Introduction

Recent debates have questioned the extent to which existing theories, particularly Marxist political economy and cultural studies theories, are able to explain changes in media production (see Dwyer, 2015, 2016; Fuchs, 2016; Garnham, 2011, 2016; Murdock & Golding, 2016). This chapter examines one of the most frequently adopted theories of media production, flexible specialization (hereafter, FS) (see Storper, 1993; Barnatt & Starkey, 1997; Karlsson & Picard, 2011). It focuses on the way the key concepts of FS theory – innovation and flexibility – have been used by academics, policymakers, practitioners, and industry lobby groups to explain and/ or justify the move from vertically integrated broadcasters to a system requiring outsourcing to independent production companies.

This chapter examines the extent to which FS theory provides a good explanation for the trend towards precarity of employment – freelance or casualized work, often with poor terms and conditions – in TV production (Banks et al., 2013). How far can this precarity be said to have been driven by the need to achieve innovation in TV programming through flexible processes of media production? The UK offers a good case study for investigating and understanding trends internationally, as it has a media industry with a prominent role for public broadcasting, a complex production network that is both local and globally networked, and a moderate level of professional organization of media workers.

First, the key policy documents which created the UK independent TV production sector are reviewed to illustrate the way first cost efficiency, and then increasingly flexibility and innovation were advanced as reasons to support the growth of the sector and the accompanying precarity of employment. The underlying theory of FS is then reviewed to identify the proposed relationship between flexibility and innovation and to identify measures with which to test whether the move to independent production has been associated with greater innovation, flexibility, and precarity.