What Lies Beneath: Organisational Responses to Powerful Stakeholders

Abstract

This article takes recourse to a particular branch of French Pragmatic Sociology, namely, Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ paradigm, as a lens through which to both explore the misalignment between espoused values and retrospective discourses and illustrate the underlying motivations behind decision making in an organisation within the creative industries sector. By virtue of its contributions at the organisational, social and sectorial levels, our study contributes to extant debates pertaining to individual agency versus structural constraints as well as demonstrating the heterogeneity of modes of formal compliance to wider institutionalised legitimacy. In so doing, it builds upon recent work that seeks to broaden the notion of value in the creative industries, while, simultaneously, calling for greater heterogeneity in policy making in the sector through an ongoing process of ‘creative conflict’.