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10.1080/10286630903029658
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1028-6632
Original
Taylor
302010
16
Professor
j.t.mcguigan@lboro.ac.uk
00000August
and
&
Article
Francis
JimMcGuigan
(print)/1477-2833
Francis
Journal
2010 of Cultural
(online)
Policy
This paper distinguishes between creative labour as a universal human attribute and
cultural work as specifically a meaning-making practice in order to offset the way
in which that distinction has become blurred in recent cultural policy rhetoric. It
discusses the enduring relevance of Marxs theory of alienation, the separation of
conception and execution in the modern labour process and issues concerning
individualism and collectivism. Institutional transformation of television is traced
as an exemplary instance of the transition from organised to neoliberal capitalism.
The consequences for cultural work of this transition are examined, and the concept
of individualisation is used to illuminate the conditions of work at the present time
for young entrants to the creative industries. In conclusion, the urgent need for
research on the sociology of occupational experience in the arts and culture today
is stressed in order to rectify its neglect in cultural policy studies.
Keywords: alienation; conception/execution; creative labour; cultural work;
individualisation
Introduction
The idea of creativity is at once both discredited and extraordinarily fashionable.
How could that be? Why such a paradox? It is discredited because the very notion of
creativity was once held to be a special attribute, something unusual and rare, confined
to only a select few in origin, God-given. It is unfashionable now because overt elitism (but perhaps not covert elitism) has been outlawed in an illusory culture of democracy. Yet, at the same time, it is a conventional wisdom to say that we are all creative
now. That meets the bill of routine populism and, indeed, a banal existentialism that
has become pervasive in everyday life and increasingly so at work. Everyone is
creative; so nobody is excluded. However, it also seems that some are more creative
than others. Creativity is held to be a good thing so we should all try to achieve it.
Faced with such equality of opportunity, some fall short unfortunately and, in consequence, must pay the penalty for their abject inertia, especially in business. Along the
way, creativity loses all specificity. It is such a good thing that we can hardly say what
it is. It used to be associated most strongly with art, imagination and inspiration. Such
associations are too elitist today. People who would not normally be counted as artists
are creative too (Willis 1990). And, since entrepreneurial business is the stuff of life,
surely enterprising individuals must be creative as well. It is said, so I have heard,
managers are no different from artists. Hierarchies fall and boundaries are blurred,
analytical distinctions erased. Yet, it is very difficult to analyse anything if you cannot
*Email: j.t.mcguigan@lboro.ac.uk
ISSN 1028-6632 print/ISSN 1477-2833 online
2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10286630903029658
http://www.informaworld.com
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J. McGuigan
make distinctions between what is and what is not but that is the dreaded binary
thought, which is no longer permitted. It is indeed a commonplace assumption these
days that there is no real distinction to be drawn between art and business (Negus and
Pickering 2004, p. 47). Is it not all creative?
In this paper, I do not wish to be drawn too far into some abstract discussion of
creativity. For my purposes, that is too idealist. I would prefer to be materialist about
the matter; and talk about the location of cultural work as a sub-category of creative
labour in the so-called creative industries instead. It is necessary, however, to
include a brief survey of the conceptual and substantive history of creative labour and
the specific differentiation of cultural work. The general aim is to make sense of the
present-day conditions of cultural work, taking the television business as an exemplary case, thereby seeking to illuminate how neoliberalism operates at the everyday
level of working life in the cultural field. The concept of individualisation may prove
useful in this respect.
In order to make the case concerning the individualisation of creative labour and,
specifically, of cultural work, it is necessary to situate the argument in a broader theoretical perspective on human labour, creativity and cultural production. This applies
to both the everyday experience of certain kinds of work, especially for young people,
and the neoliberalisation of political economy, which has made working life much less
secure and precarious. This is partly masked by the rhetoric of creativity today that
is related to a discourse of empowerment in managerial discourse. Developments in
the labour process associated with cultural work in particular may be experienced as
liberating, as existentially enabling, yet the effects can also be extremely negative with
regard to employment conditions and remuneration. These tendencies are likely to
become more pronounced with the deepening economic recession and attendant
depression resulting from the recent financial crisis in the global economy. The paper
calls upon policy-oriented researchers to focus greater critical attention on the labour
process in the cultural field.
