The Fifth Column
Project notes, sector analysis and opinion. Creative Alchemy is our long-form series on culture, creative industries and the future of the creative economy.
Catch up with the latest news from The Fifth Sector
Reinforcing the survivors
Three policy decisions in the same week have put money where creative success is already visible. There is a hidden creative economy still waiting to be counted.
Working the whole: how we sustain and grow value in the creative economy
Jung’s quaternity describes wholeness as a creative tension. Four parts of the psyche pull against one another, and resolution arrives only when their conflict is consciously worked through. This essay proposes that the creative economy carries a comparable architecture, and it offers a four-tier heuristic for reading that economy: a public-facing layer of recognised institutions, a working layer of registered businesses, a half-seen layer of portfolio freelancers, and a hidden collective ground that sustains the rest while staying invisible to official measurement.
Still not an ecosytem
Ten years ago, on the eve of a General Election, I wrote an article arguing that calling the UK’s creative industries an “ecosystem” was dangerous. I warned that this seductive metaphor would allow policymakers to imagine the sector as self-regulating and inherently resilient. That it could somehow thrive through ‘organic’ processes separate from market forces, that it would magically regenerate struggling areas simply by being planted there, that it would grow in any soil regardless of distance from talent, capital, and markets. But the metaphor has persisted, and the result is failure. Nowhere has the failure of the metaphor been more visible than in film, television and media production.
How the Creator Economy will transcend Creative Industries
The Creative Industries model, devised in the late 1990s in the UK and widely adopted since, is coming to the end of its useful life. Those of us with a strong interest in preserving the role of culture and creativity in the economy, and the wellbeing of the creators within it, need to understand the transformation of industry sectors into combinatorial and parallel ‘stacks’ of tools, content, services and products.
The Reckoning: Why the Creative Economy demands its own alchemy
For three decades, we have celebrated the creative economy as a vibrant engine of progress, a wellspring of economic and social opportunity. This narrative, repeated often enough, has acquired the patina of established truth. Yet, it is a narrative that conveniently overlooks deep fissures beneath the surface –ingrained inequalities, the often-unacknowledged dependence on dominant cultural and economic powers, and the precariousness that such a foundation inevitably breeds. The time for polite applause is over; a reckoning is upon us.
Creative Alchemy
Since I announced my intention to publish a book, Creative Alchemy, in the last quarter of 2023, many conversations have started with the same question: ‘when is your book out?’
What makes The Fifth Sector?
Iain Bennett, founder of The Fifth Sector, in conversation with ex-BBC producer Andy Taylor about the business and its development over the last decade.
7 priorities for an industrial strategy for creative industries
But the Modern Industrial Strategy is a misnomer. It's long on windy optimism - 'cultivating world-leading sectors', 'creating the right institutions to bring together sectors and places.