Expression and expropriation : the dialectics of autonomy and control in creative labour

Creative labour occupies a highly contradictory position in modern, global, ‘knowledge-based’ economies. On the one hand, companies have to balance their insatiable need for a stream of innovative ideas with the equally strong imperative to gain control over intellectual property and manage a creative workforce. On the other, creative workers have to find a balance between the urge for self-expression and recognition and the need to earn a living. This article explores the interplay between these doubly contradictory impulses, drawing on the results of European research carried out within the scope of the WORKS project as well as other research by the author. It argues that the co-existence of multiple forms of control makes it difficult for workers to find appropriate forms of resistance. Combined with increasing tensions between the urges to compete and to collaborate, these contradictions pose formidable obstacles to the development of coherent resistance strategies by creative workers.Peer reviewe

Saints and sinners : lessons about work from daytime TV

This article looks at the messages given by factual TV programmes to audiences about work, and, in particular, the models of working behaviour that have been presented to them during the period following the 2007-8 financial crisis. It focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on daytime TV, which has an audience made up disproportionately of people who have low incomes and are poorly educated: an audience that, it can be argued, is not only more likely than average to be dependent on welfare benefits and vulnerable to their withdrawal but also more likely to be coerced into entering low-paid insecure and casual employment. It argues that the messages cumulatively given by ‘factual’ TV, including reality TV programmes ostensibly produced for entertainment as well as documentaries, combine to produce a particular neoliberal model of the deserving worker (counterposed to the undeserving ‘scrounger’ or ‘slacker’) highly suited to the atomised and precarious labour markets of a globalised economy. This is, however, a model in which there are considerable tensions between different forms of desired behaviour: on the one hand, a requirement for intense, individualised and ruthless competitiveness and, on the other, a requirement for unquestioning and self-sacrificing loyalty and commitment to the employer and the customer. These apparently contradictory values are, however, synthesised in a rejection, often amounting to demonisation, of collective values of fairness, entitlement and solidarity.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Future of work: taking the blinkers off to see new possibilities

New winners, models and industries will emerge; the universe is full of new opportunities for commodification, writes Ursula Huw

Online, on call: : the spread of digitally-organised just-in-time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non-standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT-related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.Peer reviewe

A way to explore the existence of “immortals” in cancer registry data – An illustration using data from ICBP SURVMARK-2

Accurately recorded vital status of individuals is essential when estimating cancer patient survival. When deaths are ascertained by linkage with vital statistics registers, some may be missed, and such individuals will wrongly appear to be long-term survivors, and survival will be overestimated. Interval-specific relative survival that levels off above one indicates that the survival among the cancer patients is better than expected, which could be due to the presence of immortals. We included colon cancer cases diagnosed in 1995-1999 within the 19 jurisdictions in seven countries participating in ICBP SURVMARK-2, with follow-up information available until end-2015. Interval-specific relative survival was estimated for each year following diagnosis, by country and age group at diagnosis. The interval-specific relative survival levels off at 1 for all countries and age groups, with two exceptions: for the age group diagnosed at age 75 years and above in Ireland, and, to a lesser extent, in New Zealand. Overall, a subset of immortals are not apparent in the early years within the ICBP SURVMARK-2 study, except for possibly in Ireland. We suggest this approach as one strategy of exploring the existence of immortals, and to be part of routine checks of cancer registry data. [Abstract copyright: Crown Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.