Industry Synergies and Composite Careers

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Arts and Creative Work

Abstract

Many cultural workers facing unpredictable employment seek other kinds of jobs beyond their respective culture industry to make ends meet. Yet, aside from noting the precariousness of cultural work, existing scholarship says little about how these workers manage their employment both inside and outside of creative jobs and across multiple industries, leading to an incomplete portrait of artistic working lives. Based on a two-year qualitative study of the Nashville music scene, we show how musicians assemble composite careers, defined as complementary types of employment involving jobs across two or more industries. We found that workers integrated creative work and service jobs in ways that were strategically useful for their work lives along three lines (structural, symbolic, and social), which were directly shaped by urban resources, narratives, and networks. We elaborate on how culture workers assemble composite careers based on the availability and “fit” of multiple kinds of jobs in geographically proximate yet categorically distinct industries. As composite careers come to increasingly characterize the employment reality of today’s cultural workers, we highlight the difficulty of managing composite careers and suggest that the process of assembling these careers partially defrays individuals’ inability to secure stable employment and livable wages while enhancing the local cultural scenes of which they are a part. We discuss the implications of composite careers for cultural industry work, precarious labor, and urban sociology.

Authors

• Adam Kaelin Schoenbachler, Cornell University

• Eli R. Wilson, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque