Cultural Labor Research Articles

Creative class politics: unions and the creative economy

This article examines how cultural workers participate in the construction and contestation of the creative economy at the policy level. An analysis of the role unions play in the film and television industry association FilmOntario demonstrates the paradox that the creative economy, as an economic development strategy, presents to the cultural workforce. FilmOntario has succeeded in attracting a high volume of work to the province through film and television tax credit advocacy. Although FilmOntario’s success in policy advocacy is deeply tied to union resources, the unions’ decision to work within creative economy discourses, and in association with employers, has prevented core issues related to the quality of work from being articulated as a function of policy design. The argument is that the discursive and associational choices unions, as the collective voice of the (creative) working class, make as policy actors have a significant impact on the degree to which cultural labour problems are understood as cultural policy problems.

Constructing a Socialist Community: The Victorian Socialist Party, Ritual, Pedagogy, and the Subaltern Counterpublic

The Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) was a vital crafter of Australian labour's political culture in the early twentieth century. It engaged in a wide array of cultural activities, most often associated in historical literature as an attempt to create a socialist 'community' which operated as a replacement for mainstream religion. Here, I endeavour to demonstrate the political implications of the organisations' cultural activities and connect them to its broader project of social transformation. I do so by considering these acts of cultural creation against international literature on labour culture and propose a new understanding of the VSP as a subaltern counterpublic, as identified by Nancy Fraser, operating within a broader proletarian public sphere, a concept elucidated by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. This unique perspective enables an appreciation of the varying components involved in constructing labour's culture, and enables such cultural expressions to be considered as fundamentally political, connected to a project of social change.

The Discourse on Media Is Dominated by Reactionary Cant

This brief note examines two interrelated themes that I think need to be at the core of studying the media industries. Neither will be popular, because they are critical and they veer away from the norms of US graduate schooling and English- language journals. The first is that we need to focus on cultural labor. The second is that we need to focus on the environment, specifically the media’s destructive impact on the world’s ecology over centuries. These critiques sometimes help encourage workers to organize and corporations to reform, but they have yet to gain major currency in academia outside environmental science. A decent future for the cognitariat and the earth depends on the centrality of these topics to each course, publication, policy, and initiative undertaken by and about the media. Business as usual needs to be shaken up.

La Lucha Sigue: Latina and Latino Labor in the US Media Industries

Given the present contradictions in which Latinos are both celebrated as the next top consumers and reviled as the least-wanted citizens, this article examines the state of Latina and Latino labor in the US media industry and the ways in which we continue to be an invisible and fragmented workforce. By understanding the ways in which capitalist practices divide cultural labor into disparate parts in order to benefit industries while simultaneously producing negative consequences for not only workers but also the sociocultural milieu, we are better able to recognize the role of Latina/o labor in communications. The fact that Latina/os are nearly nonexistent in the English-language media sector—and in the Spanish-language sector, executives prefer Latin American professionals with excellent Spanish literacy skills—is not inconsequential. These material conditions communicate something important about how Latino labor is valued differentially according to the needs of the media sector, the imperatives of the global economy, and the cultural politics of media in the United States. These issues must be examined closely if all Latino Americanos, from the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, are to be full participants in the dismantling of media exploitation.

The Punk Show: Queering heritage in the Black diaspora

This article presents ethnography of Black cultural politics in post-flood New Orleans during the summer and fall of 2009. I engage in three interrelated subjects: (1) life histories and oral narratives in which I trace a history of Black queer performances locally referred to as “Punk Shows”; (2) my observations of a community play in which heritage, Black queer subjectivity, and the struggle over communal memory intersect; and (3) a broader discussion of the ways power is constituted by the shaping of history and communal memory to narrate race and sexuality. I argue that some ways of life are constructed as timeless, recuperable, and productive to the nation rather than ephemeral and contradictory. In arguing for a theory of Black queer generation, I deploy performance studies to valorize the “ephemeral” history of their cultural labor.

