A Visual Ethnography of Business Models and Social Impact: Creative Integrative Leadership and Value Capture in Community Filmmaking

Filmmaking is a deeply collaborative and social process. The multidisciplinary working environment creates a group dynamic, using creative integrative leadership that has social impacts on the collaborators and creates a visual culture product. Business models, traditionally structured around profits, historically struggle to capture the value for these social purpose organizations (SPOs), especially ones that produce cultural products. Business models, specific to cultural industries indicate that shared value can be leveraged in the network ecosystems that these SPOs exist in, called Social Innovation (SI). Therefore, if the business model is reframed around how the social processes create value, then the emerging SI models can enable more value capture and a better positioning of the cultural SPOs in the market and make them sustainable. The case of Cine Laboratorio studied in this paper is a small community filmmaking company in Venice, Italy. Through visual ethnography and practice as research, the way creative integrative leadership in filmmaking creates meaning, how those methods and community filmmaking intersect to create value through social impact and how the business model is not structured to acknowledge that value and impact was elucidated from this case. Community filmmaking studies have shown how this process creates social impact when employing the careful leadership techniques, and how filmmaking business models are not organized to capture value, either commercially or socially. However, no study has shown how all these factors intersect each other, where the social impact is created from a value creation perspective, nor have they been studied from a visual ethnographic methodology. Findings were that participants had gained skills in negotiating complex social situations, discovered agency, self-identity, belonging and an understanding of themselves within the community through the filmmaking experience. Through the analysis of Cine Laboratorio, this thesis reveals that meaning, meaning making and meaning understanding is important for participants and collaborators, and this is why filmmaking creates a particular social impact. It further finds that while the network ecosystem in which this organization exists is supported by it’s community, further entrenching into the broader social networks could have a shared value capture that would benefit this organization long-term. While this thesis seeks to explicate the issues with theory, it also aims to discover frameworks in which to address and solutions for long term sustainability for cultural SPOs.