An Investigation into individual meaning, knowledge production and research identities of creative industries entrepreneurship scholars to map their academic careers in uncertain time

The creative industries are an attractive phenomenon for policy makers (DCMS, 2001), and various scholars in the field of entrepreneurship (Carey, 2015; Henry 2007; Penaluna and Penaluna, 2008), and organizational studies (Nathan, Pratt, & Rincon-Azner, 2015; Jones, Svejenova, Strandgaard Pedersen and Townley, 2016). They are considered the engine for growth (DCMS, 2001; 2016; 2017) and they play an essential role in the twenty-first-century developed countries (Nathan et al., 2015; Jones et al., 2016) as promoters of innovation (Giles and O’Dwyer, 2016), creators of aesthetic values for customers (Peltoniemi, 2014), symbolic meaning (Jones et al., 2016) and independents to traditional models of growth (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999). This paper investigates the stories of the researchers in creative industries entrepreneurship field to map their research identities and understand academic performances in uncertain times. Stories are essential to narrate the organizational symbols by verbal expression or written language (Marti et al, 1983; Mitroff and Kilmann, 1976; Trice and Beyer, 1993). Generally, stories have three basic elements: ‘a narrative subject in search of an object, a destinator (an extratextual force, the source of the subjects’ ideology), and a set of forces that either help or hinder the subject in acquiring the desired object’ (Fiol, 1989: 279). Following this pattern, the paper is structured as follow. We start by reviewing relevant literature in the field of identity and creative industries research and then discuss the plan for the research methodology and the findings