Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464

www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Risk and trust in the cultural industries

Mark Banks a,*, Andy Lovatt a, Justin OConnor a, Carlo Rao b
a
Manchester Institute for Popular Culture, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6LL, UK
b
Post 16 Studies Unit, School of Education, Manchester Victoria University, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

Abstract
Preliminary claims have been made that working practices within cultural industries such as fashion, music, design and the night
time economy may dier from Fordist or modernist arrangements. Cultural rms are often imagined to be more innovative, in-
formation-rich, dynamic, exible, non-hierarchical and dependent on local clusters and networks than their Fordist counterparts
(Lash and Urry, 1994). As their impact and signicance increase, understanding how creative and cultural industries actually work is
of high priority. This paper presents preliminary ndings from an on-going ESRC funded study of cultural Micro and Small
Enterprises (MSEs) within Manchester, England. Drawing on one element of the project, this paper considers the signicance of risk
and the importance of social trust for the cultural entrepreneur. Following a discussion of Becks development of risk as an ana-
lytical concept, and its intersection with Giddens notion of active trust, the paper examines how risk and trust are dened, ex-
perienced and negotiated by entrepreneurs in Manchesters cultural industries. It is suggested that senses of risk are constitutive and
often pivotal to the whole economic and social basis of cultural entrepreneurship risk being central to choices made not only in
business but in the lifeworld more generally. The paper then investigates the importance of trust for facilitating as well as countering
or osetting risk. Empirical evidence is presented to show how risk and trust co-relate and interact as constitutive elements within a
wider set of shifting relationships between work, leisure and lifestyle in the creative city. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights
reserved.
Keywords: Risk; Trust; Cultural industries; Entrepreneurship; The city

1. Introduction could provide useful guides and indicators for a wider

An integral feature of the transformation of cities is
the economic and symbolic value brought to them by
the cultural industries.1 In turn, the city, and especially
the city centre and city fringe, acts as a complex of re-
sources which cultural entrepreneurs readily utilise in
their everyday working lives and in their pursuit of lei-
sure and pleasure. This group demonstrate the consoli-
dation of a new set of urban relationships, deriving
opportunities and possibilities from risk, individuali-
sation and plurality. Micro and Small Enterprises
(MSEs) in the cultural industries are embedded in risk;
they need to be innovative, exible, creative, ideas
driven, constantly changing and, in this capacity, they
*
Corresponding author.
1
Cultural entrepreneurs we understand as those directly involved in
the production of cultural goods and services: products whose
principal value is symbolic, derived from their function as carriers of
meaning in images, symbols, signs and sounds.
set of transformations impacting upon post-industrial
city economies. This paper will examine how the city
contributes to cultural entrepreneurs' business practice
and how they use it in their everyday operations.
Drawing on the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony
Giddens we will look at the emergence of new forms of
work and learning associated with more reexive and
risk oriented life and career trajectories. Through anal-
ysis of a single case cultural entrepreneurs in the city of
Manchester we show how cultural entrepreneurs' im-
mersion in risk, and the way they deal with this risk
through notions of trust, both draws upon and consol-
idates recent post-industrial economic and cultural
transformations in the city of Manchester. Our intention
is that the processes and relationships that we identify
may generate hypotheses for similarly interested ob-
servers analysing cultural production in other post-
industrial cities.
It has frequently been asserted that the cultural in-
dustries sector is a harbinger of a new set of subjective
rationalities that may be illustrative of new ways of

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454 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464

working and living, especially in cities (Crewe, 1996; with 50 entrepreneurs in Manchesters cultural indus-
OConnor, 1997; Pratt, 1997; Scott 1996, 1997). It is tries.3 We conclude by suggesting that these new un-
argued that this sector is innovative, entrepreneurial, derstandings and relationships oer the opportunity to
exible, creative, ideas driven, mixes the local and the more fully develop theoretical accounts of both risk
global and, as such, is placed at the leading edge of the and trust in the contemporary city.
new post-industrial, informational economy (Lash and
Urry, 1994; Scott, 1997). Furthermore, the ability of
such a sector to thrive in a city could be an important
2. The problem of risk
indicator of an innovative capacity in other sectors of
the city and for the wider regional or national economy
The concept of risk has come to ercely divide the
(Landry and Bianchini, 1995). The ways in which cul-
social and the natural sciences (Adams, 1995). Until
tural rms in multimedia, music, art, fashion, design,
recently, social and cultural determinants of, and re-
clubs and cafes, symbolic specialists of all kinds impact
sponses to, risk have often been subsumed beneath the
on the city economy have begun to attract sustained
hegemonic weight of an objective and scientic/ratio-
academic, political and popular attention (Bianchini and
nal approach to risk assessment and management. Lash
Parkinson, 1993; Brown, 1998; CLES, 1988; Crewe,
and Wynne, in their introduction to Beck's Risk Soci-
1996; Crewe and Beaverstock, 1998; Landry and Bian-
ety (1992), assert that within this scientic sphere, any
chini, 1995; OConnor, 1997; OConnor and Wynne,
accommodation of conceptual pluralism or subjectivity
1996a; Pratt, 1997; Scott, 1996, 1997; Smith, 1998;
is done under suerance. Furthermore, the debate
Zukin, 1991, 1995).
