?
Pathways into Creative Working Lives
Creative Working Lives provides critical insights into worker experience and working lives in the global sector of the cultural and creative industries. These industries have for decades been championed as an answer within many industrialized economies to the loss of manufacturing to lower wage and less regulated markets. This embrace of the creative industries has notably occurred alongside a parallel shift away from inclusive public support for the arts and culture as essential public goods. As the crises and major transitions of global and national economies impact on many conventional jobs, the cultural and creative industries are experiencing exponential growth. The persistent social and media fascination with creativity and the arts, powerful rhetorics that advocate ‘doing what you love’, the promise of creative fulfilment and an escape from the 9 to 5, all combine to attract more aspirants to creative work including rising numbers of graduates and trainees. Yet the available employment is increasingly precarious. Life adjustments are forced at both social and individual levels. Creative workers must accommodate change and manage uncertainty. Technological innovation facilitates new forms of digital working and even produces wholly novel occupations. Innovation-centred policy discourses increase pressure on workers to re-skill and update their qualifications, responsibility is individualised, and self-promotion is celebrated and increasingly normalized. Increasing numbers of creative workers embrace self-employment and micro-entrepreneurship, taking the expectation of increased freedom and flexibility as fair reward for low earnings. Creative workers accept overwork and under-employment, different life practices, interrupted trajectories for careers and life courses in addition to new forms of control and inequality, giving rise to very real concerns over exploitation and inequalities in the sector, as well as social dislocation and mental health issues. As work itself is reframed as a personalised quest for achievements beyond earning, working hours stretch and work-life boundaries blur. Opportunity and privilege appear in new guises, sometimes with older underpinnings. To address this complexity, the Creative Working Lives series presents original research from across multiple disciplines, including cultural and media studies, gender studies, social psychology and sociology, politics, labour studies, cultural policy studies, anthropology, art and design, and interdisciplinary research. The series provides insights on urgent global and national issues around contemporary cultural and creative working lives, addressing academics, practitioners, students, policy-makers and general readers with an interest in cultural and creative worker experience in a changing world.