For Marx, human beings are homo faber. This is their species-being. It is interesting
that, in order to make the point, Marx should compare the busy bee with a worker
close to cultural work, the architect. Bees build remarkable structures but they do so
automatically, as drones. On the other hand, the creative human imagines what he or
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she wishes to build. There is a conscious purpose in the act of making something and
an object is produced with human-made instruments. Marx is here illustrating his
conception of human nature, which in our anti-essentialist times is an unfashionable
kind of concept. Yet, it is reasonable to assume that there is something that distinguishes humans from other animals, in addition to the opposable thumb, that is,
purposeful work made possible by imagination, creative labour. Elsewhere, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, Marx had already elaborated upon this concept of
human nature: it is social and facilitated by language. Humans engage in cooperative
work, which typically takes the form of a complex division of labour in order to
produce efficiently and economically. Such cooperation is, of necessity, enabled by
sophisticated means of communication, language, defined as practical consciousness
(Marx and Engels 1970[1845]).
George Steiner (1975[1971]) placed even greater stress on language when he
described the human being as the language animal: man is a zoon phonanta, a
language-animal (Steiner 1975[1971], p. 73). The very sense of the self is inaugurated by the first-person pronoun, the I, in language. Moreover, other animals, in
comparison, are trapped in a perpetual present with no sense of the past or the future.
Language tenses facilitate a constitutive temporality and make memory, history, aspiration and planning possible. It might also be added that no other animal than the
human has a definite awareness of eventual death irrespective of momentary hazard.
Language is the foundation of all communication and humans have developed
extremely intricate sign systems. Bees dance exact messages to each other as to the
direction, amount, and quality of honey found (Steiner 1975[1971], p. 66), but they
do not have multi-point perspective and the Internet. This human communicative
capacity, bound up so intimately with creative labour, is fundamental to the
production not only of material necessities in general but also of art and culture in
particular.
In his youth and arguably always, Marx (1975[1844]) believed that creative labour
was alienated under capitalism. The process of exploitation separates the worker from
the product of labour, which takes on the character of an alien object that returns in
the marketplace in the form of a fetishised commodity appearing to have a life of its
own (Marx 1976[1867]). The very act of labour is thus experienced as alienating, as
a necessary chore rather than a freely chosen means of expression. In consequence,
the worker is alienated from a natural feature of humanity and alienated from other
human beings in society.
In the late twentieth century, Braverman (1974) argued that a key aspect of the
highly developed division of labour in advanced capitalism is the separation between
conception and execution. Most workers wind up performing a specialised and repetitive function in the labour process to manufacture a product that has been conceived
and designed by a privileged few. That alienation of execution from conception may,
of course, be simply unavoidable in complex modes of production. Perhaps it is just
unrealistic to expect or wish for anything otherwise.
The belief in the possibility of non-alienated labour in a cooperative system of
production, not only associated with Marxist humanism, is easily dismissed as a
romantic delusion, a hopeless wish that only the unworldly could possibly imagine
realising. Yet, it is not an uncommon desire and the source of an impulse in many
working lives, especially working lives that come within a clearly demarcated category of creative labour for the specific purposes of cultural analysis and cultural
policy studies.
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327
and genre in which the poet writes that has been constructed by the interaction of
producers and consumers of poetry over time. As Becker observes:
Imagine, as one extreme case, a situation in which one person did everything: made
everything, invented everything, had all the ideas, performed or executed the work, experienced and appreciated it, all without the assistance or help of anyone else. We can
hardly imagine such a thing, because all the arts we know, like all human activities we
know, involve the cooperation of others. (Becker 1982, p. 7)
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J. McGuigan
labour issues are even there, especially when jobs are lost and workers of one kind or
another in a multi-billion business believe they are insufficiently remunerated for their
labour. It has often been said, though, that artists, writers and the like are too individualistic for collective representation to work effectively. That has not always been true
in cultural production and certainly not so in the press and broadcasting. But, as we
shall see, the process of individualisation which is not the same as old-fashioned individualism under neoliberal conditions has undermined collective protection and
representation there as well; and not because of some lingering Romanticism.
