Creative Labour

Working in the Creative Industries

Alan McKinlay, Chris Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781350305120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gestion des ressources humaines

Creative Labour provides an insight into the unique employment issues affecting workers in film, television, theatre, arts, music, radio and new media. In the UK alone, more than 1 million people work in the creative industries, generating billions of pounds in exports each year. These workers have to contend with elastic working hours, employment and promotion uncertainty and vigorous competition for each role. Creative Labour offers a contemporary perspective on a fascinating area of study and a rapidly growing area in developed economies. Key benefits: - Grasp the realities of work behind the industry façade - Evaluate real-life case-studies through a flexible, critical mindset - Tailor your management decisions to the needs of creative staff

Part I

Theory and Overview

CHAPTER 1

Creative Industries and Labour Process Analysis

Chris Smith and Alan McKinlay Introduction

Introduction

Definitional problems beset the field. What precisely are creative industries and who works in them; what do they produce and are these products commodities or goods with special social and national as well as private individual utility? How are creative goods distributed and how does the form of distribution affect the character of the product; how is a live concert or performance different from a recorded one, and what is the precise relationship between performance, audience and production? Is there a unified definition of the organisational field of creative industries and do those working in this field share common work organisation, employment relations, motivation and purpose?

Overarching terminology used to capture the entire field has shifted from the idea of the arts to cultural industries to creative industries. The concept of the arts is widely used as a sub-set for theatre, music and many branches of long-established creative expression with solo or ensemble production at its centre. An art also has the connotation of skill, talent or ability, thus drawing attention to the idea of an artist as a trained but also innovative person, with a gift or knack that might be innate, person-specific and hence not easily learnable; hence the centrality of individual expression, calling and aptitude in the arts. Asset or skill specificity is highly individualised, specific to the person, not occupation or company which is more typical of external and internal labour markets (Osterman, 1984: 174). This makes creative labour in the arts comparatively distinct. When generalised to sectors outside this tight list, such as advertising or new media, the term the arts loses purchase because the production system and skill structures in these sectors are different. There are also intense problems of ranking or stratification of taste, with notions of high and low brow, mass and elitist products, tastes and markets. But for reasons of narrowness, the concept of the arts is no longer used by those wishing to capture the entire field.

The idea of cultural industries raises the opposite problem of being too eclectic and broad. This is because the concept of culture is notoriously opaque, embracing as it does the role of tradition, identity, values and social belonging, with links into sub-cultures, multi-cultures and cultures as expressions of group identities, whether as national culture or youth cultures, counter-cultures or black and ethnic minority cultural identity. How these social manifestations of cultural identity are linked to notions of creativity or an industry or commercial production is a major problem, although culture has the advantage of placing social groups, society and broad definitions of producers and consumers of culture at the centre of the debate (O’Connor, 2007). Cultural industries as a term has the major disadvantage because of boundary problems – what to include and what to exclude in the term culture – and the relationship between social and unique or individual production, which is central to ideas of creativity. It also lacks a strong connection to a political economy, as commercialisation of life styles and youth cultures are within industries (fashion and clothing) with conventional mass or batch production labour processes, and are not usefully defined as creative.

Creative industries is the new dominant and politically fashionable term being more inclusive of new and old sectors, such as theatre and new media, but sufficiently discriminating so as to produce a relatively clear industry category. Nevertheless many insist that the term creative industry is too broad, as leading with the term ‘creative’ makes it difficult to discriminate between scientific/technical creativity and artistic creativity (Haunschild, 2008; Pratt, 2005). However we favour this term in this book to help explore the work of those working within traditional and new sectors that share certain features of innovation, risk, uncertainty, performativity and differentiation from repeat or mass production sectors.¹

This book is not about definitional themes however, but will instead focus on the production of creative or artistic products, and the labour processes, employment relations and organisation of work that surround the different production processes. These labour processes vary across numerous components of the creative industries, and the book will explore the commonalities and differences between industry segments. Variation in work organisation and structure of the same branches also exists across various national contexts, and the theme of comparative difference is explored across several chapters. Comparative research is important for examining truth statements about ‘an industry’ or occupational group, as comparative research immediately reveals local prejudices and differentiation, thus testing the robustness of categorical statements about essential features of a particular field. An important part of a labour process account of creative labour in this book is to suggest that one cannot adequately or rigidly divide human labour power into creative and non-creative absolutes, as all human labour involves some creative elements, such that envisioning or imagining producing something prior to doing or execution is part of what it is to be human. We will pick this critique up in Chapter 2.

