Theorizing Cultural Work

Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries

Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill, Stephanie Taylor

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138087088
• eBook ISBN: 9781134083589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this 'turn to cultural work' has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to 'self-exploitation'.

While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of 'converged' worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. Theorizing Cultural Work instead views cultural work through a specifically historicized and temporal lens, to ask: what novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent? The contributors to this volume also explore current transformations and future(s) of work within the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future.

This book challenges more affirmative and proselytising industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them, to locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and industrial relations, as well as management and business studies, cultural and economic policy and development, government and planning.

1 Introduction

Cultural work, time and trajectory

Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor

The turn to cultural work

After decades of being displaced in media and communication studies by a focus on texts and audiences, and in sociological research on work by the study of industrial and service sector labour, the labouring lives of people working in the cultural and creative industries are now firmly on the research agenda. This recent upsurge of interest – which amounts to something of a turn to cultural work – can be attributed to at least three factors.

First, it can be traced back to the mid-1990s and the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the alleged rise of a ‘creative’ or ‘cultural’ economy, seen, for example, in the hyperbole about ‘Cool Britannia’ in the UK, or in the ‘Creative Nation’ cultural policy of Australia. The cultural and creative industries,¹ once regarded as peripheral to the ‘real’ economy, took centre stage in a seemingly unstoppable celebration in which they were hailed as engines of economic growth, motors of urban regeneration, and promoters of social cohesion and inclusivity. Across Europe, regional and national governments sought to rebrand deprived neighbourhoods as ‘cultural quarters’, or entire metropolises as ‘creative cities’, and there was fierce competition for the coveted title of ‘European Capital of Culture’, seen as a means of attracting inward investment, and transforming economic and social fortunes. Similarly, across North America, Australasia and Asia, national and regional governments sought to identify those places and peoples that could contribute most effectively to establishing an economic advantage in the new creative stakes.

The growing interest in the cultural and creative industries prompted explorations of the nature and organization of work in fields such as fashion, design, music, television or new media. These fields were rapidly expanding in the wake of accelerated public demands for more symbolic leisure or entertainment and goods, an enhanced commercial focus on cultivating effective images, brands and marketing, and the rapid technological changes underpinned by the Internet, which began to transform working practices and give rise to entirely new occupations, such as web designer and digital animator. Political and industry changes, most notably a trend towards media deregulation, also contributed to a rapid expansion of the creative and cultural economy, for example spawning a multiplicity of small, independent TV production companies alongside the few ‘giant’ transnational operations. Broader deregulation and patterns of disintegration, fragmentation and dispersal within large firms and bureaucracies across all creative sectors brought the freelance, ‘portfolio’ or independent creative worker to the fore. Although today the ‘hype’ about the creative industries in the UK might be said to be waning from the dizzy heights achieved during the New Labour administrations, the creative industries are nevertheless still regarded as exceptionally important and as a sector that is ‘vital to national economic recovery’ which can ‘get people back to work’ (Arts Council England 2009) during a time of financial crisis. Indeed, during the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the Conservative (coalition) Prime Minister David Cameron reiterated his faith in the ‘extraordinary’ talent of UK creatives whose work had been showcased in the opening ceremony, and called for renewed rounds of investment in creative endeavour.

Second, parallel to these shifts, there were also optimistic voices from the academy backing the turn to cultural work and studies of workers. Richard Florida’s (2002) influential ‘creative class’ thesis, while focusing on a broad set of industrial sectors, nonetheless gave prominence to cultural workers and those engaged in creative occupations as vanguard workers in post-industrial transformation. Flores and Gray (1999) saw the emergence of new, entrepreneurial, DIY (do-it-yourself) biographies – emblematic of media workers – as offering potential for flexibility, autonomy and self-reinvention: liberations as much as cages. Writers such as Charles Landry (2000) and John Howkins (2001, 2010) repeatedly drew attention to the economic and socially progressive potential embedded in the cultural and creative industries, and the kinds of work and social relationships they promised.