Whereas individualism is a little-realised value of bourgeois society and at best
confined to the privileged few under late-modern conditions individualisation is a
necessity, experienced as liberating yet simultaneously an obligation, increasingly so
for the many. The person becomes responsible for what they do and, therefore,
personally culpable for their own failures. Individualisation is not just rewarding; it is
also penalising. The individual is left without excuse and becomes eminently expendable: Unfortunately, well have to let you go [and, as it happens, employ someone
cheaper but more driven by necessity].
Neoliberal restructuring
The development of capitalism over the past century can be understood in terms of
three successive phases: liberal, organised and neoliberal. The transition from liberal
to organised capitalism occurred in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s and
the challenge of socialism/communism to capitalist civilisation. At the time, the
Soviet Union projected itself and was understood widely as representing an alternative
principle of civilisation to capitalism. This alternative remained credible at least until
as late as the 1960s. Partly in response to the communist challenge, social democracy
transformed capitalism in the USA, Western Europe and satellite territories throughout the world. The welfare state and strong trade unionism were notable features of
that transformation in addition to extensive state intervention in economic management and, to some extent, ownership of the commanding heights, leading sectors of
extractive and manufacturing industry, transport and so forth; as well as the steering
mechanisms of finance and governmentality. This was, of course, the period when
modern forms of public-sector cultural policy were established in arts councils, broadcasting corporations and cultural ministries (see Leys 2001, on the undermining, diminution and effective dismantling of such public-sector institutions during the
subsequent neoliberal phase).
The crisis of organised capitalism during the 1970s is usually explained in connection with the OPEC oil price hike of 1973. Organised capitalism, often named
Fordism, was called into question due to its organisational inefficiency and costs,
especially labour costs. The neoliberal switch to post-Fordism is characterised by the
disaggregation of vertically integrated major corporations, outsourcing, reduction in
the social wage and faster response to consumer trends facilitated by computerised
information systems. The balance of power in the labour bargain between capital and
labour shifted inexorably from the latter to the former and working life became much
less secure and more precarious.
Interestingly, post-Fordisation was pioneered by Hollywood, as noted by
Christopherson and Storper (1997[1986]), initially in response to the Paramount case
of 1948 when the big five studios were forced, in an anti-trust action, to sell off their
first-run cinema chains. Since these studios could no longer guarantee favourable
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exhibition arrangements for their movies, they discontinued the studio-factory system
of production that was originally modelled on Henry Fords assembly-line production
of motorcars. Production was increasingly devolved to independents that rented
studio space and studio space was also turned over to television production. American
television took the same organisational form as the movie business with independent
companies supplying the distributive majors. The vertically integrated corporation,
then, gave way to a network system of production and circulation in the audio-visual
industries. Although different functions in the movie business came to be performed
by different firms on a project-by-project basis, the majors retained command over
distribution, the nodal point of power in the system as a whole. And, in any case,
Reagan rescinded the 1948 judgement in 1984.
Post-Fordism is associated with greater consumer choice in the sense of a broader,
more differentiated product range and rapid turnover of products and styles in ostensible response to changing consumer trends. However, as in Hollywood, such diversity is somewhat exaggerated in conventional accounts, which tend to be
technologically determinist and take too little account of complex processes of political economy. The system, though flexible and characterised by dynamic networking,
is probably more accurately named as neo-Fordism since there is still a great deal of
standardisation and uniformity; not only in cinema but also, for instance, in television
with innumerable channels but little genuine choice in viewing, as some critics would
still say unmodishly.
Neo-Fordism hit the British television industry in the 1980s as it did other Fordist
systems of broadcasting across the world around the same time. John Ellis has
presented a rather sanguine view of the transformation of television over recent
decades. He identified three eras of television: scarcity, availability and plenty. The
first era that of scarcity lasted until the 1970s. For technical reasons, there were a
limited number of channels and television in almost all countries represented the
nation in some respect. The second era that of availability from the 1970s onwards
is still, in effect, the present era. This is the era of satellite and cable distribution,
proliferating channels and dramatic institutional change. Writing just a few years ago,
Ellis described the imminent third era that of plenty as follows:
The third era, the era of plenty, is confidently predicted by the television industry itself.
