Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural

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-realisation, 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 21 st 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.

Acknowlegments	p. xi
Introduction: can creative labour be good work?	p. 1
Good and bad work in the cultural industries	p. 1
Creativity as doctrine	p. 3
The critical backlash, the debate and our own approach	p. 6
Definitions and boundaries	p. 9
Research design: selection of industries and cases	p. 10
Methods: interviews and participant observation	p. 15
Outline of the book	p. 17
Theoretical synthesis	p. 23
A model of good and bad work	p. 25
Marx on work and alienation	p. 25
A sociological concept of alienation	p. 27
Towards a model of good and bad work beyond alienation	p. 30
Good products as good work	p. 35
Autonomy as a feature of good work?	p. 39
Self-realisation as a feature of good work?	p. 43
Post-structuralist critique of work and the problem of values	p. 44
Subjective experience	p. 50
The specificity of creative labour	p. 52
Outline of the chapter	p. 52
Three approaches to cultural production	p. 53
General neglect of labour in studies of cultural production and possible reasons	p. 55
Political economy and the specificity of creative labour	p. 56
Raymond Williams on the specificity of creative labour: the communication of experience	p. 60
A critical conception of creative autonomy and its two variants	p. 61
Creative work and social class	p. 67
Cultural studies on creative labour: subjectivity and self-exploitation	p. 70
The debate about creative work	p. 75
Empirical study	p. 79
The management of autonomy, creativity and commerce	p. 81
Creativity, commerce and organisations	p. 81
The creative management function	p. 83
Managing creative autonomy: magazines	p. 86
Managing creative autonomy: the case of music recording	p. 92
Pressures of autonomy (1): marketisation in broadcasting	p. 95
Pressures on autonomy (2): the rising power of marketing	p. 103
Anxieties about autonomy	p. 105
Pressures on autonomy (3): the obligation to network	p. 108
Conclusions	p. 111
Pay, hours, security, involvement, esteem and freedom	p. 113
Quality of working life in the cultural industries	p. 113
Pay, working hours and unions	p. 114
Security and risk	p. 121
Esteem and self-esteem	p. 123
Challenge, interest and involvement	p. 127
The experience of autonomy	p. 136
Ambivalent experiences	p. 137
Creative careers, self-realisation and society	p. 139
Decline of the career?	p. 139
Finding the right creative occupation	p. 141
The fragility of creative careers	p. 145
Defining yourself too much through creative work	p. 148
Teamwork, socialising, networking	p. 152
Isolation	p. 156
Self-realisation and sociality: ambivalent features of modern creative labour	p. 157
Emotional and affective labour	p. 159
Immaterial labour, affective labour and 'precarity'	p. 159
Emotional labour	p. 161
Media labour and symbolic power	p. 164
The talent show: budget, commissioners and independents	p. 166
Emotional labour and the anxieties of star-making	p. 170
Pleasure and sociality on the production team	p. 173
Affective labour and immanent cooperation?	p. 176
Conclusions	p. 179
Creative products, good and bad	p. 181
Questions of quality	p. 181
Pleasures and satisfactions of making good cultural products	p. 182
Conceptions of good texts	p. 187
Bad texts: frustration and disappointment	p. 190
Conceptions and explanations of poor quality work	p. 192
Negative and positive experiences of quality	p. 198
Audiences, quality and the meaning of creative work	p. 200
Creative workers thinking about what audiences think	p. 200
Magazines: is the reader everything?	p. 201
Music: a communicative thing or a private thing?	p. 206
What can audiences handle?	p. 210
Television and audience size: ratings tyranny?	p. 214
Audiences, ambivalence and projection	p. 219
The politics of good and bad work	p. 220
The hardest way to make an easy living?	p. 220
Work and life: choosing not to self-exploit?	p. 226
Spreading good and bad work: how intractable is the social division of labour?	p. 228
Appendix: the interviews	p. 235
References	p. 238
Index	p. 253
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries

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