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Work in the “cultural economy” is increasingly defined by blurred boundaries between labour and leisure. This edited volume reveals how those in the arts, sports, and entertainment industries actually work – and struggle – behind the spectacle.
Drawing on original empirical research across arts, sports, and entertainment, this edited collection examines labour processes, employment relations, and worker experiences in the rapidly expanding “experience economy”. Featuring chapters with a diverse range of methodologies and data, the contributions span sectors from Hollywood production and independent performing arts to immersive entertainment, music, and sport. The chapters make visible precarious careers shaped by gig work and hybrid employment; the emotional and performative demands placed on workers; and widening inequalities in pay, security, and recognition. The volume also interrogates pressures on the value of creative work, such as artificial intelligence (AI), marketization, corporate control and climate change. It also highlights emerging forms of resistance, solidarity and alternative modes of organizing. By centring both front-stage and often invisible backstage labour, the collection advances sociological debates relating to labour process theory, cultural work, and employment relations.
Offering a critical perspective on artistic and athletic labour today, this book equips readers to rethink value, power, and rights in cultural industries. It is appealing reading for scholars and students in sociology of work, industrial relations, cultural studies, technology studies, media and communications, sports and labour economics.
Gretchen Purser is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, USA.
Andreas Pekarek is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management and Marketing at The University of Melbourne, Australia.
Markus Helfen is Professor of Strategy and Leadership in Non-Profit-Organisations at the University of Labour, Frankfurt (Main), Germany.
Rick Delbridge is Professor of Organizational Analysis at Cardiff Business School and Co-Convenor of the Centre for Innovation Policy Research, Cardiff University, UK.
Chapter 1. Setting the Stage: Working in the Arts, Sports, and Entertainment; Gretchen Purser, Andreas Pekarek, Markus Helfen, and Rick Delbridge
Chapter 2. Stepwise and Transformative Promotions: How Early Careers are Shaped in Hollywood; Julia M Dessauer
Chapter 3. When Cultural Workers Become Disaster Workers: Working Conditions and Support Needs of ‘Creative Recovery Workers’ Leading Post-Disaster Arts Projects; Anna Kennedy-Borissow
Chapter 4. A New Labor Landscape: Worker Experiences and Employment Relations in Immersive Entertainment; Ziyi Wang
Chapter 5. Nothing but Worries? Performing Artists' Career Bricolage in the Face of Social Security Threats; Axel Haunschild, Hannah Speicher, and Verena Tobsch
Chapter 6. From Exit to Mobilisation: Concept Artists’ Multi-Level Responses to AI; Deepa Kylasam Iyer and Francis Kuriakose
Chapter 7. Music, Artificial Intelligence, and the Politics of Class Discipline; Charles Umney
Chapter 8. ‘Once More with Feeling’: Revivals, Repertoire, and Networked Inequality in the US Opera Industry; Caitlin Vincent
Spotlight on Ethnography
Chapter 9. The Band and the Bar: Occupational Communities and Resistance in Nashville's Live Entertainment Economy; Adam K. Schoenbachler
Chapter 10. Cool Labour: Snowboard Instructors’ Professionalisation as Relational Work; Tania Aparicio