The purpose of the book is to look inside the production or work process of different creative industries, because how work is structured and what people do when they make creative products remains relatively under-researched. Authors within the book use a labour process perspective to different degrees, as what characterises this approach is a focus on production relations, and issues of control and authority, wage-effort exchanges, conflict and social or class relations between the owners of creative capital and those who work as employees or freelancers to help expand the value of this capital and their share of it. A labour process perspective, as we discuss below, looks inside the experience or actuality of production processes and reveals how inputs of human labour, machinery and ‘raw materials’ are transformed into finished products, which within a capitalist political economy, means creation for the purpose of profit or accumulating more capital, by producing use values which possess high value for both producers and consumers. Applying this framework to labour processes in film, television, theatre and new media will help interrogate some of the broader claims for the creative industries as unique or special sites of production compared with other branches of the economy.

Themes in the book include changes to the division of labour and job structures in key branches of creative industries; the expansion of jobs and reduction in wages as labour supply expands and capital moves around geographically to reduce production costs; the role of social networks for distributing information (especially job information) and people within the industry; the idea of craft or profession in some creative industries and its absence in others; the role of space as a type of social capital – for aggregating companies and people – and how spatial concentrations of creative capital and creative labour are undergoing important shifts as work is decentred, globalised and distributed away from established locations (such as Hollywood) and the consequences this has for jobs, getting work and the intensity of work. Before examining in detail the structure of the book and the contents of the different chapters, we will briefly outline some of the different ways in which creative industries have been theorised and described.

The creative industries, labour and the state

The creative industries – film, theatre, television, radio, arts and new media – have become a distinctive and expanded sub-sector of the economies of many advanced capitalist countries. Some writers have even suggested a new class of employees – ‘creative workers’ – have emerged in cosmopolitan centres and cities, with their own identity, interests, employment structure, work ethic and networks of organisation and communication that are distinct from other occupational classes (Florida, 2002). The coherence of this ‘class’ has been questioned however. O’Connor (2007: 39) notes that Florida’s creative class is an ‘agglomeration’ of creative professions’ and the ‘book is marked by an absence of any empirical investigation into what [the creative class] is (Healy, 2002; Peck, 2005; Montgomery, 2005).’ At best this is ‘occupational class’; in other words part of the internal differentiation within the waged population of workers; but there is also ambiguity as sellers of creative skills are also a class of petty-owners, and hence class in both a Weberian and Marxist sense can be applied to the category. It is an occupational structure stratified by levels of skills and expertise (which in Florida’s case are the vague skills of ‘intelligence, knowledge and creativity’), which produce distinctions between the owners of these skills and other waged workers, and not just between the sellers of these skills and those that buy and put them to work. We would suggest that whatever differentiations are opened up between skilled and less skilled workers (and skill hierarchies are normal in all labour markets) it is as sellers of labour power that they are united in having to enter labour processes to exchange these labour services for wages, and it is the exchange with owners that is the central economic and class relation, and not internal differentiation as waged workers.

Florida says that the skills or assets that the creative [occupational] class possess, is a creative capacity which is ‘an intangible because it is literally in their heads’ (Florida, 2002: 68). Capacity expresses precisely the commodity waged workers sell in the market place, but, as Warhurst and Thompson (2006) note, for ‘that capacity to have any utility, it must be transferred from heads to balance sheets via forms of managing knowledge and creativity’ and hence we need to explore the dominant relationship between sellers and buyers of ‘creative capacity’ and not assume that possession of this capacity itself has any economic or sociological novelty. The claim by Florida that the creative class ‘are paid to create and have considerably more autonomy and flexibility ...to do so’ than those ‘primarily paid to execute or plan’ raises the problem of not only the uniqueness of this activity to this field, but also the classificatory problem of abstracting creativity, as defined above, as an economic or social category. As Haunschild (2008: 253) has noted: ‘since the creation of ‘new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content’ is not limited to arts, music and entertainment, but is also a core phenomenon of science and engineering, architecture and education, this perspective [a focus on the content of labour] further broadens the definition of creative industries.’

