title: Image, money, music: more than business, less than autonomous self
Creators: name: Hartley, Daniel
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2014

description: The role of musical opportunity in the future commercial and cultural viability of North-West England is secured by social and economic policy that emphasises the contribution of musical entrepreneurs and consumers to creative industries of the region. Yet though opportunity and opportunity recognition have become prominent policy concerns through scholars' response being restricted to attempts to explain their quantity and performance before or after the event of practice clear distinction has been made between entrepreneurs and their historical and institutional habitats and status and wealth have been posed unquestioned as central motivations. In turn conceptual abstractions have reproduced visions of practical and instrumental economic men or powerless and inert human black boxes that are thrown around by socio-economic movements like other 'non-producers' and scholars' capacity to study the nature of musical opportunities within human experience has been limited. Musical opportunities are of especial value for understanding the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities and practice more widely because it is within the experience that commercial setting may provoke organizational creativity. This doctoral thesis aims to understand the nature of musical opportunity as experienced by musical entrepreneurs operating in and around the Mersey basin of North-West England and distinguish how musical opportunities can contribute to understanding entrepreneurial practice more widely. The normative conceptual abstraction away from experience is reversed, so that opportunity becomes articulated by the entrepreneurial imagination. Situating opportunities within everyday imaginative experiences, clear distinction between producers, consumers, habitats falls away, and a range of entrepreneurial experiences are revealed that relate critically to the assumption that opportunity recognition is driven by sober calculations and interests in wealth and status. A multi-sited longitudinal ethnographic approach employing narrative and observational research techniques participates with different moments and different territories of musical opportunity and entrepreneurial practice that find their presence in relation to each other. The findings show that musical opportunities are often at odds with the current manifestation of opportunity in the management studies literature because its 'rationality' is less affording of space to imagine and create and can often omit significant personal and social connections. Musical organization is shown to be co-created as entrepreneurs resist or are unable to reproduce opportunities that are distinctly commercial. Rather than restricted to purely artistic or commercial interests, musical opportunity is animated amidst the interplay of human resources like entrepreneurial imagination and versatility and the historical and institutional settings musical entrepreneurs and consumers encounter throughout their lives. This maintains the authority of opportunity recognition for understanding organizational creativity through posing the experience in raw and mobile state: imagination.