The Meanings and Problems of Contemporary Creative Work

ORIGINAL PAPER

The Meanings and Problems of Contemporary CreativeWork

Stephanie Taylor

Received: 22 December 2010 /Accepted: 10 August 2011 /Published online: 20 August 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract Contemporary creative work has emerged as a focus of internationalacademic and policy attention since the late 1990s, the period in which the culturaland creative industries achieved recognition as a highly successful new sector.Commentators have noted the problems faced by many contemporary creativeworkers because of the precarious and ill-paid nature of much of the work in thesector. This article proposes that associations with the creative arts provide animportant resource for the occupational identification for these workers, yet also asignificant source of conflicts. Analyses of interviews with creative workers whowere recruited from the students and alumni of UK art colleges (Higher EducationInstitutions in Arts and Design) suggest that meanings derived from the creative artsand taken up in educational contexts and elsewhere continue to shape these workers’understandings of creative work, including the process of creative working, thetrajectory of a creative career, and what constitutes success in creative work. Theimportance of these meanings is explored and detailed through a consideration ofparticipants’ identifications using a narrative-discursive analysis of interview data.

Keywords Creative industries . Creative workers . Career trajectories .

Narrative-discursive analysis . Identities

Contemporary Creative Work

This article discusses contemporary creative work within the highly successful,international and pan-national sector that is identified by both academics and policymakers as the cultural and creative industries (e.g. Banks 2007; Guile 2006;Leadbetter 2004). The sector is broad and diverse. Although many of theseindustries and their associated occupations and work practices have long and distinct

Vocations and Learning (2012) 5:41–57DOI 10.1007/s12186-011-9065-6

S. Taylor (*)Psychology Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UKe-mail: [email protected]

histories, for example, as part of the creative arts, they are assumed to be‘intertwined economically and technologically in radically new ways’ within thesector (Guile 2006, p. 435). Contemporary creative workers, considered as acategory related to the sector as a whole rather than particular specialisations, havebeen found to be strongly motivated yet often precariously employed and poorlypaid (e.g. Gill and Pratt 2008). A relatively high proportion of these workers havedegree-level qualifications and it has been noted that the majority are ‘overqualifiedfor the specification of their roles’ (Creative and Cultural Skills (CCS) 2011),although there are also skills deficits in particular industries and areas of creativeactivity. This article retains the broader focus on contemporary creative workers inrelation to the sector as a whole. My interest is in the attraction which creative workholds for its practitioners and their own interpretations of the possibilities andproblems associated with working in this sector. Following the continuingassociation of the industries with the creative arts, including the aesthetic, and‘romantic discourses of art’ (Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009, p.416), the meaningsderived from the creative arts as encountered by creative workers in educationalcontexts and elsewhere are explored here. It is proposed that these meanings haveimplications for these workers’ career expectations and also potentially conflictingpractical consequences for contemporary creative work practices and working lives.

The first sections of the article describe the creative and cultural industries whichare the context of contemporary creative work, and the connections made betweensuch work and a contemporary identity project (Giddens 1991; Rose 1989, 1996). Inparticular, an argument is outlined that creative work is attractive to workers in thissector as a means of self-realisation (McRobbie 1998). The following sectionpresents the narrative-discursive methodological approach which is used to explorethe meanings which creative work holds for some of these workers. Then empiricalresearch with current and prospective workers who have an art college background isoutlined. Selected interview extracts are used to illustrate some of the key findingsfrom an analysis of multiple interviews, considered as collective datasets. The finalsections of the article discuss: i) the implications of participants’ interpretations ofthe nature of creative work and an identity as a creative practitioner; ii) the creativework process; iii) the trajectory of a creative career, and iv) what counts as success increative work. In all, it is proposed that some of the conflicts and problems aroundcreative working noted by other researchers can be seen to derive, at least in part,from its original associations with the creative arts.

The Cultural and Creative Industries

The cultural and creative industries comprise a broad and diverse sector which hasbeen celebrated and promoted worldwide, including in the UK, the USA,Scandinavia, China and the Pacific Rim (Guile 2006; Keane 2009; Power 2009).The functioning of these industries is not confined to separate countries, but assumedto extend across national borders, linking major international cities, such as London,New York and Los Angeles, as global hubs (Banks 2007). The industries are creditedwith exceptional growth and also the potential to regenerate depressed localeconomies, particularly in urban areas (Banks 2007). Despite concerns about the

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impact of the current economic downturn, there are expectations that the growth ofthe industries will continue (CCS 2011).