It is foreseen as an era in which television programmes (or, as they will be known,
content or product) will be accessible through a variety of technologies, the sum of
which will give consumers the new phenomenon of television on demand as well as
interactive television. The era of plenty is predicted even as most nations and individuals are coming to terms with the transition to the era of availability. (Ellis 2002, p. 39)
The era of plenty has since arrived but, as yet, its cultural significance is hard to estimate, though the early signs are not as promising as the hype around it claims. Earlier,
the transition from scarcity to availability corresponded to a shift from a publicservice model to a substantially deregulated, free-market model. That shift had enormous consequences for the conditions of labour in the television industry similar to
changing conditions in other creative industries and, indeed, throughout industry in
general. Changes in the labour conditions of television very much turn on what could
be called the paradox of independence (Hood 1994, Hood and Tabary-Peterssen
1997[1980]). For several years leading up to the 1980s, there had been progressive
campaigns to open up the Fordist and consensual system of British broadcasting to
the representation of a greater diversity of voices and representations by independent
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331
Doogan (2009) is right, it must be said, to warn against exaggerating the impact of
what some have called the new capitalism. There is indeed a great deal that has
not changed dramatically. For some, employment is still secure and reasonably wellprotected and rewarded. Doogan is also right to suggest that the rhetoric of new
capitalism functions ideologically to reconcile workers to less propitious working
conditions. However, here, we are considering developing tendencies already in train
that are likely to become yet more significant. One area, especially regarding the
labour process, where the impact of the new capitalism has indeed been profoundly
evident is the cultural industries; and most notably perhaps in what were the hitherto
public-service oriented broadcasting systems of countries like Britain and Canada,
though not only there exclusively.
Hard labour in the creative industries
The effects of the neoliberalisation of work have been pervasive across what are now
called the creative industries in general. Especially pertinent to the matters in hand
are Beales (1999) observations on culture and cultural policy in Canada, a country
very much on the frontline of the confrontation between organised and neoliberal
capitalism during recent years due to its proximity to the USA and participation
since the mid-1990s in the North American Free Trade Association, now the Free
Trade Area for the Americas. Beale is particularly concerned with the situation of
women at work in creative industries that have been going through neoliberal
restructuring. It is important to appreciate that a legacy of British colonialism in
Canada is that there is greater state intervention in the interests of public service and
social provision, such as public-sector childcare facilities, than is characteristic of the
US free-market tradition. Also, and similarly to France, Canadian politicians were
keen to assert a cultural exception in the face of unrestricted free-marketisation and
the ideological sway of the consumer model in which the autonomy of producers is
sacrificed to an alleged consumer sovereignty of choice. Tensions and consequences of a changing policy are severe especially with regard to women employed
in creative industries where apparent advances in position have coincided with the
deterioration of working life.
Although very nearly half the labour force in the cultural sector is female yet
women are near the bottom of occupational hierarchies with few in positions of power
and control. Neoliberalisation does nothing to ameliorate the situation, and actually
exacerbates it in spite of much-trumpeted anti-sexism. As we have already noted with
reference to British television, it is very difficult for women to bear and care for children in careers that are so insecure, time-consuming and stressful.
In addition to older workers forced to leave television or retire early due to burnout, it is extremely hard for young entrants to the audio-visual industries to obtain a
foothold and build their careers. Every now and again in Britain and elsewhere shock
horror stories are reported in the press of how young people are overworked, paid very
little or not paid at all. As Silver (2005, p. 2) has reported:
It is televisions dirty little secret. The eager young faces that flit about on every production set, making sure that scripts are photocopied and the coffees are made and the taxis
are booked. Always among the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night,
desperate to make and secure the all-important step on the first slippery rung of the industry ladder. Many are so determined to forge a career in the glamorous world of television
that they are prepared to work for little or nothing to achieve it.
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It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so many should want to be the agents of such
endorsement and exhortation in spite of everything. However, we need to go further
in trying to understand why young people do it and at what cost. In what follows, then,
I aim to open up questions concerning the individualisation of cultural work, particularly for young entrants to such occupation, in order to contest some prevalent illusions and to suggest directions for future research in cultural policy studies.
Individualisation in creative industries and cultural work
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheims thesis of individualisation, a corollary
to Becks risk society thesis, is of general significance for making sense of the quality of life in more affluent parts of the world at present. And, it is of particular relevance to illuminating the contradictory experience of creative labour and the peculiar
attractions and difficulties of cultural work that are experienced most acutely by
young entrants to such employment today. Individualisation is an institutionalised
condition and, in that sense, obligatory, not a freely chosen individualism. Individualism has itself been a collectively shared doctrine, to be sure, though a somewhat
fanciful principle and, in practice, potentially disruptive of solidarity and social integration, something that worried Durkheim over 100 years ago (Durkheim
1964[1893], 2006[1897]). In comparison, individualisation is quite possibly a
strongly integrative phenomenon, along the lines of how self-discipline under
surveillance, doing it to oneself in the gaze of the guards (Foucault 1977[1975]), is
more effective than overt coercion. Individualisation is a collectively shared experience, however lonely it seems (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002[2001]). It is as
though the ethical dilemmas of existentialism have become normalised for everyone
in a modern social formation where risk is endemic at societal, global and personal
333
levels, producing a kind of banal existentialism in personal conduct and working life.
Individuals are condemned to take personal responsibility in their everyday lives
whether they like it or not and are, therefore, obliged to make agonistic choices
routinely. As Beck (1992[1986], p. 135) said some years ago in Risk Society:
Individualization means that each persons biography is removed from given determinations and placed in his or her own hands, open and dependent on decisions. The proportion of life opportunities which are fundamentally closed to decision-making is decreasing
and the proportion of the biography which is open and must be construed personally is
increasing. Individualization of life situations and processes become self-reflexive;
socially prescribed biography is transformed into biography that is self-produced and
continues to be produced. Decisions on education, profession, job, place of residence,
spouse, number of children and so forth, with all the secondary decisions implied, no
longer can be, they must be made. Even where the word decisions is too grandiose,
because neither consciousness nor alternatives are present, the individual will have to pay
for the consequences of decisions not taken.
Here, Beck is describing a total life situation, not just a work situation. It is both a
liberating and a terrifying situation. Those who were previously denied choice now
have much greater room for manoeuvre along lifes way. In this respect, womens
lives have changed markedly. Assumptions about womens prescribed social role
have been overthrown and there is much greater formal equality between the sexes.
There is a downside, though, in that womens increased employment opportunities,
the possibility of having it all makes life actually harder for many women who have
to juggle a set of often contradictory role obligations at work and at home. Individualisation means that the individualised subject is held responsible for the unintended
consequences of their chosen actions. This is so for both men and women. Nobody
else is to blame. There is no safe haven. Like risk society itself faced with the negative
consequences of industrialism, the individualised person must shoulder the consequences when things go wrong. This is an uncertain and precarious life to lead.
Although Beck and Beck-Gernsheim believe that individualisation is an upshot of
the risk culture of industrialism, which is not reducible to capitalism, it is extremely
tempting to draw connections between individualisation and neoliberalisation, especially at work and in present-day working cultures. One obvious connector is the
decline of trade union representation and collective bargaining that isolates the individual worker in the face of capital. Another feature is the rhetoric of empowerment
that is associated with flatter organisational structures. And, fixed-term contracts
mean that workers are constantly on the lookout for the next job opportunity.
Continuity of employment is difficult to maintain; establishing a track record and
reputation vital. Frantic networking is a salient feature of such working life, particularly in cultural work. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005[1999]) have spoken of the type
of the networked project worker, a figure characteristic of the new spirit of capitalism, which is a hedonistic spirit derived from the artistic critique of the old puritanical spirit of capitalism.
McRobbie (2002) has produced an impressionistic account of the youth labour
market in Londons creative industries, following on from her earlier research on the
training, unrealistic ambitions and poor career prospects of fashion designers
(McRobbie 1998). Her account is consistent with the individualisation thesis. Young
cultural workers are required to work upon themselves, to fashion a useful self and to
project themselves through strenuous self-activity; to be, in effect, self-reliant whether
self-employed or temporarily employed. For young cultural workers, hedonistic club
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Acknowledgements
I must thank Chris Bilton for sensing that I might have something to say in the debate over
creativity and my colleague Graham Murdock for his helpful comments on the manuscript.
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