engleski

Towards More Insecurity? Virtual Work and Sustainability of Creative Labour

The interest in research on creative labour in the last two decades concentrated mainly on the changing working practices and conditions of employed in the field of cultural and creative industries. Although cultural and creative industries are heavily influenced by the digitalization processes, it is intriguing to note that the input of virtual work in these industries has been researched marginally. Previous research has shown that the vulnerability of the creative (cultural) workers (Banks, 2007) is connected to the contradiction between artistic autonomy and creativity on the one hand and the market and income on the other. These contradictions are inscribed in the productivity type as well as in the organizational contexts of the cultural and creative industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2002). Creative (cultural) workers are in constant conflict both with external and with internal control mechanisms that limit their autonomy, but that contribute to self-exploitation (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011) and thus to the deepening of their precarious situation. The precarity of their position stems from the type of labour and employment in cultural and creative industries that is by definition atypical and non-standard with the elements of non-paid work and under-employment to use Edgell's (2006) categorization. In addition, the nature of creative (cultural) work demands long-term temporal and financial investment into various skills and expertise (McRobbie, 2002 ; Barada, 2011). Unlike the former notions that these labour and employment types are liberative and emancipatory, it has been shown that they contribute to the reproduction of the already present class, gender and ethnic inequalities in the contemporary capitalist societies (Hesmondhalgh, 2002 ; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). These workers cannot be purely defined as ‘virtual workers’ as their labour practices encompass both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ dimensions. However, researchers of creative labour seldom investigate the input of virtual work to the daily working practices of creative (cultural) workers – it is more taken for granted and seldom discussed. The exceptions are Terranova (2000) who focused more on creative workers dealing with digital content, or e.g. Burston, Dyer-Witheford and Hearn, (2010) with their focus on ‘digital labour’. Furthermore, Hesmondhalgh (2010) criticized the prevailing focus of research in ‘digital labour’ on the position of ‘users’ and ‘prosumers’ rather than ‘professional workers’. He also highlighted how one has to approach the notion of ‘exploitation’ in creative labour and virtual work more carefully so as to put the negative trends in creative labour in the adequate political framework. The diminishing of labour rights of creative cultural workers, the increase of unpaid labour in cultural and creative industries and the decline in the professional standards (to name but few problems of creative labour) have to be taken into account and researched in order to bring about adequate policy solutions for the development of models for sustainable creative labour. In this article I will try to overview the input of the ‘virtual’ work in the creative cultural workers practices, in order to decipher its’ input to the prevailing insecurity and overall precariousness of creative labour. This will be done in order to outline the possible policy implications for the development of sustainable creative labour models, oriented primarily towards ‘professional workers’ in cultural and creative industries.

creative labour; virtual work; cultural industries; creative industries; sustainable development

nije evidentirano