There has been considerable discussion but little final agreement about the range ofindustries encompassed by the sector (e.g. Banks and O'Connor 2009; Guile 2006).There is also limited agreement on what counts as creative or cultural work.1 However,an influential policy document from the UK’s New Labour government suggested thatthe creative industries embrace the conventional territory of the arts and extend beyondthem, including into the areas of media and new technologies. In this mappingdocument, they were listed as “advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market,crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, theperforming arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio.”(Department of Culture, Media and Sport 2001: p. 4) This listing is consonant with theargument, sometimes labelled the ‘culturisation’ thesis (Oakley et al. 2008), that therise of these industries reflects a new economic importance for culture, ‘ideas’(Howkins 2001), creativity and, most recently, innovation (O’Connor 2007). In thisview, the economic success of the industries derives from the ‘individual creativity,skill and talent’ (DCMS 2001) of their workers.

The reference to individual creativity, skill and talent evokes the creative arts and theimages of an individual creative maker, like a Romantic artist or, in more contemporaryterms, an ‘auteur’ film director. In a well-cited early study, McRobbie (1998) suggestedthat such an association attracts young people to contemporary creative work, partlybecause of the congruence with the identity project proposed by sociological theoristsof contemporary identity (Giddens 1991; Rose 1989, 1996). She suggests that creativework is seen as a means of self-realisation, consistent with the more generalcontemporary onus to make oneself as a successful individual. In this way, it mayappear to be an appropriate occupation for the workers of ‘late modernity’ (Giddens1991) and ‘contemporary liberal democracies’ (Rose 1996, p.11).

McRobbie’s broad argument is consistent with features of contemporary creativeworking noted by other academics. Creative workers often tolerate ill-paid orunpaid, short-term, precarious employment (Gill and Pratt 2008; Oakley 2007).McRobbie suggests that it is their commitment to creative work as part of apersonalised and individualised identity project which leads them to give a great dealfor little return, in a form of ‘self-exploitation’ (1998 p.103). She suggests too thatwomen and also Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) workers, as groups who havebeen marginalised in more conventional occupations and workplaces, may beattracted to creative work for its seeming difference. This attraction is partlyconfirmed by statistics (Pollard et al. 2008) showing that women comprise themajority of students in United Kingdom higher education Creative Arts and Designcourses which prepare many graduates for work in the creative industries, althoughBME students are under-represented in these courses. However, of concern here isthat outside education and in the workplace, both groups are under-represented in the

1 The ‘cultural industries’ came to be of interest as producers of culture, including national culture, forexample, through media like television (O’Connor 2007). ‘Creative industries’ is a newer term combining‘cultural industries’ and ‘creative arts’ (Hartley 2005, p.6). The concept of the creative industries wasoriginally introduced in the UK (DCMS 2001) but has subsequently been taken up in other nationalcontexts, with varying emphases and definitions (see Keane 2009; Power 2009).

The Meanings and Problems of Contemporary Creative Work 43

creative industries (Freeman 2007), confirming McRobbie’s further claim that theapparent promise of greater opportunity in the creative and cultural industries is notfulfilled.

Yet, despite it seeming explanatory quality, McRobbie’s argument can be criticisedon several grounds. Firstly, it implies that the attraction to creative work is based onillusion. That is, contemporary creative work supposedly offers limited rewards andit will only be undertaken by workers who fail to recognise the problems associatedwith it. Yet, a recent report notes that ‘There is a sense of genuine “vocation” evidentacross all of our sectors’ and ‘talented individuals…are often motivated more by apassion for developing their skill or craft rather than commercial motives’ (CCS2011, p.22). This would suggest that the drive to be creative may be stronger, andbetter informed, than McRobbie allows. Similarly, Banks (2007) has suggested thatsuch work may be a genuine and informed choice, for example, for people whoreject market values and are seeking an alternative to ‘capitalist norms such as profitmaximisation, disinterested exchange or wealth accumulation’ (p.184).

In addition, McRobbie’s work can be critiqued as offering an overview whichdoes not furnish an adequate account of how an association with the creative artsshapes the complex lived experience of creative working, or workers’ own decision-making about their lives. Here, findings from empirical work which investigated theconnection between the creative arts and creative working at this different level arepresented. The aim was to explore the complexity of the project to construct acontemporary identity and to pursue self-realisation through an analysis of themeanings in creative workers’ talk, the decisions and the ways in which workers arepositioned, and position themselves. In the next section, the theoretical premises ofthe approach adopted for this study are discussed.

