This book is concerned with providing a critical understanding of how knowledge work is changing with the integration of digital technologies into processes of production and organisation. It starts from the fundamental assumption that the conditions of existence of today’s knowledge work are the consequence of slightly more than a decade of frenzy around the concepts of ‘creativity’ and ‘ creative’, and that these have now completed their delinking from the purely artistic and leisure domain to become fully integrated into a managerial and organisational logic of knowledge production founded on creativity. This now results in a number of processes that are changing existing jobs and forms of professional work in various contexts of the knowledge economy, particularly—but not exclusively—as these meet with the digital media industries.
Based primarily on a doctoral research that focused on independent and freelance workers in the knowledge economy at various levels of experience, age and skills, undertaken between 2011 and 2013 across two urban international contexts— London and Milan—and a digital marketplace— Elance, now known as Upwork—this books offers an outline of how knowledge work has changed as a result of the ideological valorisation of creativity as a mantra for innovation and professional advancement, and how this combined with the rise of digital and social media—henceforth rendering knowledge work a digital and freelance knowledge economy centred, it is here argued, around a shared, diffused cultural notion of reputation as value.
This book contends that conceiving reputation as a form of value should be seen as the main interpretative paradigm of knowledge work in the digital age, and provides a contextualisation of how this inserts into a broader dynamic of transformation of work alongside technological advancements in the aftermath of the recession. To do so, in addition to the primary empirical data, this book benefits of secondary empirical materials that come from two other projects I have participated with in 2014 in my post-doctoral work—an international study on so called, and the first year activity of an EU-funded project on commons-based peer production (CBPP).
By combining all these sources together in a single contribution, this book provides an unprecedented comprehensive acknowledgement of the role of reputation as a specific form of individual social capital for knowledge workers, that finds empirical visibility and potential measurability across online social media platforms and algorithms. Reputation comes to be shared by participants in these environments as a cultural conception of value that is principled on the fact that knowledge workers have interiorised an ideological celebration of entrepreneurship and creativity, and become the protagonists of a job market characterised by a notion of venture labour. 1 Reputation is an object ‘traded’ by knowledge workers in a labour market where they operate as independent professionals treating their own reputation as an economic asset—a reputational capital that represents an investment in social relations with expectations of economic return, and is decisive for job procurement.
The various empirical sources, which will be discussed in the book from a comprehensively critical perspective, show how knowledge work has been colonised by the logics of creative labour and has simultaneously integrated digital technologies into a variety of processes, for a digital and freelance workforce that bears the contours of a multi-functional professional category with original features. This, it is here argued, renders the photograph of a socio-cultural and socio-economic professional scene based on the managerialisation of social relations and the multiplication of the channels through which these are pursued, maintained and mediated. This dynamic should be understood within the broader transformation of work that originates in the socio-political affirmation of neoliberalism as an ideology-turned-culture that pursues the reduction of labour costs and the flexibilisation of employment for purposes of increasing accumulation—which now finds workers happily embracing a context which Angela McRobbie has described as a marriage between counterculture and the financial economy.2 This is the starting point of the present discussion.
A Brief History of Knowledge Work and Creativity
In broader socio-economic terms, the last 30 years have been the era of ‘posts’. A fordist society based on the industrial mass production of goods in specific places (i.e., factories) and the availability of lifelong full-time jobs—a society where mass media served the aim of fuelling desire for the mass consumption of those goods—has witnessed an evolution towards what came to be defined as a post-industrial society, centred upon a post-fordist mode of production based on financial accumulation and the valorisation of information.3 The comprehensive combination of these instances brought knowledge workers into a central position. The pioneering vision of an information-based and service-driven economy where workers are able to capitalise on their own knowledge and skills, envisaged earlier in the twentieth century by thinkers such as Peter Drucker and Daniel Bell,4 became a reality across the 1980s and 1990s, representing the latest evolution of a bourgeois mode of production founded on the rise of the middle class as the main productive subject in society, as described by Karl Marx in Das Kapital.5
Yet, this period in history coincides with the surge of a set of economic policies that we commonly refer to as neoliberalism.6 By placing individual entrepreneurial initiative at the centre of an ideological approach to free markets, neoliberalism consisted in practice not only in the loosening of regulatory frameworks for economic and financial activities, but also—and crucially for the purposes of this book—in the liberalisation of employment regimes and regulations, favouring the diffusion of more flexible forms of work, plotted as a way to liberate entrepreneurship and individual economic action from the constraints of bureaucratic institutions.