which has focused on risk compensation and man-
Previous research has demonstrated that cultural
agement of modern technological society, has been
industries are attracted to the city and in particular
constrained by its cultural heritage (that of scientic
the alternative (i.e. cheap) workspaces in and around
rationalism) and by its unreective idiom (Beck, 1992,
the city centre; the city fringe.2 As such, cultural
p. 4). In the social sciences, analyses of the social
businesses thrive in the milieus, networks, clusters,
meanings and management of risk have recently come
embedded knowledge and informal infrastructures of
to the fore, given the emphasis placed on uncertainty,
the city, and, we argue, demonstrate new and per-
instability and insecurity in explorations of the mooted
haps important understandings and practices of both
transition from modernity to post-modernity. Such an
risk and trust. We argue that the cultural industries
approach attempts to account for the ways in which
stand in unique relation to aspects of risk and social
risks impact, or are perceived and handled, on a day to
trust because they exhibit distinctive forms of moti-
day basis, by dierent social groups. John Adams
vation, organisation and working practice, that are
(1995) asserts that ordinary people develop systematic
guided by, and constitutive of, characteristic forms of
ways of dealing with the hazards and insecurities in-
risk management and trust development identied as
duced or introduced by social modernisation. Em-
central to social transformation in the late modern
ployment risks, nancial risks, family and relationship
period.
risks, health risks, environmental risks are all concep-
To enable us to do this we rst set the scene by
tualised and dealt with in personally and culturally
examining the theoretical notions of risk and individ-
distinctive ways, a fact hitherto overlooked by the
ualisation and their links to the city and cultural in-
scientic approach. Adams asserts that risk is cultur-
dustries. This is then followed by an examination of
ally constructed and that:
trust within the context of risk and how this, again,
can be applied to cultural industries. The substantive
part of the paper draws out these arguments in the . . .where scientic fact falls short of certainty we are
context of empirical data gathered from interviews guided by assumption, inference and belief. In such
circumstances the deterministic rationality of classic
physics is replaced by a set of conditional, probabi-
listic rationalities. (Adams, 1995, p. 9).
2
A city fringe is a transitional zone where MSEs can take advantage
of the value of centrality without traditionally high city centre rents. The ways in which individuals and groups handle dif-
Such areas are by nature ephemeral but include the Northern Quarter
ferent forms of risk can tell us much about late modern
in Manchester, Duke Street/Bold Street in Liverpool, the Lace Market
in Nottingham and Shoreditch, Hoxton, and Clerkenwell in London. societies. Within the social sciences risk is a concept
Its marginal status is both its weakness and its strength. These areas
are crucial to the local economy because as well as providing a refuge
3
for smaller, marginal businesses they act as incubators for new This research is part of the two year ESRC investigation of the
economic activity. Cheap rents, short contracts, lots of sub-letting are cultural industries in Manchester Cultural Industries and the City:
accompanied by dense networks that allow both old and new Innovation, Creativity and Competitiveness and is part of the
businesses to survive and grow. ESRCs Cities: Competitiveness and Cohesion Programme.
 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
which straddles disciplines and discourses concerned to
address the meandering crisis of modernity and in-
dustrial-technological society, and is intimately tied to
concerns with trust (Giddens, 1990, 1991), individuali-
sation4 (Beck, 1992) and of reexive modernisation
(Beck et al., 1994). And, for us, the ways and means by
which cultural entrepreneurs negotiate a sense of onto-
logical security and the choices they make in order to
articulate a set of alternative futures for themselves and
for the wider city, have to be bound up with this
wider debate about risk and the renegotiation of social
structure.
3. Risk society
Translated into English in 1992, Becks Risk Society
ties social risk implicitly to the concept of reexive
modernisation 5 and argues that the concerns of indus-
trial society the redistribution of wealth and resources
have been replaced by another form of modernity now
dominated by a quest for safety. This is safety from the
uncertainties of life in late modernity the wider social
and environmental risks which are a product of techno-
scientic modernisation and for which modernisation
seeks the answers and solutions.6 The paradox Beck
notes is that many of the dangers and uncertainties we
face today have been created by the very growth of
human knowledge, rather than resolved by it. Knowl-
4
A resultant eect of the decreasing inuence of the binding
structures of industrial society such as those rooted in class, gender,
ethnicity, the family, generation and so on forcing individuals to
become more autonomous, responsible and self-reexive in the
determination of their life paths; what Beck calls a biography of
choice. Individualization is not about alienation or detachment, but
rather about the need to actively establish new securities and
certainties for oneself as traditional structures and institutional forms
dissolve.
5
Beck understands this as a dis-embedding and re-embedding of
industrial social forms with another modernity a maturation of the
modernization process that is characterised by the self-monitoring or
self-reexivity of individuals and new collectives, partially freed from
constraints of traditional structure, critically reecting upon and
working to change social conditions. Modernity has become its own
theme, as the foundations of science, economics, the family, politics
and so on are increasingly questioned and new possibilities, and
problems, envisaged.
6
Becks argument, in very general terms, is that industrial progress
and techno-scientic modernisation has led to the proliferation of risk
rather than safety and security. For instance, food scares, global
warming, nuclear accidents, acid rain are all examples of how
progress has exposed the globe to new, unforeseen and barely
calculable risks. In the world of work the end of the era of mass
production with its attendant social structures and securities places risk
management and self-determination squarely within realm the of
individuals who must now map out their own lifecourses, taking active
responsibility for their career trajectory, nancial security and personal
and social development.
455
edge accumulation has had a destabilising rather than
stabilising inuence, as we become more aware of the
contingency, partiality and vulnerability of institu-
tionalised knowledge and authority:
Key institutions (such as political parties and
labour unions, but also causal principles of ac-
countability in science and law, national borders,
the ethic of individual responsibility, the order of
the nuclear family and so forth) all lose their foun-
dations and their historical legitimacy (Beck, 1994,
p. 176).
