In Pursuit of Recognition

Christina Isabela Federis Aragón

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement

for the award of the degree BA (Hons) Creative Direction,
University of the Arts London.

06 March 2019
Abstract

The focus of this dissertation is the arguably contrived and opportunistic use of the
idea of creativity by advertising ‘creatives’, specifically copywriters and art directors. It
explores the socio-economic impact of ‘capitalist realism’, turbocharged by
neoliberalism, on the idea of creativity. Through their conceptions of creativity,
advertising creatives engage in an act of self-branding where they actively try to gain
recognition as a particular form of social capital. Recognition is intrinsically connected
to their identity and has become a strategy of distinction.

This dissertation employs research carried out in 2019 into the subjective identities of
a specific group of creative practitioners in London-based advertising agencies.

Keywords:

creativity, valorisation of creativity, commodification of creativity, social capital,

recognition, neoliberalism, capitalism, capitalist realism, ideology

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Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction 1

2.0 Literature Review 4

2.1 Introduction to Literature Review 4

2.2 Capitalist Realism 4

2.3 Creativity Under Contemporary Capitalism 7

2.4 Self-branded Identity Within Advertising 9

3.0 Research 12

3.1 Methodology 12

3.2 Considerations 14

4.0 Findings & Discussion 16

4.1 Conceptions of Creativity 16

4.2 The Pursuit of Recognition 20

5.0 Conclusion 25

Bibliography 26

Appendices 29

Appendix I: Participant Consent Forms 30

Appendix II: Interview Audio Transcripts 34

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Overview

Main Research Question: How do the valorisation and subsequent commodification

of the idea of “creativity” impact the subjective identities of art directors and
copywriters in London-based advertising agencies?

Research aim: The aim of this dissertation is to critically analyse how the
valorisation and commodification of the idea of creativity impact the subjective
identities of creative professionals within London-based advertising agencies,
specifically art directors and copywriters.

Research objectives:

- To evaluate the relationship between the ‘creatives’ and their engagement

with the idea of creativity.
- To determine if the valorisation of creativity is a strategy of distinction for their
subjective identities.
- To discern the representational techniques employed by creatives in their
pursuit of newness.
- To determine the extent to which notions of creativity influence perceptions of
recognition within the advertising industry.

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1.0 Introduction

“Now, everyone is encouraged to be creative -- at work, in our personal

lives, in our political activities, in the neighbourhood in which we live, in
schools, in our leisure time, in the choices we make in what we eat every
night, in how we design our CVS. . . Moreover, we are told that this
version of creativity is no longer the privilege of an elite ‘genius’ few; it is
something that everyone has.” (Mould 2018, p. 9-10)

As the passage above cautions, today everyone is encouraged to be creative under

the current global political, cultural and social state of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009),
where ideological neoliberal conditions of contemporary capitalist society prevail.
Creativity and, more importantly, being creative now has a value attached to it.
According to Oli Mould in his book Against Creativity, creativity had become “a
character trait that was much sought after by employers, businesses and governments;
it was an exchange value.” (2018, p. 8)

Creativity and creative work have become very important economically. In the United
Kingdom, the Creative Industries have been credited with the capacity for exceptional
economic growth, with figures published on November 28, 2018 showing they were
worth £268 billion, having just broken the £100 billion mark the previous year (DCMS
2018). Within London specifically, the creative sector is growing faster than any other
sector and providing one in six jobs in the (Mayor of London 2018). The Department
of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) originally defined the creative industries to
include ‘advertising, architecture, design, designer fashion, film and video, music, the
performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television, and radio’,
among others, and attributed their economic success to the ‘individual creativity, skill
and talent’ (DCMS 2001) of their workers. The research presented in this dissertation
was prompted by an interest in the workers themselves and a curiosity about what it
meant for them to be creative, in today’s cultural climate of incessant and pervasive
creativity. If everyone is creative and encouraged to be, what does that mean for the
creatives - the professional creatives, namely, art directors and copywriters.

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The art directors and copywriters central to this dissertation are explicitly involved in
the valorisation and commodification of the idea of creativity. They are generally
considered as the most valuable assets of an agency and as the main sources of
creativity in the processes of cultural production. Within the creative departments of
advertising agencies, dyadic teams of copywriters and art directors have generally
generated campaigns. Copywriters are responsible for the logic of a campaign and
the linguistics, while art directors are responsible for the visuals and artistic qualities
of a campaign (Gustafson 2004). Thompson and Haytko (1997) posited that by
utilizing the symbolic capital of culture and society, advertising practitioners are implicit
in reconciling the worlds of commerce and culture. In this respect, advertising creatives,
with their socio-cultural capital, are considered to be 'cultural intermediaries'
(Featherstone 1991) themselves, responsible for building symbolic meaning in society.

