Media work, career management, and professional identity: Living labour precarity

Understanding creative industries in general and media work in particular poses a fascinating paradox: as people worldwide engage with media in an increasingly immersive, always-on, almost instantaneous and interconnected way, the very people whose livelihoods and sense of professional identity depend on delivering content and experiences across such media seem to be at a loss on how to come up with survival strategies – in terms of business models, effective regulatory practices (e.g. copyrights and universal access provisions), and perhaps most significantly the organization of entrepreneurial working conditions that support and sustain the creative process needed to meet the demands of a global market saturated with media. This article proposes a model for professional identity in media work that engages with these questions, based on past, present and ongoing personal experiences of one of the authors as a self-employed media worker in multiple creative industries. NL_10_Deuze_9-24.indd 9 3/23/12 6:22:31 PM Phoebe Harris Elefante | Mark Deuze 10 People now spend more time with media than at any previous point in history. The number of media channels, forms, genres, devices, applications and formats is proliferating – more media are produced every year. Yet at the same time, the news about the media as an industry is less than optimistic. Reports about massive layoffs, casualization of labour and ongoing precaritization in all the creative industries – most notably film and television entertainment, journalism, digital game development and advertising – proliferate. This suggests a fascinating paradox: as people engage with media in an increasingly immersive, always-on, almost instantaneous and interconnected way, the very people whose livelihoods and sense of professional identity depend on delivering content and experiences across such media seem to be at a loss on how to come up with survival strategies – in terms of business models, effective regulatory practices (e.g. copyrights and universal access provisions), and perhaps most significantly the organization of working conditions that would support and sustain the creative process needed to meet the demands of a global market saturated with media. In recent years a rich literature emerged documenting the working lives and labour conditions of media workers. Clearly, the production of culture and cultural production invite serious scholarly interest in the context of calls for a global ‘creative’ economy to emerge out of the multiple economic crises of the early twenty-first century, affecting or altogether eradicating traditional (perspectives on) industry business models. On the other hand, with some exceptions (as in the work of scholars such as Andrew Ross, John Caldwell, Alisa Perren, Liz McFall, Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill and Susan Christopherson; see Deuze 2011), so-called ‘real-world’ perspectives on the working lives of media professionals remain scarce in the literature. Certainly, the interdisciplinary field of studies on labour, work, media and communication, entertainment, and news industries is rich (and seems to be enjoying an upswing), but work grounded in everyday lived experience is rare. To some extent this has to do with problems obtaining or maintaining access to the research population. Such practical issues are exacerbated by the rapid growth of what the International Labour Organization (ILO) has called ‘atypical’ working conditions across the media, information and communication sectors of the economy, where people increasingly work without contracts, without formalized relationships with clients or employers, and at times even without any kind of official salary or pay. Media work, particularly in the film and television sectors, is a highly structured and organized form of labour taking place in casualized and disorganized settings. What happens in media work tends to be governed by hierarchical relationships based on tradition and seniority, while at the same time operating largely on the basis of intimate and informal networks. Across the world, the number of degree programmes related to media, cultural and creative industries at institutes for higher education has risen sharply (Flew, in: Deuze, 2011). Such programmes tell all kinds of stories about media – but often fail to explain what actually happens on a day-to-day basis for those working across such industries, leading students to sigh that they learned more during internships and other unpaid, entry-level work than in class. It is our intention with this article to talk about the precarious labour conditions in (new) media work, using the real-life experiences of one of the authors as a case study. By matching the research of the second author (Deuze 2007) with the work-life of the first, we hope to connect theory and practice, universal claims and particular context. Our piece is structured as a NL_10_Deuze_9-24.indd 10 3/23/12 6:22:32 PM Media work, career management, and professional identity 11 conversation, where [M] is the second author, and [P] is the first (representing the first letters of our first names). Not only does the dialogue format allow us to identify and contextualize specific everyday experiences of the practitioner, it also highlights the differences (and disconnects) between those who live and work in the media industries, and those who seek to document and understand it. We have observed through our dialogue that media practitioners have little interest in theory as a tool for navigating the changing industry, and that academics tend to bypass the mundane realities of media work, which would otherwise allow them to, in effect, theorize more practically. Through such an approach we advocate, following the earlier work of Donald Schon (1983), how the lessons learned from knowledge-in-practice may lead to reflection-in-action.