Abstract
Cultural work has become a prominent research topic for a number of reasons, and around these reasons is a range of relatively optimistic and pessimistic appraisals of the nature, conditions, scope and spread of cultural work in Western or Westernised capitalist societies. Across this range is a widespread assumption that what is being identified and evaluated is radically new. This assumption is rarely tested by explicitly applying to it a concerted historical perspective. Theorizing Cultural Work is welcome because that is what it is designed to do, assessing current novelties against social precedents, and viewing cultural work through historical and temporal lenses so as to realign pasts, presents and futures for both work and workers. The book is organised around three sections. The first of these looks at histories of cultural work, tracing antecedents, re-establishing continuities, attending to areas of neglect. The question of what makes cultural work distinctive, and how it may be changing, directs the work of the second section. Contributors examine the special status of cultural work and the boundaries it has, ask whether we should instead see cultural and non-cultural work as continuous or view both as part of wider networks and chains of organisation. And so to the future, in the plural because of issues of difference and inequality, exclusion and prejudice, and because of changing conditions and expectations, as for instance in the increasing acceptance of the acceptability of the unpaid internship. The third section ends with the editors interviewing Andrew Ross, who has made cultural work become very much associated with his name. Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor have put together a lively, stimulating and challenging collection that should help shape this area of study for the better.