Creativity is subjective in nature (Boden 1994). This dissertation does not look to
understand creativity in and of itself nor does it offer its own definition for the term
‘creativity’. Instead it discusses creativity as a discursive notion, where “constructions of
creativity change according to the contexts within which they occur” (Kalin 2016, p. 33).
This dissertation is more concerned with the current conceptualisations of creativity as
thought of by art directors and copywriters, their relationship with the idea of creativity
and how it impacts their ontological subjectivity and identity. As an example, this is shown
through the intentional usage of the term “valorisation of the idea of creativity”, to
emphasise on creativity as a fluid concept, rather than just “the valorisation of creativity”.
Otherwise, the terms ‘creativity’ or ‘creative(s)’ is used throughout this dissertation to
simply refer to the professional occupations of these art directors and copywriters and the
work they do. In this sense, creativity is “the application of creative talent to commercial
ends” (Nesta 2012, p. 24). Within the advertising industry, Sean Nixon defined
creativity as referring to the features of “agencies as specific service providers
(‘purveyors of creativity’ and ‘creative businesses’), as well as to describe the
attributes of certain uniquely gifted individuals (‘the creatives’) or, increasingly
frequently, all of the agencies core professional staff” (2006, p. 91).

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The topic brings more than significant personal appeal to the author of this dissertation.
The research actually started incubating based on previously formed, existing and
late-breaking impressions of the advertising industry. Throughout her father’s career
in marketing, brand and communications, from a young age the author was exposed
to and fascinated by the creative process of advertising – from conceptualization to
production to deployment. In recent years, she has personally experienced first-hand
and gained insights into the inner-workings of the industry, owing to several work
placements and internships in renowned advertising and marketing conglomerates e.g.
Unilever, WPP and Havas.

This dissertation offers an outline of how the professional subjective identities of

advertising creative practitioners is negotiated as a result of the ideological valorisation and
subsequent commodification of the idea of creativity in their pursuit of professional
advancement centred around a shared cultural notion of recognition as value. This
dissertation contends that conceiving recognition as a form of value should be seen as a
fundamental interpretative paradigm of identity and subjectivity for creative practitioners
today.

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2.0 Literature Review

2.1 Introduction to Literature Review

This chapter will discuss what previous literature has been written in relation to the
topic of the valorisation and commodification of the idea of creativity. The materials
surveyed all relate to how commercial creatives, specifically art directors and
copywriters, construct identities in professional contexts for the purpose of
advancement. This research serves as a foundational understanding of the conditions
that creatives abide by today.

The main themes identified through my research are: capitalist realism, creativity
under capitalist conditions, creative identity within advertising. Within those themes,
this dissertation recognizes these key concepts: ‘capitalist realism’, ‘neoliberalism’,
‘capitalism’, ‘ideology’, ‘business ontology’, ‘social capital’, ‘self-branding’, and ‘agency
and structure within identity theory’.

2.2 Capitalist Realism

In order to understand the art directors and copywriters central to this dissertation, one
must recognize the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions in which they
exist. This dissertation turns to Mark Fisher (2009) in his book Capitalist Realism: Is
there no alternative? in which he introduces his ideological framework, ‘capitalist
realism’.

Capitalist realism can be seen as a set of behaviours and affects that arise from the
widespread and internalised belief that the cultural integration of capitalism is so
advanced that it is highly unlikely that any alternative system will ever efface the
current global socio-political system. Fisher describes it as “conditioning not only the
production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a
kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (2009, p. 16). Ultimately, what

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capitalist realism amounts to is the naturalisation and hegemonization of neoliberal
ideas within late-capitalism.

It is through this prevailing ‘ideology’, this collective attitude of resignation and fatalism
(Fisher & Gilbert 2013), that ‘capitalist’ is able to intersect with ‘realism’. Heavily
referenced within Fisher’s book is Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, who has a
psychoanalytic approach to the study of ‘ideology’. Unlike Marx and Engel (2004), who
thought of ideology as false consciousness, Žižek believes that ideology is
consciousness. It presents the topography, the mapping of the world we live in, that
the mind then mirrors to make sense of the world. Žižek writes that “ideology is not a
dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension
it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for ‘reality’ itself” (Žižek 1989,
p.45).

“Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream.”
(Fisher 2009, p. 34)

Arguably, capitalist ideology enabled the evangelisation of, what Fisher calls, a
‘business ontology’ “in which it is simply obvious that everything in society […] should
be run as a business” (2009, p. 17) including ourselves. This has had drastic
repercussions for workers as they find themselves engaging in mandatory
entrepreneurialism and covert individualism. Under these new work conditions,
precarious workers are required to hustle and market themselves in artificial conditions
of competition. In his book The Selfish Capitalist (referenced in Fisher 2009), Oliver
James describes “the systematic encouragement of the ideas that material affluence
is the key to fulfilment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is
open to anyone willing to work hard enough” (p. 36). In the entrepreneurial fantasy
society, if you do not succeed, there is only you to blame.

In the pursuit of capitalist fulfilment, James recognized the need for material affluence or
‘economic capital’. In the field of sociology, however, Pierre Bourdieu (1986) identified two
other forms of capital necessary for social mobility: ‘cultural capital’ and ‘social capital’. The
concept of cultural capital refers to the collection of non-economic elements an individual

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acquires through being in a specific social class such as family background, education,
credentials, tastes, mannerisms, material chattels etc. Bourdieu argues that such elements
ultimately shape the experiences and opportunities available to us. Expanding on his theory
of cultural capital, Bourdieu proposes the concept of ‘social capital’ as a term that
encompasses both economic and cultural capital. As such, an individual’s social capital is
dependent on the size of their relationship network, the summation of their economic and
cultural capital and how quickly they can activate their network. Taking a neo-capitalist
approach, the premise behind Bourdieu’s definition of ‘social capital’ results in four
consequences: the flow of information between networked individuals to provide new
opportunities and interactions with others, the determination of an individual’s capacity
for decision-making based on the level of influence of their social ties, the degree of
value an individual provides for a network based on their credentials, and the access
to emotional support through the reinforcement of identity and recognition by an
individual’s social network (Lin, Cook and Burt, 2008, p. 5).

Fisher delineated a new form of bureaucracy where “there are hidden expectations
behind official standards” (p. 39). These artificial conditions introduced an additional
layer of competition, a competition with the self, where the minimum expectation is to
exceed expectations. Determining the real value of worker performance or output has
become a game of optics - what it needs to appear as versus what it actually delivers.
Consequently, work becomes about the making and manipulation of representations
rather than the official intentions of the work itself. “This reversal of priorities” can be
attributed to ‘market Stalinism’, in which value is placed on “symbols of achievement
over actual achievement” (p. 42). This could only emerge in late capitalist culture in
which “all that is solid melts into PR” (p. 44).

There are some associations between this dissertation’s examination of creativity and
the use of creativity, as argued by Fisher, to further reinforce the dominance of
capitalism through control of the entire contemporary cultural experience. Fisher
makes this argument by analysing popular culture like the band, Nirvana, and the film
franchise, The Hunger Games. Both are examples of creative expressions of
discontent and opposition towards the dominant socio-political/economic state that

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capitalism has sold back to consumers as commodities. Fisher demonstrates the
capacity of capitalist realism to absorb acts of subversion, resistance and protest to
feed its own narrative that capitalism is so embedded in these essential and
inconspicuous aspects of everyday human life that we cannot help but think it to be
the only possible viable system.

2.3 Creativity under Capitalist Realism

As Fisher asserted, under capitalist realism “’creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ have

become intrinsic to labour” (2009, p. 39). To an extent, this can be attributed to Richard
Florida (2004) and his best-selling book The Rise of the Creative Class. Coinciding
with neoliberal ideologies, he had hypothesized a ‘creative class’ of young, flexible,
tolerant workers, capable of driving economic prosperity, especially in urban areas.
“They were people who defied the stuffy, overly-bureaucratic nature of ‘normal’
working life and preferred flexible working hours and dressing down for the office;
perhaps they even spent a day or two working in a coffee shop. They craved autonomy
and a less stifling management structure and didn’t always require financial incentives”
(Mould 2018, p. 20 on Florida 2004). In the UK specifically, creativity was accredited
an economic value when, in 1998, Tony Blair’s New Labour party created the DCMS.
By endorsing a “cultural production policy that championed the ‘creative industries’” (p.
9), Blair was exploiting the language of creativity to further his party’s economic growth
agenda.

