Introduction

An increasing number of countries are adopting a creative industries policy platform, combining the film, digital, media, music, performing arts and design segments under one banner to stimulate economic development. A key reason for this is that the innovation generated by those that work in the creative industries (henceforth ‘creative workers’) appears to produce significant spill-over effects across multiple economic sectors, while requiring little government investment or regulation in comparison to previous cultural policy frameworks (Jaaniste, 2009; Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009). To date, however, government efforts to implement, or extend, a creative industries policy agenda have largely used localised cluster platforms, to the exclusion of any other strategy (UNESCO, 2013). Such a one-dimensional policy approach appears to have done little to address the significant labour problems associated with creative work (such as job insecurity, under-employment and labour exploitation).

At the grassroots level creative workers still appear to be suffering from an unregulated, precarious and exploitative labour environment (De Peuter, 2011; Huws, 2006). To mitigate these effects and generate consistent work creative workers have become reliant on the collaborative networks developed with other professionals and organisations within the field (Belussi and Sedita, 2008). While traditionally such collaborations have been embedded within localised ‘creative clusters’, increasingly creative workers are leveraging from their local connections to generate ‘non-local networks’, as such arrangements appear to provide additional benefits, such as opportunities to work on larger, higher paying projects (Hill, 2007; Vang and Chaminade, 2007). Mulgan and Albury (2003) define this process as ‘up-scaling’, meaning the ability of creative workers to leverage resources (including networks and partnerships) from the local to larger, regional, national and global scales of operation.

For creative workers non-local networks present as the most mature, up-scaled collaborative arrangements, exhibiting benefits over and above those of clustered arrangements (Giuliani, 2013). Such benefits include access to new markets and new collaborations, and these activities may have a significant effect in improving creative labour outcomes (Boso et al, 2013), though little empirical research exists to support these claims. In contrast, there has been extensive research on the impact of localised clustered arrangements for creative workers (Cooke and Lazzeretti, 2008), showing that local network initiatives can enhance the labour security of creative workers (Belussi and Sedita, 2008), and may act as a precursor to the more mature, up-scaled arrangements sought by policy.