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The purpose of this paper is to broaden the conversation about the link between identity and employability by investigating how identity can function as a type of career capital. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1990) theory of practice and Côté’s (2016) identity capital model, the authors introduce the concept of identity capitalization and elaborate on the career practices people engage in to convert identity into career capital based on studies of careers in the creative industries.

The conceptual development is based on an examination of studies of careers in the creative industries. The authors move beyond a single idiosyncratic occupational setting and offer insights about how individuals acquire, accumulate and deploy identity capital in response to varying occupational demands and institutional norms.

The authors identify three patterns of work – display work, authenticity work and personation work – that creative professionals use to harness identity as career capital to enhance their employability. The authors find that both the demand for authenticity and the existence of social inequalities in the creative industries present challenges for the acquisition, accumulation and deployment of identity capital.

The ability to harness one’s identity for career capital has become increasingly important for career actors in the face of a challenging labor market. This paper provides a conceptual understanding of the process of identity capitalization and presents concrete career practices in real-world settings. It also offers practical advice for individuals wishing to capitalize on their identity to maximize career opportunities.

The rise of creative economy has been the subject of considerable interest in the recent literature. Despite the growing effort to investigate entrepreneurship in creative industries, little work has been done to scrutinize the relationship between individual attributes of creative entrepreneurs and the new venture outcomes. Prior research shows that entrepreneurial creativity and opportunity recognition are the major determinants of entrepreneurs’ behavioral posture in the new venture process. Therefore, this study aims to explore the typology of creative entrepreneurs’ attitude to new venture creation using entrepreneurial creativity and opportunity recognition to categorize entrepreneurs in creative industries.

A sample of 291 entrepreneurs in creative industries of Taiwan and cluster analysis was used to categorize the research data.

The results identify four types of creative entrepreneurs, namely “creative constructionist”, “creative opportunist”, “creative designer” and “creative producer”. To better understand the role of creative entrepreneurs in affecting new venture success, the career outcomes perceived by entrepreneurs were compared between different categories. Results suggest that entrepreneurs who are categorized as “creative constructionist” have better career success in firm’s creative performance, personal career achievement, social reputation, entrepreneurial satisfaction and entrepreneurial happiness. Moreover, findings also suggest that constructionist type of creative entrepreneurs have the lowest intention to quit the entrepreneurial career.

This paper confirms that entrepreneurial creativity and opportunity recognition complement each other to accomplish entrepreneurs’ career success. Its findings shed light on entrepreneurs’ attribute typology as well as how the typology is linked to entrepreneurial career success in creative industries. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.

Although there is increasing evidence that the creative industries are essential to national economic growth as well as social and cultural well‐being, creative graduates often find it difficult to become established professionally. This study aims to investigate the value of career management competence and intrinsic career motivations (as elements of “protean career orientation”) in predicting positive graduate outcomes.

Self‐report surveys were administered to 208 creative industries graduates from two Australian universities at two points in time: at course completion, and one year later.

The paper finds that individual career management competence and intrinsic work motivations, measured at course completion, were significant predictors of early career success, using both subjective and objective measures, measured one year later.

This study suggests that an emphasis on student development beyond the traditional “key” employability skills may well be worthwhile. The paper also suggests a broad learning and teaching approach by which universities can encourage the development of student career identity, and thus engender student intrinsic career motivations and career self management skills and behaviours.

This is one of the first studies to demonstrate empirically a link between a particular set of skills and graduate outcomes. In addition, it provides insights into the role of student career motivations in positive transitions to the world of work in the creative industries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the situated understandings that higher education students can offer on their employability, and to make sense of “employability” in industry and career context‐specific ways. The paper further seeks to explore potential critical reflections on emerging professional practice and future employment conditions.

Drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted with students located within a university‐operated industry‐facing media production studio, this paper focuses on how students articulate their career development and aspirations.

Discussing their studio experience and forms of “identity work”, students would nuance “employability” in terms of media industry‐specific concepts of creativity and professionalism. Anxieties around future professional practice were also voiced, signaling the potential value of a Career Studies approach that creates a space for explicitly exploring employment conditions as personally meaningful concerns.

Noting how employability is articulated in terms of industry professionalism, this paper encourages analysis that is attentive to situated understandings and identity work. Given the studio and media focus, application of findings may be limited.

Relevant for industry employers is how students make sense of their future career aspirations and undertake “work on the self” that is bound up with but also potentially critical of professional norms, quality of life and work conditions.

Recognising how employment can be understood in terms of “professionalism”, this paper suggests how an exploration of discourses and practices of professionalism can be part of a wider examination of employability. This paper explores the value of the Career Studies approach for integrating questions of student identity with subject‐specific accounts critical to employment conditions and practices.

