Pathways into Creative Working Lives

Entrepreneurialism is widely encouraged across many industrial sectors in the ‘knowledge-based’ economy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Entrepreneurialism, including self-promotion and work on the self, is a well-established feature of higher education. Universities present entrepreneurship as increasingly significant in graduate options and outcomes for students. Pursuing more critical accounts of entrepreneurship, this chapter presents findings from a co-designed research project with higher education students and established entrepreneurs. The project employed design thinking and creative methodologies to examine pathways into creative work and careers. The chapter sets out in detail the methods used to facilitate discussion and debate amongst educators, entrepreneurs and students. It discusses how these activities were instrumental in helping to challenge and contest dominant understanding of creative entrepreneurship. The activities and critical reflections presented in the chapter are relevant for practitioners, educators and policymakers with an interest in understanding, shaping and contesting pathways into creative work.

Relatively little is known about how students of media production understand their identity and identification with an industry that they are hoping to enter. This chapter offers a case study exploring graduate aspirations for entry to creative and cultural work, based on semi-structured interviews with twelve graduates of a media production degree from an Irish university. It also examines the lived reality of that entry process through an analysis of graduate experiences and their first roles in media production work after graduation. The findings indicate that confidence, internships and precarity were prevalent features of the graduates’ working lives. More broadly, the findings suggest that there are contradictions between students’ ambitions to obtain a university degree and their demands for practical experience within the degree programme. This suggests that conflicting claims about the media degree outcomes and the skills that are required for media work result in conflicting aspirations on the part of the students.

This chapter draws some conclusions about distinctive features of post-Soviet creativity, looking at the example of the career trajectories and professional identities of recent creative graduates from Moscow and St Petersburg. The emerging Russian contemporary art industry, in transition from the Soviet cultural monopoly to the market economy, has not yet established standards of cultural production. Until then, the organisation of creative work involves negotiation and experiment in an ideological battlefield where neoliberal creative entrepreneurialism and the principles of Soviet bureaucratic organisation can meet, accompanied by the heroisation of labour. Conducted in Moscow and St Petersburg from 2013 to 2017, the study is based on 61 in-depth interviews with young curators, art managers and visual artists. It reveals that at least two cultural systems, based on different set of skills and promising different forms of rewards, are active in Russia at the same time. Thus, to gain access, creative graduates should be qualified in both and must be capable of switching fluently between the two systems.

This chapter considers the lived experiences of realising aspirations for creative working lives, drawing on a longitudinal study of the transitions of young female creative aspirants in England. Participants were first interviewed in 2007–2008 when they were in education and training for the performing arts. Coming of age under New Labour, these young women were addressed by what Angela McRobbie (Be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. Cambridge: Polity, 2016) calls a ‘creativity dispositif’, which encouraged young people to seek careers in the creative economy. Follow-up interviews conducted several years later explored whether and how participants’ aspirations had been realised, reshaped or relinquished. In this chapter, I consider how these young women subjectively accounted for their transitions into, through or away from the creative economy. I discuss how participants encountered and interpreted the complex challenges associated with creative work—including precarity, low pay, informal networking and typecasting—and consider the resources and strategies drawn upon to navigate these. The analysis highlights the role of gender, class and race in shaping opportunities for making a living within the creative economy. In doing so, it offers a critical counterpoint to optimistic framings of creative work as offering unfettered opportunities for young people—especially those from marginalised groups.

This chapter explores the social space available for creative subjects in China, based on interviews with artists and writers in Shanghai. We argue that the space for creative autonomy is configured differently in China to the way it is presented within Western creative labour studies. Autonomy in China rests on a sense of serving the public good rather than on Romanticism’s free creativity, and links to a state project are long-standing. Building on Bourdieu’s notion of the creative field, we suggest that the state adds a distinct parallel polarity to that of restricted versus commercial production. Outside of both commerce and state-sanctioned art there is a very precarious space of independent cultural activity, less to do with censorship than the absence of a socially sanctioned space for an ‘artistic’ subject.

This chapter draws upon recent work in the sociology of art and the studies of cultural work to analyse the ways in which experiences of entering creative industries relate to the larger processes of sociocultural change. I examine this by looking at the emergence of flagship cultural initiatives in the non-capital Russian cities stemming from the influence of charismatic local cultural leaders, with the Ural Industrial Biennial being the most important and well known. I look at the complex networks that exist around the biennials and their ways of popularising professional knowledge. The art biennials achieve popularity through promoting elaborate specialised cosmopolitan discourses around production, distribution and consumption of contemporary art. Their forms of representation are interpreted by large groups of mediators, generally female, who are attracted to this volunteer work by its potential to be a pathway into creative employment. I draw on existing research and fieldwork at the few biennials held in Ekaterinburg from 2010 to 2018, and analysis of media materials, to unpack those factors, which emerge as particularly important for supplying youth with a sense of differentiation by remaining in the orbit of ‘something globally important’.

In recent times, with the rise of freelancing, there has been a spectacular global growth in co-working and co-work spaces. In an era when neoliberalism and digital communications threaten to disperse and isolate immaterial labourers, the rise of co-working demonstrates the residual power of modernist work habits, such as the desire to separate the public and private, and to be part of a workplace community. This chapter explores the emergence of co-working as both a discursive category and a concrete social arrangement. It draws on data from interviews with convenors of independent co-work spaces in three cities—Ho Chi Minh City, Sydney and Reykjavik—and argues that those who set up and convene such spaces do so not primarily for economic reasons, but from a genuine commitment to the ethical principles of co-working: collaboration, mentorship and skill-sharing. However, co-work centres also provide creative workers who own or are employed in such centres with a ‘side-hustle’, allowing them to both diversify their working lives and supplement their precarious incomes as freelancers. Thus, for these people, co-working becomes part of the improvised pathway of the creative career.

