Normativity and Social Justice in the Analysis of Creative Labour

Abstract

There has been a remarkable rise in studies of creative or cultural labour in recent years. Much of this research has emerged from cultural studies. Cultural studies writers have drawn attention to political questions of subjectivity that tend to be neglected in Marxian and other approaches to labour. In doing so, they have drawn, directly and indirectly, on post-structuralist concepts and assumptions. I discuss these critical cultural studies approaches briefly in the first section of this article. My claim is that, in spite of their important contributions, such studies lack clear conceptions of what might constitute good work, including good work in the cultural industries (which is how 'creative labour' is defined here). This failure to offer an adequate normative grounding limits critique. To help fill this lacuna, I then outline research that emphasises concepts of autonomy and selfrealisation as components of good work (sections 2 and 3), followed by a post-structuralist critique of this research. I question this critique, in order to suggest some of the limits of post-structuralist perspectives on work more generally (section 4). These debates in the sociology of work and organisations do not directly concern creative or cultural work, but they throw important light on it. In particular, as I explain in section 5, they illustrate some of the problems of rejecting normativity in relation to labour. I begin the final part of the article (section 6) by claiming that debates about creative labour need to be considered as part of broader debates about the distribution of good or meaningful work across modern societies. Briefly referring to political philosophy's treatment of work, I suggest some ways in which attention to such issues might advance studies of creative labour.

Educating tomorrow’s media workers: television instruction at American institutions of higher learning, 1945–1960

“…Applying methods drawn from anthropology and cultural studies, production studies scholars have offered detailed accounts of everyday labor practices and struggles for worker agency (Caldwell, 2008;Mayer, 2011;Mayer, Banks, & Caldwell, 2009), while work in organizational communication has pursued similarly close analyses of management strategies and job satisfaction in creative industries (Deuze, 2007;Mumford, 2014). These micro-level approaches have produced rich understandings of media work and illuminated once-neglected forms of below-the-line labor, but have also been criticized for insufficient attention to larger structural forces that channel and limit creativity (Hesmondhalgh, 2010;Mosco, 2011). The present analysis combines elements of both macro-and micro-level approaches, delineating concrete sets of institutional practices while also attending to the larger structuring forces that shape them.…”

Be creative for the state: Creative workers in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises

“…This largely resonates with the critiques of the 'self-realization' discourse that I referred to earlier: it exposes 'self-realization' as a key aspiration for creative labour and its role as a governmental discourse that mobilizes the creative workforce in the creative economy (Hesmondhalgh, 2010;McRobbie, 2016). But, given the bureaucracy and the contingent autonomy, the question is how creative workers in Chinese SOCEs understand 'self-realization'?…”

“…If precarity of labour is a factor that leads to 'bad cultural work' (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013) can we suggest that the not-soprecarious work in Chinese SOCEs is a form of good cultural work? If the elaboration of concepts of self-realization, autonomy and creativity can produce a normative framework for defining 'good cultural work' (Hesmondhalgh, 2010) and engender any potential for what McRobbie calls 'reimagining notions of creative workplace politics' (2016), it might be necessary to take into account different socio-political specialities and perceive creative labour 'as an historically and geographically situated process, or processes, that can challenge more affirmative and proselytizing industry and academic perspectives' (Banks et al, 2013: 6).…”

Young Canadians’ Apprenticeship Labour in User-Generated Content

“…Immaterial labour in the domain of paid work is similarly rendered less exploitative through the concept of autonomy as incarnated within a range of creative and media-based professions, including fashion modelling (Wissinger, 2007), software development (Brophy, 2006), video game development (de Peuter & Dyer-Witheford, 2005;Kline et al, 2003), television industry work (Hearn, 2010;Stahl, 2010), and new media work (Gill & Pratt, 2008;Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin, 2005;Ross, 2004), in addition to non-remunerated modes of work such as in the open-source software movement (Terranova, 2004(Terranova, , 2006, and in Internet platforms like MySpace (Coté & Pybus, 2007) and America OnLine (Postigo, 2003). Immaterial labour has thus been an extremely productive concept in this regard despite its shortcomings, which have been vigorously critiqued by David Hesmondhalgh (2010) and others to include the neglect of political questions of subjectivity within notions of liberatory autonomy (see also Camfield, 2007;Dowling, 2007;Hearn, 2010). To contribute to this critique, I propose the integration of a number of other perspectives with the Autonomist account: Arlie Hochschild's (1983) "emotional labour"; Dallas Smythe's (1981) "audience commodity"; and Pierre Bourdieu's (1984) "new cultural intermediaries.…”

“…(Hearn, 2008, p. 201) This branded self is a necessary construct for negotiating the precarity of creative industry careers, which raises the question of the limits of any normative conception of autonomy in this context. David Hesmondhalgh (2010) notes that any designation of cultural work as autonomous or self-realizing might be critiqued from a broadly poststructuralist perspective on the social construction of identity, and indeed from a Marxist perspective on how a sense of personal autonomy is the necessary condition of the worker's own self-exploitation. Here identity can be seen as an expressly political construct in that, as Hesmondhalgh asserts, framing autonomy and self-realization as normative concepts implicates understandings of justice in cultural work-work performed by mostly white, middle-class, educated people according to larger structures of privilege.…”