Factor Analysis on Agricultural Mechanization Level in Changsha

The author deeply studied agricultural mechanization level from the year of 1994 to 2012 in Changsha with Path analysis method. The research found that the peasant cultural levels, rural labor transfer rate and the peasants' income level were the leading factors deciding on agricultural mechanization level in Changsha. The direct influence of arable land per capita was not great while its indirect contribution by other influence such as the peasant cultural levels and rural labor transfer rate. Finally constructive suggestions were put forward to give impetus to develop agricultural mechanization.

Placing International Media Production

Studies of contemporary media production have to grapple with the empirical, methodological, and theoretical challenges of internationalization. While cultural imperialism and the new international division of cultural labor theories have highlighted important power differentials internationally, they often lack empirical depth and focus on large traditional media companies and national, particularly Western, countries. In this short essay I consider how “spatialization” and the social production of space might provide a useful theoretical approach for studying international contemporary media production practices. I illustrate my argument by contrasting findings from empirical research on the factors shaping the spatialization of the digital games and broadcast animation industries: one an emerging industry struggling to legitimate its cultural standing and build international networks of production; the other a well-established cultural industry tied into national cultural policies and networks of production. An industry focus and relational approach to space allows us to capture the dynamic tension between international flows (of ideas, products, services, workers, and money) and the practices (policy, regulation, institutions, markets, technology, and content) that attempt to capture these flows in particular places.

Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies

The aim of this paper is to locate academics within the sights of critical labour studies, and, in particular, the contemporary interest in cultural workers. Despite a growing literature about – and in response to – the transformation of the University there have been few attempts to study academics as workers. This paper argues that there are a number of parallels between academic work and the much more well-documented experiences of work in the cultural and creative industries. The paper examines the increasing experience of precariousness among academics, the intensification and extensification of work, and the new modes of surveillance in the academy and their affective impacts. The aim of the article is to build on the critical lexicon of studies of cultural labour in order to think about academic work as labour and to generate new ways of thinking about power, privilege and exploitation. It argues for the need for a psychosocial perspective that can understand the new labouring subjectivities in academia.

Confronting Precarity in the Warhol Economy

Normative cultural economy discourse on New York City embraces the creative industries as engines of job creation but neglects the quality of employment within them. This article sets out to both illuminate the precarious conditions of nonstandard workers in New York's vaunted creative sectors and identify emerging collective responses to precarity in this city. Three areas of labour activity are focused upon: fashion industry frictions, art world agitations, and independent worker initiatives. Under each of these headings, the article profiles two organizations that are variously exposing, resisting, and mitigating precarity among flexible labour forces in the arts, the media, cultural industries, and beyond. The discussion of these organizations is informed by interviews with some of their protagonists, by documents produced by the organizations, and/or by media coverage of them. Challenging the assumption that getting by in informal cultural labour markets obliges individual coping strategies, this article reveals scenes from a metropolitan laboratory of precarious labour politics. These initiatives are inklings of a recomposition of labour politics in which flexible workforces in creative industries are important participants.

Mobile livelihoods among ethnic minorities in China: Insights from Yunnan

Ethnic minority populations in Yunnan have had diverse mobility patterns since the advent of globalized production and developmental programmes. The article presents insights into the various mobility patterns and their effects in Yunnan and contributes to an understanding of the present economic and social processes of mobilities and changes in China as a whole. The analysis is based on an empirical study conducted in the years 2010–2011 by the authors together with local researchers in Yunnan. The results revealed that the mobilities practised among members of the ethnic minority groups in Yunnan included not only outmigration but also cross-border cultivation of plantations, daily and circular mobility, inflows of labour and investors, and involuntary relocation. Although some mobilities may have been conducive to livelihoods and capabilities due to the income-earning and profit-making opportunities arising from the acquisition and appropriation of land and capital, they have also resulted in differentiation processes that confirm the counter-geographies of production, survival, and profit-making. The authors conclude that mobilities do not just concern physical location, but as a social process, mobilities have reconstituted relational references and networks in terms of ethnic and cultural identity, gender relations, labour division, and locality and community integration.

