everyday that, today, people talk about an Independent Film industry and they talk about independent film makers, actors and actresses and others in the same way they talk about independent musical entrepreneurs, label owners and shop staff. The significance of this 'Independent' sector in the creative industries has also been recently worked on by Charles Leadbeater and Kate Oakley (1999). They suggest 'Independents' in the creative industries make a substantial contribution in the UK economy but remain an area of cultural and economic production that scholars and policy makers know very little about. Independent musical entrepreneurship is even less visible. If, though, 'independence' is what it is commonly thought to be (autonomous production), then there might not be any reason to consider what policies could support independent entrepreneurs: they are isolated from that stuff. So understanding 'independence' as it is commonly imagined and experienced, sometimes perhaps also as a feeling or an attitude to experience, seems to perplex an interest in it. Maybe the popularity of this notion of isolation and independent production in the creative industries today, in part, could be explained in respect to romanticised notions of the artist as an isolated actor seemingly able to operate by talent alone (although it did emerge and potentially embody whatever Neo-Liberal and individualist ideology might be). It seems that it is valuable to audiences and producers alike if people are able to work in isolation, through their talent alone (of course, on the side of 'producers', it means retaining more remuneration). On the side of audiences, it seems to express something more mystical- a kind of essence of creativity needing to be released. People are drawn to this romance. Television today doesn't clear things up either. The talent show 'Britain's Got Talent', for instance, affirms this notion of independent talent being able to ascend to the heavens of media success solo. Musical entrepreneurs, actors, comedians and other 'performers' get up on stage for 2 minutes (if they're lucky) and perform their piece to the onlooking board of judges (with varying degrees of what people would call musical and commercial talent and ability). The role of Simon Cowell and the play of wider industrial and economic milieu can be ignored if the title of the show alone is considered, as if it is 'performer's' talent alone that got them there, or the direct contrast must be the case: that those foolish enough to be duped by Cowell and his cohorts are jigged around in the mechanics of industry, being cajoled into chasing false dreams or thrown about by the economy's equilibrium inducing forces at a time when the traditional image of the music industry is collapsing or in a state of flux. If 'Britain's Got Talent' does work as a metaphor for one extreme case of what might have become of the notion of 'independence' in musical entrepreneurship, then those willing to perform on 'Britain's Got Talent' or those known as 'Independent' musical entrepreneurs might appear to stand precariously somewhere between total independence and isolation on the one side, as if their talent alone can save them and situatedness doesn't matter, and social authorship, determinism and equilibrium inducing forces on the other, as if imagination doesn't really matter. There is not much talk of any kind of movement within and between musical entrepreneurs and the wider context- between the isolated 'subject' and the situatedness that some suggest can determine entrepreneur's actions. The experience of musical entrepreneurship as an embedded and active 'subject', as a result of that, is probably fondled a lot less than it should. Another interesting observation to make is that the 'talent' of those on 'Britain's Got Talent' is contrasted against the commercial interests of Simon Cowell et al for whom the bottom line is always 'Will it sell?', 'Will it make it to number one or number ten?'. The history of musical entrepreneurship, in a similar way, is potentially partitioned into camps expressing more interest in musical creativity and those expressing more interest in making money or taking other's. At times, it works to think of the music industry as divided, as others have (e.g. Stratton 1982; Hesmondalgh 1999), between the 'Independents' and the 'mainstream' record business. The Independent movement is potentially a product of that assumed tension in the history of musical entrepreneurship. It might have developed aesthetic value as people considered those involved against the wider record business, as they considered what musical products they could and could not obtain, and questioned the interests and values assumed to be expressed by the kind of musical products available and the kind of industrial and market-based procedures both sites performed. At the same time, musical entrepreneurs seized hold of interstices cast off by larger firms imagined novel opportunities. But, the old romanticist image of the isolated ('Independent') genius, living in poverty somewhere in France or Italy, without much care for what other artists are producing and not having much regard (or even knowledge of) acquired techniques and intellectual abilities, still mystifies the emergence of the Independent movement and how 'independents' operate. Wendy Fonarrow (2006), for instance, suggests that Indie culture and ritual became one of asceticism and well chosen consumption and production choices and performances. People involved in Indie music (as it all became an aesthetic, rather than just a way of thinking about work and jobs in the music industry) were not supposed to display wealth or express any kind of ego or interest outside of the music scene. Money- as long as people do not explicitly express a will to make it - then they 'pass' as legitimate musical entrepreneurs (of course, in Britain, Indie music has the reputation of being middle-class and of Indie enthusiasts being able to act that way). Similarly, in the experiences of musical entrepreneurs there is an assumed tension thought to exist between musical creativity and commercial interest. Musical entrepreneurs have to make money and still they have to generate aesthetic value. Like the independent movement, they too must operate in the midsts of industry and, whether they like it or not, what they get up to is relational to that wider milieu- known as part of a wider industrial and market reality. If that assumed tension thought to exist between commercial interest and musical creativity is then cascaded, the presupposed tension thought to exist between musical people (entrepreneurs) and management forms (i.e. signing up to an established label and all that might incur) also fits. Management and entrepreneurship, like commerce and creativity, express terms that, in a way, feel far too abstracted from experience and formalized, as all words and acts are. Musical entrepreneurs have to make money and that means management, but not necessarily performing specialised 'roles' of management. It might just be being curious about ways of operating, having knowledge of oneself and others in the local and wider milieu for entrepreneurship and being willing to work on ways of bringing musical imagination into being. So it starts to become necessary to understand how it is musical entrepreneurs learn and how they develop aesthetic and other forms of value in what they do. A turn to the experience of musical entrepreneurship as socially situated might begin to understand where that value comes from, where ideas and images from come- and even what might have become of the notion of independence- which, if anything, is a feeling or an attitude to relational characteristics of experience that are always there, but changing. Embedding actors like that and being interested in experience based 'movement' and 'change', assumed tensions thought to exist in musical entrepreneur's lives can be understood as experiential processes in which any tautness dissolves away. There is, then, a need to turn back to musical entrepreneurship in the hope of understanding, firstly, the kind of things that are significant in musical entrepreneur's experience, in what ways people operate in the thickness of that embedded experience, and, secondly, how their attitudes, feelings and memories of that experience might be expressed. Particular modes of operating can help express this theoretical way of thinking and can express processes of change, attentiveness to characteristics of experience, and imagination. Historically, it seems that the traditional notion of independence expresses some of the distaste for the wider music business that was shouted about by the earlier punks and post-punks. Today, with 'Britain's Got Talent' potentially selling stolen dreams to adolescents and the chance to ascend to stardom by independent talent alone and the unclear nature of what 'Independence' means in terms of different ways of operating and sociocultural values- people's feelings, memories and attitudes to relational characteristics of experience, how they operate amongst them, and the term 'independence' itself is likely to be very different and expressed in very different ways.

This paper now forwards an epistemological position through which it disrupts the traditional notion of musical entrepreneurship as expressing actors and business entities that are isolated from their local social context. It tries to develop some understanding of the kind of phenomena that musical entrepreneurs might depend upon, in experience, for imagining novel ways of making a living. Considering the kind of phenomena that make up those images, it then suggests that appreciating musical entrepreneurship to involve a kind of 'pedagogical attentiveness' to different characteristics of experience may help in understanding in a more general sense what musical entrepreneurs depend upon in experience-based learning processes. The paper suggests that temporal and relational experience are the most explicit of those characteristics of experience expressed through musical entrepreneurship, as a kind of (socially situated) experience-based management and entrepreneurial imagination. Based on a specific epistemology that formalizes the the significance of temporal and relational experience, the paper moves on to describe and interpret two 'image work' processes in the descriptions of aPAtT: 'image re-presentation' and 'image-management'. It suggests that entrepreneurship often expresses a process of transforming commonplace phenomena in terms of people's own person experience and that image re-presentation such as that requires images to be brought into being through people re-presenting common ways of operating. Two images of what aPAtT, a Positive Approach to Totality, get up to, who are a band of musical entrepreneurs from Liverpool in North West England, help express that theory through metaphor, as their real life experience chimes against the ideas and images forwarded in this paper.

Edith Penrose, Images-of-being-in-business and Learning

To test the validity of the traditional notion of independence and begin constructing epistemology by which to appreciate musical entrepreneurship as being enacted by socially embedded actors, the paper now turns to briefly describe a phenomenologically inspired encounter with the ideas of Edith Penrose (1959/1995). Back in 1959, Penrose claimed that entrepreneurs' actions are determined by the mental image they have of their own experience of being-in-business (1995: 5, 42). She thought these images to represent the particular experience of the person or group of people in the world of business. Each person or group of people has a different image- made up of a different history of being related to others and sharing common phenomena in particular ways – and that history enables people to understand things (i.e. resources, services, cultural signifiers) they encounter in unique ways. The expression of that image of being-in-business is the unique 'services' a person or group of people is able to produce from a common set of resources. Images become productive opportunities because they are socially embedded, arresting images. These images people develop over time and through which they make sense of the wider world of business can be termed 'images of being-in-business'.

Images of being-in-business are constituted by phenomena that are significant in entrepreneurs' experience. Entrepreneurs coordinate different phenomena commonly encountered and understand them in terms of their own experience of being-in-business. At the broadest level in the context of musical entrepreneurship, the things that constitute images of being-in-business can be things like, local, industrial and market-based relations- such as stereotyped genres of music and different ways of releasing or distributing it. Or they could be more personal- such as the different resources, services and experiences people develop over time. The point is that images are constituted by commonplace phenomena that are comprehended by the entrepreneur in terms of their own experience of being-in-business over time, in terms of their own characteristics- and these properties emerge through the encounter. This way of thinking about images and the way in which people experience commonplace phenomena in unique ways can be pulled back and tied to something more sturdy, an epistemological position. JC Spender (1996a; 1996b; 1998) is one scholar that worked around this neck of the woods in Organizational Learning oriented work and he suggested that theorists might move away from positivist oriented analyses often assuming static and isolate entities- those assuming that knowledge can exist 'out there', as objects or 'assets', without the experience and situatedness of people really mattering. Spender (1996b) went on to affirm that all knowledge is 'knowledge in use' and that no such entitative kinds of knowledge exist: knowledge is a 'process' rather than a 'thing'. That chimes with what Penrose suggested about 'knowledge' never being a case of isolate 'assets' with static qualities and that 'reality' is really an experience-based mental image (1995:42). For Penrose, it would then only be in images, as people encounter commonplace phenomena in terms of their own experience- images of things based on their own history - that properties emerge and knowledge is developed.

That is pretty much how Penrose (1959) described 'learning processes' developed through the kind of 'internal processes' she claimed spur growth. She describes a kind if swaying movement enduring between the things that constitute people's personal memories, resources and services and the things that constitute the world of business they encounter. Difference or 'disequilibrium' is imagined between the material perception of the different phenomena people encounter and their comprehension of them in terms of their own experience- it works as a metaphor for being-in-business. So people consider things like resources, services and experience they have already been developing over time in relation to things like local industrial and market based relations, as images: there are not any entitative sites of knowledge or any real materiality: instead a kind of swaying movement between experience and materiality. Resources, services and opportunities, are comprehended relationally and in terms of people's temporal experience, like a 'pedagogical attentiveness' to the uncertainty and possibility of perceptions of oneself as being-in-business.

This re-description of learning is based around knowing one's being-in-business as a historical image and then being able to imagine a new image of being-in-business. The creation of opportunities and wealth strategies depends on this certain kind of 'pedagogical attentiveness': allowing oneself to be drawn and to consider oneself within the local social context. That attentiveness also involves a will to imagine- the product of these learning processes being the creation of novel images as people recognise potential, virtual, difference between the material existence of things they encounter in business and their experience-based comprehension of them. Attentiveness is, in this way, is both managing and entrepreneuring- ' image work' that endures in experience.

These disequilibrium oriented learning processes surface two broad constituent parts of people's images of being-in-business. These are people's relationality and people's temporality. People express attentiveness, most explicitly, to temporal and relational characteristics of experience. They express those two aspects of pedagogical attentiveness as the resources, services and experience that people develop over time enable them to comprehend different relations they experience in the business environment. Memory allows people to imagine things differently- to imagine novel 'services'. 'History matters' (Penrose 1959:xiii) because it is the history of being-in-business that enables people to develop and re-present images of experience. Understood in those terms, history and memory reshape and redescribe matter: it is people's temporal experience that enables them to comprehend and then imagine the numerous relations they encounter differently.

That swaying movement between history, memory and the materiality of present experience suggested by Penrose operates as epistemology, epistemology of entrepreneurial action. Like epistemology has already been surfaced by JC Spender (1996b; 1998) in his attempt to develop an 'inherently dynamic' knowledge-based approach to firm growth based around pluralistic epistemology. As with Penrose, Spender also suggests that knowledge and different material forms only really exist when they enter experience, as they are used by people in terms of their own experience and situatedness. Spender (1996b, 1998), though, was more interested in a triadic representation of learning processes, suggesting that a movement (which he called a dialectic) endures between organizational, collective, and personal memory modes of knowledge. He was interested in historical phenomena and the play of memory in things, but he does not put that concern into such terms as temporal and relational experience per se. If the play between the two really does need tying back to something a little more sturdy, this notion of a kind of 'movement' enduring between experience and materiality can be tacked onto process philosopher Henri Bergson (2002). One of the things that really fascinated Bergson was people's experience of time and, in his ontology of duration (2002), Bergson suggests that the past overflows into the moment, like a gradually expanding rubber balloon, and continually enables perception and imagination. For him, “there is no perception which is not full of memories (2002:27)” and reality, based on that, is experienced in terms of 'movement' and 'change'. That too affirms that the perceptions, divisions and other intellectual procedures performed by positivists often stymie a real appreciation of experience if given too free a reign and allowed to dominate human inquiry. Bergson suggested that there is no real division or separation in experience and that the human predilection for cutting, calculating, separating and manufacturing objects, are really expressions of a practical mind straining to operate functionally. He suggests that formal constructs and strategies that help in practical manoeuvres are often overly concentrated upon and allowed to stymie an experience of flow, undivided change and movement not separated by anything other than people's attention (2002). In a similar sense, Penrose's concentration on the significance of history expresses a like fascination with temporal experience and material presence, for, as images have been described here, they entail a certain kind of uncertainty and possibility, manifest as people encounter materiality with their own experience. Without forgetting, it too must be noted that Penrose 'cultivated her own garden' (Penrose 1959:10), often in stark contrast to other theorists active during her era who favoured equilibrium, invasive and abstractive oriented analyses and were dislocated from the “flesh and blood” (Penrose 1959:12) of the firm. She too knew entrepreneurial experience to be undivided and, instead, to be a world of plurality often too mystical for equilibrium oriented analyses predicated on productivist and functionalist concerns to deal with reasonably.

Image Work

Epistemology developed from Penrose calls up two 'image-work' processes that are of interest. The first is the move from the commonplace images and appearances people see in the world to how they are really experienced. People, initially, know these common forms through sharing the world with others, in time. How people then make sense of them in their own unique ways can be thought of as a process of re-presentation. Bergson said something very similar. He suggested that, as people encounter materiality (i.e. relations and phenomena of different kinds), they re-present that material presence in terms of their own temporal experience, in terms of their own duration. The second process concerns how the re-presented image will managed into being in a social, business context. This is a process of image-management. Both processes express the epistemological interest: they evoke some images-of-being-in-business, express temporal and relational characteristics of experience as a kind of pedagogical attentiveness, and display image-work processes.

