Purpose: Policy change is frequently framed as resulting from governmental strategy based on explicit preferences, rational decision making and consecutive and aligned implementation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical perspective of institutional work as an alternative approach to understanding policy change, and investigates the construction of resources needed to perform such work.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on a case study of the process wherein the idea of cultural and creative industries was introduced into Lithuanian cultural policy. The main data generating methods are document studies and qualitative interviews.

Findings: The analysis demonstrates the ways in which the resources needed to perform institutional work are created through the enactment of practice, and through the application of resourcing techniques. Three such techniques are identified in the empirical material: the application of experiences from other fields of practice, the elicitation of external support, and the borrowing of legitimacy.

Originality/value: The study offers an alternative approach to studies of policy change by demonstrating the value of institutional work in such change. Further, it contributes to the literature on institutional work by highlighting how instances of such work, drawing on a distributed agency, interlink and connect to each other in a process to produce policy change. Finally, it proposes three interrelated resourcing techniques underlying institutional work.

This article examines the transfer of creative industries as a policy idea to Lithuania. Tracing the stages of the transfer and analysing its consequences in the local cultural policy field, this paper argues for the importance of studying cultural policy process. The findings reveal that the process of the international transfer of creative industries mattered, because it generated wider transformations in cultural policy field by having ambiguous effects on local power relations. The policy idea of creative industries opened the cultural policy field to new actors. As a result, competition for scarce state funding increased, but cultural organisations gained access to the European Union structural funds. In all, creative industries as a policy idea significantly transformed Lithuanian state cultural policy, in that it led to a reassessment of both the practices and identities of cultural organisations.