Creative Work and A Contemporary Identity Project

Studies of contemporary creative workers have emphasised the strong personalidentification with their work, referred to, for example, in the above quotation fromCCS (2011) which notes their evident ‘genuine “vocation”’. Writers like McRobbiehave discussed this identification with reference to sociological theories ofcontemporary identity and subjectification, such as the reflexive modernisation theoryassociated with Giddens (1991), and Rose’s work on the neo-liberal subject (1989,1996). The argument in these theories is that contemporary identities are shaped lessby social location, including class and family, than by individual intention,interpretation and aspiration; identity becomes both an opportunity and a responsibilitywhich requires intensive self-monitoring. Yet, the theories have been criticised forover-emphasising the extent to which identity is either freely chosen or whollydetermined (Burkitt 2008; Banks 2007). A further possible criticism is that thesetheories oversimplify the processes through which people take up their identities.

A more complex and nuanced understanding of these processes is offered bywriters in critical discursive and narrative psychology (e.g. Edley 2001; Wetherell1998; Reynolds et al. 2007; Taylor 2006; Taylor and Littleton 2006). In such anapproach, identities are assumed to be constituted in ongoing talk. This assumption,however, contrasts with more conventional qualitative analyses in which talk is often

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analysed as the expression and reflection of an already existing identity. A personalidentity (‘who I am’) is understood to be complex and unresolved, given by themultiple positionings and contexts of everyday interactions and also by theaccumulation of previous positionings and discursive constructions. This identityis, therefore, open-ended and ongoing through the interactions and relationships ofordinary social life. It is the product of its discursive contexts, in the double sense ofinteractions or talk, on the one hand, and, on the other, the shared meanings andideas which enable and shape such talk, and are in turn re-produced and negotiatedwithin it (Wetherell 1998).

An analysis of creative workers’ identities in these terms can consider theestablished ideas or common sense assumptions around creative work and beingcreative. It explores how such ideas shape participants’ understanding ofthemselves and how they are understood by others, and also how these ideasimpact on their experience, including their careers as creatives. Such ideas canbe described as cultural or discursive resources for the ‘identity work’ of theongoing project. Many of these resources have a recognisable quality and havealso been noted, in different terms, by other researchers. This is unsurprising,given that such resources are part of the shared knowledge or ‘commonsense’of society (e.g. Edley and Wetherell 1995, p.165). It follows, therefore, that thefocus in this article is on a particular set of discursive resources associated with thecreative arts. These emerged from the data analysis as a recurring feature of theparticipants’ talk. As already noted, I consider how these discursive resourcesfunction in the talk and their implications.

A further point of interest in the analysis of discursive identity work is the lifenarratives which are constructed in talk. Theorists of identity and subjectificationnote that the construction of a life narrative is central to the identity project, as partof the ‘biographical project of self-realisation’ (Rose 1999). In discursive terms, thesituated constructions of a retrospective and prospective life narrative will be shapedby the available discursive resources, including established narratives of the ‘normal’trajectory of career and personal life (Reynolds and Taylor 2005). The constructionin talk may be accomplished minimally, through brief references to past and future,sequence, origin and destination (Taylor 2010). Later, the analytical focus turns tothe life and career narratives which participants construct in relation to their work.

A further assumption of the approach employed here is that, in addition tothe kinds of discursive resources outlined above, the construction of the lifenarrative and other identity work will be shaped by more local resources fromnarrower contexts, such as family and work environments (Taylor 2006; Taylorand Littleton 2006). Educational contexts are obviously very significant here: inthe research discussed below, the voices of former tutors and teachers constituted anoticeable element in participants’ talk about themselves and their prospects. Localresources may themselves be derived from the larger discursive resources and theninflected with additional meanings by the contexts in which they are encounteredor re-encountered. For example, the established image of the Romantic artist, withits associations of starving in a garret, was re-presented to participants in theadvice of their teachers and parents, taking on additional meanings from thesevoices. Having outlined the study undertaken, it is necessary to describe itspurpose and form.


Creative Workers as Research Participants

The data discussed here were collected in a series of research projects with creativeworkers at different points in their careers (Taylor and Littleton 2005, 2008b). Theparticipants studied and worked in a variety of specialisms, including sculpture,product design, fashion, photography and animation. They were interviewedbetween 2005 and 2007. The workers were recruited from the current students andalumni of UK art colleges (that is, Higher Education Institutions specialising in thecreative arts and design). Given the connections between the creative industries andthe creative arts which have already been discussed, these art colleges can be seen asentry points into the creative industries, but in a complex way, as an overview of theresearch projects indicates.