This chapter explores so-called expat agencies in the graphic design, branding and advertising sectors in the Netherlands, the young British ‘flexpatriates’ and self-initiated expatriates who staff them, and the different pathways into creative labour their expatriation represents. Hybrid local–global spaces are marked by the mobility of people and management practices, which give rise to contradictions when capitalist relations of production are mediated at different local and global registers. Thirty-three interviews were conducted with expatriates working in the field and other creatives employed at, or with experience of, the workplace and sectoral dynamics underpinning the constellation of expat agencies based in Amsterdam and the wider Randstad area consisting of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Utrecht. This chapter considers the role of individual expatriates and the expat agencies around which they congregate in conditioning their pathways into and between creative jobs.

The UK’s creative industries workforce is dominated by the white and relatively privileged, and it appears the craft sector is no different. According to the Crafts Council, compared to the average profile of all occupations, craft workers are more likely to be male and white. The Crafts Council is attempting to support greater diversity in the UK craft sector through various schemes and research projects. This chapter reflects on one such project, a 2018 Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Creative Economy engagement scheme, which sought to provide social media skills training to women makers from black and minority ethnic backgrounds in two UK cities: Birmingham and London. The workshops, facilitated by the author, investigated the specific challenges facing women makers of colour who wish to use social media for the benefit of their craft practice. These challenges centre on the volatile nature of social media platforms, where makers of colour are subject to disproportionate scrutiny. There are also concerns that social media skills gaps may block the pathway of contemporary craft micro-enterprise. The concept ‘mutual aid’ draws attention to the positive possibilities of social media for unblocking those pathways for makers of colour through mutual support and mobilisation.

This chapter explores the pathways of mothers with young children into cultural and creative industries (CCIs). These women can be described as mumpreneurs, meaning that they combine running a business enterprise with looking after their children. Typically unstable, insecure, and unpredictable, CCIs also offer scope for great self-engagement and personal satisfaction. At the same time, the current culture of intensive mothering has made motherhood more challenging than in the past. Mumpreneurship may be a way to ‘have it all’ for the women interviewed for this study. However, critical researchers have suggested that this individual ‘choice’ locks women into marginalised roles in the neoliberal economy and makes them scale back their dreams. This chapter focuses on the experiences of mothers in Finland. The ways that they balance motherhood and creative entrepreneurship are interpreted in the context of CCI work cultures and Finnish social and labour market policy. The chapter suggests that the Finnish childcare system, the culture of women’s work, and the scarcity of waged work in CCIs together explain why Finnish mumpreneurs talk about their situation in rather positive terms.

This chapter aims to analyse how new forms of collective organisation can be developed to counteract the ongoing process of precarisation and individualisation of labour. In particular, attention is paid to the Smart cooperative, an interesting laboratory exploring new forms of solidarity within a general trend characterised by the lack of trade unionisation and labour organisation. Smart is a cooperative of ‘salaried autonomous workers’ created in Belgium in the late 1990s to support freelance artists in a way that allows them to work autonomously while also accessing a salaried status, which provides the best social protection. Over the years, Smart realised that it was offering opportunities to support the careers not only of creative workers but more generally of freelancers, who work in a wide range of economic sectors and experience very different working and income conditions. In this chapter, we investigate, through the example of Smart, how a cooperative model can develop new forms of collective organisation and autonomy among artists and creative workers, and how this model can also address the lack of bridging solidarity and enact a compositional project able to support a broader range of workers in different employment sectors.

This chapter looks at the extension of personal branding logics beyond the traditional domain of white-collar work. In particular, we argue that emergent forms of low-skilled platform labour, such as ride-sharing or delivery, also entail a fair amount of personal branding. Using initial evidence from in-depth biographical interviews conducted with Italian workers using a variety of platforms, we show that the personal branding logics and thus also the creative labour required to undertake such activity have entered the everyday life of low-skilled platform workers. This affects the relationship between structure and agency and enhances the relevance of the signalling logics that derive from peer evaluation, which are related to practices of self-commodification.

Since the 2000s, for many midsize, former industrial cities in Europe, urban ‘worlding’ (Ong, Introduction: Worlding cities, or the art of being global. In A. Roy & A. Ong (Eds.), Worlding cities: Asian experiments and the art of being global (pp. 10–26). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (2011)) has involved imagining creative industry futures and pathways into creative work for its citizens. Comparing itself to major metropolitan areas such as London, New York or Vancouver, the Netherlands’ city of Rotterdam (700,000 inhabitants), for example, has been struggling to reinvent itself. This chapter outlines how certain norms and expectations towards workers have travelled from the creative industries to other fields and sectors, and how these expectations are now informing urban economic government. Part of cities’ aspirations to establish creative industries, I argue, happens through a translation of these aspirations into governments’ expectations of citizens. In particular, in the Rotterdam case, the dreams of prosperous futures translate into (1) ongoing displacements of the population deemed unfit for future labour markets, (2) aesthetic evaluations in welfare programmes and even sanctioning of welfare claimants based on aesthetic appearance and (3) aesthetic pedagogies for unemployed populations. Based on ethnographic vignettes and policy analyses, this chapter outlines some on the ground effects of worlding cities that are linked to the value of creativity, and the particular forms of gatekeeping in creative industries.