Workstyles in Advertising: On the Organization of Creativity in Agencies and Firms

Abstract

For a media profession so central to the contemporary global economy, it is of crucial importance to understand the influences of changing labor conditions, professional cultures, and the appropriation of technologies on the nature of work in advertising. In this paper, the various strands of international research on the changing nature of advertising as a profession are synthesized, using media logic as developed by Altheide and Snow (1979 and 1991) and updated by Dahlgren (1996) as a conceptual framework. The theoretical key to understanding, explaining and perhaps predicting creativity in advertising is to focus on the way institutional, technological, organizational, and cultural trends are embedded in the creative process of advertising agencies and firms.