The powers of governments or state institutions to
manage or counter risk are in fact lessened as moder-
nisation and globalisation proceed, and risk manage-
ment becomes more fully embedded within the domain
of individuals, or new forms of social collective, who
must actively seek to lessen the impact of social bads
both realised and potential upon their lifestyle and
status. In terms of employment and work, the diminu-
tion of large scale primary and manufacturing indus-
tries, the end of dreams of full (and full time)
employment, the dismantling of union power, and a
general sense of job insecurity and unease are the con-
sequences of modernisation handling these bads be-
comes imperative. As we will show, cultural producers
are well equipped to manage these risks. In cultural in-
dustries the primary value of goods is symbolic and
short lived; it is lodged in ephemeral signs, meanings and
senses of style. Here, the market is well understood to be
volatile and subjective and prone to rapid and appar-
ently illogical transformation. Small, medium and large
scale cultural producers, have always been more inno-
vation intensive (Lash and Urry, 1994), even under
Fordist conditions, and are thus better placed to navi-
gate the complexities of post-industrial, risk based
economies.
According to Beck, then, risk management is a de-
ning characteristic of our age, realised in all domains
from family and interpersonal relationships and em-
ployment insecurities, to environmental hazards and
scientic practices. Risk Society is dominated by a
narrative of the dark side of modernisation and the
Enlightenment and, in particular, the constitutive role of
science and knowledge within it. Littered with messages
of foreboding Risk Society redenes the challenge for
the individual as no longer concerned with attaining
something good, but rather preventing the worst
(Adams, 1995, p. 182). A more optimistic approach is
provided by Anthony Giddens (1991, 1994) who shows
how a distinctive form of individual and institutional
reexivity has developed under the conditions of late
modernity. Developed from his previous work around
ontological security Giddens questions how risk and
trust are negotiated in an increasingly fragmented and
456 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
uncertain world and how identity formation and bio-
graphical narratives are pursued amid the breakdown of
modern institutions and support mechanisms. As with
Beck, the key here is that it is the individual who as-
sumes responsibility for his or her lifecourse. But, cru-
cially for Giddens:
. . .this society is not only a risk society. It is one
where the mechanisms of trust shift in interesting
and important ways. What can be called active trust
becomes increasingly signicant to the degree to
which post-traditional social relations emerge (Beck
et al., 1994, p. 186).
The de-traditionalisation which modernisation implies
has led to the increasing individualisation of society.
Beck and Giddens both acknowledge that individuali-
sation implies a degree of liberation with all its in-
herent ambiguities freedom from the constraints of
class status and hierarchies but dependence upon an
increasingly mobile and volatile market economy, and
ones ability to map out a lifecourse without any ob-
vious or reliable templates. This is especially acute
within the context of what is still largely a dynamic but
diuse cultural industries sector. As our cultural en-
trepreneurs will show, in the absence of any formal
business infrastructures, state recognition or history of
public visibility, personal life becomes increasingly de-
termined by what Giddens refers to as the necessity of
choice.
Today, in many situations, we have no choice but to
make choices; ltering through shifting forms of expert
knowledge, becoming more self-reliant and self-reex-
ive. In such circumstances, new forms of organisa-
tional solidarity tend to replace the old (Giddens,
1994, p. 187). The notion of society becomes open to
the necessary choices of the individual, whether this be
in the domain of leisure, work, or the ways in which
all these choices are spatialised in the city. As Beck
argues:
The individual. . .becomes the reproduction unit for
the social in the lifeworld. . .and individuals inside
and outside the family become the agents of their
livelihood mediated by the market, as well as of
their biographical planning and organisation. . .
Furthermore:
. . .[b]iographies too are becoming more reexive.
People with the same income level. . .can or must
choose between dierent lifestyles, subcultures, so-
cial ties and identities. (Beck, 1992, p. 131).
Under these conditions Beck makes it clear that biog-
raphies themselves become more self-reexive and in
turn society is opened up to individual manipulation
and interpretation; it becomes more variable and open
to the articulation of alternatives [lifestyles, careers,
work practices, spaces]. We argue that, for Manches-
ters cultural entrepreneurs, pursuit of these possibilities
has enhanced diversity and competitiveness in the city,
enabling some degree of side-step from the supposed
homogenising and coercive colonisation of global cap-
ital upon urban space (Harvey, 1989). These entrepre-
neurs show how the experience of modernisation is
ltered or refracted through the individual and how the
necessity of choice, experienced by the individual, can
shape both the perceptions of uncertainty and risk but
also an alternative lifeworld of possibility. These
choices entail risks of varying proportion which eect
the individual concerned and the social world in which
they act.
Clearly the way people deal with something is in-
herently tied to the way that they perceive it.7 The re-
sponse by the individual is both reective and cultural in
that it depends upon internalised meaning based upon
the lived experience of the individual. Adams states that
The cultural lters through which we perceive risk are
formed by our experience of dealing with it (Adams,
1995, p. 180). Risk therefore involves a process of
dealing with a perceived hazard or problem. The action
taken depends upon the perception which in turn is
shaped by our experience. That experience is continually
shaped by the processes [risks] deployed or taken to deal
with a perceived problem:
Thus the perception of the probability and magni-
tude of some future adverse event [business failure,
market volatility] is shaped by our previous experi-
ence and undergoes continuous modication as we
act upon the problem. (Adams, 1995, p. 180).
As we will see later, the ways in which individuals from
Manchesters cultural industries respond to problems is
indeed shaped by grounded and situated, reexive,
hands-on learning experience; the individual cognitive
reection alluded to by Giddens.
7
In Reexive Modernization, Beck, Giddens and Lash oer alterna-
tive understandings of reection and reexivity in the context of social
change. Beck highlights a distinction between a cognitive, knowing
reection and an unknowing, (reex like) reexivity, the former based
upon knowledge the latter upon self-application and adjustment it
is this sense of self-application that lies at the heart of the transition to
a risk society. Giddens places more emphasis on cognitive reection,
the conscious and active process of making ones own biography, as
the driving force of current social change. Lash is concerned with an
aesthetic-subjective reexivity, more uid and less ego-driven and
instrumental than cognitive reection.
