scholarly journals ‘Culture is a Meritocracy’: Why Creative Workers’ Attitudes may Reinforce Social Inequality

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Taylor ◽  
Dave O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Creative Class ◽  
Web Survey ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Creative Workers ◽  
Components Analysis ◽  
Cultural Sector ◽  
British Research ◽  
Unique Dataset

The attitudes and values of cultural and creative workers are an important element of explaining current academic interest in inequality and culture. To date, quantitative approaches to this element of cultural and creative inequality have been overlooked, particularly in British research. This article investigates the attitudes of those working in creative jobs with a unique dataset: a web survey of creative workers’ attitudes (n = 2487). Using principal components analysis and regression, we have three main findings. First, in contrast to Richard Florida’s thesis on the attitudes and values of ‘the creative class’, our respondents’ attitudes were no more meritocratic than those of the general population. Second, those with the strongest belief in meritocracy in the sector are those in the most privileged positions, specifically those are best rewarded by the sector. Third, our research provides support for existing qualitative research on attitudes in the cultural sector, in which the worst rewarded workers are most aware of structural inequality. We conclude that the attitudes held by creative workers, and who holds which attitudes, make it unlikely that access to the sector and trajectories of individual progression within the sector will change. These findings also have important implications for current public interest in whether access to creative work is limited to those from privileged backgrounds.

scholarly journals Culture is a meritocracy: Why creative workers’ attitudes may reinforce social inequality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Reproduction ◽  
Web Survey ◽  
Cultural Workers ◽  
Creative Workers ◽  
Components Analysis ◽  
The Uk

This article investigates attitudes towards inequality among creativeworkers. In the UK, there is considerable public interest in access tocreative jobs, and a concern that these jobs are limited to those fromprivileged backgrounds. Moreover, both inequalities in cultural work andthe attitudes of cultural workers have been important areas of study forexisting research. Based on a web survey (N=2487), thisarticle investigates attitudes among creative workers, and finds that thecharacteristics that are most consistently associated with success bycreative workers are hard work and ambition, rather than structuralfactors, such privileged social origins, gender or ethnicity. Usingprincipal components analysis and regression, we show that there are threemain factors related to getting ahead, associated with reproduction,meritocracy, and education, and we show that those in the most privilegedpositions – broadly, the highest-paid white non-disabled men – are thosemost likely to deny an account of success in the creative industries associated with cultural reproduction. Weconclude that the attitudes held by creative workers, and who holds whichattitudes, make it unlikely that access to the sector and trajectories ofindividual progression within the sector will change.This paper has been submitted to a journal for consideration.

scholarly journals Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class: Kuaishou and Chinese Digital Cultural Production

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511988343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Lin ◽  
Jeroen de Kloet
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Chinese Economy ◽  
Creative Class ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Creative Workers

This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated according to the workings of the platform. This grassroots entrepreneurship, in tandem with the institutional regulation and censorship of the Internet, contributes to the transformation of Chinese economy and the production of social stability and a digital culture permeated with contingency and negotiation.

Creating Creative Identities in Organizations

2020 ◽  
pp. 668-682
Author(s):  
Iva Josefsson
Keyword(s):  
Creative Work ◽  
Work Organizations ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Creative Workers ◽  
Work And Life

Creative workers, fuelled by the desire to be and be seen as creative, have come to epitomize some of the most intense identity struggles of any group of employees in modern times. This chapter begins by reviewing the significance of identity for creative work and by arguing for its heightened salience given its importance in both the processes and outcomes of creative work. Organizations play a role in inspiring and framing the creative identities that people construct. Echoing many broader discourses of creative work, organizations capitalize on these to delimit people’s aspired-to identities. While official discourses of autonomy and creativity offer the promise of self-making, they can also be understood as softer forms of control in organizations that aim to produce an ideal subject who is self-disciplining and invests him/herself in work. This chapter concludes by arguing that creative identities are often problematic as they can blur the lines between individual and organization, work and life, and further encourage (self-)exploitation of workers in potentially harmful ways that demand further research.

scholarly journals Detrimental Collaborations in Creative Work: Evidence from Economics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyvan Vakili ◽  
Florenta Teodoridis ◽  
Michaël Bikard
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Output Quality ◽  
Creative Workers

Prior research on collaboration and creativity often assumes that individuals choose to collaborate to improve the quality of their output. Given the growing role of collaboration and autonomous teams in creative work, the validity of this assumption has important implications for organizations. We argue that in the presence of a collaboration credit premium—when the sum of fractional credit allocated to each collaborator exceeds 100%—individuals may choose to work together even when the project output is of low quality or when its prospects are diminished by collaborating. We test our argument on a sample of economists in academia using the norm of alphabetical ordering of authors’ surnames on academic articles as an instrument for selection into collaboration. This norm means that economists whose family name begins with a letter from the beginning of the alphabet receive systematically more credit for collaborative work than economists whose family name begins with a letter from the end of the alphabet. We show that, in the presence of a credit premium, individuals may choose to collaborate, even if this choice decreases output quality. Thus, collaboration can create a misalignment between the incentives of creative workers and the prospects of the project.