The impact of this capitalism-friendly creativity in the workplace has been discussed
by Oli Mould (2018) in his book Against Creativity. Mould’s main contention is the
tension between creativity as a means of achieving public good and creativity as an
instrument of neoliberalism, designed to compel workers into accomplishing more in
the service of privatised wealth. In particular, he argues that creativity was used to
enable austerity, coercing workers to think up “creative” solutions to problems posed
by a lack of support and resourcing.

Mould detailed the transformation of the workplace under the guise of creativity, as
conceptualised by businesses and government, and the impact it had on its workers.
In an attempt to catalyse collaboration and foster diversity and innovation, firms within

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the creative industries began adopting a flattened organizational structure. “Modelled
on a creative aesthetic straight out of the Floridian playbook” (p. 28), their physical
offices and workspaces also reflected this change. However, Mould strongly qualifies
that it has not really inspired or enabled genuine collaboration and interdependence.
Instead, he offered this analogy to describe creative workers under these new
conditions:

“Creative Industry workers are a lot like male peacocks during the mating
season; if they’re not constantly showing off, they’re not going to get
anywhere in this business. So by getting them to work in the same space,
where they can see each other’s work, they are more inclined to produce
better, more creative results.” (Mould 2018, p. 18)

This analogy represents how workers are coerced into becoming performers of
collaborative work. In order to succeed, workers need to be flexible, amenable and
enterprising. Similarities can be drawn here to Fisher’s notion of ‘market Stalinism’ and
the late capitalist propensity towards PR production.

With “long tables, break-out spaces, a café, repurposed industrial paraphernalia

adorning walls, play areas, arcade machines” (p. 29), the boundaries between work,
rest, and play are eroding. It superimposes an illusion that work is play, and vice versa,
as though the entirety of human dynamics within that environment is singularly
about “producing things, ideas, experiences and services that capitalism can exploit”
(p. 30). This manipulated intersection effectively blurs the lines between work and life,
as architectural theorist Douglas Spencer comments, “The old question of whether
one lives to work, or works to live is rendered seemingly redundant” (Spencer 2016 in
Mould 2018, p.30).

Mould’s Against Creativity does not thoroughly engage wish specific examples from
the creative industries, allowing this dissertation’s focus on art directors and
copywriters in London-based advertising agencies to be justified. In taking such a
sector-specific approach, this dissertation will be filling a significant knowledge gap in
the field’s existing research.

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2.4 Self-branded Identity within Advertising

Having identified the knowledge gap in Mould’s work, it would be useful to draw on
research that already addresses material very close to what this dissertation will
explore. Within the literature around advertising, Sean Nixon (2003), in his book
Advertising Cultures, made valuable observations about commercial applications of
creativity and its relationship to identity. Through his detailed ethnographic study of
male creative practitioners in London-based advertising agencies in the 1990s, Nixon
argued that in order to understand advertising specifically, and commercial
implementations of creativity, it is necessary to discern the subjective identities of
people occupied in creative advertising. He explores how these practitioners utilised
the langauge of creativity in an attempt to validate the cultural work they performed
within their commercial roles as ‘creatives’.

Nixon focused on the social and educational make-up of the creative workers in
advertising and found that they “formed a distinct social grouping within the industry”
(p. 64). They were more likely to have entered the advertising industry via honours
degrees or HND in either fine art or graphic design. Alternatively, workers who had
entered via a generalist humanities degree or without a degree at all would have
encountered elements of art and design training through advertising-specific courses,
like the D&AD workshops. This training exposed them to two different notions of
creativity within art and graphic design education through the distinction between ‘fine
arts’ and ‘applied arts’. This distinction can also be interpreted as ‘authentic creativity’
and ‘derivative creativity’.

This tension resulted in what the IPA regarded as “the dilemma of the ‘artist in
advertising’” (IPA 1965 in Nixon 2003, p. 82). In effect, ‘authentic creativity’ became a
much-coveted redeeming factor from what is considered to be merely ‘derivative
(therefore less-authentic) creativity’ applied into a commercial agenda or pursuit.
Other practitioners exalted their roles in other ways by casting themselves as ‘cultural
translators’ or ‘conceptualisers’. Unlike graphic designers who “did menial stuff” (p.
84), these creatives Nixon interviewed were connected to culture and thought up
innovative ideas. Their status and stature depended on the extent to which they were

9
able to connect the cultural dimension of their profession to the commercial success it
facilitates.

