Creativities of the Culture Industries

• In Event: 322 - Regular Session. Identity, Diversity, and Inequality: The Work and Politics of Popular Culture

Abstract

Often theorized as resistant to or excluded from labor processes, creativity now appears as a requisite feature of work, especially in knowledge, information, and culture industries. Scholars in sociology and the neighboring field of communication suggest that creativity, as a discourse, acts as an instrument of control over work. Still, little research empirically examines how workers understand and construct creativity in the context of paid employment. This paper asks how workers, management, and digital platforms discursively construct creativity in order to argue that discourses of creativity alone do not control or discipline workers in the popular culture industries. I then argue that social control over creative work requires particular materialities described in prior research. I draw upon 20 months of participant observation in a multi-channel YouTube network and a music studio along with 75 interviews with management and workers. Beginning with a brief genealogy of creativity as a philosophical and social scientific concept, I then develop a four part typology of creativity based on the aforementioned qualitative data. This typology includes romantic, individualized creativities that I term 1) god-like, creation ex nihilo and 2) autonomous expression as well as 3) heteronymous entrepreneurialism and 4) instrumental pragmatism. I find that the last of these tends to be espoused by management, suggesting a gap between managerial ideology and worker understandings. I argue that recent research that claims the discourse of “creativity” as a labor control mechanism ignores the material experiences upon which this discourse depends for meaning.

Author

• Michael L. Siciliano, University of California Los Angeles