Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Rustbelt Aspirational
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Creative Imperative: Remaking Capital/ Remaking Labour
- 2 Post-Industrial Pedagogy
- 3 Leaving Covers-Land: The Metropolitan Journey and the Creative Network
- 4 Do Give Up Your Day Job
- 5 Labile Labour
- 6 The Just-In-Time Self?
- 7 Beyond the Social Factory: Reclaiming the Commons
- Conclusion: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Labile Labour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Rustbelt Aspirational
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Creative Imperative: Remaking Capital/ Remaking Labour
- 2 Post-Industrial Pedagogy
- 3 Leaving Covers-Land: The Metropolitan Journey and the Creative Network
- 4 Do Give Up Your Day Job
- 5 Labile Labour
- 6 The Just-In-Time Self?
- 7 Beyond the Social Factory: Reclaiming the Commons
- Conclusion: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Policies promoting labour flexibility erode processes of relational and peer-group interaction that are vital for reproducing skills and constructive attitudes to work. If you expect to change what you are doing at almost any time, to change ‘employer’ at short notice, to change colleagues and above all to change what you call yourself, work ethics become constantly contestable and opportunistic.
Guy Standing The PrecariatAt this point, it is worth recapping the argument with which we opened this book. Economic change in the West has made the directions of working life more difficult to fathom. Jobs and careers that once appeared stable seem more and more precarious, as do skills, both those acquired on the job and through education. In societies where communal and social supports have eroded, people are increasingly made responsible for their own fate. Policymakers and educators have encouraged workers to develop their creative skills, arguing that the West's future prosperity depends on symbolic and intellectual innovation. Such an injunction strikes a popular chord at two levels. Firstly, it accords with a radical critique of soul-destroying, Taylorised work that has its roots in both the 1960s counterculture (a largely middle-class movement) and in working-class resistance to alienated labour. The creativity injunction appears to offer an alternative to moral conformity, mass production and consumption and the conventional scripts of working life. It finds expression in popular culture, particularly televised talent shows (now a subgenre of ‘reality television’), where contestants can find fame in a variety of creative endeavours – singing, dancing, cooking, modelling. Secondly, the creativity injunction appeals to youth, particularly those who resist or don't fit in at school. Such people can easily become lost in the fog in the journey to adulthood and the idea of a creative career suggests the possibility of bridging subculture/ youth culture and adult life. Where once such cultures seemed hermetically sealed against the workaday world – forming a parallel universe where only imaginary solutions to alienated adult life were possible – now youthful symbolic play receives pedagogical and technocratic encouragement. Most of our interviewees related their vocational aspirations to those freewheeling youth cultural practices. In the creative economy even resistant subculture can provide a foundation for life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Creativity HoaxPrecarious Work in the Gig Economy, pp. 83 - 104Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2018