 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
4. The problem of trust
At the tail end of Reexive Modernisation, Anthony
Giddens points out that, as Beck has shown, the present
global society is unied in a negative way by the in-
dustrialised worlds generation of generic or common
risks, social, political and environmental in character.
Yet he also asserts that this commonality of risk can be
countered by new and dynamic mechanisms of trust,
and it is the intersections of risk and trust that have
signicant impact upon the conditions and experience of
late modernity; including, as we will show, that which is
experienced by cultural entrepreneurs. Giddens asserts
that active trust is increasingly important with the
emergence of new social relations in the post-tradi-
tional society. With the emphasis on active, he asserts
that new forms of social solidarity have to be dynami-
cally and energetically sustained amid increasing pres-
sures from processes of individualisation and new forms
of community and association.
Giddens is clear also that these new relations are, or
may be, less dependent upon physical locality or place
than previous relations and that as a consequence of
social disembedding, new imagined communities
(Anderson, 1991) can be developed and sustained across
indenite stretches of space-time (Albrow, 1997). What
is clear for Giddens is that new relations of active trust
are predicated on an opening out of the self to the
other, which now includes a process of mutual narrative
and emotional disclosure. Mutual narrative here is not a
priori predicated on class or social status but rather by
the combination of choices in convergence. As Martin
has previously pointed out, alternative lifecourses are
not necessarily mapped through the choices of the
consumer but may involve:
. . .all the underpinning taste and styles, modes of
feeling, styles of understanding including self un-
derstanding and presentation of identity which
are involved in lifestyle construction (Martin,
1991, p. 127).
In Manchester these mutual narratives have, to a greater
or lesser extent, converged in and around a regenerated
city centre as it has been subject to some of the alter-
native articulations of popular culture. OConnor and
Wynne have argued that the reclamation of parts of the
city centre by individuals and networks of pop cultural
entrepreneurs is dependent upon a wider and concur-
rent commodication of culture. They suggest that:
. . .it is this commodication together with a perva-
sive liminality which is primarily responsible for the
destabilisation of cultural hierarchies and taste dis-
tinctions such that, not only is the game of distinc-
tion threatened, but that also such a collapse invites
457
the emergence of an articulation of alternatives. As
a result, social identities . . .exist as a combination
of choices, articulated around a series of possible
alternatives made available by this collapse.
(OConnor and Wynne, 1996b, p. 81).
This milieu of possible alternatives the subjective
decisions of consciousness and identity formation of
individuals and groups is crucial to Becks notion of
individualisation and Risk Society and to Giddens un-
derstanding of social relations in the post-traditional
society. It is also crucial to those of us interested in
gaining a fuller understanding of the transformative
capacity of cultural industries in contemporary urban
contexts; and of the subjective and culturally ltered
choices relating to risk and trust of cultural producers
and intermediaries, now considered by many to be a key
sector in the post-industrial urban economy.
We have intimated some possible intersections be-
tween risk, trust and the cultural sector. However, as
their impact and signicance increase, understanding
how the cultural industries actually work is of high
priority. We need to address how entrepreneurs them-
selves negotiate these choices; how their biographies
evolve and converge; how the social and spatial con-
tours of lifecourse and identity are mapped and under-
stood especially in relation to cities in transformation.
While we do not wish to over-estimate the emancipa-
tory potential (Crewe and Beaverstock, 1998) of a
thriving small cultural sector, fetishise local production
regimes (Amin and Thrift, 1992), underestimate city
impacts of global political economy (Castells, 1996;
Harvey, 1989) or gloss over the fact that cultural in-
dustries may be host to inequality or discrimination
(Milestone and Richards, 1999), we would maintain that
an evaluation of current and key, lead producers in local
cultural sectors can oer pertinent insights that have
both local and potentially wider scale salience. Such
inquires are central, not only to debates surrounding
reexive modernisation, but also to the future of the
post-industrial city per se.
5. Handling risk, building trust: Manchester's cultural
entrepreneurs
5.1. Handling risk
As we have argued, conditions of reexive moderni-
sation, highlighted by Beck and Giddens, have brought
to the fore possibilities for more individualised and self-
reexive lifestyles, ones driven by the necessity of
choice. Cultural industries operate within subjective
and volatile markets, where product value judgements
are primarily aesthetic, where business goals are not
singularly concerned with the pursuit of prots or
458 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
shareholder return but with the need to remain cutting
edge and creatively relevant (Crewe and Beaverstock,
1998; OConnor, 1997). They invest in the ability to spot
and exploit the limited shelf life of trends, styles and
symbols, to access and create new knowledge, to make
gambles on possible future markets. It is this volatility,
changeability and instability which places risk so cen-
trally within the biographies and practices of the cul-
tural entrepreneur and makes their work so adaptable
to, and indicative of, the risk society.
At this point we should highlight the relatively low
nancial risk involved in the start-up of many cultural
businesses. As Bell (1976) has previously emphasised,
the real investment comes from the subjective (personal)
knowledge which they are prepared to commit to the
project. Their negotiation of risk therefore operates at a
distinct and distinctive level. Initially we can see how
risk was perceived in terms of starting out and setting up
in business. Here, one respondent shows how occupa-
tional stability can just as readily be pursued by the
individual as in a collective:
Just prior to starting up, I did work for a company
about two and a half, three days a week and [they]
made me redundant at the Christmas, I had other
work as well [but] I thought its as unpredictable
working for other people as working for yourself
(. . .) thats when I started nding premises and
setting up in business (Interviewee 25, Fashion
Designer).
