Creative Labour

Media Work in Three Cultural Industries

David Hesmondhalgh, Sarah Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135146276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What is it like to work in the media? Are media jobs more 'creative' than those in other sectors? To answer these questions, this book explores the creative industries, using a combination of original research and a synthesis of existing studies.

Through its close analysis of key issues – such as tensions between commerce and creativity, the conditions and experiences of workers, alienation, autonomy, self-realization, emotional and affective labour, self-exploitation, and how possible it might be to produce 'good work' Creative Labour makes a major contribution to our understanding of the media, of work, and of social and cultural change. In addition, the book undertakes an extensive exploration of the creative industries, spanning numerous sectors including television, music and journalism.

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of life in the creative industries in the twenty-first century. It is a major piece of research and a valuable study aid for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including business and management studies, sociology of work, sociology of culture, and media and communications.

1 Introduction

Can creative labour be good work?

1.1 Good and bad work in the cultural industries

It is often wisely said that there's more to life than work. But work takes up huge amounts of people's time and energy. It has the capacity to absorb and enrich us, and it can be experienced as futile or degrading. The quality of working life matters, and so does the relationship of work to well-being.

For many people nowadays, the degree to which their job offers the chance for them to be creative is an important feature of its quality. People can of course be creative in any kind of work but some types of employment are commonly thought to offer greater possibilities for creativity than others. Because of the special association of creativity with ‘art’, amongst them are occupations that are primarily aesthetic and expressive, perhaps most obviously in ‘the arts’ (painting, sculpture and literature and so on) but more prominently in the television, film, music and publishing businesses, in the various institutions known as ‘the media’. A term commonly used for this mixture of commercial and publicly subsidised enterprises is the cultural industries.

The research problem this book explores is, put simply, to what extent is it possible to do good work in the cultural industries? We explore this problem by drawing upon research we ourselves conducted in three major cultural industries: television, magazine journalism and music.¹ The research question we sought to answer emphasises the quality of subjective experience. What kinds of experiences do jobs and occupations in the cultural industries offer their workers?²

As we shall see, the nature of work in the cultural industries is an issue that has rightly concerned a growing corpus of researchers of creative labour, especially those influenced by cultural studies. Strangely though this body of research has paid at most only sporadic attention to thinking about labour more generally, be it the long history of reflection on this vital domain of human activity (Tilgher 1931) or academic research fields such as the sociology of work, social and political theory, or organisation, business and management studies. Conversely, with some exceptions, these academic research fields have not examined the cultural industries much.³ Given the seeming special desirability of work in the cultural industries, these fields of research, and policy-makers and activists, might benefit from analysis of this specific area of employment. The book aims to bring these areas of analysis into mutual dialogue as a way of advancing our understanding of creative work, and of the difficult concepts of good and bad work. ecause our focus is cultural industries, that requires special attention to the concept of culture and why it might be the object of utopian aspirations for the work we do.⁴ We hope then that this is more than just a study of work in the cultural industries. We have aimed to produce a study of jobs that are considered particularly desirable in the times in which we live.

This chapter explains our approach and methods, clarifies definitions, and lays out what follows in the rest of the book. First though, we explain why we think the issue of creative labour in the cultural industries is a pressing one. We do so by explaining some of the political, economic and cultural circumstances surrounding the rise of what has been called a doctrine of creativity in recent years. Part of our purpose is to acknowledge that the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘creative’ have been abused and over-used. It will become clear that we nevertheless feel that they still refer to issues of great importance concerning the potential value of culture in people's lives. To sceptics, we would also say that to point to the motherhood-and-apple-pie banality of many uses of the term ‘creativity’ is nothing new. As the great Welsh writer Raymond Williams put it many years ago, ‘No word carries a more consistently positive reference than“creative”’ (1965/1961: 19). But Williams continued his sentence: ‘and obviously we should be glad of this, when we think of the values it seeks to express and the activities it offers to describe’. Those activities include the making of products that entertain, inform and even enlighten us, and the values potentially bound up in the term include the idea that, when done well, such products might enrich our lives and make the world a better place to be. This is not romanticism or mysticism; nor is it elitism. Our interest in the work behind cultural production is motivated by the same commitment to equality, social justice, well-being, and the democratisation of creativity that motivated Williams.