To outline the 'image work' processes the paper is interested in, Michel de Certeau's (1984) ideas of 'strategies' and 'tactics' chime with the interest in temporal and relational experience and the interest in acts of re-presentation. 'Strategies' help in understanding this image-work because for Certeau the term 'strategy' represents the material appearance of things: commonplace and easily recognisable by people and not having any connection to people's real experience. Experienced as inherited resources or 'equipment', strategies are established ways of operating people encounter as already instated in the business world. They represent a specific kind of historical and commonplace knowledge of ways of operating. So, in places like Liverpool, musical entrepreneurs might share images of popular music much in the same way they share time and space (the city) with ways of operating already embodied in the spatial fabric.

'Tactics', on the other hand, for Certeau are the lived out reality of things. Tactics are how strategies are actually experienced. They are re-presented images of strategies. More significant in light of Penrose, though, tactics are also the manifestations of people's temporal experience. So, as they encounter things like strategies, places and other phenomena, people re-present them tactically in terms of their own experience of being-in-business. Like Penrose, at this juncture Certeau et al (1998:137) felt a 'pedagogical relation' exists in experience between common forms people inherit or encounter and their lived out reality in people's lives through which these change processes develop. For both Penrose and Certeau, temporal experience enables people to imagine and to act- they share that epistemological concern.

a Positive Approach to Totality

The paper now turns to aPAtT to help make sense of the processes of image-re-presentation and image-management in terms of temporal and relational characteristics of images of being-in-business: in terms of an attentiveness to experience. “So what is aPAtT?” aPAtT is a non-entitative band of musical entrepreneurs from Liverpool in the North West of England. It sometimes operates as a band, sometimes as a larger 40-piece ensemble called The aPAtT Orchestra.

a.P.A.t.T.''' (pronounced however you want) would have been a growing group of people and a growing idea. Most of the things a.P.A.t.T. do are related to passion, music, art, each other and new people, travel, time, 'learning', 'archiving', and imagination. a.P.A.t.T. is a Positive Approach to Totality. a.P.A.t.T. has recorded and released 'music' that is probably best described as serious progressive pop, titty pop, slap stick, noise, and sound. True to 'pop' in a truer sense of the word, a.P.A.t.T. would have and does 'produce' 'music', 'sound', and 'images' that cite commonplace experiences of consumption and 'music'. Categories of 'music' are not very applicable to a.P.A.t.T. because their albums and singles can range so much, within and between 'songs'. They treat 'performance' as space to perform, play, experiment, joke, and be serious, and are recognisable through their unique and awkward choice in simple white clothing with the 'a.P.A.t.T.' logo printed on the front. Members of a.P.A.t.T., 'musical' or otherwise, have left and others have come. Today, the members of a.P.A.t.T. who play musical instruments and wear the outfit are General Midi, Dorothy Wave, Field Marshall Stack, Master Fader, and The Count In. Allegedly, that look, and the output, 'musical' or otherwise, has the purpose of binding those involved and pricking people's ears as to who a.P.A.t.T. are, who they are not, and what they might be. If there needs to be a point to a.P.A.t.T., then it might be to absorb everything a.P.A.t.T. can, in a positive way. a.P.A.t.T. are about reflecting and building, bricolage and experimental music, seemingly.

What aPAtT get up probably makes more sense when considered against what aPAtT means- the words that Ben and Steve scribbled on the first C90 cassette they released back in 1998: a Positive Approach to Totality. It means aPAtT produce a range of musical products that are in themselves often peculiar and against the grain of normal musical entrepreneurship. They regularly release musical singles (through their own or another label, or for free download), have released 2 albums and are working on their 3rd, develop video projects, manufacture and release merchandise, work with people and organisations from all over the UK, and perform widely. They have just played in Lille as part of a European tour and will be going back in October 2010 to help in a workshop for young musical entrepreneurs. They have been album of the week on top British radio stations and have worked with the BBC in Liverpool and are a favourite band of some local musicians. They also have a strong web-presence and they develop their own web-based mediums to communicate between friends involved in similar things and audiences. Much of this is undertaken 'independently'- without direct support from larger established organisations – but, in other ways, occurs 'dependently'- as aPAtT reproduce and re-present common images of musical entrepreneurship and bring novel ones into being that express their attentiveness to their (and our) experience of musical entrepreneurship.

aPAtT's songs contain snippets from conversations, textured recordings taken from different places and recorded through different mediums, samples from classical composers and reproductions of pop song beat patterns. Their music can range from death metal to jazzy riffs (in the same song), to a poppy reproduction of Prince or an exact 'replica' of a trance track from 1994. They say they want to “archive” their experience musically and through practice and they want to engage with the forms and practices of others, those of history and of the wider context of the music business, through doing it themselves. Like us, they call these modes of practice “learning” or “archiving” and that notion of what it is like to learn characterises their ethos of musical production as much as their name does. Hence, aPAtT can't simply be categorized as doing this or that- they are involved with all different types of projects and they feel that part of the art and value of what they do is learning and being “comfortable with being uncomfortable”.

a Positive Approach to Totality also means that aPAtT have an interest in imitating, juxtaposing and questioning common forms of musical entrepreneurship and popular music. Much of their work involves taking a mode of musical entrepreneurship or a form of popular music and re-enacting the images they perceive to be associated with it, in terms of their own experience. They claim this mode of practice is far from 'experimental'- they reproduce commonplace things at times and always undertake sensible management to bring things into being (and that term 'experimental' seems to really only express the dominance of positivistic epistemology even in fields of non-scientific production). As aPAtT then re-present, juxtapose and imitate common forms of popular music and musical entrepreneurship, they implicitly reference a tradition in independent musical production that endures from the likes of CRASS, This Heat and Pere Ubu from the 70s and 80s and the likes of Bill Drummond and the K-Foundation from the 90s. Operating in relation to others like this, aPAtT's work involves different forms of everyday knowledge and image-work: expressed as an attentiveness to their own and to other's experience of being-in-business, as novel forms of entrepreneurship and management based in everyday experience.

The Ruse Track

An example of this questioning mode of operation in which aPAtT re-present and imitate common forms is the development of a musical single that aPAtT call the 'ruse track'. It is a re-presentation of some common forms of popular music in Britain and an imitation of some common strategies of musical entrepreneurship people associate with the specific form of popular music. aPAtT have developed a collection of tracks that purposively imitate and play with common images of popular music and musical entrepreneurship. The muse of this particular act of re-presentation is popular British indie band, Snow Patrol, whose emerging popularity was legitimized in the media in respect to a common narrative of independent production then being associated with the increasing numbers of musical entrepreneurs utilising web-based information communication mediums. The single aPAtT have produced and the video being made express how aPAtT perceive and feel about that particular kind of music. aPAtT imitate the image they perceive in order to open lines of questioning as to why they and others do what they do.

As a re-presentation of a common form of popular music, the ruse track imitates the usual structure and sound that people expect in order to pass as a legitimate musical product. Chord harmonies aPAtT associate with that music are imitated. The actual sound of the track is crisp and well-produced- the feel of 'over-production' by a mainstream record label. The normal 3 and a half minute duration is there, a beginning, a chorus line and an end, and the usual make-up of instruments too. Everything that they think the particular image (or 'ideal type') of popular music contains and which they think the market expects. Reproducing all they think matters camouflages the ruse for the surroundings aPAtT perceive. That also means it is not actually the members of aPAtT who play the public role of the band. For the image to really work, aPAtT want a lead singer with high cheekbones for public appearances. He might wear bracelets, will probably have messy hair and will definitely be good looking.

The song is also about the lead singer. The lyrics spout the commonplace story of the young aspiring musician who is still in music college and struggling with everyday life. He produces the track for a college music tech. project and, somehow, manages to get it picked up by BBC Radio One and get the single is released. The rub really comes with the image of the music video that will accompany the release of the single. aPAtT imagine re-creating this hyperbolic image of the lead singer atop a snow-peaked mountain, helicopter circling above and filming as he proclaims his passion and desire for making music for the world.

To re-present the strategy of releasing singles, aPAtT have to operate tactically. This means they have to negotiate other strategies in terms of the resources, services and experience they have developed over time. So, to record the single, aPAtT used all their own equipment- instruments and studio equipment they have developed over the years. Today, Steve has a desk full of new and expensive post-production facilities at his disposal that he uses readily. It was also recorded at a venue they already had access to so there was no need to hire a recording studio. And the video is being made by a friend who they have worked with in the past and who they like working with, which saves money and means they can trust him. Between the tactics, aPAtT negotiate issues of restricted resources and services in light of the strategy they are re-presenting.

The release of the single also includes some imaginative tactics. Although Steve and Ben think they can thread the singles release on the end of a pop genealogy of big business bands, they have to imagine how they could lever the resources, services and experience they already have. That's if the track is likely to get played on BBC Radio One, which is Britain's largest radio station, and if they are to bypass the bar room deals expected to be made between pluggers. Getting played on Radio One is a must: it is a mode of operating aPAtT and the market is likely to associate with the image of popular music being re-presented. To then get round the concentration of influence around well-established institutions and record labels, aPAtT turn to friends they already know. Somebody Jon knows well now works at BBC Radio One and they expect he might be a “back door” into the institution. They suspect he might feel guilty for working at BBC Radio One and so might help them. So they contact him. But they restrict the information he has access to in order to avoid any chance of him being a “shitbag” about it.

The lyrics also play a part in helping the track to pass as a legitimate musical product. The whole image they are re-presenting is based around the story (or legend) of the aspirational musician, trapped in an ordinary life. The lyrics go that the teenage lead signer wants to escape college and become the popular musician that he feels he is. This is his first attempted release. The story helps because it reduces the background imagery people need to see and hear and that means that aPAtT can more easily operate as the puppeteers jigging the false band.

aPAtT make sure the other modes of musical entrepreneurship associated with the particular form of popular music are imitated too. “There will be all the usual shit” that people expect, Steve says. At the moment, Myspace, Facebook and other web-based mediums that create a background story and imitate the normative image are being put in place. Doing so helps the image pass as a legitimate musical product and opens more possibilities.

The Post Music Record Label

Another project aPAtT have been working on is the development of their own record label, Post Music. This entity is organised amongst friends with similar interests and capabilities. A strategy itself, the label also, tactically, performs some of the strategies most record labels operate by: recording different musical products, organising pressing and distribution contracts, the release of musical products and development of other merchandise, the development of web-based manifestations of the label, the organisation of live performances and so on. Post Music performs and re-presents most of the strategies larger traditional labels do in an aPAtT way- in terms of their small size, reduced resources and services, the gesture they want to make, and the fact that they are based in a particular locality and have developed modes of operation.

The development of the Post Music record label is a similar story of image-re-presentation and image-management to the ruse track. It too follows a general strategy-to-tactic itinerary. It is common knowledge throughout music making communities that record labels release musical products and provide different services to musicians. The history of music making is also based around a concentration of influence around record labels in terms of what kinds of music get released and what bands get supported. Being-in-business, aPAtT are well aware of this historical background to being in the music business.

To establish their own label means aPAtT have “more room”. They have to rely less on established organisations, even those they have previously worked successfully with, and, instead, learn themselves. Doing things like that is part of the value of the whole aPAtT project- they take the totality on in a positive way. The label was established between them and a close friend, Jake, who they have known for a long time. They can share resources and services. Post Music releases aPAtT's products and the products of bands and musicians that they already know and like working with. All musical products associated with the label originate from the Liverpool environs and there is a strong community spirit. It operates like a kind of home, network or community centre for them and friends they like to work with.

Like the ruse track, Post Music also re-presented other modes of practice associated with record labels. They host a website, postmusicclub.co.uk, which connects all the various fronts associated with all the bands. It enables communication both between those involved and audiences (on matters associated and not necessarily associated with Post Music) in an online forum. Musical products are available for priced and free downloads regularly too, and live performances are announced to audiences and uploaded for people to watch. The site also offers support to other musicians and technical information advice and there are even invitations to come and work for aPAtT on an intern basis or to volunteer in 'street teams'. Like the background imagery for the Ruse Track- all the usual stuff people expect and that is proven to work is there and aPAtT play with as much as they can.

The way that aPAtT firstly re-present the, historical, image of the strategy to develop a record label expresses a set of tactics- i.e. how they use it, what they use it for, the gesture they make with it and how they develop novel images into being. They re-present the strategy they perceive in terms of their own experience of being-in-business over time and how they feel about that type of musical entrepreneurship. More directly than that, though, the record label is only possible on the back of a promo-video aPAtT are concurrently producing. The promo-video contains those bands who work with the label performing at a local derelict cinema that aPAtT had access to. It was filmed quickly amongst friends in a lo-fi, low-budget style. The importance of the promo-video is that it establishes the label as a productive entity. aPAtT will send it down to Southern Record Distribution which is a large independent record distributor in Britain. As a tactical combination, the promo-video markets different musical products to distribution companies and, once the video is officially released through Post Music, aPAtT will receive remuneration. The promo-video is also part of a wider itinerary aPAtT have put in place so that, between the projects that they are currently involved with, they combine sources of finance and can develop the Post Music label.

Discussion

Both of those stories about aPAtT express a strategy-to-tactic plot which helps make sense of these processes of image-re-presentation and image-management that endure from Penrose. For Penrose, entrepreneurship and management are based in experience. They are one and the same: entrepreneurship is imagination-based and management is knowledge and hands-based. The first story is explicitly an example of these processes of image-re-presentation and image-management. The ruse track literally imitates a common form of popular music and does try to re-present the commonplace images of musical entrepreneurship. That's the aesthetic value. And aPAtT did then make a series of decisions as to how they might tactically undertake bringing that image into being, in a business sense. The buying audience then might experience a kind of juxtaposing of images, as commonplace images they know already clash against the faces of aPAtT. An image might coalesce in audience member's minds of some top musician, played out in terms of aPAtT's own experience and the gesture they want to make. It might question them- perhaps asking who and what this band is and why they are playing about with images of top musicians already commonly known. One of the questions might be something like “Why are they doing this at all? Is it not common practice in pop music to have one person write the songs and another person or group of people perform the songs and play the public role of the artist?”

