Socio-Economic Review Advance Access published October 13, 2011 Socio-Economic Review (2011) 1–27 doi:10.1093/ser/mwr022 Competition and public service broadcasting: stimulating creativity or servicing capital? Simon Turner1,* and Ana Lourenc¸o2 1NIHR King’s Patient Safety and Service Quality Research Centre, King’s College London, London, UK; 2School of Economics and Management, Catholic University of Portugal, Porto, Portugal *Correspondence:
[email protected] Downloaded from In UK public service broadcasting, recent regulatory change has increased the role of the private sector in television production, culminating in the British Broadcast- ing Corporation’s (BBC) introduction of ‘creative competition’ between in-house ser.oxfordjournals.org and independent television producers. Using the concept of ‘cognitive variety’, we focus on the increasing role of the independent sector as a source of creativity in the delivery of programming for the BBC. The paper shows that the intended benefit of introducing new competencies has been thwarted by, at the micro- at King's College London on October 17, 2011 level, a high level of cognitive proximity between in-house and external producers and, at the meso-level, a conflict in values between the BBC and the independent sector, with many of the larger producers responding to a commercial imperative that encourages creativity in profitable genres, but leaves gaps in other areas of provision. Tracing these meso-level institutional effects has implications for micro- level analyses of innovation, notably communities of practice theory. Keywords: governance, innovation, organizational theory, public sector reforms, social networks, United Kingdom JEL classification: L14 transactional relationships, contracts and reputation, networks, L22 firm organization and market structure, L23 organization of production 1.