Nixon observed that the industry was divided by “understandings “of career hierarchy
and succession and the opposition between the established and the ambitious” (p. 87).
Through the valorisation of creativity and the exploitation of its language, the
advertising creatives he interviewed upheld a “social fantasy” of success. He found
that their idea of success was to achieve an almost pseudo-celebrity status in which
they could transcend the average ways of working to more autonomous fields of
production. Practitioners could accomplish this through the visible markers of winning
industry awards. This “formed a large part of the currency upon which reputations were
made and careers advanced” (p. 90).

Nixon noted the ambiguity of the structure of the labour market for creative jobs, with
“the process of both getting a job and making progress in the career was not based
upon clear recruitment and promotion criteria” (p. 90). Rather than being promoted
within the same agency, career advancement usually involved mobility between
agencies. Nixon detected there was a sense of urgency to gain recognition,
exacerbated by the transitory nature of creative careers. With that in mind, his
participants “aimed to establish themselves in advertising and then saw themselves
moving into whatever desired creative field on the basis of the contacts and networks
they had made” (p. 90). This meant that networking within the industry was imperative
for creatives. Their capacity to do this well would depend on self-branding
performances such as the aforementioned ability to garner awards, and generally
make themselves known on the industry circuit. In this regard, social capital was
essential to the pursuit of a successful career for advertising creatives (p. 72).

Advertising’s ability to create value for goods and services by assigning them with
cultural meanings has been credited to the process of branding (Oakley & O’Connor
2018). According to Ann Cronin, advertising practitioners view their agencies as brands,
in which their business is situated in “a very unstable and competitive field”. Part of their
job, therefore, relies on persistently pitching their agency’s commercial and creative talents
to both existing and potential clientele in a “reflexive self-promotional strategy” (Cronin

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2004, p. 342). Due to the ‘business ontology’ that capitalist realism instils, creative
practitioners have a vested interest in fostering the perception of creativity as a strategy
of distinction. They behave as individual cultural intermediaries, in and of themselves,
engaging in marketing and self-branding practices that reflect those of their agencies and
the wider industry. Within our materialistic society, brands and corporations rule the
production and consumption systems that the world remains heavily dependent on.
Douglas Rushkoff argues that due to such conditions creative practitioners are motivated
to become “recognizable brand icons” themselves as an adaptive strategy (Rushkoff 2009 in
Oakley and O’Connor 2018, p. 177 ).

Although Nixon’s work deals with the same subject matter as this dissertation, it is
set within a pre-digital context. This dissertation looks to address contemporary
concerns and situate itself within the work of Fisher, Žižek, and Mould, whose books
all treat late capitalism from the perspective of digital material cultures and
contemporary information society. Nixon privileged a story about masculinity, youth,
and tensions between ‘authentic’ and ‘derivative’ creativity. Unlike Nixon, however,
this dissertation will focus on both male and female art directors and copywriters. In
showcasing specific jobs in advertising and a particular group of advertising persona,
the system of creativity valorisation is explored to its fullest.

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3.0 Research

3.1 Methodology

This chapter describes the research methodology that was applied in seeking to
answer the research question: How do the valorisation and subsequent
commodification of the idea of “creativity” impact the subjective identities of art
directors and copywriters in London-based advertising agencies? The following
methodology was informed by the research practices presented by Alan Bryman (2012)
in Social Research Methods.

To preface the methodology, the research paradigms in which it belongs to needs to

be considered. The central premise of the current research is how individual creative
workers construct their identity in relation to their own conceptualisations of creativity.
In this sense, this research inherently subscribes to an interpretivist epistemology and
a constructionist ontology, working within the frameworks of hermeneutics,
phenomenology, and symbolic interaction (Von Wright 1971; Schutz 1962; Blumer
1962 in Bryman 2012). Hermeneutics is concerned with the empathic interpretation of
human behaviour, in other words, “the subjective meaning of social action” (p. 30).
Phenomenology is a philosophy that views human behaviour as an outcome of how
people construe the world around them. Symbolic interaction indicates the way an
“individual is continually interpreting the symbolic meaning of his or her environment …
and acts on the basis of this imputed meaning” (p. 31). These frameworks are
particularly relevant to study how art directors and copywriters interpret the symbolic
meaning of creativity.