The participants were of different original nationalities, reflecting theinternational status of London art colleges and the importance of the city itselfas a global hub of the contemporary creative and cultural industries (Banks2007). As art college students and graduates, these participants are perhaps part ofthe ‘rich over-supply of general creative and cultural graduates’ as noted by CCS(2011, p.27). Given the variety of their personal histories, it would not be possibleto generalise about particular skills areas but this is not the focus of this article. Asalready noted, the focus here is on workers across the cultural and creativeindustries as a sector, rather than in specific industries or areas of work. Theanalytic approach, detailed below, involved the search for commonalities acrosslarge datasets.

The first of the projects, conducted in 2005, interviewed 29 participants whowere postgraduate students. They included people who had gone from school tohigher education study, at undergraduate then postgraduate level; people whohad returned to postgraduate study after some years of employment in acreative field; a few who had never studied at this level before, and some forwhom a postgraduate course was an opportunity to change occupation andmove into a creative occupation for the first time. The second research projectreturned to some of these participants after a year (11 in total), to follow theirexperience within academia or outside it, working or attempting to work intheir chosen creative fields. The third study, in 2007, interviewed a largernumber of different participants (46) who were already working or aspiring towork in fields which, again, located them within the creative industries. Again,it was noticeable that there was no neat correspondence between career maturityand either age, level of study or years of work experience: study and work,levels of earning and recognition, and perceived prospects were not neatlyconnected. Some participants studied, or returned to study, following workexperience in related or completely different fields. Some regarded further studyas a support and stimulus to an ongoing career. In all of this complexity, onecommon feature was the positive value attached to creative work, as discussedin the next section.

For each project, the interviews with the participants were audio-recordedand transcribed, then initially analysed as a single body of data. In discursivepsychological terms (e.g. Edley, 2001; Wetherell 1998) patterns identified acrossmultiple interviews indicate speakers’ use of the commonly held or ‘social’

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discursive resources already discussed. A second stage of analysis involvedexamining these patterns within the context of particular interviews in order to seethe implications of a resource for a speaker’s identity work, including theconstruction of a life narrative. A third stage was the study of patterns withininterviews. These internal patterns were considered in terms of ‘local’ resources,established within or given additional meanings by the contexts of that speaker’slife: this is a further element particular to a narrative-discursive approach (Taylor2006; Taylor and Littleton 2006).

In the following section, the aggregated datasets for the research projects andshort extracts from different interviews are used to illustrate resources and forms ofidentity work which recurred across multiple interviews and also across the threeprojects. These extracts have been selected to exemplify common features fromacross the datasets and therefore to illustrate claims which have a general relevancefor the aggregated sample as a whole, as representative of contemporary creativeworkers, rather than particular individuals.

Discursive Patterns Found in the Interviews

In this section the patterns identified across the interview data described aboveare presented and discussed. As in any qualitative research, it is not practicableto quote multiple participants or present long data extracts. In this section, shortextracts from a small number of participants are presented in order to illustratepatterns found across the datasets, as already noted. These patterns relate to theways in which participants characterised the nature of creative work and anidentity as a creative practitioner, in comparison with other professions (ExtractOne); the creative work process (Extract Two); the trajectory of a creativecareer (Extracts Three, Four and Five) and what counts as success in creativework (Extract Six).

Each extract has been transcribed to indicate the irregularities of speech (such asrepetition). Short pauses are indicated with the symbol (.). The extracts areminimally punctuated, without the full stops and other conventions which markthe sentence structures of written English.2

An identity as A Creative Practitioner

The first extract illustrates the unfixed, negotiated nature of a creative identity. It istaken from an interview with a designer who had studied engineering before goingon to art college. At the time of the interview, he had been running a successfuldesign practice for a number of years. This long extract presents an anecdotalaccount of creative identities in a work context.

2 Other details of the transcription are as follows:(Laughter) indicates laughter by speaker… indicates that words have been omitted from the transcript[he] indicates a word added to increase readabilityItalics indicates a word emphasised by the speaker


Extract One

… the two scenarios I’m often in is One scenario (.) I’m the creative guy andthere’s a team of engineers (.) and (.) they feel a bit threatened by me because(.) and they see me as the sort of you know the wild artistic type um and I haveto put on my you know my previous Rolls Royce and engineering hat and Ihave to sort of like you know (.) in crude terms knuckle down and rut withthem to prove that I’m a good you know dirty-finger-nailed engineer you knowa proper engineer (.) And I then I usually (.) you know it’s formingrelationships I usually win them over because I have to because I have towork as a team you know and and so that’s one aspect (.) The other aspect isthe flip It’s the opposite where they have The company is very creativethemselves and they have a team of designers and a team of marketing peopleand they’re seeing me as in in fact you know this this (.) grubby engineeringtype who has a bit of design experience but isn’t a (.) a you know an artist likeum you know (Laughter) a Philippe Starck or someone like that