In a different, perhaps less questioning way, the development of the Post Music record label re-produces some of the common ways of operating that aPAtT and their friends perceive. They operate those tactically in accordance to the resources and services they have and how they like to work. The commonplace strategies lead to an overflow of image re-presenting tactics: aPAtT were attentive to that history shared amongst people, their own personal temporal experience, and to current environmental conditions as they perceived them. And then the label is also part of a tactical combination, an 'itinerary' (Certeau 1984), that manages the re-presented image into being. Far from experimental, the way aPAtT bring the re-presented images into being is not random nor fatalistic, but appears to be 'purposive' (Holt and Chia 2009): to intervene into the drabness they perceive in the images they question, juxtapose, and re-present (or misrepresent). The ruse track engages with historical and shared images and does so because aPAtT have some kind of problem with Snow Patrol and they think the audience might appreciate that too. It lifts away some of the mysticism wafting around industrial and market-based procedures in musical entrepreneurship- specifically, that there are practices which betray some of the ideas audiences might hold regarding how music should be produced, practices which overstep some wider ethics of musical production. In much the same way, how and with whom aPAtT develop the record label gestures to us: it expresses some kind of desire, some possibility and some potential distaste or dissatisfaction for other images of musical entrepreneurship. The mechanics of how the ruse track and the record label both then emerged as productive opportunities and were made to work in a novel business context- in the swing between the common form and the experience-based re-presentation - then expresses how Penrose described image-work and her suggested epistemological position.

aPAtT only have that knowledge and are able to bring things into being successfully through being-in-business over time and experiencing the things that other people do. Management, here, is that pedagogical attentiveness to temporal-relational experience: an attentiveness toward a shared history and stock of commonplace phenomena, which then allowed aPAtT to imagine how things could be different- how they can initiate a series of questions as to why they do what they do, and how they might make things operate in a novel business context. Expressive of a pedagogical attentiveness to temporal-relational experience in a double sense, aPAtT then imagine bringing the two strategies into being, tactically, in terms of their own experience of being-in-business over time. Personal memories and personal stocks of resources and services in the locality are brought to bear on the common, historical images- the two strategies. Because aPAtT already know people and know how to do things, as beings attentive to their duration, their own experience of time, they can envision the ruse track and the label as images and manage them into being. So even though they operate in a world of strategies and even though they have reduced resources, aPAtT are able to develop the imagined label and re-present the strategy through a clever combination and play on history. They dive into their shared experience with us: what Bergson (2002) would call being 'intuitive'- as if aPAtT are attentive to their shared experience with us and the possibility of reaching back and developing something novel, at the same time familiar and strange, and fabricate a way to disrupt or develop tradition in some novel way. Without having that historical background of being-in-business aPAtT would neither be able to re-present the commonplace images, and nor would they be able to manage them into being, in terms of their own temporal-relational experience. They depend on that embedded experience in order to imagine and to operate. Because they do, the re-presentation is more potent, valid and meaningful as a (wealth generating) gesture that questions modes of musical entrepreneurship.

In-dependence or Independence

Interpreting these experience-based processes questions the notion of independence and the assumed tension thought to exist in musical entrepreneurs' lives between commercial interest and musical creativity. The history of musical entrepreneurship involves this tradition (e.g. Stratton 1982; Strachan 2001; Holbrook 2005) which assumes the lives of musical entrepreneurs to be torn between commercial interest and musical creativity. The tradition either assumes musical entrepreneurs to be adverse to working with larger established organisations or assumes them to be unwilling to make economic decisions at all. Punk music metaphors an extreme expression of this assumed tension in people's lives and their unwillingness to accept the role of large organisations or commercial activities generally. The assumption is predicated on the notion that people have no interest in the commerce of others, no background commercial knowledge or that they feel uncomfortable having to make money through music. There exists, however, a tradition of bands and musicians who establish commercially operating entities and who purposefully question and take on modes of musical entrepreneurship. The notion of independence in music business is also associated with this assumed tension in experience. Although David Hesmondalgh (1999) suggests the UK Independent distribution movement which arose after Punk music was a response to the perceived difference of interests between smaller groups and organisations and larger, better established entities often termed 'the majors'- that Independence for them meant a will to make money, the emergence of this 'independent' movement in relation to larger established organisations, and the other forms of cultural and commercial knowledge and modes of action that translate imagination into a business context are little fondled. As Stratton (1982) noted early on, the movement arose and was perceived to be culturally valuable only through people being attentive and interested (pedagogically) in the commercial activities performed historically by close industrial relations. That means sometimes making the kind of contracts that Richard Caves (2000) talks about- between friends and within groups in order to brings things into being. In aPAtT's experience described here, that was just friendships and ongoing work with like minded people in the local area and wider, not really anything that formal as to be correctly termed a contract or a business partnerships. It's just friends and a curiosity, and goes back to that idea of a Positive Approach to Totality.

In both image-texts here, aPAtT have those lines of dependence- aPAtT's entrepreneurial imagination depends on the 'constrained flexibility' (Foss 1998) that exists in their experience of being musical entrepreneurs in the city of Liverpool. Autonomous or independent creation of productive opportunities, as Penrose suggested, are confused misnomers for them: it is not that aPAtT's work falls in contrast to the perceived mass of musical entrepreneurs with presumably more commercial interest. Rather, like the emergence of the independent movement, aPAtT too manage different forms of knowledge, cultural and economic, developing from being-in-business, temporally and relationally, as they imagine and bring questioning and productive modes of musical entrepreneurship into being. Their management is an attentiveness to commonplace images of popular music and modes of operating, a will to consider their own unique experience in relation to current environmental conditions, and a will to bring novel images into being. They might not be commercially minded, but aPAtT do express a curiosity for the commerce of others and the will to bring things into being. aPAtT depend on and express the significance of temporal experience for knowing and imagining images- that is what the aesthetic value of the ruse track is all about: they purposefully engage us with arresting images and make a point of their attentiveness to temporal and relational characteristics of experience through their 'archiving' project. Images arrest audiences because value is social, as Penrose (1959) described it to be. These forms of image-work would be impossible and invisible if entrepreneurship and management were not experience-based, expressive of a kind of pedagogical attentiveness to those characteristics of experience. Without being understood to develop through epistemology the paper suggests characterises Penrose's conceptualization of the production of productive opportunities, modes of practising like that expressed by aPAtT and larger musical movements such as the Independent scene of the 1980s might, paradoxically, appear to to emerge without being 'learnt' (i.e. imagined) in direct relation to the historical make up of relations in music business. Epistemology evoked from this paper challenges polemic views which either suggest entrepreneurship to occur in isolation or occur due to equilibrium inducing forces in the market. 'a Positive Approach to Totality' is a good metaphor for this epistemological position and the impact that has on the traditional representation of musical entrepreneurship because it expresses the band's feelings and attitude to experience (local and more general industrial and market-based relations) and the way in which a movement endures in experience between people like musical entrepreneurs and the local (or more 'total') social context. 'a Positive Approach to Totality' also works as a pretty neat metaphor for thinking about images-of-being-in-business: again, it suggests a kind of movement between the 'members' and wider society and the idea that totality- whatever it might be in the industrial or market-based milieu – might be engaged with by aPAtT and part of their experience.

Conclusion

The pedagogical attentiveness implicated in Penrose's suggested ontological position on the creation of wealth strategies and opportunities as 'image-work'- specifically the attention image-work necessitates in regard to temporal-relational characteristics of experience - expresses entrepreneurship and management as modes of the same experience-based process, or different intensities of the same phenomena. Images, as they operate here, appear part then/part now, part them/part us, part commonality/part unique experience, part uncertain/part practical, part creative/part commercial, part entrepreneurship/part management. Interpreted to be expressed through this kind of image-work that depends on temporal-relational embeddedness, aPAtT's pedagogical attentiveness appears to reconcile such abstractive notions. These different poles and dualities dissolve away in experience as people become attentive to their personal experience, imagine, and act. This paper now finishes by asking others take accept Penrose's invitation to research entrepreneurship and management as experience-based. The image-work in this paper expresses a different kind of entrepreneurial experience, away from the neatness or clunkiness of the usual resource-to-productive opportunities-seized narrative embodied in institutional norms and it stands somewhere between isolated actors and social authorship or equilibrium inducing forces. It uses made up terms and expresses a processual interpretation of entrepreneurship in which 'history matters' because it enables imagination, not because it determines and enables prediction as some might have wanted, and the normative entrepreneurial narrative mode is only part of that image-work. Phenomenological made up terms like images of being-in-business, and image-work, interpreted as processual ontology and based around a different kind of productivist interest like this, imagine new modes of learning, 'vision' or experience oriented research- an encounter and memory for more images of what the 'subject' is...

References

Bergson, H. (2002) Henri Bergson: Key Writings, Keith Ansell-Pearson, John Mullarkey (eds.), Continuum Publications, London.

Caves, Richard E. (2000), Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce, Harvard University Press

De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Vol. 1. University of California Press, Berkeley.

De Certeau, M. Giard, L. and Mayol, P. (1998) The Practice of Everyday Life :Volume 2 Living and Cooking, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Fonarrow, W. (2006). Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music, Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut.

Foss, N.J. (1998). “Edith Penrose and the Penrosians- or, why there is still so much to learn from The Theory of the Growth of the Firm”, Prepared for a Special Issue of Cahiers de l’ISMEA - Série Oeconomica that commemorates the contributions of Edith Penrose, ISMEA, Paris.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (1999) "Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre", Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, Issue 1, (pgs. 34-61)

Holt, R. & Chia, R. (2009). Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Lockett, A. (2005). “Edith Penrose's Legacy to the Resource Based View”, Managerial and Decision Economics, No.26, (pgs. 83-98).

Leadbeater, C. & Oakley, K. (1999). The Independents: Britain's new Cultural Entrepreneurs, Demos Publications, London.

Penrose, E. T. (1959/1995). The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Spender, J.C. (1996a). “Making Knowledge the Basis of a Dynamic Theory of the Firm”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 17, Winter Special Issue (pgs. 45-62).

Spender, J.C. (1996b). “Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Memory: Three Concepts in Search of a Theory”, Jounrnal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 9, No. 1, (pgs. 63-78).

Spender, J.C. (1998). “Pluralist Epistemology and the Knowledge Based Theory of the Firm”, Organization, Vol. 5, (pgs. 233-256).

Stratton, J. (1982). “Between Two Worlds: Art and Commercialism in the Record Industry”, Sociological Review, Vol. 30, (pg. 267-285), reprinted in Frith, S. (2004), Popular Music: The Rock Era, Routledge, London.

SCOS Paper Lille 2010

2010-06-05T18:48:00.010+01:00

a Positive Approach to Totality: Creative Commerce and Image-Making in North West England's Music Business

Daniel Hartley. The University of Liverpool Management School

Paper presented at The Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, Lille, France, July 7-11 2010

This paper develops a novel interpretation of experience-based entrepreneurship and management from an encounter with the things that Edith Penrose (1959) said about the growth of firms. It presents an ontological position invoked from that encounter with Penrose through which the paper suggests learning-oriented entrepreneurship studies and other scholars interested in experience-based learning might approach the 'subject'. The theory will be talked through with the help of two stories about some friends of mine, aPAtT, who are a band of musical entrepreneurs from Liverpool in North West England.

The development of a musical single for release and the development of aPAtT's own record label, Post Music, will be used as 'phenomenal attractors' that help think through the kind of experience-based learning processes that Penrose described. The paper uses phenomenological made up words like 'images of being-in-business' through which to interpret Penrose's description of entrepreneurship as 'image-making' and her suggested ontological position. It then turns to interpret some different forms of 'image-work' that aPAtT perform on an everyday basis through a kind of 'pedagogical attentiveness'. Identifying this pedagogical attentiveness at (or as) the hearts of being-in-business and experience-based learning processes leads to a questioning of the notion of independence associated with musical entrepreneurship and the assumed tension thought to exist in the lives of musical entrepreneurs between commercial interest and musical creativity. Daydreaming, the paper then turns to invite other researchers to accept Penrose's invitation to research entrepreneurial learning as experience-based image-work and for researchers to imagine themselves what they can do with the kind of ontology and image-work I describe. First, though, I will briefly describe my phenomenologically inspired encounter with the ideas of Edith Penrose (1959/1995).

Back in 1959, Penrose claimed that entrepreneurs' actions are determined by the mental image they have of their own experience of being-in-business. She thought these images to represent the particular experience of the person or group of people in the world of business. Each person or group of people has a different image- made up of a different history of being related to others and sharing common resources in particular ways – and that history enables people to understand things (i.e. resources, services, cultural signifiers) they encounter in unique ways. The expression of that image of being-in-business is the unique 'services' a person or group of people is able to produce from a common set of resources. I call these images 'images of being-in-business'.

Images of being-in-business are constituted by the things that are significant in the entrepreneurs' world. Entrepreneurs coordinate different phenomena commonly encountered and understand them in terms of their own experience of being-in-business At the broadest level in the context of musical entrepreneurship, the things that constitute images of being-in-business can be things like industrial and market-based relations- such as stereotyped genres of music and different ways of releasing or distributing it. Or they could be more personal- such as the different resources, services and experiences people develop over time. The point is that images are constituted by commonplace phenomena that are comprehended by the entrepreneur in terms of their own experience of being-in-business over time. This is a basic phenomenologically oriented interpretation of Penrose.

Penrose then identifies 'learning processes'. She describes a kind if swaying movement enduring between the things that constitute people's personal memories, resources and services and the things that constitute the world of business they encounter. Difference or 'disequilibrium' is imagined between the material perception of the different phenomena people encounter and their comprehension of them in terms of their own experience. So people consider things like resources, services and experience they have already been developing over time in relation to things like industrial and market based relations. Resources, services and opportunities are comprehended relationally and in terms of people's temporal experience, like a 'pedagogical attentiveness' to the uncertainty and possibility of perceptions of oneself as being-in-business. Personal histories of being related to others in unique ways, then, are turned to face different phenomena in the hope of imagining productive opportunity and different people do this in different ways.

Learning, as Penrose puts it, is based around knowing one's being-in-business as a historical image and then being able to imagine a new image of being-in-business. The creation of opportunities and wealth strategies depends on this certain kind of 'pedagogical attentiveness'- allowing oneself to be drawn and to consider oneself against the wider social context. That attentiveness also involves a will to imagine- the product of these learning processes being the creation of novel images as people recognise potential, virtual, difference between the material existence of things they encounter in business and their experience-based comprehension of them. Attentiveness is, in this way, is both managing and entrepreneuring- ' image work'.

The way Penrose describes these learning processes lead me to identify two broad constituent parts of people's images of being-in-business. These are people's relationality and people's temporality. People then express those two aspects of pedagogical attentiveness as the resources, services and experience that people develop over time enable them to comprehend different relations they experience in the business environment. Memory allows people to imagine things differently- to imagine novel 'services'. 'History matters' for Penrose (1959:xiii), then, because it is the history of being-in-business that enables people to develop and re-present images of experience. But history and memory do not simply matter- they reshape and redescribe matter: it is people's temporal experience that enables them to comprehend and then imagine the numerous relations they encounter differently. And people are attentive to these temporal-relational characteristics of experience. This swaying movement between history, memory and the materiality of present experience suggested by Penrose I see as her ontology, an ontology of entrepreneurial action.

The ontology- or, perhaps, if we are talking about learning and the expression of learning and knowledge - this epistemology, also calls up two 'image-work' processes that are of interest. The first is the move from the commonplace images and appearances people see in the world to how they are really experienced. People, initially, know these common forms through sharing the world with others. How people then make sense of them in their own unique ways can be thought of as a process of re-presentation. The second process concerns how the re-presented image will managed into being in a social, business context. These are processes of image-making and of image-management.

To outline the image-making and image-management processes I am interested in, I will draw on Michel de Certeau's (1984) ideas of 'strategies' and 'tactics'. 'Strategies' help in understanding this image-work because for Certeau the term 'strategy' represents the material appearance of things- commonplace and easily recognisable by people and not having any connection to people's real experience. Experienced as inherited resources or 'equipment', strategies are established ways of operating people encounter as already instated in the business world.

