Introduction
Over the last few years, we talked with an extraordinary range of young people with creative interests in film, art, games, hip-hop, and music who were trying to make their way in the cities of Austin, Denver, Brisbane, and London. At the same time, a persistent national and international debate about the composition of the creative labour force was taking place, backstage, as it were. Public debate about who makes up the creative labour force has been intense. Throughout 2016, outrage at the lack of representation by black actors and filmmakers led to #oscarssowhite. In the UK, the news drew attention to ways that nepotism and unfair internships have created a ‘pandemic lack of inclusion’1 in terms of people from working-class backgrounds or those discriminated against by gender or race. Academic research from 20152 to 2018 kept in the public eye questions about the lack of diversity both onstage and offstage, on-screen and offscreen.3 The Hollywood film director, Paul Greengrass, proclaimed ‘young people starting out in film or TV are being screwed to the ground.’4 Since 2014, the tech industry has come under increasing scrutiny for its lack of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity (Miller, 2014). As tech, big data, and artificial intelligence become the dominant features of modern society, the lack of diversity in the design of the smart future is deeply problematic. In Australia, research highlighted gender inequality: ‘women aren’t the problem in the film industry, men are.’5 Although the #metoo movement is by no means confined to media, cinema, or other creative occupations, some of its most public success has been in drawing attention to structural inequality and oppression, particularly through Time’s Up.6 Creative work, of course, extends far beyond the legacy media of film and television, and now includes digital media, design, and even the civic sphere (Watkins, 2019).
In some ways, discussion about who gets to make the media that millions of people consume has always been a fraught political question given that there is a deep common sense yoking together the idea that the way media represent diverse social groupings must in some ways be understood in terms of who makes the products in the first place (Oakley & O’Brien, 2016; Saha, 2017). Getting into the film, television, design, or tech industries is thus part of a wider social struggle for representation which in turn affects recognition of inequality and social injustice.
Of course, describing these wider debates of national cultural importance as backstage or offscreen to the discussions we were having with the young people trying to get their first exhibition or hustling to secure a DJ gig in a club in downtown Austin, Texas, might seem the wrong way around. This book focuses on the experiences of young people as they maneuvered to enter varied and changing forms of employment across the creative industries—we offer cases in film, hip-hop, game design, music, and visual arts—and our attention is on the struggle and hustle of youth as they tried to set up companies, snaffle gigs, make pitches, earn a living, or just earn respect. On the one hand, their stories are a key part of these wider debates about representation and recognition. Indeed, our young people are often precisely the segment of the workforce that appears to be more often denied equal advancement than their more privileged peers. On the other hand, whilst our criticism of the wider context certainly animated our research, the wider political canvas was not our starting point.
The book brings together a rather under-researched intersection of several fields relating to youth, employment in the creative industries, and transitions into work given that there has been a structural realignment of pathways into employment more generally (Furlong & Cartmel, 2006). While previous eras were characterised by relatively straightforward transitions from education into employment, today’s youth face an extraordinary set of social challenges in terms of accessing secure employment, housing, and other opportunities to enable them to enter adult life. Indeed, assumptions about vocational pathways and full employment have been thrown into disarray as the new precarity facing the current generations has given rise to new forms of existential angst manifest in changing subjectivity, especially in relation to the extended nature of learning to work.
There are curious gaps in the research about the transitions for young people into work. This is partly a question of disciplinary provenance. Studies of education and training pay attention to credentials, outcomes, stratification, and equity. Studies of the workplace are interested in career progression, changing occupations, structures of the firm and workplace, and the impact of changing technologies. Sociological studies of youth pay attention to changing trends in employment, family, housing, and financial independence. However, given a context where all of these transitions are themselves changing in deep and essential ways, there is surprisingly little research about how young people navigate entry to employment where the concept of work might be best thought of as a process which might well take place over an extended period of time and across multiple pathways (Tomlinson, 2013). Given the structural decline of the long-term career, the work required to enter work calls for its own scholarly attention, including new understandings of work-based identity, opportunity, experience, accreditation, and both formal and informal markets.
In this book, we consider how young people enter into and navigate these new activities and its implications for the changing world of work, opportunity, and mobility. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the creative and cultural sector where traditionally high-status and difficult to enter occupations have been fundamentally restructured due to the disruptive effects of digital technologies. Far from lessening the attractions of working in these industries with their high degree of staff turnover, capricious audiences and high-risk rewards, opportunities for creative work have multiplied in recent years. Digital technologies make possible new markets and new opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovation. In the case of game development, for example, new advances in software make it possible to produce high-quality, playable games with very little money. In these and other instances, technology lowers the barrier to entry, opening up spaces for creators to make and distribute their creative work. How young people leverage emerging technologies into career and creative opportunities is one of the aims of this book.
The young people who are able to take advantage of these changes and opportunities customarily have high levels of formal education and are from affluent middle-class households with particular kinds of social and cultural capital. This raises questions about social justice and the wider social impact of control of media industries by these elites. The case studies in this book take these challenges and this inequality as their starting point and explore both how young people make and take opportunities for themselves in these precarious times of shifting structural patterns of company and employment, and, at the same time, how education and training systems, and informal innovation ecosystems, attempt to intervene in these new labour markets through forms of support, incubation, and training.