1.2 Creativity as doctrine

To create is simply to bring something into being. ‘Produce’ has a similar meaning but ‘create’ has strong implications of newness, invention, innovation, making something afresh. Originally applied to divine intervention, the word ‘creative’ became increasingly attached to art, thought and learning from the nineteenth century. The recent fetishisation of creativity in policy and academia draws on the prestige attached to these spheres in sections of nearly all societies and civilisations.⁵

How did the concept of creativity come to be the object of such reverence? Psychologists showed great interest in the term from the mid twentieth century.⁶ But it has been the attention of two groups in particular that has been decisive in making creativity a key word of the last three decades (1980 to 2010). One group consisted of management analysts, seeking in psychological theories the secrets of innovation and motivation as sources of competitive advantage. In the late 1950s, human relations management took up the ideas of humanist psychotherapists (McGregor 1960). By the 1980s, the booming academic fields of organisation, business and management studies were increasingly seeking in the concept of creativity a way of combining pursuit of the bottom line with a higher purpose.⁷ The other group was economists. Economic theories of endogenous growth, central to much governmental economic planning over the last twenty years (Aghion et al. 1998), assign a central role to idea generation, creativity and knowledge, and see human creativity as the ‘ultimate inexhaustible source of growth’ (Menger 2006: 801).⁸

Economic and management thinking had a direct impact on policy in the 1990s. In an era where government increasingly took many of its cues from business fashion, think tanks were soon portraying creativity as a key source of prosperity in the post-industrial city (Landry and Bianchini 1995) – a line of thinking eventually turned into zealous advocacy by some (Florida 2002). By the 2000s, in the words of Philip Schlesinger (2007: 378), creativity had become not merely a discourse but a doctrine for policy-makers, ‘an object of unceasing advocacy by its proponents’. While in business and management studies creativity may now be a little beyond its fashionable peak, its effects in public policy continue to resonate. It is not unusual these days to hear of a shift to innovation from creativity in policy discourse, but most of the same issues still apply.

The term ‘cultural industries’ had been widely used from the 1960s onwards, by sociologists and progressive policy-makers. But in the wake of economics and management's celebration of creativity, policy-makers in the 1990s began to prefer the formulation creative industries and new definitions that included such heterogeneous activities as architecture and antiques, designer fashion and film (DCMS 1998). Software was also included, and this allowed the sector to be presented as an area of special growth.⁹ For many politicians, ‘culture’ was a confusing word, redolent of vague and abstract theories. In the UK context for example it carried a continental European flavour that was often considered too pungent for British tastes. Creativity was a blander term: few would wish to take a strong stance against it.

Creative industries initiatives are in many respects versions of employment and education policies that have long aimed to replace the steadily declining role of manufacturing in national economies, under names such as ‘the information society’ and ‘the knowledge economy’ (see Garnham 2005). This is apparent in this extract from a 1997 article by the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was justifying his government's strategy of directing significant resources towards the development of creative industries:

Britain was once the workshop of the world …It was defined by shipbuilding, mining and heavy industry …Once again Britain can claim to be leading the way. We can say with pride that we are the ‘design workshop of the world’ – leading a creative revolution.

(quoted in Blair et al. 2001: 170)

The focus on creativity is by no means just a parochial British matter. In the People's Republic of China, creative industries policy is now incorporated into the five-year plans of various cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing (Ross 2009: 53). As Andrew Ross (2009: 43) points out, there are material influences behind the international spread of creative industries policies, in particular their relationship with the increasing importance of intellectual property, and with urban property markets, through dynamics of ‘regeneration’ and gentrification. Also, compared with other policy areas, such policies could be implemented cheaply, and easily marketed as benign interventions.

These policies have explicitly aimed to increase the number of jobs centred on symbol making in modern economies. Crucially, these creative jobs have been presented by policy-makers and other commentators as desirable not only because of their economic benefits, but also because they supposedly offer greater fulfilment and self-actualisation than other kinds of work. This extract from a publication called Your Creative Future, issued by the Department of Media, Culture and Sport, the Design Council and the Arts Council of England, offers a particularly wide-eyed version of such thinking:

Just imagine how good it feels to wake up every morning and really look forward to work. Imagine how good it feels to use your creativity, your skills, your talent to produce a film […] or to edit a magazine […] Are you there? Does it feel good?

