Looking for work in creative industries policy

Abstract

In this article, we first outline and account for the utopian description of work in much UK creative industries discourse. We then offer a contrasting assessment that shows how creative workplaces are marked significantly by insecurity, inequality and exploitation (including self‐exploitation). In the third part, we examine recent developments in UK policy discourse, exposing a reluctance to recognize or engage with these manifest problems of creative labour. The article concludes by suggesting that this absence reflects something of the focus and limitations of creative industries policies in the current period, where government initiative appears increasingly driven by a narrowly focused skills and employability agenda, one that seeks to disavow problems of labour markets and bring greater discipline to those (relatively) autonomous institutions that generate creative workers, as part of the wider purpose of producing a more integrated and governable ‘creative economy’.

Keywords:

• creative industries
• labour
• UK policy
• skills
• education

Notes

1. This figure conceals considerable variations across sub‐sectors; the amalgamated ‘software, computer games and electronic publishing’ sector comprises almost a third of total employment with 631,300 jobs, the next largest sectors being ‘publishing’ (269,700) and ‘music and the visual and performing arts’ (257,200). Radio and television employs only 109,000, while other sectors – such as ‘video, film and photography’ (57,500) and arts and antiques (21,700) – are much less significant (see DCMS 2007). It is likely, of course, that the emerging economic downturn will impact significantly on these figures, in all sub‐sectors.

2. Elsewhere this has been referred to as ‘cultural work’ (Banks 2007) or ‘symbolic creativity’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007, pp. 4–5) with similar meanings intended – i.e. artistically driven production of symbolic or cultural commodities.

3. This does not of course in any way mean that the way for progressive policy to deal with these problems of precariousness and insecurity is to introduce bureaucratically fixed, regular working hours of the kind that artists and other creative workers have generally been assumed to find unamenable. But we resist the romantic notion that creative workers must suffer in order to be ‘really creative’ and that therefore no attention should be paid to the improvement of their working conditions.

4. All page references in this section are to the document – Creative Britain.

5. A term developed by neo‐classical economists to refer to the talent, knowledge and skills that may enhance the earnings of workers and by extension, the wealth of societies.