Getting in, getting on, getting out? Women as career scramblers in the UK film and television industries

This article looks at the predominance of freelancing in the film and television industries as a lens to examine the persistence of gender inequalities within these fields. Previous research has indicated that women fare better in larger organizations with more stable patterns of employment, and in this article we explore why that might be the case, by focusing on the experiences of female freelancers at a moment when project-based, precarious work and informal recruitment practices are increasing in the UK film and television sector. We highlight in particular the ways in which gender inequality is mediated by age and parental status, and the impact of intersectional identities on women's ability to sustain a career in film and television

The Public Relations Profession as Discursive Boundary Work

Public relations (PR) has spent more than a century as a professional project, marked by a struggle with adjacent professional fields for market control, social closure and elite status. However, the wider literature on professionalisation lacks a systematic account of how professions discursively construct their boundaries, or how differences in field position can influence a profession’s use of discursive strategies to defend or contest its boundaries. This matters for the deepening of PR scholarship, since an effective exploration of the PR profession must include studies of PR’s jurisdictions and its jurisdictional disputes. This article introduces into PR theory, a discourse analytical framework for deconstructing boundary work between PR and adjacent professions. The discourse framework, and accompanying discussion, answers the call to dismantle silo thinking about PR activity, through a methodology designed to examine PR’s intersections with other fields

On the basis of risk: how screen executives' risk perceptions and practices drive gender inequality in directing

This paper explores how gendered perceptions of risk drive gender inequality. It does so by applying an Intersectional Risk Theory (IRT) framework to new empirical data on gender equality initiatives in the Canadian screen industries. The paper shows (1) that gendered risk perceptions constrain women directors’ work opportunities; (2) that the construction of gendered risk perceptions (‘doing risk’) is shaped by the screen industry context and social inequalities generally; and (3) that practices of constructing risk perceptions can be disrupted and changed, which creates opportunities for a ‘re-doing’ or ‘un-doing’ of gendered perceptions of risk and offers new analytical perspectives onto the efficacy of gender equality initiatives. By interrogating how perceptions of risk inform decision-making the paper contributes new understandings of the drivers of systemic and intersectional inequality as a defining characteristic of work and labour markets in the screen industries, and in the creative industries more broadly