For many of our respondents in the fashion sector,
setting up their own business was a way to maintain a
level of personal and creative control. It was also a
process of carving a distinctive niche in a market
characterised by volatility and polyvalence (Crewe
and Beaverstock, 1998, p. 295), launching an idea and
working it towards conclusion. Respondents did in fact
often have clear ideas that particular products or even
businesses should be of limited shelf life, the trick
being to develop ideas and take them as far as they
would go, thus minimising risk in terms of time and
resources committed and invested. In industries that
are innovation-led, laws of diminishing return -
nancial and aesthetic may cut in much sooner. For
our interviewees, production was about single ideas,
short runs, small batches and, crucially, knowing when
to stop:
[I]ts typical of a creative business in this type of
city, where you can do something, can get loads
of publicity, you can have a good run on an idea,
then it goes thats it. I can admire and appreciate
people who do that, coming up with something,
working it to death and saying right thats it. (Inter-
viewee 43, Fashion Designer).
Awareness of both self, product and market become
central resources for the cultural entrepreneur.
. . . you are aware just through lifestyle you can sep-
arate yourself. . ..so its a constant process of renew-
al and, essentially, its a cliche, youre only as good
as your last promotion; that is so true. Its very ck-
le, its very liquid, it moves on. If you rest on your
laurels and dont progress and slightly stay
ahead. . ..you have to be obsessed about whats go-
ing on everywhere and be original and be leading.
(Interviewee 40, Night-club promoter/DJ).
While built in product obsolescence is to be found in
other formal industries, it is usually accounted for and
accommodated within business plans, cost-benet
analysis or market research (Harvey, 1989; OConnor,
1997). In the small cultural industries insurance is more
likely to be provided by investment in ones intuitive
sense of remaining cutting edge, culturally relevant and,
as Beck notes, creatively self-reexive. For some, the
risk of becoming stale, or creatively unproductive was
suciently great to encourage more drastic action, such
as closing down the business altogether:
We set it up when everybody was buying clubwear
around 1993, we just did that for twelve months
had a very nice time doing it, the bottom was start-
ing to fall out of the market and I think we knew
that before we started so it was not a long term ven-
ture, we only sold to the UK. Anything in the cloth-
ing business because its allegedly fashion you
don't look at it in a long term way. Were doing
very nicely with the [new] business at the moment
but its incredibly ckle. . ..theres no logic to it.
Youre no longer avour of the month, so you dont
go into anything too long term (Interviewee 35,
Fashion Designer).
We see this compulsion for control and self-manage-
ment, compressed into short-term projects, as a valid
response to a society where employment risk is perceived
to be largely unforeseeable and barely calculable (Allen
and Henry, 1997, p. 183). While a number of critics see
such opportunistic responses as both short-term and
insubstantial, and unable to compensate for longer
term structural decline in urban industrial economies
(Harvey, 1989; Sorkin, 1992), we should not disparage
or disregard the determination with which these entre-
preneurs are taking steps to shape their own destiny.
Further, as a supposedly short-term, insubstantial re-
sponse to the inexorable eects of economic time-space
compression (Harvey, 1989), cultural entrepreneurship
has proved remarkably procient at establishing city
competitive advantage, inspiring creativity and allowing
its practitioners to achieve high levels of personal and
 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
social fullment (Crewe and Beaverstock, 1998;
OConnor and Wynne, 1996a). As Lash and Urry note,
in a risk society people are more obliged to take control
over their more exible work lives (1994, pp. 3637), in
the cultural industries this obligation becomes an im-
perative, almost to the sense of being only the only way
forward (Beck, 1992).
But if rms do survive and begin to expand, new el-
ements of economic and what we might call infrastruc-
tural risk are introduced. This may lead to an increased
nancial investment, employment of extra sta, devel-
oping skill and resource bases, marketing, networking
and so on. Some rms were keen to avoid the risk and
were quite clear in their intent to remain small or me-
dium sized; sometimes because of anticipated problems
in cost or administration and management procedures,
but more often because they felt that the integrity of the
product, creative element or the design could be put into
jeopardy:
I dont think youre going to see [us] becoming a
weekly mainstream [club night], there wont be a
market for it when Richard Branson is opening
clubs in London and its free in, cheap beer prices,
its essentially money, money, money and if we are
seen to do that in our environment it would com-
pletely undermine [it], it would just lose its credibil-
ity (Interviewee 41, Night-club promoter/DJ).
While such decisions could be seen as the product of
economic adjustments to market forces as much as
cultural adjustments to risk, cultural, creative and life-
style considerations did tend to have more impact upon
decisions about investment, planning and infrastructure.
In general, what made work worthwhile was the culture
and lifestyle that working in a cultural rm allows and
indeed demands:
Deb who I work with, shes very Zen, she says I re-
fuse to let something like money get to me. . .talking
with her eases me through [problems]. Sometimes
its really awful, because all your friends are in fab-
ulous jobs. . ..really secure. . ..and you just think.
Then you remind yourself that you actually like
what youre doing. . .I have a fabulous life-
style. . ..Id say my life was unbeatable (Interviewee
43, Fashion Designer).
I was caught on camera at the Northern Quarter
Festival, being mouthy, and the camera swung
round and they said What do you think about the
festival? And I was like, same old people same
old barbecue which seemed a little trite but I
meant it in a fun way. But thats the whole thing it
is very small and its just packed full of talented peo-
ple, all on the same level, and its fab really. We all
459
moan about it how small our lives are but there
are so many things doing the same thing but theyre
all dierent and everyone does network. It really
cross-pollinates massively, music, fashion,
art. . ..(Interviewee 34, Night-club Promoter/Stylist).