The quick rise of neoliberal policies to a hegemonic status across the Western economies rapidly transformed the generalised flexibilisation of employment relations in a mantra that propelled a comprehensive individualisation and entrepreneurialisation of the knowledge workforce. This paired up with—and grew upon—the generalised enthusiasm around a supposedly emerging ‘new economy’ brought by the Internet, in the rise of what Manuel Castells famously defined as a network society.7 Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor of Bill Clinton’s administration, in the book The Work of Nations, envisaged a society where new media workers were to become ‘model entrepreneurs’ of a new knowledge economy rushing to embrace with open arms the diffusion of digital technologies.8 Similarly, the Blair era in the UK politically marketed with success the cultural notion of ‘cool Britannia’ that celebrated the centrality of the creative and cultural industries as an engine of innovation and economic growth for the country.9
A new typology of jobs, based on the valorisation of creativity as a process to add surplus value to products of knowledge, became fashionable and diffused over this so-called new economy. These quickly established as a combination of entrepreneurial activity, individual talent and creativity and broadly colonised a variety of sectors caught in the middle of a momentous frenzy for technological advancement and the diffusion of digital media. This frenzy gave rise to what arguably is the most controversial cultural product that resulted from the hegemonic popularisation of a culture of economic advancement around knowledge professions based on creativity: the myth of the rise of a creative class of knowledge workers.
This grew up across the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s following the publication of Richard Florida’s same name bestseller,10 which propelled a narrative of individual self-realisation by means that combine social recognition, lifestyle and creative entrepreneurial activity across knowledge and especially media-related professions within the new economy. Florida’s argument is based on the assumption that a widespread diffusion of jobs based on creativity and individual talent was destined to bring a new era of economic development and prosperity through the rise of this new socio-economic subject, the ‘ creative class’. The term identifies an undistinguished ensemble of urban, young knowledge workers employed in broadly different jobs, sharing a common ethos for creativity, innovation and individualism.
Despite quickly surging as a popular concept adopted by policy makers and city planners, who soon started to project the development of ‘ creative cities’,11 the idea of a creative class attracted substantial criticism by a number of authors such as Jamie Peck, Mike Storper and Allen Scott in the USA, Andy Pratt, Rosalind Gill and David Hesmondhalgh in the UK, among others. The basic criticism raised by these authors concerns the celebratory framework that characterises the creative class vision, which neglects social inequalities and class divisions diluted within the ‘coolness’ of the emerging economy, and reduces class categorisation to a mere taxonomy based on lifestyle that conflicts with the notion of class as traditionally conceived in sociological terms.12 This argument often comes together with the criticism of the idea that the presence of creative talent in a region is functional to economic development, in that it generates growth and jobs. Research has evidenced, on the contrary, how individuals endowed by such human capital are likely to move only where employment opportunities are already available in order to profit on their investment in higher education and professional skills.13
The critique to the creative class vision has seen many critical media scholars adopting an Autonomist Marxist approach, to highlight issues related to employment precariousness, job security and flexibility. These authors have been flagging up the many forms of ‘flexible exploitation’ that are at stake in the world of ‘ creative labour’, basically sustaining that Florida simply ignores many of the critical aspects at stake with creative jobs in the knowledge industry.14 Particularly, such critique focuses on the role and extent of an individual worker’s subjectivity and the way this is put at value through the notion of creativity. This builds on the idea that knowledge work in the new economy is an example of ‘immaterial labour’, defined by Maurizio Lazzarato as the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of a commodity—that is, the outcome of activities that no longer pertain to the domain of material industrial production but actually to the valorisation of cognitive and cultural features.15 The essential trait of the ‘immaterial worker’ is what another Autonomist exponent, Paolo Virno, calls virtuosity—meaning the aproductive, self-referential activity of the post-fordist knowledge worker whose labour shares characteristics with the ‘performance’ and the ‘score’ of an artist.16
Based on this approach, Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt (2008) describe the dynamics of work in the knowledge economy based on creativity, as a ‘social factory’—a ...