This article compares the work of fashion models and 'new media workers' (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participantobservation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are drawn to the autonomy, creativity and excitement that jobs in these media industries can provide, they have also come to accept as normal the high risks associated with this work. Diffused through media images, this normalization of risk serves as a model for how workers in other industries should behave under flexible employment conditions. Using interview data from within the fashion media and the dot-com world, we discuss eight forces that give rise to the phenomenon of entrepreneurial labor: 1) the cultural quality of cool, 2) creativity, 3) autonomy, 4) selfinvestment, 5) compulsory networking, 6) portfolio evaluations, 7) international competition, and 8) foreshortened careers. We also provide a model of what constitutes the hierarchy of 'good work' in cultural industries, and we conclude with implications of what entrepreneurial labor means for theories of work. 1 Media industries, in part influenced by the unpredictable audience reception of their products, have long dealt with the problem of how to stimulate creativity in the face of organizational and industrial uncertainty (Hirsch 1972, Caves 2002, Biebly and Biebly 1994, Peterson and Anand 2004). One way that media industries negotiate the dual pressures of innovation and uncertainty is through changing workplace norms. Indeed, one of the first and most important scholarly studies of flexibility in the workplace traces shifts in employment relations in the film industry from the relatively stable days of the studio system to the present flexible organization of jobs and contractors (Christopherson and Storper 1989). Since the 1970s, there has also been a more general trend in the post-industrial economy toward greater employment insecurity. 'Nonstandard employment,' or work outside of a fulltime, permanent arrangement, is on the rise across all economic sectors in the United States (Kalleberg et al 2000) as well as in other regions. Practices ranging from firing then rehiring employees as independent contractors (Treaster 2001) to retaining 'permatemps' within fastgrowing industries (Smith 2001) and demanding that employees 'keep up' with new skills on their own time (Kotamraju 2002), press workers to accept more risk and greater responsibility. Understandably, adapting to these demands has altered individuals' attachment to work and their sense of self (Beck 1992; Beck 2000; Sennett 1999; Smith 2001). This article looks at two distinct groups of workers in the contemporary media industries-fashion models and 'new media workers' or those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet-to trace the processes b...
This paper addresses itself to literature on 'aesthetic labour' in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming 'enterprising' with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a 'cardboard cut-out', and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or 'body/self', and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project 'personality' requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on-going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are 'always on'. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003) would have it.
This article explores the aesthetic labor of embodying race. The author’s research on fashion models in New York City uncovered a demand for aesthetic labor that differs along racial lines, namely, black models must fit themselves to a narrower set of standards, and experience their race as both an asset and a liability. This difference is evident in the context of the market for black models, where the “white gaze,” and the “corporate gaze” intersect. Yet both employers’ desire for workers with a particular “look,” and workers’ willingness to call on personal resources to style that “look” for the job foster a structural bias toward racist practices that are masked by appeals to “aesthetics.” Managing one’s racial appearance reveals a unique quality of aesthetic labor that emerges only when race is taken into account, arguing for its inclusion among the characteristics workers manipulate when their work is studied as aesthetic labor.
New forms of wearable technology are blurring the lines between technology and bodies, raising questions about personhood, selfhood, and what it means to be human. Consequently, scholars are examining these iterations of body/machine interface and human machine communication from a variety of angles. While fashion scholars focused primarily on garments and celebrating potential techno-futures, media and communication scholars more critically examined how wearable tech mediates bodies and relationships. Social scientists are concerned with issues of labor, privacy, data ownership, and value, drawing on ethnographic studies of the Quantified Self (QS) community and the phenomenon of self-tracking more generally. This scholarship is rooted in studies and theorizations of ubiquitous computing, feminist science and technology studies (STS), and fashion and dress as both ornament and second skin. Generally, it asks how wearable technology can augment the human body, how it affects human relationships to self and other, and whether wearable technology can promote human autonomy, when it is locked into commercial and power relationships that don't necessarily have the users' best interests at heart. The essay ends by briefly outlining of directions for further research, urging further investigation into wearable tech exhibiting gendered attitudes toward "femme" women, and calling for increased attention to issues raised by wearable technology's coming merger with the growing fields of biotech and synthetic biology.
CUNYTwiggy, the impossibly lean and girlish 1960s model, shocked the fashion system, jarring it into a shift in tone. Many women sought to do the glamour work of copying her coltish charms, heedless of the impossibility of replicating them. Unlike the elegantly exclusive dames preceding her, Twiggy was everyone's model, her popularity spreading far beyond fashion magazines. Within months of hitting the scene, according to model historian Bridget Keenan's account, Twiggy was everywhere:Car stickers said FORGET OXFAM FEED TWIGGY, there were Twiggy clothes, Twiggy eyelashes, Twiggy dummies in shop windows and in Madame Tussaud's. Twiggy was taken to Paris to comment on the collections, and her ingenuous Wissinger, Elizabeth. (2015)#NoFilter: Models, Glamour La-bor, and the Age of the
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.