“There’s No Way That You Get Paid to Do the Arts”: Unpaid Labour Across the Cultural and Creative Life Course

Abstract

Unpaid labour is an important element of how precarity has been theorised. It is also an issue that is often seen as endemic to cultural and creative work. Questions as to the role of unpaid work, including but not limited to unpaid internships, have become central to understanding how the social exclusiveness of many cultural and creative jobs is reinforced through their precarity. This article uses survey and interview data to outline the differing experiences of unpaid labour in cultural jobs. It contrasts the meaning of ‘free’ work over the life courses of a range of creative workers, showing how it is stratified by social class, age, and career stage. By exploring the stratification of unpaid work as a form of precariousness in cultural jobs, and of who describes their experiences of unpaid work as benign, the article offers new empirical evidence for those challenging the negative impacts of precarious working conditions.

‘Thriving instead of surviving’: A capability approach to geographical career transitions in the creative industries

“…Among our informants, this inability to enact key capabilities while pursuing a metropolitan creative career had led over time to revised conceptions of what constitutes quality of life, and, by extension, career success. Such findings chime well with recent studies showing that creative workers' attitudes to work are stratified by age and career stage (Brook et al, 2020). There is ample empirical evidence that 'mid-career crises' impose the need for significant revision and comprehensive makeover of 'early-stage' subjective perceptions of career success (Jung and Takeuchi, 2018;Potter, 2020).…”

The values of culture? Social closure in the political identities, policy preferences, and social attitudes of cultural and creative workers

“…We begin by situating our interest in attitudes and values within the literature on the relationship between cultural production, cultural consumption and social inequality (Brook, O’Brien, & Taylor, 2017; O’Brien, Allen, Friedman, & Saha, 2017; Oakley, Laurison, O’Brien, & Friedman, 2017; Oakley & O’Brien, 2016). In doing so we connect, for the first time, research on cultural production and inequality to research on values.…”

Nine Mechanisms of Job-Searching and Job-Finding Through Contacts Among Young Adults

“…In a context of widespread precarity, mobilizing different ‘foci’ is a good strategy for acquiring a greater diversity of information (Aral and Van Alstyne, 2011), being particularly important for those young people who combine skilled and unskilled jobs during their labour trajectories. For example, Carlos (ID 80, 31, male, owner, and manager) explained that although he had studied acting at the most prestigious school in Barcelona, his employment in the entertainment industry was often unpaid, so he had always needed to find complementary side-jobs (Brook et al, 2020 on job insecurity in the cultural industry). While Carlos mobilizes his friends and acquaintances to seek job opportunities as a waiter, it is only by mobilizing his ‘colleagues at [ acting ] school’ that he finds opportunities at one of the city’s theatres.…”