The complicating factor of labour power in the creative industries is the diversity of ownership of the means of production and problematic for the worker of selling or realising labour power through a production or labour process. Some occupational segments may own their means of production (instruments in the case of musicians, for example), and operate as jobbing producers moving from project to project, or venue to venue and hence share labour power features with many jobbing craft workers. They will also seek, as petty commodity producers, to control their intellectual product or property when this is commercialised, and there are major struggles between creative workers and employers over Intellectual Property (IP), especially in relationship to repeats or residuals – a significant issue in the 2007–2008 strike by the Writers Guild of America.² The degree of movement between self-employment, employee status and petty producer or owner positions seen in some segments is in contrast to creative occupations that are more typically wage labourers selling their skills or expertise as labour power – voice, looks, embodied and highly personal labour power as in the case of actors for example – through a collective production process and without a continued claim on the intellectual product or profit beyond the hours contracted to produce it. Often, this labour power is idle or not working to reproduce itself in a creative labour process. A typical actor is not usually acting but earning money through non-acting work, yet the individual will maintain a strong craft identity as an actor, and see not working, that is not being in a production process, as normal for the industry. Hence self definition and working practice are not always concurrent; and the under-utilisation of creative labour power is a major feature of segments of the sector, as there are always more people wishing to join the industry for the available demand, and the costs of maintaining this labour power is borne in other sectors, the family of the worker or through capital resources owned by the creative worker. These constraints often confine recruitment into certain segments of the creative industries to those with these other resources, and hence those from middle or upper middle class backgrounds have favoured entry. They also make the business of finding work – bringing labour power to the market – hugely problematic compared with most other labour processes. Hence much of the literature on working in the sector – and several chapters in this book – explore precisely this problematic of realisation, namely the difficulty of uniting labour power with labour processes, which strongly defines the experience of ‘working’ in the creative industries.

Returning to sector terminology, beyond looking at the content of creative labour, other approaches have preferred to focus on the special features of creative industries, arguing that there are a range of creative and non-creative occupations employed within this sector, which all share the features of the sector, most especially the precariousness of the market for creative products (Caves, 2000). Success factors normal in mass industries are absent in the creative industries where a ‘no-body knows anything’ argument remains dominant, as in the film industry where despite massive attempts to reduce uncertainty through star systems, blockbusters, big budgets, ownership concentration and formulaic production – uncertainty remains and expensive flops are normal (De Vany, 2004). According to this perspective the risk and unpredictability of production and consumption shape the dynamic of the industry, and the sector is defined by outputs. Hence production for the supply of ‘goods and services that we broadly define as cultural, artistic or simply entertainment value’ (Caves, 2000: 1) are what constitutes creative industries and these ‘products’ are significantly different from mass production products because of the uncertainty surrounding their consumption or marketability. Caves’ approach has the advantage of arguing that not all work in the creative industries is creative as defined by Florida, but consists of what he calls ‘motley crews’ of differentiated occupations. But to stress market uncertainty in the selling of creative products as unique, misses huge uncertainties in other areas of commodity production (even mass confectionery for example, Smith et al, 1990). More importantly it misses shifts in product markets everywhere to more turbulence, and hence suggestions of flexible specialisation or mass customisation, which despite being overblown, do highlight more rapid rates of product obsolescence, competitive pressures and increased uncertainty in more globalised markets.

Agents in the creative industries are not simply labour and capital; governments play a role because some of the goods produced in the sector are treated as public goods, for example those with educational value; others have national or cultural value, both for internal purposes of social or ideological control, and also for inter-country competition and prestige. Finally, state...