By drawing on ethnographic data gathered from British and Malaysian Islamic television channels between 2012 and 2017, this article argues that different religiopolitical and sociocultural environments in which such television production workers as creative managers, producers and researchers exist, shape how they make creative decisions for religious programmes that they produced. This article points to the extent to which these television production workers from both the British and Malaysian television channels have various degrees of creative autonomy, and how 'limited' creative autonomy affects their working life. The results show that the creative managers and producers of British Muslim television channel have lesser autonomy than their Malaysian counterparts. The clash between the Western and Islamic cultures and intergenerational clash are mainly the forms of religiopolitical and sociocultural factors that shape the creative autonomy in Islamic television production in Britain. Such representational issues relating to religious personalities, music artists and performances, and women, are among the constraints that these workers faced. By contrast, creative managers and producers in Malaysia, have some degree of autonomy. Unlike their British colleagues, religiopolitical and sociocultural factors concerning identity politics have less implication for their working life. Nonetheless, despite having a higher level of creative autonomy than their British equals, their creative decisions often are driven by the notion of giving what audiences want. Such commercial pressures as audience ratings and advertising force are the primary factors that shape the creative autonomy of managers and producers of Islamic programmes in Malaysia.
This article examines the quality of work life in Islam-based television by focusing on the emotional wellbeing of television production workers. It identifies the extent of religious television a humanised workplace at the turn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The study draws upon literature from media sociology and cultural studies approaches to creative labour in two folds by addressing the implications of 4IR for 1) human (television production workers), including such concepts as human emotional and spiritual intelligence, and emotional labour, and 2) for the quality of work life in television production, through the discourses of human-robot interaction (HRI) and humanised workplace. The analyses of an ethnographic data gathered from television stations in London and Kuala Lumpur indicate that television production work demands a different degree of emotional labour, depending on their professional roles, tasks, and the genre that they produced. The study concludes that doing emotional labour in the 4IR requires television production workers to renegotiate their professional roles not only with other humans, but also with robots/machines as robots/machines have increasingly taken over their production tasks. Such forms of negotiation and the rise of robots/machines resulting from the 4IR do affect the quality of work life in religious television.
This article examines the power dynamics that shape the production culture of the Islam Channel, a Muslim television based in London. A study of production culture is critical as it stands to support our understanding of how religious television programming comes to take the form it does. This article adopts the discourses of the ‘clash’ drawn from culturalist Samuel Huntington and reformist Edward Said’s theses to identify the power dynamics facing the Channel. The study employs an ethnographic research design that forms a two-layer analysis that includes the sociocultural environment that the Channel exists and its institutional context. While the first layer of the research design discusses the discourses of the ‘clash’ that exist in the western society, the latter examines the missionary (da’wah) goals of the Channel. The results of the analysis point to the extent to which the missionary (da’wah) goals of the Channel manifest the ‘clash’ that shape its production culture and the ‘clash’ between the western and Muslim cultures. The Channel’s endeavour to seclude itself from ‘a suspect community’ (e.g., fundamentalists and extremists) has nurtured the ‘culture of caution’ among members of the production community at the Islam Channel. Such a ‘culture of caution’ has impacted the production quality and working life of employees involved in the production of magazine talk show Living the Life (2012 – present).
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