The three lead authors of this book came together as part of the Connected Learning Research Network, an interdisciplinary research group examining interest-driven learning communities, with a particular interest in how digital tools create possibilities for transforming educational opportunity for young people from socially marginalised backgrounds (Ito et al., 2013). We come from different academic disciplines, including sociology, media and communication studies, youth development, and education and cultural studies, and so arrived at our interest in the experience of transitioning into work in the creative industries from different perspectives, research traditions, and even purposes.
Defining the Field: Contexts, Approaches, and Traditions
We are united by a common political interest in using academic research to support changes in both policy and practice to improve opportunities for those young people who typically do not benefit from the current education system. Where our work is rooted in the tradition of social critique, we hope that bringing young people’s accounts to the forefront will influence public debate and social expectations in relation to recruitment, sponsorship, and the provision of opportunity. Our work is also rooted in traditions of social intervention; we hope this work will contribute to changes in how higher education and non-profit organisations design outreach programmes and interventions to support young people’s pathways into creative work.
We do not necessarily share a common intellectual frame defining a single problem because of the ways that the phenomenon of transitioning into work are viewed analytically by our varied disciplinary outlooks. The phenomenon represents, for example, a way of talking about managing economic precarity as much as it does forms of apprenticeship learning. These two perfectly valid insights into our young people’s journeys are captured in the accounts we give but with distinct conceptual frames and disciplinary purposes. This section thus attempts to presents an overview of the range of disciplinary perspectives employed in our accounts and attempts to explore the theoretical connections (and disjuncture) as we have tried to capture a very broad process of both provision and change at work across three continents.
Creative Labour in Precarious Times
For young people today in general, transitioning into the labour market is a protracted, fraught, competitive, and precarious process. Whilst the idea of a smoothly regulated passage from training to employment carefully and fairly regulated by the acquisition of credentials may be more of a nostalgic ideal than an accurate representation of how life was lived, it is generally accepted that current times pose very different challenges for young people from all social classes (Brown, Lauder, & Ashton, 2011). Global competition, automation, AI (artificial intelligence), deindustrialisation, and regional economic inequalities have to some degree broken the compact between education and employment with a whole range of associated social consequences (Baldwin, 2016; Rifkin, 2001; Saxenian, 2006; Srnicek & Williams, 2016). Within this broader context of the changing relationship between education and work, and indeed the meaning of work itself in terms of career progression (Tomlinson, 2013), creative labour (and we shall come to challenges in this definition next) is of interest to sociologists of work very much in terms of acting ahead of its time: in Sandra Haukka’s words, ‘Pathways into the creative industries are not institutionally or occupationally determined compared to pathways into other industries’ (Haukka, 2011, p. 6)
First of all, creative labour captures both subjective and objective dimensions to changes in the nature of work itself. There are a number of strands here. Critiques of the post-war Fordist labour markets (even when they were working successfully within their own terms in the countries of the global North) have pointed to the contradictory aesthetic and affective dimensions to the meaning of work that have been contained and incorporated as workplaces themselves, and how attitudes towards work have changed since the 1960s (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). Further exploration, especially associated with the work of Richard Sennett (Sennett, 2007; Sennett & Cobb, 1973), has moved our understanding of work away from a simple version of the exchange of labour to embrace subjective understandings of class consciousness and individual respect. Subsequent research into what motivates artists and other forms of creative workers has built on this tradition, showing that people who work creatively (often very broadly defined) are as much motivated by existential questions of what gives meaning to their lives in contradistinction to a narrow view of work which is solely and exclusively concerned with economic return. The work of Angela McRobbie, for example, has consistently explored the interplay of gender, class, and other meaning-making processes that can explain some of the contradictions inherent in creative labour (McRobbie, 2015).
One of the key contradictions is the classic tension between working for art or money (Taylor & Littleton, 2008a), and this theme has been stimulated by changes in the labour market more generally, summed up in the term, precarity. Whilst in some ways, as earlier scholars have argued, there has always been inbuilt insecurity implicit in the concept of creative work, changes in employment more generally have made creative work emblematic of broader shifts in labour practices (Standing, 2016). Precarity describes a complex process of labour market instability, undermining job security, and employment practices. However, as a number of scholars have noted, in some ways, these broader conditions have always been in force in the creative and arts sectors (Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin, 2005; Christopherson, 2006).
As we will discuss next, the emergence of precariousness as a more normal state of being clearly has significant consequences for young people as they enter into work in every field. Here, we were interested in the ways that trying to become a filmmaker, hip-hop artist, game developer, or musician might be understood in terms of choices between equally insecure options as opposed to the paradigm of art versus money, which wrongly implies that there are more sensible and safe alternatives to pursuing an artistic life. At the same time as intra-institutional studies might be able to delineate different kinds of career building (Ashton, 2015a; Felstead et al., 2007), thus shedding light on varied ways that workers are developing routes through precarity, so we wanted to explore how, faced with this norm, young people build strategies and practices to ease and safeguard their progress, such as Nelligan’s study of networking in Australia opened up (Nelligan, 2015).
Studies in the US context have also examined how young people navigate these conditions of economic uncertainty through aspirational labour (Neff, 2012; Duffy, 2017), networking (Currid, 2008), and side hustling (Ravenelle, 2019; Watkins, 2019). Indeed, the latter, side hustling, has become a common feature among young people as they seek to balance the realities of having to maintain some form of employment—a day gig—while pursuing more desirable forms of employment—a side gig (Watkins, 2019).
Indeed, precarity itself is a state of economic and social relationships that are highly influenced by contingent local circumstances and subject to broader shifts. Central here is the unequal impact of digital technologies which have both transformed working practic...
