BOP Consulting is looking to recruit a Principal Consultant to strengthen our team, particularly in our international work. A detailed job description can be found here, while we also ask that you complete a Equal Opportunities monitoring form, found here. From the job description:
We are looking to appoint an outstanding candidate to be a Principal Consultant. You will be joining our dynamic, multi-disciplinary and multi-national team at a pivotal moment: we are becoming a larger, more international company (particularly in Greater China/East Asia and Brazil/South America), with a more varied portfolio of projects and revenue streams. We see this appointment as crucial to the success of this transition as we enter the next phase of BOP.
Applications must be received by the end of Monday 1 April, 2013.
BOP’s managing director, Paul Owens, will be speaking tomorrow (Tuesday 19 March) at an event organised by The Fifth Sector, a company owned by a friend of BOP’s, Iain Bennett. The discussion, Creating the city: can the UK export its creative model? will explore the strength or otherwise of the UK’s creative sector; whether its model can be exported to other places; and whether UK leadership in the sector is more rhetoric than substance.
The discussion should be a lively one, and will be held at 18 Hewett Street, a ‘concept space’ (whatever that might be) in Shoreditch in London.
In an increasingly digitised world, it is hard to get people to pay for content directly. The Reuters blogger, Felix Salmon, has published an interesting piece looking at three ways that many publishers are trying: paywalls; asking for donations, and selling non-digital things to the digital audience. Much of Salmon’s article pivots off a fascinating TED video by the musician, Amanda Palmer, who talks about the way she has built up a ‘tribe’ (to borrow Seth Godin’s term) to support her band. (The video can be found below.) Salmon concludes:
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Creative Skillset has published a report, Classifying and measuring the Creative Industries, which offers some further thoughts on ways in which Britain’s system might be improved. It is closely related to NESTA’s recent Dynamic Mapping, but uses slightly more up-to-date statistics.
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In these tougher economic times, a number of organisations are publishing reports making the case for investing in culture. The latest to do so is the Local Government Association. Its report, entitled Driving growth through local government investment in the arts, mostly uses case studies to illustrate the variety of ways this can happen. As Councillor Flick Rea, chair of the LGA’s Culture, Sport and Tourism board. puts it:
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After a very difficult few months for the organisation, Creative Scotland has announced the first steps it intends to take to try and regain the confidence of the cultural sector. These are set out in its Action Plan for Change.
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DCAL, the department responsible for the creative industries in Northern Ireland, has published its second set of experimental statistics looking at the state of the creative industries in the province. (We blogged about the first set of data in 2011 here.)
The figures suggest that the creative industries are struggling to grow. The total GVA of the sector has fallen by 25% between 2008 and 2009 (though it should be pointed out that GVA figures are often subject to big fluctuations), while the number of businesses remained static at 1,375, or 2% of Northern Ireland’s stock. The employment picture was brighter, with 21,000 people working either in the creative industries or in creative occupations outside the creative sector: 2.8% of the total.
Among the individual industries, architecture and publishing were the two largest contributors to GVA. The total of 1,375 businesses included only ten computer software firms, a much lower proportion than is typical for the rest of the UK.
The picture is not all gloomy, however. Music and visual and performing arts saw both GVA and business numbers rise. The music scene in particular is thriving, as this New York Times article observes.
Last month BOP’s Alex Homfray spoke at a VisitEngland conference. His presentation, along with those of the other speakers, has now put been online. Alex’s topic was ‘The economic impact of culture and what it means for tourism’. In it he discusses the issues using case studies drawn from BOP’s work for the Womad and AV Festivals, the Arts Council and arts venues across the East Midlands. The presentations can be read here.
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In this guest post, BOP associate (and novelist) Tom Campbell examines the effects of technology on the creative industries and their workers.
A two-sentence history of the British working classes over the last half century goes something like this: a combination of technology and international competition transformed Britain’s traditional manufacturing sectors, and led to a dramatic contraction in the size of the industrial workforce. The labour movement, its weakness compounded by government policy, was unable to resist, resulting in lower wage inflation and a generation of mass unemployment.
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The effects of cuts in arts spending continue to be a source of controversy, but the debate is often hampered by a lack of evidence either way. In response to a conversation he had with Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture and Creative Industries, in which Vaizey asserted that the cuts were having no effect whatsoever on new writing for the theatre, the playwright, Fin Kennedy, has tried to gather such evidence. He has just published a report of his findings: In Battalions.
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