Ecologies of creativity: the Village, the Group, and the heterarchic organisation of the British advertising industry

In the 1980s, the hegemony of the large US advertising networks has been ch allenged by a new breed of London-based agencies who pioneered what is know n in the trade as 'second wave'. On the one hand, second wave implied the e mancipation of Soho from an 'outpost of Madison Avenue' to the 'advertising village' on the basis of momentous product and process innovations. On the other hand, a few London agencies rose to global top positions on the cres t of the second wave by transforming themselves from international advertis ing networks into global communication groups. This paper starts from the a ssumption that both, the localised cluster of advertising agencies in the a dvertising village (the 'Village') and the global communications group (the 'Group'), share basic principles of social organisation. It aims at demons trating that the organisational logic of both the Village and the Group can be conceptualised in terms of a heterarchy. By drawing on case-study evide nce from Soho on the one hand and from the world leading communications bus iness, WPP, on the other, the five basic features of heterarchies - diversi ty, rivalry, tags, projects, and reflexivity - will provide the conceptual tools for the investigation into the social organisation of the Village and the Group.