'Tactics', on the other hand, for Certeau are the lived out reality of things. Tactics are how strategies are actually experienced. They are re-presented images of strategies. More significant in light of Penrose, though, tactics are also the manifestations of people's temporal experience. So, as they encounter things like strategies, places and other resources in the world, people re-present them tactically in terms of their own experience of being-in-business. Like Penrose, at this juncture Certeau felt a 'pedagogical relation' exists in experience between common forms people inherit or encounter and their lived out reality in people's lives through which these change processes develop. For both Penrose and Certeau, temporal experience enables people to imagine and to act- they share that ontology and epistemological concern.

I will now turn to aPAtT to help me make sense of the processes of image-making and image-management in terms of temporal and relational characteristics of images of being-in-business- an attentiveness to experience.

aPAtT is a musical entity from Liverpool in the North West of England. It sometimes operates as a band, sometimes as a larger ensemble called The aPAtT Orchestra. Usually, though, it is made up of 5 people- Steve (General Midi), Josie (Dorothy Wave), Ben (Field Marshall Stack), Jon (Master Fader) and Andy (The Count In). Steve and Ben have been working together together as aPAtT since 1998, when they left the other bands they were in to do the things they weren't able to. Since then, the line-up has changed, but the current members have known each other for about 6 years.

What aPAtT get up probably makes more sense when considered against what aPAtT means- the words that Ben and Steve scribbled on the first C90 cassette they released back in 1998 - a Positive Approach to Totality.

It means aPAtT produce a range of musical products that are in themselves often peculiar and against the grain of normal musical entrepreneurship. They regularly release musical singles (through their own or another label, or for free download), have released 2 albums and are working on their 3rd, develop video projects, release merchandise, work with people and organisations from all over the UK, and perform widely. They have just played in Lille as part of a European tour. They also have a strong web-presence and they develop their own web-based mediums to communicate between friends involved in similar things and audiences. Much of this is undertaken 'independently'- without direct support from larger established organisations – but, in other ways, occurs 'dependently'- as aPAtT reproduce and re-present common modes of musical entrepreneurship and only make sense relationally.

aPAtT's songs contain snippets from conversations, textured recordings taken from different places and recorded through different mediums, samples from classical composers and reproductions of pop song beat patterns. Their music can range from death metal to jazzy riffs (in the same song), to a poppy reproduction of Prince or an exact replica of a trance track from 1994. They want to “archive” their experience musically and through practice and they want to engage with the forms and practices of others, those of history and of the wider context of the music business, through learning and doing it themselves. Like us, they call these modes of practice “learning” or “archiving” and, although not entirely experimental, at least aesthetically, that notion of what it is like to learn characterises their ethos of musical production as much as their name does. Hence, aPAtT can't simply be categorized as doing this or that- they are involved with all different types of projects and they feel that part of the art and value of what they do is learning and being “comfortable with being uncomfortable”.

a Positive Approach to Totality also means that aPAtT have an interest in imitating, juxtaposing and questioning common forms of musical entrepreneurship and popular music. Much of their work involves taking a mode of musical entrepreneurship or a form of popular music and re-enacting the images they perceive to be associated with it. They claim this mode of practice is far from 'experimental'- they reproduce commonplace things at times and always undertake sensible management to bring things into being. As aPAtT then reproduce, juxtapose and imitate common forms of popular music and musical entrepreneurship, they implicitly reference a tradition in independent musical production that endures from the likes of CRASS, This Heat and Pere Ubu from the 70s and 80s and the likes of Bill Drummond and the K-Foundation from the 90s. Operating in relation to others like this, aPAtT's work involves different forms of everyday knowledge and image-work- expressed as an attentiveness to their own and to other's experience of being-in-business - as novel forms of entrepreneurship and management based in the everyday.

An example of this questioning mode of operation in which aPAtT re-present and imitate common forms is the development of a musical single that aPAtT call the 'ruse track'. It is a re-presentation of some common forms of popular music in Britain and an imitation of some common strategies of musical entrepreneurship people associate with the specific form of popular music. The muse is popular British indie band, Snow Patrol, whose emerging popularity was legitimized in the press in respect to a common narrative of independent production then being associated with the increasing numbers of musical entrepreneurs utilising web-based information communication mediums. The single aPAtT have produced and the video being made are based around how aPAtT see and feel about that particular kind of music. aPAtT imitate the image they perceive in order to open lines of questioning as to why they and others do what they do.

As a re-presentation of a common form of popular music, the ruse track imitates the usual structure and sound that people expect in order to pass as a legitimate musical product. Chord harmonies aPAtT associate with that music are imitated. The actual sound of the track is crisp and well-produced- the feel of 'over-production' by a mainstream record label. The normal 3 and a half minute duration is there, a beginning, a chorus line and an end, and the usual make-up of instruments too. Everything that they think the particular image (or 'ideal type') of popular music contains and which they think the market expects. It purposefully tries to blend in with the surroundings aPAtT perceive around it by reproducing all they think matters. But it is not actually the members of aPAtT who play the public role of the band. For the image to really work, aPAtT want a lead singer with high cheekbones for public appearances. He might wear bracelets, will probably have messy hair and will definitely be good looking.

The song is also about the lead singer. The lyrics are based around the commonplace story of the young aspiring musician who is still in music college and struggling with everyday life. He produces the track for a college music tech. project and, somehow, manages to get it picked up by BBC Radio One and get the single is released. The rub really comes with the image of the music video that will accompany the release of the single. aPAtT imagine re-creating this hyperbolic image of the lead singer atop a snow-peaked mountain, helicopter circling above and filming as he proclaims his passion and desire for making music for the world.

To produce the single and hence re-present a strategy, aPAtT have to operate tactically. This means they have to negotiate other strategies in terms of the resources, services and experience they have developed over time. So, to record the single, aPAtT used all their own equipment- instruments and studio equipment they have developed over the years. Today, Steve has a desk full of new and expensive post-production facilities at his disposal that he uses readily. Between them, they have the knowledge to use the equipment needed. It was also recorded at a venue they already had access to so there was no need to hire a recording studio. And the video is being made by a friend who they have worked with in the past and who they like working with, which saves money and means they can trust him. Between the tactics, aPAtT negotiate issues of restricted resources and services in light of the strategy they are re-presenting.

The release of the single also includes some imaginative tactics. Although Steve and Ben think they can thread the singles release on the end of a pop genealogy of big business bands, they have to imagine how they could lever the resources, services and experience they already have. That's if the track is likely to get played on BBC Radio One, which is Britain's largest radio station, and if they are to bypass the bar room deals expected to be made between pluggers.

To get round the concentration of influence around well-established institutions and record labels, aPAtT then turn to friends they already know. Somebody Jon knows well now works at BBC Radio One and they expect he might be a “back door” into the institution. They suspect he might feel guilty for working at BBC Radio One and so might help them. So they decide to contact him. But they restrict the information he has access to in order to avoid any chance of him being a “shitbag” about it.

The lyrics also play a part in helping the track to pass as a legitimate musical product. The whole image they are re-presenting is based around the story (or legend) of the aspirational musician, trapped in an ordinary life. The lyrics go that the teenage lead signer wants to escape college and become the popular musician that he feels he is. This is his first attempted release. The story helps because it reduces the background story people need to hear and means that aPAtT can sit more easily operate as the puppeteers jigging the false band.

aPAtT make sure the other modes of musical entrepreneurship associated with the particular form of popular music are imitated too. “There will be all the usual shit” that people expect, Steve says. At the moment, then, Myspace, Facebook and other web-based mediums that create a background story and imitate the normative image are being put in place. Doing so helps the image pass as a legitimate musical product- and makes it more likely to generate more attention.

Another project aPAtT have been working on is the development of their own record label, Post Music. This entity is organised amongst friends with similar interests and capabilities. It performs some of the strategies most record labels operate by- recording different musical products, organising pressing and distribution contracts, the release of musical products and development of other merchandise, the development of web-based manifestations of the label, the organisation of live performances and so on. Post Music performs and re-presents most of the strategies larger traditional labels do in an aPAtT way- in terms of their small size, reduced resources and services, they gesture they want to make, and the fact that they are based in a particular locality and have developed modes of operation.

The development of the Post Music record label is a similar story of image-making and image-management to the ruse track. It too follows a general strategy-to-tactic itinerary. It is common knowledge throughout music making communities that record labels release musical products and provide different services to musicians. The history of music making is also based around a concentration of influence around record labels in terms of what kinds of music get released and what bands get supported. Being-in-business, aPAtT are well aware of this historical background to being in the music business.

To establish their own label means aPAtT have “more room”. They have to rely less on established organisations, even those they have previously worked successfully with, and learn themselves instead. Doing things like that is part of the value of the whole aPAtT project- they take the totality on in a positive way. It was established between them and a close friend, Jake, who they have known for a long time. They share resources and services. Post Music releases aPAtT's products and the products of bands and musicians that they already know and like working with. All musical products associated with the label originate from the Liverpool environs and there is a strong community spirit.

Like the ruse track, Post Music also re-presented other modes of practice associated with record labels. They host a website, itsapatt.ning.com, which connects all the various fronts associated with all the bands. It enables communication both between those involved and audiences (on matters associated and not necessarily associated with Post Music) in an online forum. Musical products are available for priced and free downloads regularly too, and live performances are announced to audiences and uploaded for people to watch. The site also offers support to other musicians and technical information advice and there are even invitations to come and work for aPAtT on an intern basis or to volunteer in 'street teams'.

The way that aPAtT firstly re-present the, historical, image of the strategy to develop a record label expresses a set of tactics- i.e. how they use it, what they use it for, the gesture they make with it and how they develop mental images into being. They re-present the strategy they perceive in terms of their own experience of being-in-business over time and how they feel about that type of musical entrepreneurship. More directly than that, though, the record label is only possible on the back of a promo-video aPAtT are concurrently producing. The promo-video contains those bands who work with the label performing at a local derelict cinema that aPAtT had access to. It was filmed quickly amongst friends in a lo-fi, low-budget style. The importance of the promo-video is that it establishes the label as a productive entity. aPAtT will send it down to Southern Record Distribution which is a large independent record distributor in Britain. As a tactical combination, the promo-video markets different musical products to distribution companies and, once the video is officially released through Post Music, aPAtT will receive remuneration. The promo-video is also part of a wider itinerary aPAtT have put in place so that, between the projects that they are currently involved with, they combine sources of finance and can develop the Post Music label.

Because aPAtT already know people and know how to do things, as beings with historicity, they can envision the label as an image and manage it into being. So even though they operate in a world of strategies and even though they have reduced resources, aPAtT are able to develop the imagined label and re-present the strategy through a clever combination and play on history.

Both of those stories about aPAtT express a strategy-to-tactic plot which helps make sense of these processes of image-making and image-management that endure from Penrose. For Penrose, management and entrepreneurship are based in experience. They are one and the same- entrepreneurship is imagination-based and management is knowledge and hands-based. The first story is explicitly an example of these processes of image-making and image-management. The ruse track literally imitates a common form of popular music and does try to re-present the commonplace images of musical entrepreneurship. And aPAtT did then make a series of decisions as to how they might tactically undertake bringing that image into being. The initial strategy lead to an overflow of image re-presenting tactics- they were attentive to that history shared amongst people, their own personal temporal experience, and to current environmental conditions as they perceived them. Similarly, the development of the Post Music record label re-produces some of the common ways of operating that aPAtT and their friends perceive. They operate those tactically in accordance to the resources and services they have and how they like to work. And then the label is also part of a tactical combination that manages the re-presented image into being. Far from experimental, the way aPAtT bring the re-presented form into being is not random nor fatalistic, but appears to be 'purposive' (Holt and Chia 2009): to intervene into the drabness they perceive in the forms they question and juxtapose. The mechanics of how the ruse track and the record label both emerged as productive opportunities and were made to work in a novel business context- in the swing between the common form and the experience-based representation - then expresses how Penrose described image-work and her suggested ontological position.

aPAtT only have that knowledge and are able to bring things into being successfully through being-in-business over time and experiencing the things that other people do. Management, here, is that pedagogical attentiveness to temporal-relational experience- an attentiveness toward a shared history and stock of commonplace phenomena, which then allowed them to imagine how things could be different- how they can initiate a series of questions as to why they do what they do, and how they might make things operate in a novel business context. Expressive of a pedagogical attentiveness to temporal-relational experience in a double sense, aPAtT then imagine bringing the two strategies into being, tactically, in terms of their own experience of being-in-business over time. Personal memories and personal stocks of resources and services in the locality are brought to bear on the common, historical forms- the two strategies. Without having this historical background of being-in-business aPAtT would neither be able to re-present the commonplace images, and nor would they be able to manage them into being, in terms of their own temporal-relational experience. Because they do, the re-presentation is more potent, valid and meaningful as a (wealth generating) gesture that questions modes of musical entrepreneurship.

Interpreting these experience-based processes leads me to question the notion of independence and the assumed tension thought to exist in musical entrepreneurs' lives between commercial interest and musical creativity. The history of musical entrepreneurship involves this tradition (e.g. Stratton 1982; Strachan 2001; Holbrook 2005) which assumes the lives of musical entrepreneurs to be torn between commercial interest and musical creativity. The tradition either assumes musical entrepreneurs to be adverse to working with larger established organisations or assumes them to be unwilling to make economic decisions at all. Punk music is given as an extreme expression of this assumed tension in people's lives or their unwillingness to accept the role of large organisations or commercial activities generally. The assumption is predicated on the notion that people have no interest in the commerce of others, no background commercial knowledge or, even, need to make money. There exists, however, a tradition of bands and musicians who establish commercially operating entities and who purposefully question and take on modes of musical entrepreneurship. The notion of independence in music business is also associated with this assumed tension in experience. Authors like David Hesmondalgh (1999), for instance, suggest the UK Independent distribution movement which arose after Punk music was a response to the perceived difference of interests between smaller groups and organisations and larger, better established entities often termed 'the majors'. But the notion of 'independence' forgets the embedded experience of musical entrepreneurs and at times appears to reproduce a narrative more associated with the powerful masculine male ('entrepreneur') isolated in his control over environmental conditions. The very emergence of this 'independent' movement in relation to larger established organisations, though, of course, highlights that musical entrepreneurship too involves forms of cultural and commercial knowledge and modes of action that translate imagination into a business context. As Stratton (1982) noted early on, the movement arose and was perceived to be culturally valuable only through people being attentive and interested (pedagogically) in the commercial activities performed historically by close industrial relations.