A third factor contributing to the turn to cultural work was the arguments of a significant body of critical social theory centred on transformations in the nature and experience of work in late modernity. This scholarship, from writers like Ulrich Beck (2000), Zygmunt Bauman (2005), Manuel Castells (1996) and Richard Sennett (2006), took as its focus the way in which work was changing in conditions variously described as ‘risk society’, ‘liquid modernity’, ‘network society’, and ‘cultural’, ‘new’ or ‘late’ capitalism. Despite important differences, these writers and others together highlighted the speeding up and intensification of processes of individualization that left a large number of increasingly ‘liberated’ workers alone – without job security or the safety net of state or social welfare protections – to bear the risks of fragmented, precarious and discontinuous working lives. These lives, it was argued, were no longer amenable to narration through the story of a linear career or biography (notwithstanding that this was a narrative that had mostly been restricted to a minority of well-educated, first-world men). In today’s ‘political economy of insecurity’, Sennett lamented, jobs have been replaced by short-term projects, with a withering of organizational ties and loyalties, and with them the valuing of persons, as well as the very possibility of telling a meaningful story of one’s life. Manuel Castells drew on metaphors from information technology to capture the way in which work was transforming: in the network society, he argued, people had to become ‘reprogrammable’, constantly updating their skills in order to meet new challenges, staying agile and mobile, and always ‘upgrading the self’ (Ashton 2011). Cultural workers have been widely identified at the centre of many of these mooted transformations, or as peculiarly subject to their myriad influences and effects.

From a different critical position, autonomist Marxist writers such as Maurizio Lazzarato (1996), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005) helped to position cultural labour centre stage in their views of the growth of ‘immaterial labour’ in a rapidly transforming ‘cognitive capitalism’ where the production of immaterial and symbolic – rather than material – goods appears to be taking precedence. Hardt and Negri (2001) identified the qualities of labour conditional to an economy now populated by workers subjected to a stringent regime of ‘immaterial production’ where the ceaseless creation and circulation of ever more complex ranges of symbolic, cultural and informational goods corrals workers into oppressively standardized, ‘computerized’ and homogenized labour processes – a far cry from the self-liberation that others have associated with cultural work.

Despite the very real divergences between the positions outlined above, much of this social science has consistently positioned cultural workers at the centre of an ongoing transformation of work. For good or ill, workers in media, design and the arts are routinely held to exemplify the working lives and generalized practices of the ‘worker of the future’. Perhaps most significantly, artists and ‘creatives’ more broadly are said to embody the new form of constantly labouring subjectivity required for contemporary capitalism, in which the requirements for people fully to embrace risk, entrepreneurialism and to adopt a ‘sacrificial ethos’ are often linked to an artistic or creative vocation.

A fourth and final factor that contributed to the coming to prominence of cultural work as a topic of research is the idea and belief that ‘we are all cultural workers now’ (Coté and Neilson 2014). Although Mark Coté and Brett Neilson present this idea as an interrogative, to raise questions about the extent to which the precariousness that characterizes work in the cultural field has now dispersed across the economy, the notion has a more widespread currency. At its most general, this claim points simply to the ‘culturalization’ of the economy, in which culture is ‘put to work’ across a variety of spheres of production (Du Gay and Pryke 2002). In this broader sense, it refers also to the thoroughgoing penetration of all facets of social and economic life by cultural signs, meanings and values, and the apparent indivisibility of the cultural and the economic at moments of production and consumption.

Somewhat differently, the notion of all-pervasive cultural working has been used to account for the allegedly progressive ‘convergence’ of media technology, producers and consumers (Jenkins 2004). Particularly popularized since the advent of Web 2.0 technologies is the idea that large swaths of the population are now involved in cultural production (and relations of co-production and consumption) in a variety of different and complex ways. People appear routinely to tweet, blog, post videos to YouTube, have websites, update social networking sites, and contribute to debates and threads on various different electronic forums. They may work as ‘modders’, seeing themselves as co-creators in a liminal space that is both outside and inside the computer games industry. Even those who self-consciously ‘opt out’ of active ‘content creation’ on the web may nevertheless ‘like’ certain webpages, leave feedback on eBay or rate Amazon marketplace transactions. Those who eschew even these newly mundane activities will – unless they disavow technology entirely – nevertheless leave sediments and trails of digital data that can then be mined by media companies, keywords in emails that will be picked up by Google for auto-tailored advertising, and Internet browsing histories that will be bought and sold as commodities. There is, today, in affluent societies, no ‘outside’ to media and cultural production, giving rise to the idea that – whether or not people are aware of their contribution – particular forms of cultural work have now become generalized across populations.

