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Abstract
This article compares the work of fashion models and “new media workers” (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participant-observation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are drawn to the autonomy, creativity and excitement that jobs in these media industries can provide, they have also come to accept as normal the high risks associated with this work. Diffused through media images, this normalization of risk serves as a model for how workers in other industries should behave under flexible employment conditions. Using interview data from within the fashion media and the dot-com world, we discuss eight forces that give rise to the phenomenon of entrepreneurial labor: the cultural quality of cool, creativity, autonomy, self-investment, compulsory networking, portfolio evaluations, international competition, and foreshortened careers. We also provide a model of what constitutes the hierarchy of “good work” in cultural industries, and we conclude with implications of what entrepreneurial labor means for theories of work.
The authors wish to thank Paul Attewell, Daniel Beunza, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Herb Gans, Toby Miller, David Stark and the reviewers for Social Semiotics for their helpful comments on drafts of this article.
Notes
1. Historically, fashion modeling began in the 1880s when the Parisian couturier Worth showed styles on live models in his salon. Fashion shows on runways began around 1910 (Leach Citation1993; Lipovetsky Citation1993; Quick Citation1999). For more information about work in fashion modeling, see Wissinger (Citation2004).
2. These include freelance and part-time employees counted on full-time equivalent basis.
3. For more detailed description of the methodology of how subjects were chosen, see Neff (2004).
5. Many models are also dancers, actors or, in the lower echelons of the profession, restaurant workers. Furthermore, the number of models working may fluctuate widely each year. Finally, since fashion models are constantly shuttling between “shoots” and showing in cities around the world, no one know exactly how many models are working in New York City at any given time. In the past, some employment agencies provided fashion models as well as “office personnel” (advertisement in Manhattan “Yellow Pages” in 1970). Prior to 1991, the BLS included models in the category “sales personnel.” When the BLS began to count models as a separate category in 1991, the number counted was a suspiciously low 650.
6. AMD@work advertisment, spring 1997 and Jetta television advertisement, summer 1999.
7. Published in the book Fashion Cues (Visionaire Design, 2000) which shows photographs of the instructional boards models are shown before they go down the catwalk. One of our favorites instructs models to project the image of “sexy rich bitchy in a ski resort … not skiing!!” (quoted in Metropolis, June 2000, p. 46).
8. At an extreme, the offices of Doubleclick in Manhattan are “like a resort … There is … a huge terrace with a stunning view over Manhattan, an informal bistro, a couple of lounges, a well-appointed pantry, an exercise room with showers, a yoga room, a game room with a pool table, a rooftop basketball court, and an indoor park with real trees—most of it fully wired for connection to the Internet” (Vienne Citation2000).
9. This point was confirmed by a web-based survey commissioned by The Industry Standard, a trade publication for the Internet industry, which found that “challenging work” was an even more important factor in job satisfaction than salary. Job security was not found to be a significant factor in this admittedly unscientific survey (Annalee Newitz, “Thank god it's Monday”, The Industry Standard, 11 September 2000).
10. Sometimes, modeling agencies lend new models money for these expenses. If a model's career does not take off, he or she may owe the agency money.
11. One example from our sample of new media workers is a personal website that was created to advertise an “old media” project that our respondent was involved with. After the website itself became a cult hit on the Internet, a media conglomerate bought the rights to it and hired our respondent. Her investment paid off in visibility for her talents as well as in money and stocks.
12. Available online at http://www.techsunite.org/offshore/ (accessed 21 March 2005).
13. We have no follow-up information for one of these models.
14. Because most of the work in these fields is done on the basis of projects rather than jobs, we use ‘good work’ instead of ‘good jobs’.