Creative labour : media work in three cultural industries / David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 238-252) and index.

1. Introduction: can creative labour be good work? 1.1 Good and bad work in the cultural industries 1.2 Creativity as doctrine 1.3 The critical backlash, the debate and our own approach 1.4 Definitions and boundaries 1.5 Research design: selection of industries and cases 1.6 Methods: interviews and participant observation 1.7 Outline of the book Part 1 2. A model of good and bad work 2.1 Marx on work and alienation 2.2 A sociological concept of alienation 2.3 Towards a model of good and bad work beyond alienation 2.4 Good products as good work 2.5 Autonomy as a feature of good work? 2.5.1 Two accounts of workplace autonomy 2.6 Self-realisation as a feature of good work? 2.7 Post-structuralist critique of work and the problem of values 2.7.1 Good work: critique of a critique 2.8 Subjective experience 3. The specificity of creative labour 3.1 Outline of the chapter 3.2 Three approaches to cultural production 3.3 General neglect of labour in studies of cultural production and possible reasons 3.4 Political economy and the specificity of creative labour 3.5 Raymond Williams on the specificity of creative labour: The communication of experience 3.6 A critical conception of creative autonomy and its two variants 3.6.1 Variant 1: Aesthetic autonomy 3.6.2 Variant 2: Professional autonomy 3.7 Creative work and social class 3.8 Cultural studies on creative labour: Subjectivity and self-exploitation 3.9 The debate about creative work Part 2 4. The management of autonomy, creativity and commerce 4.1 Creativity, commerce and organisations 4.2 The creative management function 4.3 Managing creative autonomy: Magazines 4.4 Managing creative autonomy: The case of music recording 4.5 Pressures of Autonomy (1): Marketisation in broadcasting 4.5.1 Television documentary and factual television 4.5.2 Television drama 4.6 Pressures on autonomy (2): The rising power of marketing 4.7 Anxieties about autonomy 4.8 Pressures on autonomy (3): The obligation to network 4.9 Conclusions 5. Pay, hours, security, involvement, esteem and freedom 5.1 Quality of working life in the cultural industries 5.2 Pay, working hours and unions 5.2.1 Pay 5.2.2 Working hours 5.2.3 Unions 5.3 Security and risk 5.4 Esteem and self-esteem 5.4.1 Self-doubt 5.4.2 Cool and glamorous 5.5 Challenge, interest and involvement 5.5.1 Pleasurable absorption 5.6 The experience of autonomy 5.7 Ambivalent experiences 6. Creative careers, self-realisation and sociality 6.1 Decline of the career? 6.2 Finding the right creative occupation 6.3 The fragility of creative careers 6.4 Defining yourself too much through creative work 6.5 Teamwork, socialising, networking 6.6 Isolation 6.7 Self-realisation and sociality: Ambivalent features of modern creative labour 7. Emotional and affective labour 7.1 Immaterial labour, affective labour and {u2018}precarity{u2019} 7.2 Emotional labour 7.3 Media labour and symbolic power 7.4 The talent show: Budget, commissioners and independents 7.5 Emotional labour and the anxieties of star-making 7.6 Pleasure and sociality on the production team 7.7 Affective labour and immanent co-operation? 7.8 Conclusions 8. Creative products, good and bad 8.1 Questions of quality 8.2 Pleasures and satisfactions of making good cultural products 8.3 Conceptions of good texts 8.4 Bad texts: Frustration and disappointment 8.5 Conceptions and explanations of poor quality work 8.6 Negative and positive experiences of quality 9. Audiences, quality and the meaning of creative work 9.1 Creative workers thinking about what audiences think 9.2 Magazines: is the reader everything 9.3 Music: a communicative thing or a private thing? 9.4 What can audiences handle? 9.5 Television and audience size: ratings tyranny? 9.6 Audiences, ambivalence and projection 10. The politics of good and bad work 10.1 The hardest way to make an easy living? 10.2 Unions and the struggle for good creative work 10.3 Work and life: choosing not to self-exploit? 10.4 Spreading good and bad work: how intractable is the social division of labour? Bibliography Appendix: The Interviews

What is it like to work in the media? Are media jobs more {u2018}creative{u2019} than those in other sectors? To answer these questions, this book explores the creative industries, using a combination of original research and a synthesis of existing studies. Through its close analysis of key issues - such as tensions between commerce and creativity, the conditions and experiences of workers, alienation, autonomy, self-realisation, emotional and affective labour, self-exploitation, and how possible it might be to produce {u2018}good work{u2019} - Creative Labour makes a major contribution to our understanding of the media, of work, and of social and cultural change. In addition, the book undertakes an extensive exploration of the creative industries, spanning numerous sectors including television, music and journalism. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of life in the creative industries in the 21st century. It is a major piece of research and a valuable study aid for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including business and management studies, sociology of work, sociology of culture, and media and communications.