It is perhaps paradoxical then, that this awareness of the dispersed, networked quality of media and cultural production has helped to animate interest in cultural producers as a relatively distinctive group: to raise questions about the privileged autonomy of the artist (Banks 2010a), the ‘professional’ versus ‘amateur’ practitioner in journalism (Keen 2008), the particular qualities demanded and afforded by media work (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011), and to interrogate whether the ‘free labour’ (Terranova 2004) routinely given to media and games companies (amongst others) is always and necessarily exploited. If ‘we are all cultural workers now’, then what makes people who work in the cultural and creative industries – from advertising, to the arts, to film production – different and worthy of study? Is cultural work actually able to be distinguished from other types of work, and, if so, how and in what ways?

Contemporary debates about cultural work

It is clear that cultural work – broadly defined as symbolic, aesthetic or creative labour in the arts, media and other creative or cultural industries – has now engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines, sustained by ongoing dialogue with policy makers, educationalists and trainers, and by interactions with cultural workers themselves. The diversity of both the scholarship and dialogue must be acknowledged, but more benign or upbeat readings of the coming to prominence of cultural work in Westernized, post-industrial capitalism have been consistently challenged by critical discussions which converge around four discrete, but interrelated, problems. These are:

• the precariousness of cultural work, including its contested availability and the uneven distribution of its internal and external rewards (among them, pay, working conditions, prospects and status);

• the inequalities within the global cultural workforce and, in the Western cities that are the industries’ hubs, the persistent over-representation of the already privileged (white, highly educated, male);

• the celebrated associations of cultural work with the aesthetic and a supposed life–work synthesis of personalization, playfulness, informality and sociality which, it is argued, attracts but also disadvantages many cultural workers;

• the accelerated invasion of cultural work into the previously separate or protected territories of leisure, and personal and intimate life.

These issues have all been well rehearsed, but there is, we contend, something missing from the extended debates. While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, seldom have they sought to do so through an explicitly historical lens. Despite some cautionary voices (e.g. Ross 2008), the emerging critical language that couches the problems of cultural work in terms of postindustrial ‘individualization’, ‘precarity’, ‘immateriality’ and ‘self-exploitation’ has leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. However, this book asks, to what extent is such an unanchored, ahistorical focus appropriate? What novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and – the corollary – precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent?

The necessity of (re)theorizing cultural work

The first aim of this book is therefore to challenge what we perceive as an historical lack in the critical literature. Our contributors were invited to reflect more fully on cultural work in terms of its (arguably) more complex and variegated social pasts, and the degree to which these impress discernibly upon contemporary conditions. The perceived deficit is not simply historical, however, but more broadly temporal, in all of its dimensions. A further aim, then, is to explore more closely the precise trajectories, or patterns of continuity and change that might be discernible in work in the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future. We have invited situated projections of the cultural work of tomorrow – a world that draws from, but also extends, the work histories of today.

Our further intention is to elaborate the sometimes over-simplified objects and contexts that prevail in many discussions of the cultural and creative industries, countering the tendency for critical understandings of ‘new’ forms of cultural work – somewhat echoing the fixation of its arbiters and industry advocates – to be restricted in focus to the empirical case in hand and primarily evaluated within a context of prevailing trends, or immediate political concerns. To this end, our contributors have been asked not only to identify and explore some of the more consistent and durable elements that appear to recur in the historically composited cultural and creative work process, but also to consider the specificities of socio-historic locations. In doing so, they bring into question the often-assumed neat boundaries and interchangeable referentialities of ‘cultural work’ as an object of inquiry, opening the possibility of multiple presents and a plethora of possible futures for both the work and the workers.

By reflecting both on the salience of history in the present, and its consequence for potential work futures, the critical gaze ideally extends beyond the apparent immediacy and novelty of current events. The consequence, we hope, is a more thoroughly temporalized set of theorizations that locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process, or processes, that can challenge more affirmative and proselytizing industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them.