Similarly, in both image-texts, aPAtT have lines of dependence- aPAtT's entrepreneurial imagination depends on the 'constrained flexibility' (Foss 1998) that exists in people's experience. Autonomous or independent creation of productive opportunities, as Penrose suggested, are confused misnomers- it is not that aPAtT's work falls in contrast to the perceived mass of musical entrepreneurs with presumably more commercial interest. Rather, like the emergence of the independent movement, aPAtT too firstly manage different forms of knowledge, both cultural and economic, developing from being-in-business, temporally and relationally, if they are to imagine and realise questioning but productive modes of musical entrepreneurship. Management is expressed as experience-based pedagogical attentiveness to that knowledge of cultural and commercial practices that other musicians and organisations are involved with and it is expressed through their tactical re-presentation of the common form, practically, in terms of who aPAtT are, where they are, what they want, and the gesture they want to make. Their management is an attentiveness to images of commonplace phenomena of different kinds, a will to consider their own unique experience in relation to current environmental conditions, and a will to bring novel images into being. The ruse track and label, as such, would be impossible to imagine if entrepreneurship occurred in isolation from a historical and relational environment and if aPAtT themselves did not have temporal and relational modes of experience. That kind of swaying movement identified by Penrose and which characterises her ontology of opportunity creation endures between historical forms of knowledge and their re-presentation as questioning but productive modes of musical entrepreneurship. These forms of image-work would be impossible and invisible if entrepreneurship and management were not experience-based, expressive of a kind of pedagogical attentiveness to characteristics of experience. The entrepreneurial experience, then, might at times appear as a kind of pedagogical attention to one's history of being-in-business and the history people commonly share. Without being understood to develop through this ontology I suggest characterises Penrose's conceptualization of the production of wealth strategies and opportunities, modes of practising like that expressed by aPAtT and larger musical movements such as the Independent scene of the 1980s might, paradoxically, appear to to emerge without being 'learnt' in direct response to the historical make up of relations in music business.

The pedagogical attentiveness implicated in Penrose's suggested ontological position on the creation of wealth strategies and opportunities as 'image-work'- specifically the attention image-work necessitates in regard to temporal-relational characteristics of experience - goes some way to highlight how entrepreneurship and management must be experience-based, as parts of the same process. Images, as they operate here, appear part then - part now, part them - part us, part commonality - part unique experience, part uncertain – part practical, part creative – part commercial, part entrepreneurship - part management. These different poles and dualities dissolve away in experience as people become attentive to their personal experience in order to imagine and to act. Interpreted to be expressed through this kind of image-work that depends on temporal-relational embeddedness, their pedagogical attentiveness reconciles abstractive notions as different parts of the same process. This paper now finishes by asking others take accept Penrose's invitation to research entrepreneurship and management as experience-based. The image-work in this paper expresses a different kind of entrepreneurial experience, away from the neatness or clunkiness of the usual resource-to-productive opportunities-seized narrative favoured by institutional norms. It uses made up words and expresses a processual interpretation of entrepreneurship, a creative evolution (Bergson 2002) if you want to call it that, and the normal entrepreneurial narrative mode is only part of that image-work. Phenomenological made up words like images of being-in-business, and image-work, interpreted as a processual ontology and based around a different kind of productivist interest like this, might then help those researchers also imagining new modes of learning, 'vision' or experience oriented research, acting as a kind of historical knowledge or a significant encounter they can learn from.

Certeau, Michael de. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Vol. 1. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Foss, N.J. (1998). “Edith Penrose and the Penrosians- or, why there is still so much to learn from The Theory of the Growth of the Firm”, Prepared for a Special Issue of Cahiers de l’ISMEA - Série Oeconomica that commemorates the contributions of Edith Penrose, ISMEA, Paris.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (1999) "Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre", Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, Issue 1, (pgs. 34-61)

Holt, R. & Chia, R. (2009). Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Penrose, E. T. (1959/1995). The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Stratton, J. (1982). “Between Two Worlds: Art and Commercialism in the Record Industry”, Sociological Review, Vol. 30, (pg. 267-285), reprinted in Frith, S. (2004), Popular Music: The Rock Era, Routledge, London.

Ethnographic Triumph

2010-05-31T20:45:00.009+01:00

aPAtT and me as temporary hostage for the last song at Static Gallery. Good fun. Good night. Good beating.

Thanks mattthomas.co.uk/

apatt.com

onions@liverpool.ac.uk

SCOS 2010: Amended Abstract

2010-05-07T14:22:00.013+01:00

SCOS 2010 Abstract: Vision

a Positive Approach to Totality: Creative Commerce and Image-Making in North West England's Music Industry

Daniel Hartley. The University of Liverpool Management School

Henri Bergson suggested “there is no perception which is not full of memories (2002:27)”, and the mind does not comprehend isolated moments of individual cognition, but overflowing expressions of social and historical embeddedness. In the field of management studies, this awareness of context finds early expression in Edith Penrose (1959/1959). She claimed “history matters” (1995:xiii) as, over time, both the economic, industrial and market conditions any entrepreneur penetrates and the internal management forms and resources a firm has, allow the development of an 'image' by which the world is perceived. Taking this tradition, the paper will suggest the creation of productive opportunities within the music industry is inherently linked to the knowledge, experience and resources of any ‘entrepreneurial’ subject and how these resources create an ‘image’ through which to comprehend economic, industrial and market conditions. Penrose termed this process 'learning'. Entrepreneurs learn when over time they imagine how to better exploit their resources in strict relation to their environment and vice versa. The first part of the paper then uses the development of a radical music collective, aPAtT, to interpret how they learnt to make 'secret music'. In doing so, the paper questions the validity of a commonplace storyline associated with the institutional politics of music making - the notion of 'independence'. In its place, the paper suggests it is this very 'constrained flexibility' (Foss 1998) of depending on environmental conditions in relation to the group of entrepreneurs' history that means aPAtT can develop and re-present ‘images’ of different forms of musical entrepreneurship. This introduces the paper's second part, which considers the importance of management for entrepreneurial imagination and creativity. For Penrose management and entrepreneurship inter-penetrate: the former both uses and resembles 'knowledge', makes calculations and actualizes entrepreneurial imagination, whereas the latter imagines how it might better exploit what is being managed. The ‘image’ presented is re-presented anew. Here, the paper uses musical products developed by aPAtT such as a 'ruse' track which attempt to imitate and question common forms of musical entrepreneurship, help imagine how management is carried out on an everyday basis. The paper then argues commerce and creativity (and similarly, the commercial interests and procedures of larger record labels and smaller musical firms and musicians) - which are often perceived to be irreconcilable (Stratton 1982; Caves 2000) – are sometimes experienced as co-dependent and necessary aspects to making a living and that it is often only through sensible economic decisions that more incalculable and imaginative creativity occurs. The paper will then invite entrepreneurship studies to become more attentive to the potential of Penrose herself to frame emerging research agendas. It is, the paper suggests, by understanding Penrose as a process theorist for whom good business was the continual and irreversible creation of arresting images that the oft cited opposition between creativity and commerce dissolves.

Book Review

2010-05-06T21:49:00.007+01:00

The Politics and Aesthetics of Entrepreneurship: A Fourth Movements in Entrepreneurship Book

Internation Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=A5F3D6445DAC6FE193215E1FDF87A68F?contentType=NonArticle&contentId=1858687

The 100 Questions Answered

2010-03-30T10:53:00.013+01:00

Bill Drummond has now answered the questions I sent him...

MEMORY TIME MUSIC

February 2010

Daniel Hartley is a postgraduate researcher at Liverpool University Management School. He is researching the evolution of business models within the music industry over the past decades. He is focusing his research on five different subjects. One of those subjects is Bill Drummond and the way that Drummond has worked in and out of music for the past 33 & a third years. Hartley’s blog based on his research is at http://danielhartley.blogspot.com/

1: People sometimes say you can either be an artist or a businessman. Yet, when I consider your work you seem to live these both together. For example, The 100 questions appear to be art and something else. It reaches out to those who ask questions and gets something back. Can you tell a story to illustrate some of your experiences with money, music and art?

People need meaning in their lives. But they do not want to spend too much time searching for that meaning.

At numerous times in the past I have proclaimed that to become rich, money rich that is, is a very simple thing to do. If you want to become rich you can do it no problem. The five reasons I would give, as to why this is was simple thing to do were:

1: Money is easy to understand. From a pre-school age we learn what money is and the power it can exert over our lives. We also learn that we never have enough of it, thus it seems like an obvious goal in life – to get what we never have enough of. It does not take much imagination to dedicating your life to making lots of money.

2: All you have to do is offer goods or services to people that had no idea how desperately they wanted your goods or services until you were offering it to them. And that you are offering it to them at a price they are willing to pay for. But make sure that this price is more than the price it is costing you to provide the goods or services.

3: You also have to be willing to work hard and take risks.

4: All that is left for you to do is come up with the goods or service that people desperately want before they knew they want them. But even that is simple, preying on people’s fears and perceived inadequacies are the tried and tested ways.

5: Lastly, and this may be the hard part for some people. That is holding onto the money once you have made it. Once you have made your money you may start to look for other ways to give your life meaning and in attempting to do this you could lose all the money that you have made.

This short five-part guide to making lots of money is failsafe and works every time. There has not been an entrepreneur (or artist), who has not made his or her fortune any other way.

But of course the above is complete rubbish, as the vast majority of the world’s population struggle from dawn to dusk, just trying to get enough to survive. And their continued survival is all that is needed to give their life meaning. And when there is not enough to survive there is always religion.

Which brings us back to my opening couple of sentences – our need to give life meaning. What both the businessman and the artist have in common is a hunger to give their life meaning. But being an artist may be a lot harder than the being a businessman.

The goals of an artist in this modern age are a lot less well defined and often when you think you know what they are, those goalposts start to move again. Whereas money is always money and as a colleague of mine once said to me – ‘The only answer to the question of money is MORE.’

As to me being someone who lives life as both artist and businessman, I think that your observation is incorrect. The pursuit of money is way down on my list of methods I have used in an attempt to give my life meaning. There have been times when I have found money flowing towards me, but it has always been as a bi-product of something else that I was doing. And after it flowed towards me, it flowed away again just as easily. It was at those times when the money was flowing towards me that I came up with the five pointers above. It was also before I had spent much time in parts of the world where there was no possibility for your average or even un-average individual to make lots of money. I may have also just said it for affect. But a lot of the time is still believe it. I also do think the pursuit of wealth shows a criminal lack of imagination.

So onto the 100 Questions part of your question: I briefly touch upon this in the answer that I gave to question 16, but as I was working to tight word count with the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet I was not able to fully answer it. I will attempt to give a broader response here. There is no doubt 100 Questions was born primarily out of having done scores of interviews, where I have found myself being asked variants of the same four question over and over again, thus wanting to see if I could change that. Sometimes I will sit down with a journalist and we get on well and they ask interesting questions and the conversation flows in all sorts of directions and I come away from the interview thinking – that was good. But then the feature gets published it so often follows the same format; the first third of the article is taken up with the journalist explaining to the reader who I am and what I have done and why I justify having the spread in that particular newspaper of magazine. Then the rest of the article is taken up with the journalist’s opinions on what I am doing now. In these last two thirds he/she may drop in some quotes taken from the conversation that we had, but nearly always these are from the less interesting parts of the conversation we had and usually relate to things that people already know. At times my reaction to this frustration has been for me to stamp my feet and say quietly, that I will no longer do any interviews at all. But some how that never works and before I know it I have agreed to do another one and the cycle begins again.

The thing is, we make a huge chunk of our judgements on the work of so many people, be they politicians, artists, film makers, union leaders whatever, by the way they come over in the media, instead of the work itself. This is the way things are and I do not think that is going to change soon. So I guess, I thought that by doing this 100 Questions format, it would turn me doing the interviews into part of my practice and not just this thing that I felt obliged to do to promote what ever else I was doing.

When I first proposed it to Maija Handover, who is the PR woman I have been working with since 2007, I think she saw it as something that would just put the backs up of those areas of the media that might otherwise be interested in what I do. And at best it was just another level of things that needed explaining, as if trying to explain to an editor or journalist, that I did not see my self as a prankster, was not already hard enough. She may be right. I wanted to start doing it sometime last year before the fifth and final No Music Day, but she persuaded me to postpone it until after that. I then decided to bring it into play on the 1 January (2010).

Instead of trying to work out which publications or radio interviews that I should be doing. As in the ones that would be most advantages to my career and the promotions of whatever I was going on about now, I decided to respond positively to all requests for interviews, wherever they came from. But with the improviso that they would carry out the interview by them emailing me their four questions and they have to be ones that have not been asked before and that once I had answered, I could also use them in whatever way I saw fit.

There were some complications to this. For a start some publications only wanted to have 300 words all told, thus only 75 word answers per question. Others wanted the answers tomorrow or next Monday at the latest. The whole thing began to take up more time than I ever envisaged. In the past I would have just spent maybe ten minutes on the phone with a magazine from Belgium or half an hour chat in a café, if it were going to be a feature. But doing this has taken whole chunks of my time away from what I was supposed to be doing over the past three months.

They came through thicker and faster than I could have guessed, even though there was nothing out there that I was particularly having to promote. This meant I had to prioritize. The ones with the pressing deadlines getting done first, followed by the ones that had clean and clear-cut answers already formed in my head. This left the ones like this until last, even if they had been asked early on in the exercise.

There has also been a change in the way that I respond to the questions; I have become far more cavalier in my approach. In the past when working on a book I’d spend a lot of time thinking about what I am going to be saying. There is usually, with a book something that has been brewing away and over a period time decide to channel it into a book, as in the 17 book or even The Manual (How to have a Number One the Easy Way). With this it has been far freer flowing and all over the place. Which I guess comes from just having to respond to whatever questions have come through. Some of the questions have been a bit banal, but this has pushed me to try and find interesting ways to answer them.

To begin with I never saw it as an artwork in itself, but as it has progressed, the way that I view it has changed. For a start, I would like to publish the 100 Questions as a book. The working title for that is:

Vol.1

(100 Answer to 100 Questions)

Then at some point in the future do it again, with the possibility of that being published as Vol.2. And then take it from there. But even if I was to publish them as a book I might just limit it to run of a few hundred books and that would be it. Make them pretty disposable.

As to the last part of your question, I have now run out of steam. It is now time for me to go and put the kettle on so I will skip that last bit and when I get back with my mug of tea I will get on with the your second question. You can just make up a story that can act as the answer to that part of the question.

2: In life generally, people often talk about the idea of 'independence'. There has been and independent movement' in music for example. Yet, when I consider the independent movement, it seems to be in relation to 'the majors' and it depended on people making it happen. Can you reflect on how you might experience dependence or independence and what The17 might mean, perhaps in terms of the relationship with Penkiln Burn, the wider industry, or making it happen?

Last week I responded to a question that appears a lot later on in the list. It was Question 83, I’ve just checked. It read: ‘Did you feel that Zoo and the other independent labels of the time had a limited time span?’ I do not want to repeat what I said there, so will attempt to answer this question in a different way.

‘Independence’ is like the word ‘Freedom’ it can mean anything to any number of people who may be using it.

Obviously in terms of the music scene in the UK of the late 70s and through the 80s, it meant independent from the main stream of the major record companies. But there was nothing independent about these record labels when it came to their relationship to the bills they had to pay or the books they had to balance. All of these independents were in a situation where every record they put out had to pay for themselves. There was no room for artistic development. If a band was ‘lucky’ enough to get signed by a major label, they may then have the independence to come off the dole or quit their day job. And then have the independence to record an album in a ‘proper’ studio, over a period of a few weeks. And then have the independence to get tour support, so they can afford to hire a quality PA system, so they can sound good, when people come to see them play live. And then have the independence that even if their first album did not pay for itself, the major record company would be investing in the long term, thus see the first album as just the starting point for something far larger.

