Measuring and managing creative labour: Value struggles and billable hours in the creative industries

Frederick Harry Pitts

doi:10.1177/1350508420968187

Abstract

Creative labour is often characterised as hard to measure and manage. As ‘immaterial labour’, it breaches the working day’s boundaries and produces uncertain outputs. These conditions, claim postoperaists, precipitate a ‘crisis of measurability’. Drawing on 33 interviews with workers at 10 graphic, brand and strategic design agencies in the UK and the Netherlands, this article disputes claims creative labour eludes quantification. Responding to calls to reconnect organisational research with the study of value, it deploys Marxian value theory to demonstrate that the billable hours system of pricing and allocating work in creative agencies establishes ‘fictitious norms of timing’ reminiscent of the Taylorist factory that mediate the labour-process with reference to standards of socially-necessary labour-time set in the market. Rebureaucratising and socialising creative labour, billable hours help creative agencies overcome measurability as a problem, not a crisis. But the timesheeting practices around which billable hours are organised internally are marked by antagonisms. The combination of clear measures around which to bargain and their pivotal economic role has implications for how we conceptualise the capacity of creative workers to collectively organise, make claims on value and create the potential for a realisation of the conditions of crisis postoperaists describe.

Highlights

Creative labour is often characterised as hard to measure and manage
The valorisation-process mediates within the labour-process itself the digital Taylorism they correctly associate with contemporary work. This centres on a fictitious norm of timing – the billable hour – that tentatively articulates what goes in the workplace with the value its result attains in the market according to monetary social demand, via the measure of the ‘time taken’ expressed in the price for the job
Articulating the relationship between what goes on in the workplace and its mediation in the market in ways reminiscent of scientific management, the measurability problem is temporarily suspended through conventional means of formalisation and rebureaucratisation akin to the process of objectification Hardt and Negri ascribe to ‘digital Taylorism’. This accomplishes in the concrete context of the workplace precisely the ‘conversion’ and equalisation Hardt and Negri associate with the financialised fix derivatives effect in the economy at its most social and abstract level

Summary

Introduction

Creative labour is often characterised as hard to measure and manage. As ‘immaterial labour’, it breaches the working day’s boundaries and produces uncertain outputs. Noting the relevance of traditional forms of industrial organisation like scientific management to immaterial labour, in recent work Hardt and Negri (2017: 143) have used the concept of ‘digital Taylorism’ to explain how measure persists in spite of this underpinning crisis.

Results

Conclusion