This account is enjoyable for its use of caricature. It is also useful as an illustration offeatures of particular interest for my argument and analytic approach. The extractindicates that what it means to be a creative worker or do creative work is not fixed butrequires negotiation in a professional context. The speaker is active in positioninghimself, defining who he is for the purposes of the particular work situation, and thispositioning helps him address conflicts and problems. One premise of a discursiveanalytic approach is that a similar kind of active positioning and negotiation of identity ispart of the ongoing processes of any speaker’s situated identity work (Wetherell 1998).

The extract also illustrates a pattern around creative identities found acrossmultiple interviews, specifically, that the creative is defined in opposition to anothercategory, but this is a fluid opposition. The creative worker can be a ‘wild artistictype’, in opposition to the disciplined realism of the engineers; alternatively, thecreative worker can be sophisticated and part of an effective design team, inopposition to the ‘grubby’, undisciplined engineer. Discursive analyses uncover suchmultiplicity, variation and fluidity within shared resources and the talk of individualspeakers (Potter and Wetherell 1987), and here the fluidity is also referred to by thespeaker. However, the fluidity is not, of course, infinite. There are also strong andconsistent patterns in how different speakers characterise creative work and creativecareers, some of which have also been noted by other researchers, as detailed in thediscussions below. These patterns are illustrated in the following extracts.

The Creative Work Process

Extract Two illustrates the influence of educational contexts on the ways in whichparticipants understand the creative work process. The account is also of interest for itsparallels with features of creative work which have been noted by other researchers. Theextract is from an interview with a woman creative worker who is describing the coursesshe studied at university and later at an art college. She is discussing the requirements ofa design course.

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Extract Two

… the academic courses have been more office hours whereas the sort of theflow of a design course all of a sudden you have to like work sort of I don’tknow sixteen seventeen hour days for 2 or 3 week periods just to get thingsdone and (.) you sort of wander around the issue and you’re trying to likedesign something and until you know what you’re doing you can’t do it

This participant’s account of the creative work process for her art college courseillustrates two features of creative work which have been noted more generally. Thefirst is that the creative work is characterised as involving a very large and almostunlimited time commitment, in this case, sixteen or seventeen hours a day for 2 or3 week periods. As this woman comments, it’s not ‘office hours’: this brief commentinvokes two oppositions, between creative working and the kind of supposedlyroutine and ordinary work conducted in offices, and, again, between creative andacademic university courses.

The second pattern appears in her account of how she goes about creative work:in her words, ‘you sort of wander around the issue’ (emphasis added). Thischaracterisation of the work process is echoed by participants who referred tocreative work more generally as involving ‘exploring’ and ‘playing about’. Theiraccounts suggest that creative work is an open-ended process, without a cleardirection to an end point. The work must be followed to wherever it leads, and forhowever long that requires. Taken together, these patterns convey the demanding andunbounded nature of creative work, so that it requires the worker to involve herselftotally, to the exclusion of other aspects of life. The research suggests that this‘immersion’ model of creative working is part of an ideal promoted by art colleges.Despite the difficulty of continuing such exclusive involvement alongside the otherdemands of their professional and personal lives, workers attempted to do so becausethey had come to see this as a necessary condition for creative working; it was partof a ‘logic of success’ (Taylor and Littleton 2008b).

An important premise of the research projects discussed here is that creative workis collaborative, including in the sense brought out by Becker (1982) who discussedthe complex ‘art worlds’ which enable and sustain creative production. Researchersincluding John-Steiner (2000), Sawyer (2003) and Miell and Littleton (2004) havealso explored the collaborative nature of creative work. However, in this narrative-discursive research, the focus of the analysis is in the characterisations of creativeworking which the participants construct, drawing on available discursive resources.A strong pattern across the data was this construction of creative working in theseindividual and personal terms, as each participant’s ‘own’ work.

The issue of ownership appeared in participants’ talk about the importance ofdoing their own work. This ownership was illustrated in Extract One, in the talk ofthe designer-engineer. Although he refers to being in a team, his account makes clearthat his purpose in working with others is to further projects he is conducting on hisown behalf, for his design practice. Working for yourself, by being self-employed,having your own business or studio, was another ideal which most participantsaspired to. Even those who were seeking to be employed by others, still emphasised


the priority of also having time for their own work, separately. This emphasis on theownership of creative work by an individual, named maker derives from the imageof the Romantic artist (White and White 1965/1993); re-presented to novice creativeworkers by art college teachers and tutors, such an established image becomes alocal resource, carrying new associations and relevance as part of an ideal ofcontemporary creative working.

The Trajectory of A Creative Career

Another strong pattern in the talk was that participants contrasted themselveswith other qualified professionals who were assumed to progress steadily tohigher earnings and greater employment security or business success.3 This isnot necessarily accurate as a description: it is likely that some of these ‘others’would not see their own working lives in exactly those terms. There were alsoexamples among the research participants of creative workers with mature careerswhose own pathways could retrospectively be constructed as following exactly thekind of ‘age-stage’ progression they attributed to other kinds of workers. Theinterest, however, was in the construction of this contrast as a pattern in their talk.An example appears in Extract Three in which a woman is talking about her owncreative career:

Extract Three

… there’s probably not very many other professions where you become soskilled but have so little reward at the end of it You know if you’re (.) I don’tknow a lawyer or kind of doing something (.) which ah (.) like architectureeven you know you do a lot of training or a doctor and then you get financialreward for what you’ve done so um that doesn’t happen here

This construction is interesting because it claims an identity of difference forcreative workers. Becker (1982) suggested that artists are regarded by the rest ofsociety as in some respects both different and ‘special’, and in return are permittedextra licence, to live in a different way, outside the norms and restrictions operatingon everyone else. Extract Three illustrates how difference may be constructed intalk, possibly as a claim to the special status described by Becker and thereforepotentially as an indication that a speaker is, indeed, creative (see also Taylor andLittleton 2006). It was noticeable, however, that the creative workers who were theresearch participants did not claim or apparently aspire to live outside the rules inany sense of claiming licence: the difference they constructed in their talk did notrefer to freedom but rather to an acceptance of disadvantage, as in Extract Three.

3 The non-linear career trajectory which the participants claimed for themselves corresponds to theportfolio or ‘protean’ career (Bridgstock 2005) described by some researchers as a feature of contemporaryworking lives in certain areas. My interest in this article is in participants’ own accounts and the possiblefunctions of these accounts.

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Becker’s work would blur distinctions between ‘art’, ‘craft’, ‘technical work’ and‘design’ since he saw such categories as socially constructed and variable according tothe particular socio-historic and art world context. The notion of ‘the creative’ similarlyand usefully bridges such distinctions as well as having a particular contemporary usagewith reference to the creative and cultural industries, as discussed above.

Another point of interest is that although participants denied that they expected asteady progression to higher status and income, they often referred to an alternativeconventional career that they could have followed and been successful in, had theychosen. This pattern of reference to a path not taken perhaps functioned to deny thatcurrent shortfalls of earnings and status were any mark of failure. In a discursiveanalysis, this kind of engagement with a potential or previously encountered butabsent critic is described as ‘rhetorical’ work (Billig 1999). This is a specific use ofthe term ‘rhetorical’ indicating how talk is oriented to audiences, both present andabsent, which also indicates, once more, the complex nature of the kind of discursivework in talk which I am analysing.

As discussed above, some creative workers claimed not to expect steady progression intheir future careers. More generally, they often did not seem to expect anything at all,confirming a point noted by Gill. In her research on new media workers (Gill 2007), shecommented on their striking refusal to look ahead or discuss the future. This could be aconsequence of creative workers’ immersion in their work, because they were soinvolved in the present time of the work that they simply were not able to think aboutthe future. This might be particularly likely with participants who were still students andhad to meet deadlines for their coursework. An example of this appears in the extractbelow, from an interview with a woman currently on a postgraduate art college course:

Extract Four

INT: So what are your plans for the futureD: I haven’t got any....you know I can’t pay the rent on my flat (.)INT: MmD: just in 2 weeks time (.) so (.)INT: So where will you goD: I (.) don’t know

I have discussed how participants characterised other careers as following an age-stage progression. The trajectory of a creative career was discussed less explicitlybut there were patterns in participants’ references. One, as already mentioned, wasthe construction of an ongoing present time of total immersion. Another pattern isillustrated in Extract Five:

Extract Five

… you know you might just scrape it and might take a few years or you knowit might never happen and then you like become this amazing person you you


know you know it might happen like 200 years after you’re dead or never likethere’s no guarantees

This is an example of a reference to a trajectory which can be referred to as thenarrative of the ‘big break’. The phrase ‘it might happen’ invokes a future success ona sufficient scale that the creative worker comes to be seen as ‘amazing’. This is arecognisable narrative of discovery, recognition, reward and dramatic success whichis associated with fine art, design and writing, perhaps intertwined now withcontemporary celebrity stories. The next point to be considered is what exactlywould constitute such success in creative work.