There was many a band from that period that would take two or three albums, before they had built up a big enough following to make financial sense of the money that the major record company had pumped into them. U2’s first album peaked at number 52 in the UK album charts. It would have lost a fortune, if they had been on an independent label they would have been dropped immediately. The major label had belief in the band, thus they stuck with them and of course in the fullness of time went on to become one of the biggest earning bands of all time.

Thus the point that I am making is ‘independence’ is a concept that looks different from wherever you are standing.

From the point of view of the music critic or eclectic fan of recorded music, records released on ‘independent’ labels may sound or seem more interesting, because they have not been homogenised by the pressures of the major labels. Independent labels are often regional, and are thus likely to pick up on local trends earlier than majors based in the music business capital of whatever the country is. Also, the ‘independent’ label maybe more naive in their judgement as to what might be worth releasing, thus end up releasing the quirkier or offbeat. These could also prove more interesting records to the select few who value this very quirkiness and offbeat-ness.

As anyone with a passing knowledge of British music over the past three decades or so will know, by the late 80s the term ‘Indie’ became the title for a rather conservative genre of music made by young men and women who wanted to sound not very good at playing their guitars. As a definable genre, it grew out of the records being released by the ‘independent’ record labels earlier in the decade. The bands that had been recording and releasing those records earlier in the decade did not want them to sound the way they did. They would have far rather been better musicians than they were at the time and would have far rather been able to spend more time in the studio making the records sound better than they did.

As a side issue to all of this, and I may have written about this elsewhere within the context of these 100 Questions, no interesting music makers ever set out to make music in a definable genre, they may have influences, but for their music to stand out and be counted, it has to be free from any specific genre that has gone before. Once a music has become a definable genre, it is over; only good for the history books and those that want music as a soundtrack to the lives they aspire to be living. Thus any band in the nineties or beyond, aspiring to make ‘Indie’ music, were probably not worth taking notice of. They may as well have been a tribute band.

The business models that the music business has used have always been in a constant state of flux, just like any business. Technology always leads the way in defining how the music business is going to have to play catch up, thus forcing them to re-model their working business models. And sometimes this state of flux is in more of a state of flux than usual. Sometimes the waters get undeniably choppy. This usually makes for interesting times. I have lived through a number of those choppy water times. Obviously over the past decade things have changed considerably and the music business has had to rethink massively what it is doing and how it can do it and still make some money. And I am sure that everyone that has ever been on the Clapham omnibus knows this already. I have not been directly involved with the music business for almost 20 years, so my opinions about what has been going on are only as a punter. And even as punter, I have got bored with the whole notion of recorded music and as I have said numerous times already – to my ears ‘recorded music’ sounds like the music of the 20^th- century. Tired and outdated.

The17 exists completely outside of the music business. Maybe before I go any further I should skip to the next question and make what I was about to say part of the answer to that one

3: Back in 1993, in article published in NME, you and Jimmy Cauty suggested we each have our own time. What does the development of The17 as an economic reality and your career tell us about your experience of time?

I could not remember what I might have said in an interview last year (2009) let alone what Jimmy Cauty or I may or may not have said in an interview in the NME back in 1993. But on the subject of time, I do often feel that I have already lived numerous lives and have had more than my fare share of living. Not that I am not hungry for as much more as I can get.

But back to the subject of the economic reality of The17, as I said above The17 is not part of the music business in anyway that I understand it to exist. I will not deny that some of what has driven me to do The17 has come from a reaction to my relationship to the music that has been part of my lives in the past.

There is no economic reality of The17; there is no business model that it can fit into. There is no financial upside to it. The success or failure of The17 could never be measured in how much money it grosses. It sidesteps the whole notion of music having to be a business. It was only in the 20^th-century that music became a business. Before then music was something that people did, everybody took part in the making of music. Some people, who were really good at music, were able to make a living from it, but almost as tradesman. Even the Beethoven’s and Bachs of the world were no more than hired hands, not international superstars earning a kings ransom.

The idea that music has to carry on being a business is not a given either. Maybe in a couple of hundred years we will look back at these past few decades as the time when there was this economic bubble surrounding the trading of music, like the tulip bubble in Holland a couple of hundred years ago.

For someone of my generation it is strange to think that there are now courses in universities where you can be taught the music business. For me there seems no logic in being taught it, it is just something that you go and do, that’s if you want to. The only way that you can learn is by doing it and making mistakes. If it had been something that could have been studied at university when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I am sure it would have put me off wanting to have anything to do with recorded music. All the greatest music that came out of the recorded music era was self-taught, both from the musicians that made it and the folks who nurtured, promoted, produced and flogged it.

But to get back to your question, or at least the last part of it, the economic reality of The17 and what it tells us about my experience of time. As I said there is no, or very little economic reality to The17. There are performances that I would like to do with The17, between now and the 28 April 2013, when I hope to leave The17 behind to get on with other things. A number of those performances are in far flung corners of the world. There is no economic reasons for going to those places, and there is no one there that is going to pay me to come. I do not have some vast private income, nor do I have any stashed wealth, if I want to go to Guatemala to do a performance of The17, I have to find a way, to pay for it myself. I am also loath to go cap in hand to the Arts Council, as I am fundamentally opposed to the funded arts, that said I know I have been commissioned to do certain things in the passed by funded organisations, and I am sure I will again in the future.

This means I will do certain things just to raise funds to pay my monthly payments and hope there is some left over to take the idea of The17 to wherever it is in the world that I want to go with it. The ‘certain things’ that I allow myself to do, to raise funds are pretty limited. Firstly I will not allow myself to be hired as a producer of records, for me that would drag me back in time. I will allow myself to be hired to go and talk at certain places and for those I will charge whatever I can get.

So onto my experience of time – I am sure it is the same of everyone else who gets to my stage in life and it is a cliché that we all know. Time gets faster. There is only so much time to get all the things that you want to do done and every day that passes there is less of that time. Conclusion – do what you want to do now, do not wait until tomorrow, or the time is right, or the weather is better, or you have done your exams. And don’t piss around; keep focused on what it is you are trying to do, even if part of that is you do not quite know what it is. Do not wait for somebody to give you permission. You do not need to be given permission to make great music, you just make it. Or you die trying. Either way you win.

4: The17 seems like an image for a Utopian future for music. With everything you have and know now, what might you do if you got your million quid back?

For me there is nothing Utopian about The17, it is just what I get up in the morning and do. The same way the Miles Davies gets up in the morning and blows his horn or Bach gets up and writes what he has to do for the service that day. You have a vision in your head what you want your music to sound like and you just try and make that a reality. Nobody wants to make shit music, although it seems a lot of people want to make music that has already been made, which is something I find difficult to understand.

As for the million quid, I am sure if it had not been burnt, my situation would be pretty much the same as it is. It would have frittered itself away in other directions. I would still be sitting here now doing what I am doing. Maybe I would be regretting that we had not burnt it when we had the chance. Maybe Jimmy Cauty and I would not forever be known as the men who burnt a million quid and maybe that would have given more space in peoples heads for whatever it is we have done since. But the flip side of that is that people might only take notice of what we do know because we were the men who burnt a million quid. And maybe that does not answer your question. I mean if you are asking what would I do if tomorrow morning if my half of the million quid was in my bank account. The answer to that is quite simple and it would be the same answer that I think a lot of people in this country would give – I would pay off the mortgage. And the mortgage on the house that my younger children live in and help pay for the care of my mother.

http://penkilnburn.com/paintings/100_questions/questions.php

a.P.A.t.T Walker Gallery Recordings

2010-03-23T18:08:00.027Z

I assume these are fair game. I recorded them for the aPAtT Orchestre at the Walker Gallery last weekend. The performance was great- lots of people playing in 3 of the tracks, walking round the whole gallery in a kind of procession, and finishing off with clapping out a Steve Reich composition. I was filming for them and enjoyed it. The first track recorded, here, is Steve Reich's Pendulum music... feedback....

Pendulum Music:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OLQJMI3D

Indeterminate composition by Richard Harding - Meeting Points; Clapping Music by Steve Reich:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=V7ER4YXK

Link to aPAtT's Face Book- http://en-gb.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=352539009494&comments&ref=mf

and the Blue Coats- Terry Riley's In C from a few weeks back

or,

apatt.com

Poster Day Abstract

2010-03-16T17:13:00.011Z

For the University of Liverpool's Poster Day, I had to write an abstract for my research project and then make a poster for it. The abstract summarises, pretty much, what the 'Prologue' to my thesis sets out in much greater detail.

This research project is a phenomenological ethnography that wants to understand what it is like to be a musical entrepreneur in North West England's music business. It takes a narrative based approach to collecting and interpreting data and focuses on 5 musical entrepreneurs from different sites in North West England's music business. As the project was beginning, it became clear from a discussion with Bill Drummond about a radical musical collective called 'The17' that their form of entrepreneurship deeply depended on the history of the music industry and the relations found commonly through the music business as they were experienced by Drummond. This observation oriented the project to understand entrepreneurship in terms of deeply depending upon the experience of the entrepreneur as a being-in-business, and also meant that the methodology taken must be able to account for people's experience of time and place. Edith Penrose's Theory of the Growth of the Firm is considered as a means by which to frame the research project because it focuses on the experience of entrepreneurs as beings-in-the-world. Penrose was attentive to the importance of people's situatedness and talks about 'images' that people have of their being-in-business. She also claims that it is only through this image of being-in-business that people are then able to act and that, each image, moreover, is unique to the particular entrepreneur and is developed and continually re-framed as the person or firm endures business life. Entrepreneurship, for her, is this making and re-making of images of being-in-business. The project then sets out to challenge and disrupt some of the traditional ways of perceiving the phenomena of musical entrrepreneurship, as a matter of falsification, beginning with the notion of 'independence' found commonly throughout the creative industries and the paradoxical dichotomy between commerce and creativity commonly thought to exist in the lives of musical entrepreneurs. This project then understands different forms of musical entrepreneurship through developing narraitive accounts of their experiences within the music business of North West England. It collects these narratives as images of what it is like to be in business as a musical entrepreneur from different research sites in North West England's music business. Narratives coordinate and interpret people's experience of things like time, relations and space. The project then turns to begin compiling a processual account of entrepreneurship based around the writings of Edith Penrose and her notion of 'images' and utilises the philosophy of Henri Bergson and his concept of 'duration' as a means by which to frame emerging research agendas. Ultimately, it suggests that enterprise is always dependent upon something, usually the experience of the entrepreneur as a being-in-business, and that, in order to evolve from simply being an image in people's minds, musical entrepreneurship depends on people making it happen, whether this be people simply managing themselves, their friends or turning to a larger 'star maker' record label to distribute the musical product.

Prologue, subject to change

2010-02-08T11:41:00.006Z

When making, selling, distributing or simply performing and listening to music, people embed themselves in particular places and times. Without a social context to reverberate against, their actions would be meaningless just as, without activities like making and listening to music, social contexts would be impossible to make sense of. Whether the particular context is made up a network of friends based in a particular area, then, or whether the exploits of a radical musical collective form a counterpoint to the prevailing commercial strategies of an entire industry, the principle stays the same: all musical and commercial activities inter-penetrate with their environment and, in this sense, also exist in co-dependency.

Isolated from each other, then, neither music or an environment make much sense. Hence, when it comes to making economic decisions in the music industry, similarly, they cannot be isolated and autonomous from the time and social context they penetrate. Making economic decisions is not independent of anything; to be effective, contextual knowledge of the particular environment is necessary and this knowledge will in turn impact the design and intent of the decision to be made. Most of this contextual knowledge develops out from history. The past provides the means by which to perceive and make sense of the present or the future. If history did not provide materials through which to see, think and play and, if the social context failed to embody some particular social, economic and industrial history or offer the potential to be received and understood, all such activities would be meaningless and impotent. It should stand to reason, then, that history and social relations appear as necessary and exploitable resources when making decisions. What they mean depends as much upon human action as human action depends upon them. The subsequent creativity, enacted within a music industry and social context that automatically imbues any act with cultural and economic value, is no different. It is only possible and, moreover, meaningful and defined as 'creative', through there being a past and a social context.

Edith Penrose and 'Learning'

In the field of management studies, this awareness of context finds early expression in the work of Edith Penrose (1959/1995). Penrose appears as an early processual entrepreneurship theorist when she characterises entrepreneurial creativity as depending upon the economic, industrial and market conditions the individual or firm penetrates and, more significantly, how these external conditions are comprehended in strict relation to the knowledge, experience and general working practices and resources a firm has established. Positing this is a creative process that occurs irreversibly through time, Penrose appears to be 'radically subjectivist', with ideas refracted by G.L.S. Shackle (1979) and L.M. Lachman (1970) from the Austrian School of economic theory.

For Penrose, economic growth is a matter of 'learning'. Learning occurs as an individual or firm examines their environment or the internal resources they already have, both developing over time, in strict relation to each other. In this way, the individual or firm literally 'learns' how they might better exploit historically formed internal resources and knowledge, more general and shared commercial or industrial procedures or, even, the very productive base of an entire industry. Evaluating themselves and their resources against the field and those who populate it, individuals and firms are also able to exploit the 'interstices' (Penrose 1995) that remain as larger firms struggle to cast their webs of control over the entire industry and market. It is then through these 'learning processes' that creativity and growth are manifest as, over time, the history of the individual or firm or, again, the external environmental conditions the firm penetrates, are continually perceived and re-presented in the hope of excavating more value and productivity.

For Penrose, then, learning occurs as an individual entrepreneur or firm evaluates themselves in respect to their environment or as an individual entrepreneur or firm evaluates their perception of the past in respect to what they can make of it in the present. They imagine spaces and ellipses in the industry as they learn, eye up interstices handed down and reformulate their perception and comprehension of themselves in relation to the world. In both cases, a pedagogical relation appears between the inside of a firm and its environment and, subsequently, between the past and the present.

For Penrose, these are processes of imagining and exploiting 'disequilibrium' created between the different fronts of experience. Her creative process of entrepreneurship is this continual imagination and creation of disequilibrium within the market and industry. More significantly, Penrose suggests that by turning the past and present and the inside and the outside of the firm to face each other, the history of things is continuously and irreversibly altered in respect to how it enables a firm or individual to perceive their environment and more proximal productive opportunities developing within the firm. This irreversible process performed by the pedagogical relation is the creative growth of the firm. It is often termed the 'Penrose curve' (Penrose 1995). While this illustrates a relationship between different firms and markets of varying sizes, moving away from Joseph Schumpeter to be closer to G.L.S. Shackle, Penrose believed all productive opportunities are particular to any individual or firm and how they perceive themselves in the world and are able to realize their imagination. This is what appears to be Penrosian strain of radical subjectivism and it becomes more so over time.

For Penrose, then, creativity occurs as an individual or firm and their environment inter-penetrate each other and, for this reason, both should be comprehended in strict association with the other. Affirming this, early on Penrose claims autonomy and independence are impossible constructs of economic theory (1995:xvi). For her, decisions are partly determined by the environment and this determination is strictly in respect to what the environment means in relation to the individual or firm. For any research object, then, just like making or listening to music, the local context is important and it is only through the symbolic relationship between action and context that both acquire meaning and potency.