Specificities of the artistic cultural labor market in Brazilian metropolitan regions between 2002 and 2010

This paper analyzes the singularity of artistic cultural sector workers in the Brazilian metropolitan labor market, considering the job satisfaction of artists that Throsby proposes in his work preference model of artist behavior (1994). We also examine the effect of public expenditures on the income of workers in the cultural sector. Using 2002 to 2010 data from the Monthly Employment Survey (PME) and administrative records from Finance of Brazil (FINBRA), we estimate a probit model and a wage equation. In our model, we estimate wages as a function of: (1) sociodemographic characteristics of workers, (2) a variable for informal jobs, (3) the number of working hours, (4) a variable for the worker having another job, (5) per capita expenditures on culture interacted with a dummy for artistic cultural workers, (6) interactive binary variables involving place of residence and artistic cultural workers and (7) the predicted probability obtained by the probit model. This probability is estimated based on the likelihood of working in a creative activity, considering both workers from the cultural sector and other workers, controlled by: (1) sociodemographic characteristics of workers, (2) characteristics of their jobs, (3) dummies for the metropolitan regions and (4) willingness of creative workers to work additional hours interacted with the number of hours worked. Our results show that workers in the cultural sector are likely to work longer hours when compared to workers in other sectors. For our wage equation, the results suggest that women earn relatively less than men and blacks earn less than whites. Furthermore, earnings increase with age and the level of education. Formal workers obtain higher earnings when compared to informal ones. Finally, an increase in the per capita public expenditure on the cultural sector raises the income of workers in artistic cultural occupations.

The cultural labor of surveillance: video forensics, computational objectivity, and the production of visual evidence

This essay argues that the status of video evidence as an index of real events—a sign or representation that offers a direct, empirical connection to material reality—is the result of an intentional process of production. This process involves the repurposing of new technologies borrowed from the domain of creative media production in order to transform a chaotic field of raw surveillance video into useable evidence. In addition to the exchange in technologies, an unavoidable epistemological and interpretive exchange takes place between evidentiary uses of surveillance video on the one hand, and the now prevalent forms of surveillant narration found in both fictional and reality-based storytelling. But despite this exchange in meanings and technical systems, considerable effort has gone in to establish formal standards for the evidentiary uses of surveillance video that distinguish the discovery of video evidence from the production of creative content. Building on Daston and Gallison's historical study of the prevailing “epistemic virtues” that have defined objectivity over time, I argue that what we see emerging in the field of forensic video analysis, as a means of establishing its scientific and legal status, is a commitment to a new epistemic virtue of “computational objectivity.”

‘But that was my idea!’ Problems of Authorship and Validation in Contemporary Practices of Creative Dissent

This article explores the vexed issue of authorship in the production of creative dissent in the current and recent social movements.

Preliminary conclusions: cultural labour–cultural value in a comparative frame

In the concluding essay of his unpublished explorations on Comparative Film Studies, Willemen posits a series of bold strategies to arrive at a theory of value, which would enable him to claim relevance to all geopolitical frameworks that are beset both directly and indirectly by the workings of Euro-American capitalism. Willemen recognizes that the historical frame within which questions of value have to be located is a little different from the historical narrative most often deployed when addressing culture. To understand value in this area, we need to recognize that distinct and co-existing modes of production exist in any social formation, and that contemporary ideological and political constellations within societies “like our own” reveal overwhelming evidence that premodernity is still very much with us. A “pre-modern” ideological frame which aligned god-given social status with power (both physical and political), wealth, wisdom and virtue, finds a productive afterlife within the confusion between money and aesthetic value by mystifying the difference between the two. However, given that there is no such thing as “cultural capital”, there is only capital, the ownership of congealed labour/value, then how, the essay asks, can we imagine the elaboration of a responsible mode of intellectuality? How are we to distinguish between valuable work and the production of cultural fertilizer or raw material, or allow for the possibility that both kinds of work may well coexist inextricably intertwined within the same product? The essay provides tentative answers, and the author provides his own test of value: namely, whether a work is orchestrated in such a way as to promote the best possible insight into the dynamics (historical and political as well as economic) which format cultural practice as a specific if not a quasi-autonomous sector within or in relation to capitalism.

