To recap, we have argued that behind the rhetoric of the creative economy is a neo- liberal project to transform labour. This has several elements: to habituate workers to new capitalism's churn and upheaval; to encourage them to be optimistic despite their experience of precarity, underemployment and professional/ career abeyance; and to persuade them to be ready to transfer their creative skills, passions and ambitions towards the opportunities the market presents. In the creative economy, workers should give up on any expectation of a steady, long- term job, and instead look at working life as a series of gigs. The increasing influence of globalization and digitization over economic processes, and the weakening of industrial rights, have undermined job stability. So companies expect workers to be flexible and biddable. In one sense they must live like artists – hand- to- mouth – and be ready to bring the same creative energies to work that they apply to their art, even when performing routinized and low- skilled tasks. But in another sense, they must relinquish the artist's suspicion of commercialization. This chapter will consider how capitalism meets this latter challenge – how it brings creativity to market. Following Boltanski and Chiapello (2006), we argue that the system's remarkable durability is in part based on its capacity to absorb critique. Modern capitalism's alienated labour, mass production and consumption provoked various forms of popular resistance, including from artistic, subcultural and countercultural communities. The popularity of the idea of creative work rests in its implicit promise to remedy these ills, and free us from lives of rigid industrial direction.

However, as we have seen, the task of yoking art to enterprise is not straightforward. In this chapter we look at the idea of the social factory in more detail and how it challenges the work/ play binary. In one sense, immaterial labour is everywhere, but, from a neoclassical economic perspective, it is not productive labour until it is harnessed for profit. So how to make it productive? Immaterial labour rarely complies with the rigid directions and techniques of scientific management.