Making and Re-Framing Images and the Inter-Penetration of Vision

The firm is a boundaried space circumscribed by the individual or group of individuals and the administrative control they wield over the resources it holds, the services it can render and the individual's experiential capacity, each embodied in the mechanics of the firm (Penrose 1995). If a pedagogical relation exists between this internal nature and the economic, industrial and market conditions that are perceived and, if this same pedagogical relation exists between the past and the present more generally, then this kind of learning, Penrose suggests, becomes visible as entrepreneurial vision develops a novel 'image' to be made real. The relation is illuminated precisely as disequilibrium is imagined and the dichotomies of the past and the present and the inside and the outside of a firm are reconciled in experience. In this way, smaller embryonic firms and the nascent becomings of entrepreneurs feed off the context they penetrate and the larger firms they encounter, arriving at the table with a different point of view and a new recipe to follow. More significantly, the notion of 'image' appears to reconcile the fronts of experience and also to be shifting, paused in between the clarity of management and the opacity of entrepreneurship.

Penrose claims, then, that “history matters” (1995:xiii) as a kind of 'image' that is irreversibly developed during learning processes. For her, experiential history and the mechanical history of a firm enable vision at the same time as they partially stymie the present that passes in front. Constituting a view of things from the inside of any individual or firm, the image is also highly subjective to the individual or firm and their history and, through time as learning occurs, their image of being in the world becomes increasingly unique. This is how Penrose pertains to a radically subjectivist tendency akin to economic theorists such as G.L.S. Shackle and Lachman

All factors impacting economic decision making will be dealt with by the image provided by history: possible productive opportunities in the form of uncharted but potentially productive territories and those interstices cast off by larger firms; how the general environment and competitive characters are perceived; right down to how the firm or individual perceives their chances of success and will negotiate uncertainty. Imagining ('making images') does draw on entrepreneurial versatility in the face of constraint or adversity and entrepreneurial judgement in relation to the knowledge and experience the individual or firm has established, but an individual's psychological temperament is not so significant. Rather, as with all of Penrose's claims, it appears that perception, comprehension, judgement and psychological temperament each depend upon the historical context of any decision and, moreover, the entrepreneur's own experiential history and the mechanical history of the firm. This is what she means when she claims creativity and growth develop from internal processes. The present and future and, again, the external world of the firm, are always perceived in respect to the history of the internal working, resources and experience of the individual or group of individuals whose experiences are embodied in the firm.

Creativity as the Changing Image: Managing and Entrepreneuring

If this kind of learning depends on what is already known and functioning, it could be fair to say that 'imagination' is a mode of operating whereby a more 'managed' or manageable image- a kind of embodied knowledge and history- is perceived differently. Re-thinking images of the past or the outside world in order that they better comprehend the current embeddedness of experience here and now, then, means entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship envisages disequilibrium before the manus (hands) of management eat it up. Hence, entrepreneurship is the process by which what has gone before; what is already established and known and, moreover, being managed by others or by 'the practical mind', is used differentially and altered. It is by understanding the uncertainty of the image presented by history and the adaptability of time to come, that entrepreneurship sets out to transform the image setting in, re-presenting a new image for the hands (manus) to incarnate.

As such, once the image of the industry, economy or market coalesces into functional knowledge, then it becomes dry enough and flexible enough to paint over again and stretch. Entrepreneurial creativity depends on this 'sediment' left over through time as past creativity becomes habituated, commonplace, understood and well managed, often 'standardized' and commercially functioning realities. Without such management of the past and the context of any action, any subsequent creative departures are blockaded by a lack of sight or comprehension. It is then over this managed 'sediment' that the rush of entrepreneurship reveals itself as it picks it up to reshape and transport it to make better use of some other place and time. It is due to this necessary interplay between management and entrepreneurial creativity that the image never quite settles, always being re-framed and poised to comprehend a changing landscape in relation to the changing figure of the individual or firm.

Co-dependency and Inter-Penetration of Entrepreneurship and Management

Penrose's learning processes appear dependent upon initially knowing how to see and do things, and the historical context and mechanical history embodied in the firm are only meaningful in relationship between each other. In this sense, without the mens of management, originally meaning 'of the mind' or 'the result of the hands', imagination could not then envisage things differently. Creativity occurs as this knowledge is used poetically, for different interests or in respect to how experience re-evaluates how knowledge gained can be better applied and utilised. For Penrose, this implies that management and entrepreneurship and, more generally, functional commerce and more risky creativity, are tied up in necessary and ongoing processes whereby, over time, management continually settles in as entrepreneurship imagines and, subsequently, offers a renewed view of things for the manus of management to make real. Without the manus and mens of management, then, it appears that entrepreneurship could not see and would remain inchoate. Moreover, if management did not settle in routines and if mechanics irrespective of time and place were not developed, then all energies would be consumed and spaces for entrepreneurial imagination would not transpire.

In this way, “[h]istory matters” as it becomes the past and is managed through time and, secondly, as it releases and enables entrepreneurial energy. Management matters, similarly, because it initially provides the knowledge, procedures and calculations as an image that will then be re-presented by entrepreneurship and because, ultimately, it is through the manus of management that things become realized. Creativity, then, can not become independent of the past nor the social context it inter-penetrates and, similarly, entrepreneurship, as economic creativity, cannot become independent of the managed image that it redresses or the practical management that realizes such imagination. Entrepreneurship imagines new ways of perceiving and acting on things. Management, like the painter's hand, takes the most suitable brushes and shades to incarnate the re-presentation. After a reading of Penrose, then, it seems that management and entrepreneurship are necessary partners and, subsequently, that in such cases of creative commerce, the two terms are not in tension.

The Record Industry and the Independent Movement

Now turning to face the recorded music industry, the growth and subsequent transformation of large firms, the economy, industry and market more generally might be attributed to similar 'learning' and 'growth' processes as those outlined by Penrose. Hereby, those initial firms to seize hold of Edison's invention of the phonograph and the subsequent capturing of sound as property also instated general industrial procedures and market expectations that have defined the history of music making. Those early players were able to oligopolise the market and, since Edison, recording music and distributing music in the form of material property has been the industrial and market norm ever since. The early players grew into large firms as they learnt to manage and then transform the environment they perceived in order to make the most of their resources and, in this way, both developed together. It seems then that, in the most part, the intentions of these larger firms was purely commercial and profit based. Most musical and industrial creativity has occurred within the general industrial paradigm these early players developed.

However, while larger firms such as 'The Big Four' have developed and, in some areas, concentrated the record industry (Hesmondalgh 1999:37), a retrospective glance back reveals a vibrant history to music making that is peppered with events and characters who transformed the industry, market and economy (of the distribution of music, money and symbols) forever. While those initial firms might have established the market and industry, then, and subsequently been able to grow into large and powerful corporations, they were still unable to entirely satisfy the market, exploit all the available opportunities or prevent other smaller firms from entering the arena. The possible images of the industry and market, despite all the concentration by powerful corporations, did not repel hopeful entrepreneurs and music people from entre-ing.

Fox Broadcasting Company, for example, one of the earliest so-called 'independent' entertainment corporations (and, ironically, now one of the largest, most varied and powerful 'majors' in the USA), was later followed by other entrepreneurial firms entering the music industry, such as Island records (now part of Universal Music Group) and Virgin records (now part of EMI), before many other smaller firms began populating the creative industries. Many of the early independents, such as Fox Broadcasting Company, became the major corporations that smaller firms now cast themselves as independent to. But, from the blues to punk, so-called 'Independents' have always populated the industry (Lee 1995) alongside those they were apparently 'independent' of. These smaller entrepreneurial firms must have envisaged possibility in the midsts of the larger firms, their procedures and general contextual conditions. Indeed, as Herman Gray notes, organisations such as these were able to “operate in the seams and spaces of the modern culture industry that are vacated or ignored by conglomerates (1990:134)”.

Seizing hold of the 'interstices' (Penrose 1995) to distribute music as larger firms struggled to serve a turbulent market with fleeting desires, Richard Peterson and David Berger (1971) suggested some of the early independents developing in the 1950s and 1960s were more able to negotiate uncertainty and operate amidst a lack of routine as 'process variables'. Like Joseph Schumpeter (1934), an early entrepreneurship scholar who greatly influenced Edith Penrose and her conceptualization of the interplay between the activities of larger firms and the vision and efficacy of smaller firms, Peterson and Berger believed the 'independents'' model of entrepreneurship was “very much at home in the less tangible of 'business services'” of places such as the recorded music industry, being as they are inherently 'turbulent' markets due to issues of novelty and fashion that lead to creative uncertainties and reduced possibility for routinization (Peterson and Berger 1971:104). It seems, then, that the smaller entrepreneurial firms, to some degree, envisioned productive opportunities as they evaluated the industrial landscape and those who populated it against their own resources, knowledge, experiences and intentions. They were more able to flex to the market's changing tastes (Peters 1992) and partly due to this, the music industry has been split between the 'majors' and the 'independents' ever since (Montanari 2007).

More recently, during the 1970s and 1980s, a second wave of 'Independents' grew in strength and numbers that also appeared to challenge the dominance and necessity of the major players for signing acts and distributing music. Seemingly revolving upon common and prosaic collective values found across the histories and social contexts of music making (Fonarow 2006; Hesmondalgh 2007), this cultural and industrial movement also formed the counterpoint to the industrial procedures and places of power that had developed since Edison captured sound in the phonograph. For David Hesmondalgh, the whole impetus of this movement was the reconciliation of commerce and creativity as two opposed poles, rather than to democratize music or alter the productive relations and claims this was epitomised in Creation Record's 'classic pop songs' (1999:35). It was commercial organization but with different interests other than solely commercial gain. If, then, the movement was fuelled by this desire, it seems that musicians' long struggle with being 'commodity producers' (Morrow 2009; Frith 1996; Adorno 1989), predicated upon a paradoxical dichotomy between commerce and creativity (Stratton 1982; Holbrook 2005) was at that point being confronted and becoming less absolute.

Creative Commerce and Managed Creativity

If Hesmondalgh is right, then the eutopian (e-utopian meaning not an impossible ideal) image was 'a new kind of commerce' with different interests to the commerce plotting the history of music making. Indeed, as Hesmondalgh confirms, these individuals and firms had “a more reflexive understanding of the dynamics of the record industry than had existed up to that point (1999:37)”. The movement re-coordinated and re-presented the history going before it and the environmental conditions extant, being versatile enough to imagine a new possible situation in strict accordance to those relations. In this sense, the image of independence from the majors, whether an impossible eutopia or not (a utopia rather than a reachable eutopia), can be deemed to result from Penrosian learning processes. The creative spark of the Independent movement, hoping for a new type of commerce not based solely upon commercial gain, was only possible as an image through depending upon knowledge and experience of the actions and interests of the major players of the industry. As an image, then, it was 'learnt'.

North West England

Moving closer to where economic change finds it's proper place in everyday lived experience, North West England and Liverpool more specifically appear as hubs of musical independence. Liverpool and its environs is well known for transforming music making as its popular musicians have colonized the charts and minds of music lovers around the world from the 1960’s onwards. 'Ripples' were sent around the world. Apart from the obvious band names, this 'Independent' movement also coalesced around clubs such as the Cavern and Eric's in Mathew Street, Liverpool, and around small record companies such as Probe Records and Zoo Records, both of which were developed to organize and exploit the burgeoning national distribution network for music not associated with major labels. Whilst many have come and gone, many of these entities have also grown and diversified, spreading out across the musical landscape, shifting from band to producer to record label and then possibly back again, all the while drawing on the cultural and industrial history they experience and expressed as they became musical entrepreneurs.

A case in point, Bill Drummond, who began playing in a punk band before working in the mainstream record business as an A&R man, and who helped to establish Zoo Records and the KLF in the 1990s (The KopyRight Liberation Front), now continues to challenge the concentration of influence that has built up in the music industry, the procedures that secure it, along with market expectations. One of the current ventures he is deeply involved with, The17, for example, an 'anti-choir' formed of 17 different people who perform each time only for themselves and who do not capture their performance as a recording, seems to recycle the cultural tradition and invert the industry's procedural history. Through the choir, Drummond endeavours to 'make music meaningful again'. As a eutopian image, The17 literally turns the most commonplace and habitual ways to make money on their head for 'a more meaningful kind of music'. Seemingly developing over time, Bill Drummond continuously learnt how he might exploit what he already had and what was already available in the environment or, more precisely, fundamental to the major player's longevity. In this way, The17 might appear as an enduring artefact of his learning experience. As a Penrosian learning experience, then, The17 is deeply related to the industrial history of music and the productive base of the entire record industry, along with Bill Drummond's more personal history of the music industry. It is the image he and others embody their learning in.

On a more everyday basis, though, The17, apart from being an image developed in strict relation to the history of the music industry and the main proponent of the collective, must also make money and survive. In order to evolve Drummond's imagination, then, The17 must be accompanied by functional management and, for this reason, The17 is embedded among the other exploits of the collective that bring more secure remuneration through more traditional services and products.

Artiste Management, Record Labels and General Collaboration

However, presuming music people often struggle more than most to legitimize their role as commodity producers (Frith 1996; Adorno 1989), the indissociable and unnecessary opposition between commerce and creativity amounts to artiste management, record labels and entrepreneurial music people having contrary interests. Not only would these parties appear to have contrary interests, but the lives of music people would too seem to be torn between artistic creativity or commerce and 'selling out' (Hesmondalgh 1999; Lee 1995). But, while entrepreneurial imagination remains inchoate, if either the music person of the larger firm is to grow, they often rely on each other. Indeed, as Frasogna and Hetherington correctly note, if musicians are to be creative and also survive as music people, then “their career demands at least as much management as there is talent and ambition” (2004:7).

As such, music people must often make economic decisions on an everyday basis, whether this be how they get music published or if they chose to hold a day job. In this sense, while generally distinct from each other, artiste management firms, managerial record labels and entrepreneurial music people often have compatible and co-dependent interests as, without each other, they are restricted as to what they can imagine or what they can make real. Creative commerce can only survive if, to some degree, it financially supports itself or is supported by remuneration from elsewhere. For these reasons, music people must engage with those who surround them if they are to be heard and survive. Different parties, then, sometimes with seemingly contrary interests can even be, as with the emergence of The17 and Independent labels more generally, in complete harmony (Dennis and Macaulay 2007). As such, whether it be a powerful label or the humdrum types (Caves 2000) who do the dog's body work that gets masked by romantic notions of the artist (Becker 1984), music people must engage with their surroundings to get things done. Put more simply, often music people must negotiate terms with those places they play and the people they play with and, sometimes in order to play at all, they must have careers outside of the creative industries.

Creativity as Uncertainty

Richard Caves (2000), however, identifies other reasons for the apparent co-dependency between management and entrepreneurship and between commerce and creativity. Focusing upon contractual agreements between artistic types and 'humdrum', ordinary and non-artistic types more interested in making money, Caves suggests that often a shared creative process of collaboration and facultative support develops between different individuals or firms. Even if they are “very much at home in turbulent markets” such as the music industry (Peterson and Berger 1971):xxxx), entrepreneurial music people must still evolve their imagination through commercially sound pragmatism (Frasogna and Hetherington 2004).