Success in Creative Work

The nature of success, as it was referred to and constructed in the participants’ talk,was not straightforward. First, participants denied that money was their motivationor the marker of their success, but they also acknowledged money as validation:for example, selling work or receiving big contracts or commissions were referredto as markers of success. A second point was that recognition was important, but itwas less obvious whose recognition was valued. One often-referred to ambitionwas to produce work which would be chosen for display in a design museum. Thisachievement would obviously be a marker of art world recognition. However,another ambition which designers claimed was to produce work which would notend up ‘in landfill’, that is, as rubbish. In this reference, the aspired to recognitionis presumably that which comes from a broader consumer audience. However,participants were critical of work which was directed only to such an audience; tobe successful on that level was to risk being seen as ‘selling out’, that is,sacrificing quality for popular appeal which was presumably based on a lesservalue.

Taken together, these various constructions of success and non-success indicatedthat creative workers sought and appreciated external validation, perhaps of the kindmore generally associated with professional and business careers, but they finallyrejected this as insufficient compared to the ultimate validation of their own personalfeelings about their work. The analysis indicated the importance for creative workersof their ‘love’ of the work, as other analysts have also noted (McRobbie 1998; Gill2007). An example of this reference to feelings as validation appears in thefollowing extract from a man who was formally retired although still continuing withhis creative work. He is describing an old friend and contemporary with whom hehad recently become re-acquainted.

Extract Six

A: …[He] disappeared out of my life and he came back and he now boughthimself a farm in um Gloucestershire and he’s recently just bought himself anew Aston Martin (INT: Gosh) he’s got a Ferrari in the garageINT: Well how what doing what (Laughter)A: I never know I don’t (.) I don’t like to ask him that

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INT: Don’t want to ask yes (Laughter)A: But um (.) that (.) he (.) um I don’t think his life has been anywhere near asrich as mine

One notable point here is the listing of recognisable markers of affluence and,therefore, material success: the friend has ‘a farm’, ‘a new Aston Martin’, ‘a Ferrariin the garage’. This is followed by the assessment: ‘I don’t think his life has beenanywhere near as rich as mine’ and, further on in the interview, another summary:‘he’s had a very (.) ordinary life so its been all about making money and it (.) doesn’tsound very …Very satisfactory and (.) you know I don’t think I don’t think he thinksit’s been very satisfactory somehow’. The other man, with the unspecified career, hasbeen materially successful but his life has not been ‘satisfactory’ or, in a perhapstelling adjective, ‘rich’ compared to the speaker’s creative work. It is noteworthy thatthis participant, the speaker, had himself received what to an outsider looked like asignificant amount of external validation through recognition and financial reward.However, in this talk he returns to the form of validation which is not challengeableby others because it is known only to him: that of personal satisfaction

The Significance of the Arts

The research presented here through a discussion of a small number of illustrativeextracts shows the meanings which the connection to the arts confers oncontemporary creative work for its practitioners. It confirms the broad argument ofMcRobbie (1998) that the connection is a source of attraction to contemporarycreative work. However, it indicates a greater complexity around the attraction andits implications.

First, it is noticeable that contemporary ‘creative’ work is inflected with some ofthe conventional meanings of art, but not all of them. For example,. Becker (1982)suggested that artists are regarded by the rest of society as in some respects ‘special’,and in return are permitted extra licence, to live in a different way, outside the normsand restrictions operating on everyone else. However, the research has not uncoveredmuch association of the creative with licence or living outside the rules in the kind offreedom to which Becker refers: the life of the contemporary creative worker is notnotably freer or less restricted than that of other professionals but simply very veryhard.

Second, the findings indicate that creative lives are pursued with awareness. Theresearch participants claimed to be under no illusions about the difficulties of whatthey were doing and facing (see also Taylor and Littleton 2008a). More specifically,they discussed what they did not have, and referred indirectly to how their chosencareers might appear unsuccessful to others. The compensations they claimed werein terms of ‘felt’ rewards, like love and satisfaction, which cannot be easilyquestioned by other people since any speaker is the ultimate authority on her or hisown feelings.