A Sports Journalism of Their Own

This article relates the findings of a questionnaire investigating the motivations and attitudes of fan sports bloggers who take on the cultural labour of mainstream media by reporting and commentating on quotidian sports performances. Part of a larger, multimethod comparative case study, it investigates the attitudes of bloggers of a niche and nonniche sport toward the output of mainstream media. While these bloggers differed in terms of output and motivations, the questionnaire found they shared similar attitudes to mainstream sports media (MSSM) and the role of blogging as distinct styles of sports communication. The findings suggest that blogging can be seen as a way for fans to react to and critique the work of the mainstream media in communicating sports. It could also be well as a means to supplementing and augmenting the work of MSSM in ways that reflect the nature and the media discourses surrounding their particular sport. Finding that social elements were also a fundamental pleasure and motivation, further research into the particularities of social experience is indicated.

Symphony of the Surplus/Value : Notes on labour, valorization and sabotage in the metropolitan factory

This essay is a reflection on how art produces value using the work of Arseny Avraamov, Heath Bunting, and debates around cultural labour. It argues that art produces value not through exchange itself or through labour as traditionally understood, but in how it renders value out of the labours of circulating ideas, images, and affects. Drawing from this perspective, and informed by autonomist theories of class composition, it then considers possibilities for the sabotage of value within circuits of artistic value production, such as in the regeneration of cities through an arts based economy.

Benevolent Desires and Dark Dominations

The career of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s SS City of Peking, 1874–1910, both outlined and undermined the currents of American cultural identity, national policy, industrial development, and immigration and labor history. Most significantly, the roles it played in the establishment of an American Pacific challenged the moral foundations on which the American political system was founded.

Complaints of Everyday Life: Feminist Periodical Culture and Correspondence Columns in The Woman Worker, Women Folk and The Freewoman

Complaints of Everyday Life:Feminist Periodical Culture and Correspondence Columns in The Woman Worker, Women Folk and The Freewoman Barbara Green (bio) One of the nicest things said about us was that Women Folk is a household friend to all who read it, and not merely stiff black letterpress and cold white paper. If that be so—and it is grand to believe it—then please treat us as a friend loves to be treated; tell us of the things that matter to you. Bring us your news (just think of our Parliament always waiting for you!) and if it is joyful let us go shares, and if it is troublesome let us help to smooth away the wrinkles and turn out the bothersome invader.1 I have been much interested in your paper so far, and more especially in the correspondence columns, because I must confess they have been so full of surprises for me.2 What are the forms of everyday life? In the correspondence columns of the feminist weekly, the Woman Worker, later named Women Folk, and in the avant-garde feminist publication the Freewoman, readers described the difficult interface of private life with the feminist issues of the day, so that the realities of housekeeping, marriage, childrearing, and work were made visible. Embedded as they are in the ephemeral and mundane aspects of daily life, these examples stand as emblems for the necessary connection between the three concerns of my study: domestic modernity, feminist periodical culture, and everyday life. Despite a great divide that loomed in the early twentieth century between feminist periodicals and more traditionally "feminine" women's papers and magazines, feminist papers often engaged the material of everyday life through forms usually associated [End Page 461] with women's print media: fashion pages, cooking columns, and letters pages that made room for confessional discourse. This essay is about one aspect of this rich literary culture, a "feminist complaint," or rather a series of complaints, found in the correspondence columns of two feminist periodicals of the early twentieth century circulating in Britain: the Woman Worker (1907-10) and the Freewoman (1911-12). The complaint—and modern feminist periodical culture in general—can tell us a great deal about the rhythms of everyday life and representations of women's labor in modern culture. It can also reveal the mechanisms of identification and dis-identification by which women connected themselves to the new feminist communities and identities of the early twentieth century. The feminist complaint is only one of many ways in which feminist periodical culture imagined the everyday in the first decades of the twentieth century. A periodical makes meaning through its heterogeneity and offers its reader a number of avenues for engagement.3 This is no less true of feminist periodicals than of other journalistic forms. Editors could make use of a variety of strategies for engaging the everyday—editorials and features that commented upon and sought to revise the routines of daily life as well as "lighter" fare such as fashion columns and articles on homemaking that now seem surprising in the sometimes sober pages of feminist periodicals. These diverse means express a shared interest in the everyday that establishes deep connections between periodicals that have often been treated as representing separate political strategies and agendas. That is to say that the "feminist everyday" is a border-crosser, allowing us to find connections between various feminist publications, even when audience, tone and goals were largely different, as in the case of the socialist-feminist publication the Woman Worker and its avant-garde feminist contemporary the Freewoman.4 When we read for conversations about the everyday that exist in very different kinds of periodicals we are able to expose a large shared cultural project of developing new ways of reading modernity through a specifically feminist lens. In addition, the correspondence columns of these papers provide a vernacular form for expressing the concerns of daily life, that in its ephemerality draws our attention to the rhythms of everyday life: the rhythms of labor, domestic duties, childrearing, and more. In the context of surrounding materials that make up the material culture of the feminist periodical—editorials, news...

