Television production: issues of exploitation, commodification and subjectivity in UK television labour markets

Abstract

This article analyses the features and conditions presently characterizing work and employment for freelance workers in UK television production. It does so at two levels: one is middle range in its theorization and evidentially grounded; the other, at a higher level of abstraction, ponders the most appropriate way to approach and comprehend these findings in a broader socio-historical context. At the middle and grounded level, the article argues that: 1. these freelances largely organize their own labour market in terms of recruitment, referencing, discipline and hierarchical relations; 2. the concept of an employment relation properly describes the situation for some of these workers, but not for others; 3. the features of a dual labour market are present but do not follow the pattern (of core-periphery) suggested by flexible firm theorists; 4. success as a television worker involves a process of commodification, extending beyond the transformation of simple labour power into the commodification of aspects of the individual's personality and/or aesthetic creativities; 5. the motivation to work in television reveals not only (sometimes, not even) the pursuit of earnings but also existential goals of self-affirmation and actualization; 6. television workers are active in their own commodification processes. At a more abstract level of theorization, the article reflects on the constitutive role played by television workers in the exploitative and commodifying processes of television production. The latter is viewed as largely a profit-seeking and competitive industry, and the constitutive role of workers in its operations problematizes any structurally determinist approach to analysis. The article considers that problematic in the context of labour process approaches since Braverman, the critique of same mounted by Knights and Willmott on Foucauldian arguments regarding the theorization of the subject, and the redress of Foucault conveyed in Giddens' concept of structuration and Willmott's appeal for a `dialectic of praxis'.