Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges workers face. The authors take on crucial issues and provide insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, they investigate working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in places such as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad, across a range of job categories that includes visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, Tejaswini Ganti, and others, this collection offers timely critiques of media globalization and broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.

Politicians, educators and business leaders often tell young people they will need to develop their creative skills to be ready for the new economy. Vast numbers of school leavers enrol in courses in media, communications, creative and performing arts, yet few will ever achieve the creative careers they aspire to. The big cities are filled with performers, designers, producers and writers who cannot make a living from their art/craft. They are told their creative skills are transferable but there is little available work outside retail, service and hospitality jobs. Actors can use their skills selling phone plans, insurance or advertising space from call centres, but usually do so reluctantly. Most people in the ‘creative industries’ work as low-paid employees or freelancers, or as unpaid interns. They put up with exploitation so that they can do what they love. The Creativity Hoax argues that in this individualistic and competitive environment, creative aspirants from poor and minority backgrounds are most vulnerable and precarious. Although governments in the West stress the importance of culture and knowledge in economic renewal, few invest in the support and infrastructure that would allow creative aspirants to make best use of their skills.

Historically, cinema in the Americas has been signed by a state of precariousness. Notwithstanding the growing accessibility to video and digital technologies, access to the material means of film production is still limited, affecting the spheres of production, distribution, and reception. Equally, questions about the precarious can be traced in cultural and archival policies, film legislations, as well as in thematic and aesthetic choices. While conventional definitions of the precarious have been associated with notions of scarcity and insecurity, this volume looks at precariousness from a non-monolithic angle, exploring its productivity and potential for original, critical approaches, with the aim of providing new readings to the variedly rich and complex cinemas of the Americas.

A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South. A Precarious Game explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives. Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics.

Explores how communities from disadvantaged backgrounds experience precarity more severely than others in social and economic settings.

An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies--whether apps like Uber built on flexible labor or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users--have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also furthered increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, women, indigenous people, migrants, and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.

A study of women creating fake fashion in China - and how it affects the economy, labour, creativity and culture.

The first book-length study of Nairobi-based female filmmakers—and how their dogged pursuit of opportunities, innovation, and cultural support is defining an industry. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is home to something extraordinary and unlikely: in this city, the most critically acclaimed filmmakers—both directors and producers—are women. Yet, across the globe, women make up less than 10 percent of film directors. In Creative Hustling, Robin Steedman takes a closer look at these remarkable women filmmakers, viewing them not only as auteurs, but also as entrepreneurs, who are taking the lead in creating a vibrant, and atypical, screen media industry. To understand their achievement, Steedman theorizes hustling as not only a practice born out of necessity but also an inventive labor in its own right—one that can create new spaces of community by carving new entrepreneurial pathways. Through original empirical field research gathered over eight months in Nairobi, Steedman describes how female filmmakers go about trying to create their films, as well as the challenges they face in distributing those films in their local market. Along the way, she traces the history of the industry over the last fifteen years, the lack of state support for these filmmakers’ undertakings, the low social standing of the profession, and the transnational conflicts that arise when Euro-American funding is at the heart of Kenyan cinema. Creative Hustling is a major contribution to the task of de-Westernizing media industry studies, imparting important lessons about what it takes to create and distribute creative work in a global age increasingly marked by uncertain work.

From line managers, corporate CEOs, urban designers, teachers, politicians, mayors, advertisers and even our friends and family, the message is 'be creative'. Creativity is heralded as the driving force of our contemporary society; celebrated as agile, progressive and liberating. It is the spring of the knowledge economy and shapes the cities we inhabit. It even defines our politics. What could possibly be wrong with this? In this brilliant, counter intuitive blast Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation. It is a regime that prioritizes individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to recognise anything - job, place, person - that is not profitable. And it impacts on everything around us: the places where we work, the way we are managed, how we spend our leisure time.

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title A survey into an emerging pattern of labor instability and uneven global development Is job insecurity the new norm? With fewer and fewer people working in steady, long-term positions for one employer, has the dream of a secure job with full benefits and a decent salary become just that—a dream? In Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross surveys the new topography of the global workplace and finds an emerging pattern of labor instability and uneven development on a massive scale. Combining detailed case studies with lucid analysis and graphic prose, he looks at what the new landscape of contingent employment means for workers across national, class, and racial lines—from the emerging “creative class” of high-wage professionals to the multitudes of temporary, migrant, or low-wage workers. Developing the idea of “precarious livelihoods” to describe this new world of work and life, Ross explores what it means in developed nations—comparing the creative industry policies of the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, as well as developing countries—by examining the quickfire transformation of China’s labor market. He also responds to the challenge of sustainability, assessing the promise of “green jobs” through restorative alliances between labor advocates and environmentalists. Ross argues that regardless of one’s views on labor rights, globalization, and quality of life, this new precarious and “indefinite life,&” and the pitfalls and opportunities that accompany it is likely here to stay and must be addressed in a systematic way. A more equitable kind of knowledge society emerges in these pages—less skewed toward flexploitation and the speculative beneficiaries of intellectual property, and more in tune with ideals and practices that are fair, just, and renewable.