Bousquet raises similar issues to those addressed in Andrew Ross’s latest book when he writes:

Higher education has played a crucial, innovative role in the new order of the global workplace, trading on the willingness of most of us to discount our labor-time in exchange for a little dignity and partial autonomy. It isn’t just faculty work that’s being spoiled; most people’s work is being ruined in similar ways.

What’s particularly interesting is how Bousquet charts some of these changes in relation to managerialism:

the tenure-track faculty now retain professional status in at least partial relation to their managerial function—they manage a vast range of parafaculty (adjunct lecturers, tech support, undergraduate tutors, graduate teaching and research assistants). Just as much legal work is done by paralegals supervised by lawyers, and physicians increasingly function to manage non-physician medical practitioners, nurses of various grades, students, nurses’ aides, technicians, secretaries, and other personnel.

And the economies of corporate campuses:

The smoothly-functioning campus is a post-Fordist company town, with a churning pool of self-subsidizing cheap labor that takes loans to spend in the company store, voluntarily poses for company marketing materials, pays for the privilege of serving as a “brand ambassador” for the campus, and so on.

These are problems I hope we can think through at the State of the Industry conference in November. Well worth reading Bousquet’s book in preparation for those discussions.

Organisers
Rosalind Gill, Centre for Citizenship Identities and Governance (CCIG), The Open University
Mark Banks, Department of Sociology/CRESC, The Open University
Stephanie Taylor, Department of Psychology/CCIG, The Open University

The last decade has seen a huge growth of interest in cultural labour, coinciding with increased attention to the media and other fields as ‘creative industries’, and underscored by technological changes that have brought into being new occupations such as web design, digital animation, electronic arts, etc. Suddenly there seems to be an acknowledgement that media and culture involve work! Following on from our successful workshop in 2008 on “The creative industries: 10 years after”, in this symposium we bring together a series of invited speakers to explore the nature of cultural work today. Research in this field points both to the passionate attachments cultural workers have to their work, and to the costs this involves in terms of precariousness, poor pay and ‘bulimic’ stop-go patterns of working. How do workers in fields as diverse as fashion, television, film, web design or fine art negotiate and manage working lives that are characterised by insecurity, informality, and in which ‘you are only as good as your last job’?

A series of invited key speakers will address the following themes:
*Are cultural workers the poster boys and girls for work in the ‘new economy’?
*How different is ‘cultural labour’ from other forms of work? Are we all cultural workers now?
*Is the notion of ‘creative industries’ useful?
*How do Romantic conceptions of artists and artistic work hold up in an age of individualisation and insecurity?
*Is the notion of ‘creative biographies’ useful for understanding cultural workers lives as lived and experienced in conditions of precarity?
*To what extent are creative biographies inflected by inequalities relating to class, gender, ‘race’, age and disability?

Speakers include: Lisa Adkins (Goldsmiths), Melissa Gregg (Sydney), Helen Kennedy (Leeds), Kate Oakley (City University and independent consultant), Stephanie Taylor (Open) and Andreas Wittel (Nottingham)

Attendance is free for Open University and CRESC students and staff, with a nominal charge of £25 for external attendees (coffee and lunch provided).

Please contact SocSci-CCIG-Events[at]open.ac.uk if you wish to register for this event.