From passionate labour to compassionate work: Cultural co-ops, do what you love and social change

Abstract

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From Passion to Compassion: A Caring Inquiry into Creative Work as Socially Engaged Art

“…Sociologists studying creative work have long recognized the need to develop a stronger critique of the tendencies – engendered by neoliberal exhortations of individualism and self-reliance – of ‘de-socialization’ and ‘de-politicization’ in creative work (McRobbie, 2002; Umney, 2017). Sharing a normative working hypothesis that ‘the social critique’, involving considerations of solidarity, equality and security, should not be incompatible with ‘the artistic critique’, scholars have recently started investigating the communitarian dimensions of creative work as they occur in collaborative co-working spaces (Gandini, 2015; Merkel, 2019) and within alternative self-organized spaces of resistance to individualism, such as artist cooperatives (Sandoval, 2018) and labour rights movements (Percival and Hesmondhalgh, 2014).…”

“…Such an understanding of ‘moral work’ enables these scholars to make an important normative argument for ‘good work’ and ‘creative justice’, whereby workers ‘care about’ changing and bettering society by leveraging the symbolic, emancipatory, politically progressive value of their artistic products to enhance people’s lives (Banks, 2017; Hesmondhalgh, 2017). Sociologists have recently also empirically documented the ethical motivations within specific art worlds, including considerations of fairness and egalitarianism (Sandoval, 2018; Umney, 2017), social change (Serafini, 2018) and ‘social enterprise’, encompassing creative workers’ ‘commitment to wider community, ecological and social issues’ (McRobbie, 2016a: 118).…”

“…Considerations of mutual help, solidarity, human well-being and social engagement foreground creative work as ‘other-centred’ work (see also Alacovska and Bissonnette, 2019). Contributing to emerging studies of the socialized nature of creative work (Banks, 2017; Sandoval, 2018), this article has argued that ‘unobligated’ relationships and practices of care and compassion, grounded in everyday pragmatism of ‘being-with-Others’ in the world (Heidegger, 1996), underpin creative work. Such care work rekindles hope in the possibility of the existence of ‘a better world’.…”

Creative economies of tomorrow? Limits to growth and the uncertain future

“…see de Peuter & Cohen, 2015). Researches on cultural and creative co-ops, non-profits, and different kinds of sharing or social economy have also begun to emerge (McRobbie, 2011;Sandoval, 2017). Such work serves to illustrate how creative production tends to be suffused with cultural values, and concerns for quality of life and well-being that conventional measures of "growth" are unable to captureand how growth critique might itself be fomented.…”

‘I’m Not a Bloody Slave, I Get Paid and if I Don’t Get Paid Then Nothing Happens’: Sarah’s Experience of Being a Student Sex Worker

“…However, for Sarah, leaving sex work behind was (at the time of interview) difficult to fathom -even at times of economic stability -for reasons other than making money. Sandoval (2018) argues that in post-Fordist popular culture, individuals are continually encouraged to resist the idea of working for money alone and to instead 'do what you love' despite potentially 'unlovable' working conditions and precarity. Across different sectors, work is increasingly posited as a key site of self-fulfilment, fun and pleasure.…”