Making death ‘good’: instructional tales for dying in newspaper accounts of Jade Goody’s death

Facilitating a 'good' death is a central goal for hospices and palliative care organisations. The key features of such a death include an acceptance of death, an open awareness of and communication about death, the settling of practical and interpersonal business, the reduction of suffering and pain, and the enhancement of autonomy, choice and control. Yet deaths are inherently neither good nor bad; they require cultural labour to be 'made over' as good. Drawing on media accounts of the controversial death of UK reality television star Jade Goody, and building on existing analyses of her death, we examine how cultural discourses actively work to construct deaths as good or bad and to position the dying and those witnessing their death as morally accountable. By constructing Goody as bravely breaking social taboos by openly acknowledging death, by contextualising her dying as occurring at the end of a life well lived and by emphasising biographical continuity and agency, newspaper accounts serve to position themselves as educative rather than exploitative, and readers as information-seekers rather than ghoulishly voyeuristic. We argue that popular culture offers moral instruction in dying well which resonates with the messages from palliative care.

Reconstructing the “Cradle of Brazil”: The Detachability of Morality and the Nature of Cultural Labor in Salvador, Bahia's Pelourinho World Heritage Site

AbstractThis essay examines theories of value and property in relation to conceptions of morality, correct comportment, and their influences on Afro-Bahians subject to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural heritage initiatives in the Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This urban space is the nation's most expressive site for the performance of Afro-Brazilian identity and the commemoration of tradition. In analyzing the role of morality in Pelourinho-based cultural property-making, I focus on popular critiques of heritage discourse to argue that, in conjuring a particular form of cultural heritage that bears a distinct resemblance to UNESCO's immaterial patrimony programs, the Bahian state has piggybacked on social scientific evaluations of local people's moral comportments in order to put together an archive of everyday life that exists as a standing reserve for histories of Brazil and the marketing of cultural heritage. This data produced in an effort to regulate the historical center has revolved around the state's evaluation of the moral probity and everyday habits of the Pelourinho's overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian populace. The result is a conceptualization of cultural labor that emanates not from the capacities and struggles of producers, but from a decentered or distributed view of production, which I tie to the existence of this archive. Consumers, or visitors to the historical center, as well as historical archives thus play a critical role in this form of constructing property and understanding the sources and fungibility of labor in a global economy for multicultural difference that depends on an emphasis on futurity and market reflexivity.