Transnational freelancing: Ephemeral creative projects and mobility in the music recording industry

Abstract

within projects to draw on highly-skilled labour, such literature has tended to overlook the importance of freelance, mobile labour within project ecologies, instead focusing on localised labour pools. In this paper, through a unique case study of transnational freelancing in the music recording industry, we provide a critique and development of Grabher's conceptualisation of projects. Specifically, we focus on freelance labour to reveal the ways in which transnational mobility can reproduce social processes that have assumed to be localised, and thus the ways in which project work can stimulate mobility. Emphasising the very high degrees of ephemerality and latency with social networks, we argue that the social context in which projects operates needs to be considered well beyond local geographical contexts, with mobility acting to bridge extended periods of latency and reproduce project networks. Further, we extend the notion of social proximity within projects by considering how new ecologies of physical and virtual mobility are redefining freelance labour in the music recording industry.3

Tantangan Kaum Freelancer dan Pemerintah Indonesia di Era Perkembangan Teknologi Digital

“…Dewasa ini kaum freelancer sangat dibutuhkan keberadaannya (Grabher, 2001(Grabher, , 2002 dalam dunia kerja di era globalisasi dan kemajuan teknologi digital saat ini. Meskipun ada beberapa anggapan bahwa kedudukan seorang freelancer hanya sebagai "eksternal collaborators" yang juga bisa berafiliasi terhadap beberapa perusahaan yang lain (Watson & Beaverstock, 2016). Anggapan tersebut nampaknya sesuai dengan kondisi Indonesia saat ini.…”

Contingent proletarianization of creative labor: Deskilling in the Xianyou classical furniture cluster

“…The false dichotomy between creative work and manual work is strengthened by a common methodological bias embedded in existing work on creative labor. Researchers often rely heavily on information from a small number of privileged workers, such as designers, programmers, screenwriters, directors, and musicians (e.g., Rantisi, 2002;Roberts, 2007;Christopherson, 2008;Watson and Beaverstock, 2016). Thus, the rest of the workforce is often rendered invisible in the literature.…”

Professionals with borders: The relationship between mobility and transnationalism in global firms

“…Work by Seabrooke and others specifically on 'transnational professionals' examines policy formulation across borders and the opportunities that transnational spaces afford reflexive actors who seek to advance specific agendas (see, for example, Tsingou, 2015 andWigan, 2016). Watson and Beaverstock (2016) in this journal document the increasingly transnational nature of project work in the recording industry. Likewise, Bloomfield et al (2015) show how professional migration has increased among European accountants in recent years following international regulatory harmonization.…”