Consecration represents the most definitive form of legitimation in every cultural field. Complementing previous research focused on individual, contextual, and structural conditions underpinning consecration, this paper takes a sequence analytical perspective and explores whether diverse creative trajectories are more frequently associated with consecration. We introduce the notion of signature style and the pace of category spanning as key features for consecration. We argue that a consecrated signature style is just as likely to result from a producer’s adherence to a specific style over time or from a consistent (and fast-paced) category-spanning creative trajectory. The resulting identity will be specialist in the first case, eclectic in the second. We analyze the stylistic trajectories of 863 electronic music artists and find robust support to our hypothesis. The analysis is corroborated by further exploratory findings that identify intriguing questions for future research. By examining the organization of creative journeys in the career of cultural producers, this paper emphasizes the importance of considering the unfolding and rhythm of creativity over time. This temporal perspective sheds new light on the dynamics of distinctiveness and consecration in cultural fields.

The purpose of this paper is to examine artists’ experiences of involuntary career transitions and its impact on their work-related identities.

Semi-structured interviews with 40 artists in the Netherlands were conducted. Self-narratives were used to analyze the findings.

Artists who can no longer make a living out of their artistic activities are forced to start working outside the creative realm and are gradually pushed away from the creative industries. This loss of their creative identity leads to psychological stress and grief, making the professional transition problematic. Moreover, the artistic community often condemns an artist’s transition to other activities, making the transition psychologically even more straining.

This study provides in-depth insights into how artists deal with changes in their work-related identities in the light of involuntary career transitions.

In the male-dominant creative industries, do men and women have access to the same resources for career learning and development? The purpose of this paper is to examine women’s perspectives of their career trajectories in advertising creative departments.

Situated learning theory views learning as produced through interaction with and increasing participation in a community of practice. Interviews were conducted with 19 female creatives to examine two research questions: first, how do women develop identities as creative practitioners within the male dominated advertising creative department? and second, how are women’s learning trajectories influenced by their gender?

Gendered expectations affected the type of work women were supposed to produce, their ability to sell work, and the types of assignments they received. Women lacked legitimacy and experienced difficulties developing an identity as a master practitioner. They instead emphasized parts of their identity unrelated to the profession.

Women were unable to develop identities as full members of the community of practice. The identity formed in conjunction with work was that of a person with lesser talents, fewer opportunities, and less valued contributions, causing them to exit the field or seek positive identity from places other than work.

This study was the first study that the authors are aware of to examine empirically the relationship between situated learning theory and gender. It provided evidence from women’s perspectives that gender restricted access to material for forming a positive work-identity, which impeded learning as women realized and accepted they were on a different trajectory than similarly-situated males.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the precarious nature of creative industries (CIs) work in Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, with a focus on job security, initial and on-going training and education, and access to benefits and protection.

The paper reports from a largely qualitative study featuring an in-depth survey answered by 752 creative workers in the three locations.

Survey data identified common themes including an increase in non-standard forms of employment and the persistence of precarious work across the career lifespan; criticism of initial education and training with particular reference to business skills; the need for and challenges of life-long professional learning; and lack of awareness about and access to benefits and protection. Respondents also reported multiple roles across and beyond the CIs.

The presence of common themes suggests avenues for future, targeted creative workforce research and signals the need for change and action by CIs educators, policy makers and representative organizations such as trade unions.

While precarious labour is common across the CIs and has attracted the attention of researchers worldwide, a lack of comparative studies has made it difficult to identify themes or issues that are common across multiple locations.

This chapter critically evaluates the role of creative identity and how this shapes entrepreneurial identity. The main driver for creative practitioners is one of being ‘creative’, but this is in combination with the factors that support entrepreneurial behaviours, and it provides the narrative for their entrepreneurial identity. The quest to operate successfully as a creative practitioner in the creative industries drives entrepreneurial behaviour. The research examines the relationship between creative identity and entrepreneurial identity and how these two identities intertwine. To respond to this question, the study critically evaluates the concept of creative identity and entrepreneurial identity with fourteen creative practitioners in the UK, working as either chartered architects or freelance photographers. The research employed a qualitative approach and interpretivist ontology. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the participants. The key finding that highlights the driver for entrepreneurial identity is the quest to operate successfully as a creative practitioner in the creative industries. This quest is underpinned by the desire to be able to express their creative identity, often referred to as a creative ‘voice’. Entrepreneurial identity and entrepreneurial behaviours function as conduits in which creative practitioners channel their primary driver of creative identity. This chapter contributes to the knowledge about creative practitioners’ entrepreneurial identity and creative identity and how these two identities relate to each other.

This chapter is based on more than a decade of art world research in Singapore but offers a single case of a composer who has composed a work for an orchestra. This study presents the creative reputation dilemma faced by many artists who attempt to be more entrepreneurial. Most countries promote their creative economy, and that has generated a class of artist entrepreneurs or ‘artrepreneurs’. Professional artists are encouraged and challenged to be economically independent and also to make their practice more profitable. For many artrepreneurs, maintaining their creative reputation comes with emotional costs. The thick description in this chapter demonstrates how an artist negotiates with the patron in finalising a new piece of commissioned music. But they failed to close the deal. This case deviates from studies that focus on successes in the creative industries. Creativity entails experimentation and creating new things, but new things may not be well-received. Nonetheless, these ‘unsuccessful’ works are part of the art world and contribute to creating cultural value in society.