A third point is that the meanings derived from the arts gave rise to conflicts anddilemmas, many of them around relationships with others. One source of conflict isthat a worker taking up a position within the narrative of the ‘big break’ cannot


know how near or far away success is. It is necessary to remain patient anddetermined and to keep on working, possibly for a lifetime. This position of workingand waiting for the big break will encourage the postponement of other projects,including family life which is of course conventionally associated with anotherprogressive age-stage narrative, of romance, coupling, ‘settling down’ and parenting.This normative narrative and discursive resource was identified in earlier work as the‘dominant coupledom narrative’ (Reynolds and Taylor 2005). Yet, that solutionpoints up a conflict around relationships with others which could be called a paradoxof connection. It was noticeable that many of the creative workers who were theresearch participants depended economically, practically and emotionally on thesupport of others, for example, their families of upbringing, partners, peers andflatmates, and even in some cases, the ex-spouses who took over raising theirchildren. On another level, Becker (1982) noted how the supposedly individual workof artists or creatives is inevitably sustained and given meaning by the connectionsof art worlds, as discussed. In summary, although the creative process requiredimmersion and an absence of distractions, to the extent that many participantsdescribed it as ‘selfish’, the creative life required these connections with others, atevery level.

Other conflicts arise because the characterisation of the creative work processalready discussed implies that there are no logical limits to such work. Theseworkers are immersed in their work, following it without controlling its course orschedule. It is difficult to see how work which is constructed in this open-ended waycan be reconciled with, say, goal-directed project work, or labour managementwithin organisations, or time management and planning. In addition, there areobvious problems in reconciling the financial uncertainty of such open-ended workwith earning a living and being able to support others.

One financial solution which many participants adopted was to live a ‘doublelife’, that is, to pursue creative work and also do other work for money, maintainingtheir own creative practice and also working in a different job or even a full secondcareer in order to support the creative life (Taylor and Littleton 2008b). Clearly, thiscould be extremely demanding and participants talked about the emotional andphysical effects of the stress and overwork in such an arrangement. The problem,then became the simple limits of energy, of how long it was possible to maintain twoworking lives simultaneously. Interestingly, one possible solution was that the secondworking life was pursued by someone else. The ‘peaks and troughs’ which were saidto characterise even a successful creative career could be addressed by a partner’ssteadier earnings in a different, more stable occupation. This solution, of course,again raises the paradox of connection.

The immersion of creative work is part of the blurring of work time and leisure,job and private life which commentators have noted as another feature of thecontemporary creative industries. This blurring can be justified by the ‘love of thework’ claimed by creative workers. However, doing ‘what I want’ is both anattraction and a problem. It means that there is no logical reason to stop working.Furthermore, the personalised nature of the work, creating out of ‘yourself’ or doing‘your own work’ means that creative work involves the worker giving of her orhimself. This is the emotional labour which has also been noted as a feature ofcontemporary creative work (for example, by Gill and Pratt 2008). The question

54 S. Taylor

must be around the balance and the point at which the love of the work ceases to beenough to compensate for the other difficulties.

Meaning and Contemporary Creative Work

The problems of contemporary creative working, including its precariousness, havebeen widely discussed. This article has explored the expectations and experience ofcontemporary creative workers, considered as a category related to the larger sectorof the creative and cultural industries, rather than particular industries or special-isations, and discussed findings from empirical work using a research approachderived from narrative and discursive psychology (Bruner 1990; Edley 2001; Potterand Wetherell 1987; Wetherell 1998). The attraction which creative work holds forits practitioners, and some of the conflicts and problems which other researchershave identified and noted, can be seen to derive from its connections with thecreative arts. The empirical work indicates some of the values and varied meaningsof ‘the creative’ which originate in the associations with the creative arts, includingart college contexts. Such meanings both perpetuate the problems of creativeworking, for example, through the blurring of work and non-work boundaries, andoffer a logic for such problems being managed or at least endured by contemporarycreative workers. Such workers apparently position themselves within a space ofpossibility in which self-actualisation persists as potential rather than an achievedexperience. They are oriented to a future success at an uncertain time, sustained byestablished meanings of being creative which seem likely to persist whatever theprecariousness of the actual working lives involved.

The findings reported here indicate the continuing influence of educationalcontexts associated with the creative arts. They suggest that the association withthe arts shapes the expectations workers bring to a creative career and theirwillingness to endure its difficulties. This has implications for how receptivethey will be to more vocationally oriented education and training (Bridgstock2009), for example, to encourage them to develop ‘the necessary business acumento thrive’ (CCS 2011). Calls for the implementation of new qualification andapprenticeship schemes in the sector (see Guile 2006) are part of a range ofpractical strategies (such as those pursued in the UK by Skillset and Creative andCultural Skills) which aim to perpetuate and expand the success of the creative andcultural industries. Such calls may not be effective unless they also take account ofworkers’ own interpretations and priorities, and the strength of their creativeidentities.

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Documents

The Meanings and Problems of Contemporary Creative Work