Fragmented (working) lives

The paper considers Richard Sennett’s (1998) claims about the ways in which the traits of contemporary capitalism have impacted on personal and professional lives of people. It examines some of the main themes such as reduction of working lives, pressure on personal lives, emphasis on youth, devaluation of experience, demise of authority and teamwork, in the light of data from the film and TV industry. The data resonates with much of Sennett’s concern that when ‘pieces of work’ and ‘lumps of labour’ become the norm, people’s sense of who they are is corroded and (fragmented) work becomes a destabilising factor in one’s life. Considering the wider significance of such trends, questions are raised as to how symptomatic this type of employment is and whether it is indicative of the future of work in the Western societies

No funny business: precarious work and emotional labour in stand-up comedy

Freelance creative work is a labour of love where opportunities for self-expression are combined with exploitative working conditions. This article explores this dynamic by showing how a group of freelance creative labourers navigate employment while coping with the pressures associated with economic precarity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we argue that full-time stand-up comedians engage in ‘pecuniary’ forms of emotion management in an occupational field where social networks and professional relationships play a prominent role. First, comedians project an image of positivity to demonstrate a willingness to work for little or no pay in order to curry favour with comedy club promoters. Second, comedians suppress feelings of anxiety and frustration that arise from financial insecurity in order to keep their relationships with promoters on an even keel – even when the rate of pay and promptness of remuneration fall below acceptable standards. Our study thus has implications for other creative sectors in which precarity is the norm, since it suggests that emotional labour is a resource not only for engaging with customers and clients but also for engaging with multiple employers, negotiating pay and dealing with conditions of insecurity in freelance settings – often with unintended, paradoxical, results

What lies beneath: organisational responses to powerful stakeholders

This article takes recourse to a particular branch of French Pragmatic Sociology, namely, Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ paradigm, as a lens through which to both explore the misalignment between espoused values and retrospective discourses and illustrate the underlying motivations behind decision making in an organisation within the creative industries sector. By virtue of its contributions at the organisational, social and sectorial levels, our study contributes to extant debates pertaining to individual agency versus structural constraints as well as demonstrating the heterogeneity of modes of formal compliance to wider institutionalised legitimacy. In so doing, it builds upon recent work that seeks to broaden the notion of value in the creative industries, while, simultaneously, calling for greater heterogeneity in policy making in the sector through an ongoing process of ‘creative conflict’