Professionalization, Professionalism, and New Challenges to Creative Professionals

Abstract

In a previous presentation to STP&A we presented our findings on the self-structured strategies of artist entrepreneurs, with their portfolios of jobs, hybrid practices, and protean careers. Our larger project entails, in part, investigating the career trajectories and professionalization of a variety workers in a variety of occupations within the creative sector. Currently cultural professionals find themselves in an environment in which their skills, training, policy validation, and institutionalized field context are experiencing tectonic changes from the forces of technologization, globalization as well as localization, institutional instability, and changing competency and knowledge expectations. In other words, many cultural professions are in a state of deprofesionalization as well as reprofessionalization. In this presentation we start to identify these forces of change and their implications for the professional preparation and practice of cultural professionals. How do these forces of change raise new and different challenges to: how careers are being built and sustained?; the ways in which artists, arts organizations and cultural industries secure needed resources?; the ways in which cultural policies are made and implemented?; the business and creative models that underlie the sector?; and the ways in which audiences and consumers access and engage with the arts? We begin to explore how the structures of cultural professions?policies, institutions, and collective actions?are changing and need to change to provide a thriving professional infrastructure that can reach and support cultural professions at local, national and international levels and adapt to the forces of change impacting professionals throughout society.