Abstract
The final chapter of the volume summarizes the empirical findings and re-connects them to the overarching question of how innovation-led growth can be accomplished on the basis of venture capital investment in small start-ups and studios that have the incentives and the competence to develop, for example, new digital objects. Whereas traditional manufacturing industry was oligopolistic and based on economies of scale, which resulted in relatively large production units and corporations, the innovation-led economy is primarily relying on smaller scale units wherein the flow of expert know-how and information is short and closely knitted. For policy makers, this means that there are not only a handful of corporations with whom economic policy can be negotiated, but the novel situation demands a different approach, and economic incentives and motivational factors are oftentimes separated. Indie video game development constitutes a smaller sub-set of the video game development industry, but the activities involved in developing games on the basis of smaller means include a variety of conditions that are representative of the innovation-led growth regime. The supply of finance capital and a passionate commitment to video games are two relatively separated conditions that policy makers need to attend to, and yet they are both part of the capacity of an economy to generate new products, goods, and services.
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Notes
- 1.
“What we lack today is not reflection but passion,” Søren Kierkegaard (1985: 71) writes in Philosophical Fragments. In Kierkegaard’s view, reflection refers to the human intellect, which he construed as the cognitive processes wherein everything is packaged into “sterile abstractions which could not be experienced ‘completely and personally’” (Golomb 1992: 66). In contrast, Kierkegaard was convinced that passion, authentic pathos, is devoid of “rational content” and therefore cannot be spoken about propositionally (Golomb 1992: 69). In this view, of great importance for, for example, the American pragmatism and the work of, for example, William James, passionate commitment escapes a proper denotative vocabulary, which naturally complicates the intersubjective understanding of the “authentic pathos.” As, for example, Richard Rorty (2007: 65), a notably secular writer, remarks, for Kierkegaard and his followers, “the quest for certainty is a cop-out, and that absolute commitment has nothing to do with the ability to win arguments or convince opponents.” Being passionate is not a matter of providing evidence to substantiate this conviction, but rather to follow one’s inner drives to do so. For Kierkegaard, Golomb (1992: 76) emphasizes, “absolute non-commitment to anything, not even to one’s self, results in the self’s complete dissolution.” While this Kierkegaardian defence of passionate commitment and pathos has been acclaimed in, for example, entrepreneurship theory (see, e.g., Cardon et al. 2017; Chen et al. 2009)—itself a secular theology of sorts, critics contend—what has been more challenging to handle for management scholars is Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the limits of rational language and its inability to convey passionate sentiments. Strangely, the staunch defence of passionate commitment resonates with contemporary management theory, whereas what has been treated as tolerance in Kierkegaard for non-rationalist thinking is rejected. One explanation for this piecemeal acceptance of Kierkegaard’s thinking is, as Rorty (2007: 58) puts it, that “irrationality,” that which fails to be accounted for in a denotative vocabulary or apprehended by metrics and quanta, has “become the secular equivalent of sin.”
- 2.
Sunstein (1996) argues that norms are shaped by law: “[A]n appropriately framed law may influence social norms and push them in the right direction” (Sunstein 1996: 2026). At the same time, unless there are substantial social norms in place, honoured and reinforced by citizens, it is of no use to enact law to influence a situation. “[W]ithout desirable effects on social norms, there is not much point in endorsing expressively motivated law,” Sunstein (1996: 2047) writes. In this view, legislation is a governance device that may be inadequately employed in cases where policy makers use legislations in ways that are inconsistent with social norms. Therefore, legislation should preferably be used only in cases wherein current norms need to be further accentuated and reinforced, not to promote some policy maker’s beliefs or to otherwise signal the policy makers’ preferences. In such cases, the symbolic use of law risks to undermine the authority of legislative entities and to blur the distinction between personal and community-based preferences, social norms, regulations, and legislation. An indiscriminate use of legislation as governance device may gradually undermine the respect for the rule of law, being a core principle of the modern state and its judiciary.
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Styhre, A. (2020). Passionate Production in the Shadow of the Market: The Prospects of Innovation-Led Growth. In: Indie Video Game Development Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45545-3_8
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