To investigate the lived experiences of advertising practitioners in regard to their

subjective identity, this dissertation adopted a qualitative approach. To this end, in-
depth semi-structured interviews, supported by ethnographic participant observation,
were chosen as the primary method for this study. Interviews allow the researcher to
discern the participants own experiences through the ways in which they use language,
expressions, and shared codes to interpret and make sense of their own individual

12
experiences (Seidman, 1998). Four art directors and copywriters in the advertising
industry in London were interviewed over a one-month period between January and
February 2019 (See Table 1). Their ages ranged from mid-twenties to late-thirties. The
interviewees remain confidential throughout this dissertation and are referred to by the
following pseudonyms: Nico, Louis, Carla, Emma. These particular pseudonyms were
chosen to reflect their gender and, vaguely, their national identity. All interviews took
place at the corresponding participant’s agency, which enabled an intimate and
veneer-free perspective into reality of their work dynamic, trade practices and spaces,
which would have been superficial if ascertained from interviews alone. This allowed
for a deeper and empathic appreciation of the industry and of the day-to-day lives of
its workers.

Table 1. Participant Profile

Agency Ranking Employment

Name Role Experience Gender (Nielsen 2016) Status

Nico Art Director 12 + Male 15 Freelance

Louis Art Director 19 + Male 15 Freelance

Carla Copywriter 8+ Female 21 Full-time

Emma Art Director 9+ Female 21 Full-time

The interviews were recorded, then the audio files transcribed (See Appendix II). To
analyse the interview data, thematic analysis was carefully chosen as the primary
method. The purpose of thematic analysis is to identify patterns of meaning across the
dataset through the processes of data familiarisation, data coding, and theme
development. The themes that emerge will then be analysed through the
aforementioned frameworks of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and symbolic
interaction.

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At the core of the account developed throughout this dissertation are the testimonies
of a group of art directors and copywriters. The methodological approach concerns
the state of the participant’s narrative and how it has been interpreted through thematic
analysis. This paper does not depict the relationship between the advertising creatives
who were interviewed and the specific campaigns they were involved in. Instead, the
primary concern has been to acutely observe the language and metaphors they
adopted and the associated modes of expression they deployed, as much as it has
been to chronicle the content of their statements. These were important in contributing
insights into the subjective identities lived by the advertising practitioners I interviewed
and the value they placed on creativity.

Moreover, there is a need to recognise the agenda, propaganda and various modes
of self-expression conveyed by the practitioners. There is an undeniable social factor
in the research approach, including the inescapable nuance of the researcher’s
questions, which prompted practitioners to ‘perform’ in the manner they responded.
Nonetheless, their testimonies are rich and insightful, evoking the arguments put
forward in this dissertation. The setting and context of my conversations with the
practitioners evoked self-reflection on their end. In this respect, the interviews
exemplified Pierre Bourdieu’s contention that “respondents see interviews as
opportunities to explain themselves, that is, to construct their own point of view of
themselves and on the world. Thus, we might speak of an induced and accompanied
self-analysis” (Bourdieu, 1996: 24).

3.2 Considerations

There are implicit constraints in qualitative research that need to be considered. As

Bryman (2012) suggested, qualitative research can be deemed as too subjective. As
the research methodology employs an interpretivist and constructionist approach, it
could be constrained by the researcher’s “unsystematic views about what is significant
and important”, therefore making it “a product of the researcher’s own predilections”
(p. 405).

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Although the participants sampled met the purposes of this study, in that they were art
directors or copywriters in advertising agencies, the sampling procedure was limited
by the researcher’s ability or inability to gain access to a wider and more varied sample
of participants. This resulted in having an unbalanced sample of three art directors
and only one copywriter. Additionally, the age of the participants could not be a
controlled variable. In regard to gender, the sample evenly represented two male
participants and two female participants, however, the two male participants belonged
to one agency while the female participants belonged to another. Therefore, the results
and conclusions may not be representative of other creative practitioners in other
advertising institutions. Additionally, as participant observation was used and
qualitative interviews were conducted on a small sample size of individuals, there
could be further issues in regard to misrepresentative generalisations of the research
findings. However, this dissertation looks to produce ‘moderatum generalisations’,
where the sample of art directors and copywriters “can be seen to be instances of a
broader set of recognisable features” (Williams 2000 in Bryman 2012, p. 406).

Although the subject of the research was not particularly sensitive, this dissertation
has been constrained by the ethical considerations concerning the need to protect the
confidentiality of the participants and to anonymize their testimonies. The solution was
to assign pseudonyms to the participants. They were referred to by their pseudonyms
throughout the study with each other and in the labelling of data, including recordings
and transcripts of the interviews.

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