Part of the motivation to stay small and localised was to
take advantage of the cultures of creativity and spaces of
leisure and pleasure cultural industries inhabit. In fact,
living the lifestyle furnished entrepreneurs with social
resources that could directly be used to oset or manage
economic and cultural risk. A blurring of work and
leisure meant that living a full social life becomes a
strategy for knowing ones market and picking up work
opportunities:
Manchester, although its a big city, its got like a
village atmosphere and theres certain places where
people naturally congregate, socialise, particularly
since. . .I think the cafe bar cultures been very im-
portant in that because it produces an environment
which is a forum for debate and places like Atlas [a
cafe bar] where people who work in the cultural and
media industries tend to bump into each other and
as a course of habit thingsll get discussed and stu
like that. I can just go out on a night out with
friends, Ill end up bumping into someone. . ..and
you end up talking to someone, its quite often
some work can be done, even though you werent
expecting it to be, you just bump into someone
and go: Oh do you know were doing this? Do
you fancy getting involved? Or, weve had this
idea (Interviewee 16, Journalist).
Minimising risk through the use of word-of-mouth, so-
cial networks, clusters, knowledge specialists and relied
upon customers and clients was one way of ensuring
that (rst) cultural and (then) economic value could be
added on particular products or projects. For promot-
ers, DJs and musicians, taking advantage of friendship
and collaborative networks enabled events to proceed
with some guarantee that success-both creative and -
nancial would be achieved, as two promoters noted:
Our convictions [were] that the discerning nature in
a club would be. . ..intimacy, knowing each other,
having a safe environment was important. . .gang-
sterism, scallies we wanted to keep out. . ..
They were able to do this by developing networks, reg-
ulars and friends into client bases:
On a tactical level we know how to use [networks].
What you nd is the people who go to [our nights]
its a scene, a lot of them know each other, yeah its
a little bit elitist if you like. . ..its a bit more of a
460 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
way of life, much more that people know each oth-
er, they socialise with each other as well (Intervie-
wee 40, Night-club Promoter/DJ).
This close knit collaboration extends into other sub-
sectors:
Thats it, everybody feeds. . .it can get really hard
but the bottom line is that everyone is extremely
supportive of each other. In every sector. Every-
body crosses with each other, theyre all linked real-
ly on the creative side of things, the whole lot. If
you want a photographer, somebody to write,
somebody to light, gallery space. . .(Interviewee 34,
Night-club Promoter/Stylist).
It was the sense of tempering or spreading risk in the
absence of more formal or mainstream support struc-
tures in terms of advice, training, mentors, talking shops
and commerce chambers that helped sustain a cultural
economy in the city. By resourcing and developing
networks simultaneously social and professional
cultural entrepreneurs safeguard existing initiatives, cli-
ents and projects while opening up the possibility for the
forging of new cultural and economic opportunities
social ties in many ways drive the productive potential
of the culture. As Giddens argues, trust in formal
knowledge based expert systems and in active social
networks become crucial in the absence or retreat of
consolidated state, welfare, party or class support
structures. It is noted here, that, for cultural entrepre-
neurs, formal expert systems the ocial business
support structure, banks, loan agencies, grant makers
even social welfare services are not only ill equipped to
deal with their needs, but may actually be hostile to
them:
We were refused funding from the Princes Youth
Business Trust, not initially when we rst applied,
but later pretty much when wed done the business
plan and everything. We were very close to the end
of the business plan so a hell of a lot of work had
[been] spent on that, PYBT refused to fund us be-
cause we had Jesus in the title of the business (In-
terviewee 35, Fashion Designer).
I had a lot of problems with the banks in Manches-
ter, their attitude was that if youre opening a hair-
dressers or a shop they could understand that
concept, but you know if you come along wanting
to change the world with a computer support com-
pany, theyre just not ready for you (Interviewee 37,
IT/Web Entrepreneur).
For many of our respondents such experts were not
only seen to be ignorant of their personal and sub-sector
needs, but, also, to have nothing directly (apart from
money) to oer. Any alliances between our respondents
and experts were often fragile and uncertain, preclud-
ing the development of strong mutually determined
and negotiated plans and working relationships. In the
cultural industries this lack of trust, and personal risk, is
more marked than in other industries because of the
lack of any formalised career trajectory commensurate
with the linear, learning stage models of business de-
velopment embedded within banks, enterprise agencies,
training programme and other support institutions
(Hyland and Matlay, 1997; Storey, 1994). Amongst our
interviewees there was a palpable desire to resource and
develop new and informal alliances, associations and
individuals to oset or help manage risk. Correspondent
with this desire was an expressed need to develop in-
formal and social networks of trust.
5.2. Building trust
As previously highlighted, the primary value of
cultural product lies in its symbolic resonance. Thus,
for the cultural entrepreneur, cultural literacy, cre-
ativity and possession of symbolic knowledge are
principal assets. When this knowledge is recontextua-
lised into a style or product it can be and frequently
is copied. Intellectual property is a primary concern
for small scale cultural businesses; their ideas being
their most valuable, and sometimes only, economic
resource. Within this context notions of trust become
crucial, not just to their business, but to their whole
lifeworld.
Our sample of cultural producers often spoke of their
understanding of trust, usually within the context of
some recollection of being compromised, mis-led or
plain cheated:
I lost twelve thousand pounds in the rst three
years to bad debt, basically because we were fairly
naive and we didnt understand the paperwork that
had to be implemented to ensure that if there was a
dispute it wasnt just our word against theirs. We
were naive, wet behind the ears and they decided
to take advantage of this (Interviewee 44, Graphic
Designer).
The only problem I had was mistrusting accoun-
tants who were negligent and I do regret not suing
them (Interviewee 21, Fashion Designer).
Weve only learned by doing business with people
perhaps [we were] being a bit too trusting at rst
and actually letting people take an order and ac-
cepting a cheque and the cheques bounced and
weve chased them and theyve disappeared (Inter-
viewee 30, Fashion Designer).
 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
This lack of experience, or naivete as one interviewee
called it, had cost a number of our respondents dearly:
cheated by business partners, owed money by clients,
misled by accountants or designs copied wholesale, a
litany of misfortune that has left some questioning the
very possibility of developing relationships of trust in
business:
I basically dont trust anybody anymore! [laughs].