For Caves (2000), this apparent need for interaction between different types of people with different interests exists because creativity, as the process by which the past is changed, is inherently uncertain and risky. By nature, creativity does not repeat history, even if simply for fear of diminishing cultural value (Caves 2000). But this indicates art “defies definition” and so identifying a product and a particular market is “fraught with difficulty (in Dennis and Macaulay 2007:xxxx)”. As such, some music people might often chose to collaborate with larger firms (the traditional 'star makers') to help them market and distribute their wares while others may chose to evolve their imagination through their closer friends, the local community and whatever is at hand.

Creativity, here, in the sense that it is a break with the past, as Robin Holt and Robert Chia claim (2009), is an engagement with the past in order to change it. Creative commerce cannot be calculated and certain as, if this was the case, then mechanical determination rather than re-presentation and novelty would be the result. Holt and Chia call this 'purposive' action rather than 'purposeful' action. Being 'purposive' helps describe entrepreneurial creativity whereby a novel but uncertain state of affairs will be brought about by transforming an image of the past. Being 'purposeful', in contrast, is where strategies (strategoi -στρατηγοί-, rule of the general) calculate specific paths toward desired and foreknown ends. For this reason, 'purposeful' action seems to make no break with the past and appears more mechanical. Commerce and management appear 'purposeful' because commerce functions with particular interests (commercial return) and management exists to calculate and implement the necessary actions in order to realize a re-presented image. Complicating things, though, calculations can be made only toward which decisions should be made in relation to established knowledge, available resources and services, market opportunities and so forth. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper notes, then, despite the wishes of the rationalists and strategists, there will always remain a 'poverty of historicism' that prevents teleology being knowledge.

It appears that, being purposive, then, entrepreneurial imagination and creativity are inherently risky and uncertain businesses. Alone, the creative spark cannot guarantee its successful realization and individuals and firms will have to engage with others who provide the resources and services required if they are to succeed (Caves 2000; Becker 1984; Frasogna and Hetherington 2004). Again, however, for Penrose management and entrepreneurship inter-penetrate and there need exist no line beyond which entrepreneurial creativity can be dismissed as uncreative and anaemic commerce. For her, all growth is creative and engagement with others, even managers and powerful corporations with entirely commercial interests, is an entrepreneurial act in itself (1995). Similarly, as entrepreneurial imagination must settle into managed reality before this reality is again re-presented, for all forms of creativity to occur – musical, commercial, industrial – the artist must be comfortable enough (Caves 2000; Morrow 2009) to step out of the managed image into the 'suicide quadrant' (Sarasvathy 2008) where all certainties fall away. Most fundamentally as Caves points out (2000), even the most creative firms and individuals must also make money: they must be able to survive and open up their creativity to the desires and quips of the market and often forge collaborations and informal networks between other individuals and firms.

In this respect, risky pursuits into uncertain territories must also often be embedded and protected alongside more sensible and functional activities more likely to make money. Moreover, potentially without knowledge regarding how to 'break' large markets or publish and distribute high numbers of singles, for example, entrepreneurial music people often have to engage with larger firms and establish management services while, inversely, larger firms might often depend on the versatility and creativity of signed musicians and bands (Frith 1988). Even if they do chose to remain 'more autonomous' by engaging with new mediums that combine many productive services, they often still engage with larger and more powerful firms such as Rupert Murdoch's Myspace (Hartley 2008).

Dependency as Potency, not Independence

Despite the obvious relationship between the dominant players and their procedures and the creativity of smaller firms and individuals often termed 'Independents', exemplified by The17's apparent inversion of the most commonplace ways to make money through music, however, different cultural storylines continue to thread themselves through music commerce and question the legitimacy of any relationships between larger firms and smaller firms or, similarly, any dependency between the commerce of these larger firms and the commercial creativity of smaller firms. But, the notion of 'Independence', a storyline based around the institutional politics of the music industry (Hesmondalgh 1999; 2007) and the namesake of the movement, appears invalid if the development of the Independent movement is properly considered in the context within which it arose. It has both history and context.

Firstly, it goes without saying that, to be independent, there exists a relationship between one thing and another, even if that relationship is one of opposition or negation. More precisely, however, the relationship between the larger firms populating the record industry, their procedures and interests and the market expectations they established, appear completely necessary for the development of the Independent movement and others such as The17. This necessary dependency becomes more vivid by recognising that the political potency and cultural value associated with the Independent movement was only available and, moreover, culturally and economically valuable, in respect to an industry dominated by larger firms with purely commercial interests serving an unfulfilled market. Like Penrose claims, then, the first dividing storyline to fall here is the notion of 'independence' or autonomous creativity. It was not that the movement developed in isolation but, rather, that it developed on the back of a cultural and industrial history that simultaneously constrained and flexed to their imagination.

As a matter of Penrosian fact, then, it is only through having a history and by being in a particular context that the 'Independent' movement could arise. It was the past and those powerful relations and forces that constituted the history of record industry that offered the initial image of a managed and commercially oriented industry that could then be imagined differently and re-presented for a more meaningful way to live. Rather than being independent, then, the movement deeply depended on the history and social relations populating the record industry as this was how it developed potency and was able to be comprehended as meaningful and valuable.

Creative Commerce and The Independent Movement

This kind of pseudo-independence helps identify other relationships between larger firms and smaller firms. Most significantly, in recognising that the Independent movement arose as the counterpoint to the mainstream industry – a commercial industry but with different interests – it might become clearer that, rather than simply being constituted of an isolated artistic outburst, the movement offered to fulfil an otherwise unsatisfied market and exploit unused productive opportunity and the 'interstices' (Penrose 1995) of opportunity opened up by the commonplace procedures and interests of the larger firms.

In this sense, then, individuals and firms had both envisaged the potential to develop a competitive advantage valuable culturally and economically. It is upon the very paradoxical dichotomy found traditionally between the commerce of the majors and the creativity of the 'independents' that the movement drew its value: a new kind of commerce was only able to be envisaged and created due a managed knowledge of the rest of the field (appearing dominated by managerial labels focused on commerciality), an envisaged unused opportunity, and the potential to develop a competitive advantage that those larger firms could not offer (pure creative expression, 'democratic music', more varied and flexible genres or classic pop songs rather than commercially oriented simulacra).

For these reasons, while the developing 'Independent' movement drew aesthetic value through being opposed to the commercial interests of the larger firms and in this way appeared to sit on the 'creative' side of a dichotomy between commerce and creativity (Stratton 1982; Holbrook 2005), the initial success and growth of the industry occurred as individuals and firms developed a managed image of a managed economy, industry and market which they felt could be re-presented before making sensible economic decisions as to how they might realize their image of a new commerce. It was a creative kind of commerce with interests other than pure capitalist growth and depended on both imaginative entrepreneurship and sensible management.

In recognising the dependency of the new 'image' envisaged for a more meaningful kind of music upon the history and social context of those involved like this, the unnecessary paradoxical dichotomy seen to exist between creativity and commerce by which the 'Independent' movement drew paradoxical aesthetic value begins to fall away. Akin to marketing scholars Michael Macaulay and Noel Dennis who discuss the creative commerce of jazz musicians, here commerce and creativity appear to “be embraced” and to “not stand in opposition to each other but co-exist quite happily (2007:226)”. Having an image and redressing an image depends on both commerce and creativity and, as a corollary, also upon the compatibility of management and entrepreneurship.

As steps were taken to co-ordinate an entirely new way to distribute music and merchandise, the independent movement arose as a commercial outfit performing economic functions, but remained heavy with values and interests in contrast to the pure capitalist growth favoured by those larger firms. With the commercial realization of the Independent movement, then, as a movement that made efforts to reconcile commerce and creativity and was sometimes at odds with the mainstream record labels, at other times borrowing facultative support from those larger corporations, the traditional hang ups of the past- namely the issues of 'selling out' by turning commercial or 'burning out' by stripping their productive resources due to too rapid growth- appear strained. Not only was their independent commerce in relation to the commerce of those major players with different interests, but the proponents of the Independent movement made and enacted sensible economic decisions through functional actions that evolved their imagination.

Two cases in point can help clarify the unavoidable co-dependence of entrepreneurship and management and creativity and commerce. Turning to examine The17, it becomes clear that the creative commerce Bill Drummond imagined, an entrepreneurial image whereby the most fundamental and commonplace procedures for making money through music were literally inverted, is risky and, perhaps, even suicidal. The eutopian image of The17 – a 'more meaningful kind of music' – can, in no way, be foreseen and calculated. There is no history to perceive future certainty by but, rather, only a history that will be re-coordinated and irreversibly changed. In this respect, then, in order to begin the process, Bill Drummond and The17, not simply reliant upon a manageable image of the past and of their social relations, also depend upon well calculated economic decisions that can promise to bring economic support. The past is managed as an image and the realization of the re-presentation of the image will be managed through making economic decisions.

Devoid of any possibility of making money through selling records or performing gigs, at least in the way others do, The17 appear to exchange sensible money making procedures for the sake of extreme cultural integrity or making a political intervention. However, putting The17 in its proper context, its outright commercial creativity appears embedded among other more sensible ventures as part of a larger corporation, Penkiln Burn. In this way, on an everyday basis, The17 or, at least the body of which it is part, realizes possibilities for remuneration.

At times risky and uncertain, at other times The17 might resemble a far-reaching prosthetic undertaking valuable marketing activities that draw attention to Bill Drummond's and Penkiln Burn's less risky commerce in the form of book, pamphlet, cards, art work and poster sales. Within the operations of Penkiln Burn, then, the risky and creative nature of The17 complements the commercial functionality and security of more familiar produce and both are able to flourish. While also appearing to enjoy high levels of vertical integration, Drummond also engages with PR consultancy and artist representative firm Sound UK on the way to realising The17 as a shared eutopian image.

Similarly, the pop star 'Little Boots', also from the environs of Liverpool, who media speculated to be 'the Sound of 2009', if she is ever to make the sound of 2009 a reality, must engage with others on the way. Focused on living as an artiste by making money through the most fundamental and commonplace means (selling records, performing and merchandise) and having felt she had reached the sum of her resources and skills but still had some leftover productive opportunity, Little Boots made the entrepreneurial decision to collaborate with larger and more powerful firms who offered resources and services that were otherwise restricted. Firstly establishing herself and artiste management 'This is Music Ltd. at the centre of her productive 'hub' (Watson 2002), she then chooses to collaborate with a well established 'major player' – 'Warner Music Group' and their Subsidiary record label 'Atlantic' – in a '360 degree' record contract that formalises their relationship. Having already established a life in a former band – Dead Disco – on the back of a long history of performing and training as a classical pianist, the entrepreneurial move enabled her brand to grow rapidly over a short space of time and use up her embedded and collectively imagined productive opportunity. She now collaborates with different specialized departments focused solely on commercial activities in order to grow and, through this additional management, is more free is focus her own energies on musical creativity.

The History of Music is Retarded Potential

Like the experiences of those before them, then, the historical development, complexity and size of the industry, market and economy, while in some respects constraining what music people today might do as they must manage it, are also flexible enough to prick their imagination and enable more entrepreneurially creative acts. The making and re-making of images, being radically subjective, is experienced in a world of plurality (Penrose 1995:xxx; Shackle 1979; interview with Shackle xxxx) that is not tiresome of change. If they do then look back again in order to re-present themselves and their environment, the general history, depth of complexity, concentration and size of the music industry, market and economy, and all the established procedures, market expectations and even the sounds and symbols getting made and being recycled, appear as potentialities to be imagined and re-presented. These issues remain as historical and hence retarded artefacts that are experienced as uncertain and adaptable. They enable vision and, subsequently, imagination and re-presentation.

As such, it is expected that the history of music making offers a wealth of resources to be imagined, re-presented and developed. Like social context, it provides a classroom to learn in and decorate as they wish. Being constituted over time and hence retarded, social contexts and histories will also change as individuals and firms encounter them and draw on them to comprehend things and imagine productive opportunity. The environment and social relations a firm or individual can perceive and re-imagine, then, and, more generally, the cultural storylines they can associate with, should each appear as potentialities- as uncertain and adaptable resources to be re-presented and exploited again and again. History and social context appear as the background, the rivers, trees and mountains that the entrepreneur can base their image around.

The Focus of this Project

A picture begins to coalesce that has the traditional paradoxical dichotomy between commerce and creativity and, similarly, between management and entrepreneurship, as parallel frames. Being parallel and necessary to each other in order to frame the ever changing image that is creativity, the opposition begins to fall away and it appears possible to appraise each research object as creative and commercial at different times or at the same time (Dennis and Macaulay 2007). Without each other, entrepreneurship will remain inchoate, as imagination waiting to be incarnated by the hands of management. Inversely, without entrepreneurial imagination, management would die of anaemia, devoid of the vital blood of creativity.

Taking this viewing platform, this research project seeks insight into how this need to make a life and a living are brought together in the same storied life. It will use ethnographic methods forming a narrative methodology to engage with the making and re-making of images as music people turn the past and the present to face each other; as they bring management and entrepreneurship together; and as they reconcile and feed off the inter-penetration of commerce and creativity. Ultimately, their creativity will be properly contextualized in relation to those characters, events and storylines of the industry, market and economy (monetary and symbolic) that plot their learning experience and form the background to their image.

How music people survive commercially through being creative and, similarly, how they are creative through commerce will be the general focus of the project. It focuses upon a selection of musical entrepreneurs. Making a living in different places of the music industry and developing from different time periods with different 'experiential capacities', the project will provide a richly contextualized account of how these individuals and collectives with roots in North West England learn over time. In doing so, the significance of history and of social relations for creativity will be furnished with empirical evidence that will show the, sometimes, steady and at other times rapid and far reaching processual change of the economy, industry and market.

By researching like this, the project will disrupt some of the traditional storylines associated with music making as it repeatedly highlights the dependency of creativity upon the past and upon social relations and the subsequent transformation of these historically developing resources. As such, the empirical evidence will incarnate and nuance the phenomena of dependence/independence by presenting the compatibility and indissociable nature of commerce and creativity, firm/individual and their environment and the past and present. Taking up the threads of discursive images presented by entrepreneurship literature and the history of music making, the project will then conclude by presenting novel images of of the phenomena of musical entrepreneurship.

The 100 Questions

2010-01-29T11:46:00.009Z

I've been trying to get talking to Bill Drummond and Penkiln Burn again, or trying to work with them somehow. Bill seems to have turned the tables on people like me who ask him questions a lot. He has made a thing out of it, playing on people's desire, or something...

He asked me to write four of my questions down for him. In total, he will be answering 100 questions on Penkiln Burn, which will then be published on the website (penkilnburn.com). He are mine:

People sometimes say you can either be an artist or a businessman. Yet, when I consider your work, Bill, you seem to live these both together. For example, The 100 questions appears to be art and something else. It reaches out to those who ask questions and gets something back. Can you tell a story to illustrate some of your experiences with money, music and art?
In life generally, people often talk about the idea of 'independence'. There has been an 'independent movement' in music for example. Yet, when I consider the independent movement, it seems to be in relation to 'the majors' and it depended on people making it happen. Can you reflect on how you might experience dependence or independence and what The17 might mean, perhaps in terms of the relationship with Penkiln Burn, the wider industry, or making it happen?
Back in 1993, in article published in NME, you and Jimmy Cauty suggested we each have our own time. What does the development of The17 as an economic reality and your career tell us about your experience of time?
The17 seems like an image for a eutopian future for music. With everything you have and know now, what might you do if you got your million quid back?