Abstract
For all that sociologists know about the institutional and historical aspects of cultural production, we know less about how cultural products are made on a day-to-day basis. It is this gap in knowledge that David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker set out to fill in Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries, a valuable contribution to the recent surge of U.K. scholarship on creative work. Hesmondhalgh and Baker situate interview and ethnographic data against a panoramic theoretical backdrop, which includes cultural studies, the sociology of work, political economy, business school studies of creativity, cultural sociology, and “liberal political thought.” Though the authors’ sympathies clearly lie with the critical stance of cultural studies, the book is a worthy addition to scholarship on cultural sociology and the sociology of work.
In Part One of the book, Hesmondhalgh and Baker argue that creative work is a complicating case for the theorization of both work and culture, and devote a chapter to reviewing the theoretical literature in each area. The chapter on work is squarely in the labor process tradition, though the authors advocate substituting the concepts of “good” and “bad” work for alienation, and considering the products, and not just processes, of production. In the following chapter on cultural theory, the authors launch a convincing argument that creative labor should be analyzed as a distinct aspect of cultural production. They orient this discussion in relation to the political economy of culture; organizational, business, and management studies (into which they put “production of culture” research in sociology); and cultural studies. An excellent discussion of the concept of creativity in Raymond Williams’ work is included here as it relates to commerce, and an original and useful synthesis of Bourdieu on the art/commerce division follows. Overall, Hesmondhalgh and Baker frame their theoretical approach as infusing an appreciation of subjective experience into the political economy perspective, a normative orientation into the management/organizational approach, and a consideration of the contradictions of creative work into the cultural studies standpoint.
In Part Two of Creative Labour, the authors present findings from 63 interviews with creative workers in television production, music recording, and magazine publishing, along with twelve weeks of participant observation by Baker in an independent TV production company in London. This is a strong stand-alone section. In it, the authors answer their research question—”What kinds of experiences do jobs and occupations in the cultural industries offer their workers?”—by examining the aspects of work that creative workers find engaging, difficult, and rewarding (p. 1). Their interview data show well the intrinsically conflicted nature of creative labor. On the one hand, creative workers experience what could be conceived of as genuine charm and engagement in their labor, due to the high possibility of creativity in their work, the public nature of their products, the status of the industries in which they work, and, for some, the comfortable incomes and high sociability with fellow creatives. On the other hand, the work can be hard to come by, hard to do full time, and precarious. There is also the risk, as several respondents note with eloquence, of over-identification with one’s work—not being able to set it down or distance oneself from it, and the black vacuum of time and identity that can result. The chapter on Baker’s participant observation adds the concept of emotional labor to these points, showing that the precariousness of TV production and daily work with heart-rendingly hopeful contestants involve a significant outlay of emotion work to bring the weekly TV show to life.
Chapter Eight, “Creative Products, Good and Bad,” is the star of the empirical section. Here, Hesmondhalgh and Baker consider creative workers’ relationship to the products they make, an empirical angle that forces a simultaneous consideration of work and culture. Data in this chapter investigate issues of ownership and the “good works” aspect of feeling that a creative product has a positive influence on society; though this is hard to imagine for some cultural products, other products are seen as “world changing” in their creators’ minds, or at least offering them the ability to create a unique aesthetic point of view. Conversely, the experience of producing a “bad” product is what most leads to a sense of forced creative production for workers, with commercial concerns often seen as the culprit for the decline in creative quality. Interestingly, the authors find that creative workers do not view their products as bad if they involve any commercial motivation, but only if they involve too much.
Creative Labour does a skillful job in showing the analytical and empirical relevance of a recent area of research and in enticing a wide range of readers, given its theoretical breadth. Of course, this breadth is also a liability in some sense, and leads Hesmondhalgh and Baker to make a more diffuse contribution than working within a more narrowly defined theoretical area would have enabled. Their empirical chapters contain informative data and their research design—namely, interviewing workers across three distinct cultural industries—is robust. However, the data analysis is hampered by a rather broad research question (noted above), which leads the authors to trace the usual contours of job satisfaction in their data; it is not always clear how culture matters in their analysis. At the same time, many points are revelatory. Culture and commerce are not idle abstractions for creative workers; they work out the contradictions that exist between the logics of culture and commerce as they sit down at their keyboards, editing stations, digital and virtual canvases. Creative Labour’s data and theoretical framing are effective in unpacking some of these contradictions, and Hesmondhalgh and Baker set several disciplines ahead with this research.