To be completely honest with you I really dont,
Ive had it knocked out of me (Interviewee 44,
Graphic Designer).
But in a sector characterised by the need for dense social
relationships, information transactions and network-
ing, relations of trust are paramount to the solvency
and creativity of the rm. The ways in which trust could
be negotiated were thus crucial. As mentioned, a char-
acteristic of the cultural sector is its lack of connectivity
with enterprise and training agencies, organisations that
are equipped to deal with orthodox delivery, but ill
suited to the more subjective and contextual resources
demanded of the cultural industries (OConnor, 1997).
Because accessing trust in the formal sector is prob-
lematic, often trust must develop in informal, social
ways. In terms of advice and starting out, many rms
talked of having to seek out mentors; trustworthy,
knowledgeable individuals, experienced in the cultural
sector who could oer advice, contacts, market infor-
mation and so on: key gures contacted through friends,
word of mouth or networking. Through this method,
various rms had brought in management consultants,
PR and marketing advice, bookkeepers, accountants,
agents and designers many of them drawn from local
social networks and businesses in the local cultural
sector. In terms of client relationships, whereas non-
cultural rms often counter risk by extending or
consolidating legal and administrative procedures, our
respondents lacking the resources or volition to bu-
reaucratise their operations were more likely to con-
centrate upon developing the qualities of interpersonal
relationship with their clients, making sure they found
people they felt comfortable with:
When you deal with [us] you deal with the design-
ers, theres nobody in-between. The communication
between the clients and the designers is a clear line,
theres nothing in there that can get in the way and
that does make for a smoother job, smoother rela-
tionship and happier people all round (Interviewee
33, Graphic Designer).
We do try and say that we wont work for people
that we hate, I mean we quite often walk out on
people just because theyre loathsome people to
deal with and we like to think that mostly here is
461
good fun, occasional bad bits, but . . ..we did it
for it to be fun, not for it to be a drudge (Intervie-
wee 17, Graphic Designer).
Providing the client with a personalised service, and
cultivating relationships, also helps to rene knowledge
about competitors and competitive practice:
We get an awful lot of enquiries from competitors
which were getting used to spot[ting] and theyll
come to you and say oh weve got a client who
wants this, and they just want your ideas.....you
live and learn! Unless we know the company name
now....we dont tend to work with other agencies
other than a handful of [advertising] agencies that
we know...because theres an awful lot of them try-
ing to get into this market place and theyll use you
any which way we can, weve had a couple of ideas
stolen. . .(Interviewee 26, Graphic Designer).
Trusting mentors and clients is crucial in a sector where
protecting new ideas and resourcing knowledge are in-
strumental to success. Similarly, the need to be able to
trust employees was also often remarked upon by our
respondents.
I trust [my sta] 110% and I dont think you can
work with people unless you trust them 110%. I
mean like in an emotional as well as a practical
way (Interviewee 37, IT/Web entrepreneur).
Yeah, we did have other machinists as well. One
ripped us o and starting setting her own label
up, doing our designs. . .she worked for us self em-
ployed again for a good few years and then we
found out that shed opened up her own place. . .she
was doing loads of work for herself and ripping us
o and I dont know whether she was ripping o
other designers that she worked for. . .(Interviewees
29/30 - Fashion Designers).
It is clear that the cultural industries may be more reli-
ant upon networks of active trust than other sectors.
Not only do they deal in products whose value is both
symbolic and ephemeral, and thus dicult to safeguard
through formal procedures of product protection, their
lack of nancial resources, support structures and legal-
administrative protocols, make them further vulnerable
to exploitation: they must rely upon personal relations
of trust. We observe that relations of active trust, the
cultivation of close and personally tailored support
networks, clients and mentors is a tactical response to
the detraditionalised or risk society, where employ-
ment insecurity is the norm rather than the excep-
tion and the necessity of choice enables or enforces
462 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
entrepreneurs to more fully determine the stakes of their
own work, leisure and life projects.
5.3. Spaces of risk and trust management
While the negotiation of trust and the management of
risk take place within dense networks of social and in-
terpersonal relations, we now wish to elaborate a little
further on how such relations are also rooted and re-
produced in spatial contexts, and how, in the Man-
chester milieu, particular creative spaces have emerged
that serve to contextualise and actively help shape the
contours of risk, trust and creative practice. While risk
can be managed, and trust negotiated, through social
integration, it can be further oset through spatial in-
teraction. As mentioned earlier, small cultural rms of-
ten rst occupy alternative, cheap workspace, a ready
supply of which is central to the development of a cul-
tural industries sector. In Manchester, privately con-
verted industrial/warehouse retail premises such as
Aecks Palace, The Corn Exchange and the Coliseum,
as well as streets and shops of Manchesters Northern
Quarter, have in recent years been developed or re-
claimed for mixed use culture-led enterprise and regen-
eration. Small scale workspaces have been developed at
Ducie House, 23 New Mount Street and Knott Mill,
specically serving small (specically cultural) MSEs.