Why is this necessary? First, the time seems (economically) right. As we write, the prevailing and persistent global financial crisis and subsequent economic recessions have not fully muted the optimistic discourse of cultural and creative industries expansion but have perhaps brought to a close an initial ‘golden era’. This was characterized by the energetic promotion of various aspects of the allegedly ‘new’ knowledge and innovation economy, supported by growth of the new (and ‘old’) media and creative, copyright and intellectual property industries, which, at least in the UK context, roughly coincided with the regime of the New Labour government (1997–2010) and its influential policy proclamations and naming of new sites of cultural work, including the ‘creative industries’ (DCMS 2001). The current shrinking in employment and revenues in those industries, and the diminution of much of the commercial investment and state subsidy that made them happen in the first place, suggest that cultural work may have reached a moment of pause and reappraisal. Projective talk about the creative economy is now considerably quieter, although still audible (e.g. Arts Council England 2009; GLA 2012).

In particular, if the cultural and creative industries were acclaimed as part of a post-millennial economy that had apparently ended cycles of boom and bust, that had transcended capitalist history in fact, then the rude awakenings of the 2007 crisis offered forceful disabuse. Consequently, if there is a need to accept that the cultural and creative industries have proved suspect in purely economic terms, vulnerable to ‘old’ economic cycles, then they must, too, be discredited as providers of putatively new models of flexible and responsive work and employment, as they were so frequently portrayed in the years of relative growth. Certainly, they have not (yet?) been able to provide individuals with the resources necessary to ride out the downturn or sidestep exogenous infrastructural shocks. While, of course, we must accept that to some degree all boats are lowered when the economic tide goes out, this failure is further reason to question the novelty of cultural work as part of a re-evaluation of the grounds on which the cultural and creative industries are understood. As the latest political project becomes to (re)consider the role cultural work might play in any anticipated recovery, we must also ask whether such activity is much less than a new form of time-defying, transcendental super-sector, and rather more a set of activities fully embedded within and shaped by history, politics and economy and their characteristic cycles, rhythms and patterns of internal transformation – in short, embedded in a past (or pasts) that, despite all the celebratory rhetoric of novelty, it has failed to escape or transcend.

Second, it seems timely to enquire what has happened to those social futures that the cultural and creative industries promised so volubly to usher in. What became of those egalitarian, meritocratic worlds where lack of application was the only barrier to success, and where tradition – especially in its classed, gendered or ethnicized forms – was meant to evaporate in the ardent heat of innovation and personal creative expression? What we know now is that the cultural and creative industries are actually less inclusive, equal and egalitarian than many of the traditional industries they purported to supplant and surpass (Adkins 2005; Gill 2002, 2013; Holgate and McKay 2009; Randle et al. 2007; Skillset 2010). Not only have they failed to detraditionalize progressively by, say, challenging the conventional gender division of labour, or ethnic minority exclusion in the workplace, but they have apparently even helped to ossify and intensify the prevalence of inequality in those social relations.

Moreover, a shift of focus from the industries to their workers has, inevitably, enabled some more nuanced explorations of the experience of cultural working. As accounts of a field are supplemented by accounts from its workers, it is necessary to abandon the hyperbole of either brave new careers or sacrificial labouring driven by the blind and single-minded pursuit of self-actualization. Empirical work shows, for example, that the aesthetic satisfactions of cultural and creative work cannot be dismissed as entirely illusory, and also that many creative workers are as aware of precarity as any discerning academic or policy maker. Research with novices who enter creative fields through the study of art and design, as just one set of specialisms, suggests that they are well aware of the difficult experiences of their predecessors and of the uncertain employment and poor financial rewards associated with their chosen professions. There is therefore a need to avoid the various caricatures of either the cultural dupe or the rational maximizer of information or (economic) benefits, in order to develop a fuller notion of the creative worker as a subtly responsive and interpreting situated subject. History operates in the carried-over affective associations and myths of cultural and creative working, as much as in the practical strategies noted by Ross. F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: cultural work, time and trajectory
• PART I Histories
• PART II Specificities/transformations
• PART III Futures
• Bibliography
• Index