(cited in Nixon and Crewe 2004: 129)

Recently, there has been a shift in creative industries policies, now rebranded under names such as ‘creative economy’ (Howkins 2001). In the UK at least, these recent initiatives are increasingly driven by a narrowly focused skills and employability agenda, which pays little attention to negative aspects of creative labour markets (see Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009).

Academics too have continued to celebrate creative work, and not only in management and economics. In his influential and widely read 2002 book on The Rise of the Creative Class, the geographer Richard Florida discusses why young people do not want to go into skilled craft jobs but instead want to work in creative jobs. Florida has a very broad definition of creative work, and the example he gives is working in a hair salon:

Sure, the pay isn’t as good, but the environment is more stimulating. It's more flexible; it's clean; you’re scheduled to meet your clients and then left alone with them, instead of grinding away to meet quotas and schedules with bosses looking over your shoulder. You get to work with interesting people and you’re always learning new things, the latest styles. You get to add your own touches and make creative decisions, because every customer is a new challenge, and you’re the one in charge. When you do good work, you see the results right away: People look good; they’re happy. If you are really talented, you can open your own salon. Maybe even become a hairdresser to the rich and famous.

(Florida 2002: 86)

In this passage, Florida concisely invokes a number of desirable features of work: flexibility, safety, autonomy, intrinsic interest, skill, the blending of conception and execution, recognition. This is an unlikely picture of working in most salons. He is not being ironic here, and while he appears to be paraphrasing the reasons given by young people about why they would prefer the hair salon to secure work in ‘machine shops’, he does very little in his book to distance himself from this beatific notion of creative work.¹⁰

1.3 The critical backlash, the debate and our own approach

There has been a backlash against such celebrations and simplifications of creative labour in government policy and academia. Pierre-Michel Menger, the leading sociologist of artistic labour markets, has discussed the role of artistic workers within such discourses as those outlined above. According to myth, says Menger (2006: 801), ‘artists supply the golden legend of creation, that of a subversive, anti-conformist, inspired behaviour, rebelling against social conventions and commercial utilitarianism’. Surveying a formidable body of statistical and qualitative evidence, Menger goes on to point out that in fact artistic work can be seen as characterised by conditions highly compliant with the demands of modern capitalism: ‘extreme flexibility, autonomy, tolerance of inequality, innovative forms of teamwork’ (ibid.).

Much of the backlash has come from cultural studies. Andrew Ross has done more than any other writer to develop a critical analysis of creative and artistic labour, including information technology work. In an early contribution, he claimed that

the traditional profile of the artist as unattached and adaptable to circumstance is surely now coming into its own as the ideal definition of the knowledge worker: comfortable in an ever-changing environment that demands creative shifts in communication with different kinds of clients and partners; attitudinally geared towards production that requires long, and often unsocial hours; and accustomed, in the sundry exercise of their mental labour, to a contingent rather than a fixed, routine of self-application.

(Ross 2000: 11)

A number of other critical analysts have also sought to show that the jobs offered by cultural and creative industries, and by different but related sectors such as information technology, are marked by high levels of insecurity, casualisation and long working hours. A key basis of the critique has been 'self-exploitation’, whereby workers become so enamoured with their jobs that they push themselves to the limits of their physical and emotional endurance.

We discuss some of the most notable contributions to such recent critical analysis in this book, especially in Chapter 3, but a flavour of their approach is indicated by this quotation from one pioneering researcher:

The willingness of individuals to work in television production is partly to be explained by the tantalizing possibilities thereby for securing social recognition and acclaim, that is self-affirmation and public esteem, and partly by the possibilities for self-actualization and creativity (be it aesthetic or commercially entrepreneurial). For the workers, television production is simultaneously a source of potential rewards, both material and existential, and a source of definite exploitation.

(Ursell 2000: 819)

According to such views, recognition, self-realisation and creativity become the basis for exploitation. This paradox has been at the core of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: can creative labour be good work?
• Part One Theoretical synthesis
• Part Two Empirical study
• Appendix: the interviews
• References
• Index