Our focus in this issue is centred on questions concerning the relations between culture and work. Such questions have perhaps been most extensively pursued in relation to the changing conditions of employment and labour processes in the cultural sector. While these are a key aspect of our concerns here too, we also take a broader look at changing the cultures of work across a number of different industry contexts.
The issue takes it initial bearings from a themed section edited by Mark Coté and Brett Neilson who ask whether we are all cultural workers now. Their question constitutes a pointed engagement with debates centred on the emergence of new forms of precarity both in the cultural sector and in other sectors – the university sector, for example – that are increasingly modelled on cultural and communication industry paradigms. Their purpose, though, is to breakdown unitary models and grand narratives of precarity to stress the variability of the forms of labour that the concept encompasses in different industry and national contexts, as well as the heterogeneity of the political and industrial responses that have been developed to combat precarity and its effects on working lives. The papers collected in this themed section explore global variations in the experience of precarious employment with examples drawn from Australia, the UK, North America and Europe.
Magdelena McIntyre's paper is also concerned with the experience of workers in precarious conditions: in her case, the retail sector of the fashion industry. Her interests, however, focus on the strategies that are deployed by businesses in this sector to induce sales workers to perform the kinds of aesthetic labour through which their brands take on an embodied presence in the sales person, and with the affective investment such workers often make in their aesthetic labours as a way of imbuing the experience of work in neo-liberal market conditions with a positive content. In the final paper, Grahame Thompson looks at the changing conditions of work, post-GFC, in the financial sector, focusing particularly on how emerging new practices offer the potential to change current systems of financial calculability and risk assessment. He looks particularly at two figures that of the anti-technocratic persona embodied in artisanal conceptions of financial work, and that of the ‘partisan’ whose attempts to re-territorialize financial activity are calculated to re-asset better control over it.
The Reviews and Commentary section develops and expands on these themes. Poon's essay on Gillian Tett's financial anthropology directs attention to a quite different kind of financial work: the work done by the academic analyst of finance herself and how this is conducted and directed. What role, for instance, do particular disciplinary traditions and forms of institutional support play? What innovations might be needed for researchers to be able to follow financial instruments that are themselves rapidly innovating? Echoing some of the themes in McIntyre's paper, the focus of Olga Sezneva's review of Laikwan Pang's Creativity and Its Discontents is on work within the so-called creative industries, in this case in China. This sees both author and reviewer ask questions about the capitalist capture of ostensibly aesthetic work, whether by mechanisms of intellectual property protection or the mystification of creativity itself.
The Editors