The constellation of a rich culture of small entrepreneurs
and traders, sharing knowledge and expertise, paying
low rents within exible leasing arrangements has been
crucial to dissolving or diminishing the problems asso-
ciated with start up and development in the cultural
sector.8
Aecks Palace is located at the heart of Manches-
ters Northern Quarter, an area that has shown the
ability to attract and nurture cultural rms (OConnor
and Wynne, 1996a). Here, the feeling of belonging to a
shifting, but essentially cohesive, cultural or creative
network was seen to be a powerful attractor for our
cultural entrepreneurs:
And I thought where is a good place try something
out? Because it was quite risky, didnt have any
money, didnt really know how to run a business,
you know? Where can I try this out thats not going
to be too risky? So I was from Manchester anyway
and I decided that I wanted to be in Aecks Palace
because I perceived that to be a kind of hip happen-
8
This is not to under-estimate the on-going tensions between these
vernacular local rms, corporate capital, partnership and local
government agencies over the meanings and uses of Manchesters
business spaces. The complex relationships between capital, culture
and urban change in Manchester are explored more extensively in
OConnor and Wynne (1996): see also Taylor et al. (1996), Tickell and
Peck (1997) and Young and Lever (1997).
ing place, full of young people. . .that was my
judged market, young people . . ..in a kind of slight-
ly wacky environment. And also they operated a
sort of. . ..you didnt have to have a lease, you had
a weekly licence to trade, so you could move in,
youd give two weeks notice if you wanted to move
out, or equally they could give you two weeks no-
tice to move out. I realised that there [was] a kind
of commonality of interest in this area . . ...it was
basically a kind of weird feeling that people like
it here but it was very run down, impoverished,
dicult economy (Interviewee 15, Cafe owner/
Entrepreneur).
Yes. . .we have become involved in the Northern
Quarter Association which has been great and
thats good because its not just talking to other de-
signers. . ..the gratifying bit is encountering people
from other businesses, knowing more people in
the Craft Centre or architects. . .(Interviewee 33,
Graphic Designer).
This sense of place could be found not just in the
Northern Quarter, but across the city more generally:
Manchesters youth cultures very important at this
stage in its history and I think that cafe bars pro-
vide a sort of forum to allow that to breed because
its the only place where a lot of sort art graduates
now nd that their rst art exhibition is, not in an
art gallery you know, its in a cafe bar. (Interviewee
16, Journalist).
Some of my closest friends live on my doorstep,
some of closest friends live in my building. Its a
bit Tales of the City round here! It denitely
is. . . here is denitely community, . . .it does have
its own things, a launderette, pubs, a cross section
of people, that to me is a community (Interviewee
34, Night-club Promoter/Stylist).
In Manchester, we have found that the possibilities for
cultural rms to manage or circumvent risk is enhanced
through such dense social and spatial matrices of in-
ternal and external, social and professional ties situated
within a small area of the city centre and city fringe that
encourages networking and cross-sector fertilisation
through a series of consumption spaces (bars, cafes,
restaurants), events (festivals, trade initiatives) and alli-
ances (for example the Northern Quarter Association).
Private sector and public sector initiatives to create
workspaces have also been instrumental in cementing
the productive, creative industry culture. For one jour-
nalist interviewee, such places were seen as idea facto-
ries, places where work and play could ferment to
produce new initiatives and collaborations. The fabric of
 M. Banks et al. / Geoforum 31 (2000) 453464
the city appears to exert some causative (Shields, 1991)
or enabling forces, facilitating particular forms of cre-
ative interaction.
6. Conclusions
The cultural industries have long been oered as a
model of new forms of industrial organisation and
practice but rarely have those practices been scrutinised
in qualitative detail. The city is no longer inuenced
solely by the vertically integrated institution or corpo-
ration but is open to the inuences of cultural entre-
preneurs working in micro or small enterprises in
clusters across the city. We can see the emergence of new
creative communities which, are hidden, rhizomic and
quintessentially urban. The city, and in particular cheap
rent districts of the city fringe, are seen as an indis-
pensable resource and base from which to develop ideas,
projects and markets. This sector, and consequently the
areas of the city populated by this sector, provides an
opportunity for creative and often collective initiative. A
complex and contingent appropriation of personal and
professional risk (in common with signicant like
minded others) has led to the establishment of new re-
lationships of trust and local collaboration. We suggest
that the presence of such relationships is indicative of
the potential for urban economies to avoid serial sub-
jection to the universal force of capital circulation
(Harvey, 1989, p. 351), providing culturally specic and
economically signicant production bases that may help
secure and nurture wider creative networks and alli-
ances, enhancing a city-wide potential for future cultural
and economic development (Crewe, 1996; Crewe and
Beaverstock, 1998; Pratt, 1997; OConnor, 1997).
We have shown Becks notion of risk and Giddens
ideas on active trust to be of particular signicance to
the cultural industries. Both risk and trust are embedded
within the unique working practices and forms of
(dis)organisation characteristic to the fashion, music,
design and promotions industries. We have shown how
risk is managed and trust negotiated in informal con-
texts, social networks and social spaces outside of the
formal sector. It has been illustrated that new ties of
trust, whether they be strong or weak, help break down
industry boundaries and themselves becomes part of the
creative process leading to unforeseen collaborations
and/or new cultural product. Active and passive net-
working is now seen as an integral part of business and
socialising in the city and may oer an insight into new
ways of doing business and re-organising social and
cultural life. These new forms of community based on
professional or personal association can, when spatia-
lised in the city, invest new meanings into urban space.
Whether in local creative quarters or in specic build-
ings, that meaning can equally become recognised by
463
others in possession of the appropriate social or cultural
capital, enabling its transformation and the possibility
for wider social impact.
Amongst our Manchester entrepreneurs the individ-
ual choices taken under the construction and manage-
ment of biography and life projects occur within the
context of an accelerated and increasing intersection of
cultural and economic value in a post-industrial, re-
generating city (Zukin, 1995). Within this matrix, no-
tions of risk, in terms of management and perception,
are central. Through the accommodation of risk and the
incorporation of networks of trust into their everyday
working practices, MSEs in the cultural industries
would appear to be well placed to navigate the more
path based lifecourses oered up under conditions of
reexive modernisation. If this creative potential can be
mobilised within the context of urban economic devel-
opment and more explicitly tied to notions of the city
learning, knowledge development and intersections of
cultural and economic policy, then, in the cities in which
they are located, the cultural industries may oer some
potential to create employment and help consolidate
new productive bases so essential for restructuring
urban economies.
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