Agents at work
Creators: name: Lipkin, Nadav D.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2016

description: This study explores workers' abilities to make decisions in and about their work within the creative industries in network society. It expands upon existing studies of workers in creative industries using a case study of the professional independent game making community in New York City to explore relationships between decision making capacity and various aspects of labor. These aspects include the ways in which workers relate to each other and to firms, technologies, and ideologies, and how they are situated within the broader context of labor in geography and the economy. This research serves to address key tensions in prior analyses of creative labor that describe that work as sometimes agentic and other times deprived of agency in network society.  The study finds that decision making capacity is a multifaceted resource at a worker's disposal. Like financial or social capital, it can be acquired and depleted, but it can only be effectively analyzed in regards to the worker as an agent within a networked context. This research suggests that â€œcreative industriesâ€  as a term is too broad for a discussion of decision making capacity in most situations. Particularly, worker decision making capacity is greatly affected by the desirability of a given job within the economy, which contributes to considerable differences in experiences of decision making capacity between cultural labor and non-cultural creative labor. Decision making capacity is also affected by the extent of a worker's independence within the labor assemblage. Workers who are more independent may have greater or lesser decision making capacity, depending considerably on the costs associated with performing a particular job and initial costs of becoming independent.  This research also suggests that while workers in creative industries may be working longer and less predictable hours inside and outside of traditional working spaces, workers' decisions to work precariously can sometimes be deliberately and rationally chosen to serve specific objectives, such as meeting deadlines or collaborating with distant partners. This is particularly the case with workers who are independent and hold responsibility for choosing when and where to work. The experience of decision making capacity for such workers contrasts with experiences of more traditionally employed workers in creative professions who may be working precariously under some degree of influence from their employers.   The study additionally finds that while workers in many creative industries are largely un-unionized, decision making capacity is often positively affected by a number of communities and institutions that often replicate the benefits of unions. This is particularly the case with independent workers who, by virtue of independence and the legal properties of unions in the United States, may not be able to unionize like traditional workers have in the past. Workers gain decision making capacity through emerging professional associations that may fill gaps left in the absence of traditional labor unions as well as formal and informal collaborations online through websites and social media.  This research encourages a nuanced approach to discussions of agency for workers in creative professions. It encourages future studies to view decision making in economic and ideological terms together, considering how a worker's context encourages certain work strategies. This study also suggests a turn away from attempts to study creative labor in such broad terms and advocates for policy measures that address specific factors that deprive workers of decision making capacity. This also means recognizing situations in which causes of worker distress derive from aspects of work that policy is not positioned to adequately address, such as high job desirability, accessibility to skills, and ease of product creation.