Public Policy Privileges

2020 ◽  
pp. 204-258
Author(s):  
Stavroula Karapapa
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Distance Learning ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Modern Methods ◽  
Mass Digitization ◽  
Cultural Sector

A substantial body of copyright infringement defences is primarily available to institutional users, such as educational establishments, libraries, and archives. In light of the advent of the Internet and mass digitization, the availability of defences has been enlarged through a set of legislative instruments, such as the Orphan Works Directive and the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Public policy privileges are meant to make allowances for modern methods of teaching provision, such as online courses, distance learning, and cross-border education programmes, as well as exempt from infringement new methods of carrying out research, such as text mining and data analytics, and enable value extraction from the plethora of works that are currently out of print. Although the policy reason behind the expansion of available defences has been the promotion of growth in the educational and cultural sector, there is a strong public interest underpinning the very presence of these exceptions in the statute. This has to do with the promotion of a rigorous public domain, whereby certain works shall be made more accessible for users to use and re-use. Subject to examination in this chapter is the breadth of these permissible activities and their ability to accommodate modern online services, including also the defences available for uses made by public administration.

scholarly journals The spark in the engine: creative workers in a global economy

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ursula Huws
Keyword(s):  
Global Economy ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Creative Workers ◽  
Commodification Of Knowledge ◽  
Creative Tasks

Introducing this volume, this paper summarises the contents and offers an analysis of the place of creative work in a global economy, focusing in particular on the restructuring of global value chains and the commodification of knowledge in a process which simultaneously opens up the possibility for new creative tasks for some workers whilst deskilling others. It concludes with a discussion of the contradictions that this presents for creative workers who may be offered a choice between disappointing their own creative aspirations or collaborating in their own exploitation.

Informal creative labour practices: A relational work perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (12) ◽  
pp. 1563-1589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Alacovska
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Interpersonal Relationship ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Voluntary Work ◽  
Informal Governance ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
Unpaid Labour ◽  
Informal Labour ◽  
Creative Workers

The informal nature of creative work is routinely acknowledged in the studies of creative labour. However, informality of creative work has been so far treated dualistically: firstly, as the informal governance of creative labour markets and secondly, as the ever-increasing informalization of creative workplaces. In contrast, this article argues for the importance of focusing on informal labour practices as infused in relational contexts so as to understand how creative workers uphold career sustainability and cope daily with contingent, insecure and underpaid work. Drawing on the relational work perspective from economic sociology, I contend that creative workers’ informal labour practices and economic activities are constituted by the meanings and quality workers attach to interpersonal relations. The more socially and spatially intimate and closer the interpersonal relationship, the less the economic benefit. The more socially and spatially distant the relationship, the greater the pecuniary motivation. The article maps relational work dynamics in: (1) informal paid labour practices, comprising work under-the-radar of state authorities, such as cash-in-hand work including online crowd-work, tips-based work, and paid favours and (2) informal unpaid labour practices, practices happening in webs of reciprocity that are not directly compensated with money, such as barter, favour-swapping and voluntary work.

Negotiating contract: The commerce and artifice of dealing for creative work

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-303
Author(s):  
Josh Heuman
Keyword(s):  
Creative Work ◽  
Cultural Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Creative Workers ◽  
Film Stars

Following growing bodies of scholarship concerned with the social and cultural lives of economic forms, this article tries to recover some of the complexity of contracts in creative work. While contracts might seem to reflect narrowly economic determinations, as mere instruments of commerce, sociological models emphasize their contingency and artifice. Moving toward and forward from such models, this article synthesizes a more socio cultural model, approaching contract as a scene of contestation, communication and constitution. It develops these themes in a series of engagements with predominant legal, economic and sociological models of contract; across these engagements, it draws upon and draws together cases of recording artists and film stars, while also drawing broader comparisons with other creative workers.

‘Keep hoping, keep going’: Towards a hopeful sociology of creative work

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 1118-1136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Alacovska
Keyword(s):  
Future Orientation ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
East Europe ◽  
South East Europe ◽  
Analytical Potential ◽  
Labour Practice ◽  
Informal Labour ◽  
Creative Workers ◽  
Sociological Studies

This article explores the relationship between future-oriented temporality and precarity in creative work. Existing sociological studies implicitly assume an unproblematic causal link between creative workers’ future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation. This article problematizes this link and offers a more nuanced reassessment of creative work’s futurity by arguing for the analytical potential of the notion of hope in gaining a better understanding of creative workers’ hopeful – affective, practical and moral – responses to conditions of protracted precarity. Building on theories of hope, the article conceptualizes hope both as an existential affective stance and an active moral practice oriented towards the present – an orientation that enables workers to keep going in spite of economic hardship and job uncertainty. From ‘an atypical case’ study of creative work in South-East Europe, hope emerges empirically as the central quotidian practice of coping with precarity. Three practices of hope are discussed: (1) hope as therapeutic practice; (2) hope as informal labour practice; and (3) hope as socially engaged arts practice. In so doing, the article explores the possibilities of practising ‘a hopeful sociology’ of creative work.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document