The Politics Of Cultural Work

Through a wide-ranging study of labour in the cultural industries, this book critically evaluates how various sociological traditions - including critical theory, governmentality and liberal-democratic approaches - have sought to theorize the creative cultural worker, in art, music, media and design-based occupations.

Creative Justice examines issues of inequality and injustice in the cultural industries and the cultural workplace. It offers a comprehensive and considered account of the state-of-the field in cultural studies and sociological thinking about cultural and creative industries work, education and employment, and seeks to address fundamental questions about the constitution of equality and inequality in the creative industries.

Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Literature and Film emphasizes the interrelation among women’s workplace roles, modes of authorship, and processes of subject-formation, pointing to some of the reasons for the persistence of limiting gender roles and occupational hierarchies that arose during the first 60 years of the 20th century. The book interrogates three common narratives: The rise of Fordism as a "masculine" mode of production and the transition to an era of "feminized" work; women’s liberation through the sexual revolutions; and the rise of a new form of literary authorship. Conversely, it suggests that women’s labor was integral to the operations of the Fordist business sphere, where, unlike at the factory, the white-collar office proletarian work was casualized and feminized. This book argues that this workplace was an important site of subject formation, affirming dominant ideologies through economic practices. Analyzing work by Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, and Sylvia Plath, the book presents an alternative history of American modernism, one that is more attuned to gendered discourses of labor and class. By looking at the micropolitics of power within cultural institutions, this study moves beyond the dichotomies of exclusion/inclusion to interrogate the terms on which women and minorities worked as producers, and the ideas and experiences that consequently entered the field of intelligibility.

There is a growing recognition of the role that culture can play in sustainable development strategies. This development has generally been welcomed, but also raises a number of questions: What are the implications in policy and practice? Who are the most influential voices in promoting a global agenda for culture and development, and to what extent has the creation of new international policy instruments reflected a consensus? More fundamentally, what is meant by "culture" in these discussions and who has the power to give particular definitions political and legal authority? The Politics of Cultural Development seeks to provide a theoretically and historically informed response to such questions, illustrated by reference to case studies (including the European Union, the Caribbean and China). Particular attention is paid to the formation of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and the Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, a landmark instrument in debates about culture and development. The book goes on to explore some of the practical implications that this international treaty is beginning to have for the ways that culture is (and is not) being integrated into contemporary development policy and practice. This book will be useful for students, academics and policymakers in the fields of international development, international relations, international political economy, cultural policy and cultural theory.

The 'personal' was once something to be put to one side in the work place: a 'professional manner' entailed the suppression of private life and feelings. Now many large corporations can be found exhorting their employees to simply be themselves. This book critically investigates the increasing popularity of personal authenticity in corporate ideology and practice. Rather than have workers adhere to depersonalising bureaucratic rules or homogenous cultural norms, many large corporations now invite employees to simply be themselves. Alternative lifestyles, consumption, ethics, identity, sexuality, fun, and even dissent are now celebrated since employees are presumed to be more motivated if they can just be themselves. Does this freedom to express one's authenticity in the workplace finally herald the end of corporate control? To answer this question, the author places this concern with authenticity within a political framework and demonstrates how it might represent an even more insidious form of cultural domination. The book especially focuses on the way in which private and non-work selves are prospected and put to work in the firm. The ideas of Hardt and Negri and the Italian autonomist movement are used to show how common forms of association and co-operation outside of commodified work are the inspiration for personal authenticity. It is the vibrancy, energy and creativity of this non-commodified stratum of social life that managerialism now aims to exploit. Each chapter explores how this is achieved and highlights the worker resistance that is provoked as a result. The book concludes by demonstrating how the discourse of freedom underlying the managerial version of authenticity harbours potential for a radical transformation of the contemporary corporate form.

Global in scope, but refusing a familiar totalizing theoretical framework, the essays in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital demonstrate how localized and resistant social practices—including anticolonial and feminist struggles, peasant revolts, labor organizing, and various cultural movements—challenge contemporary capitalism as a highly differentiated mode of production. Reworking Marxist critique, these essays on Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe advance a new understanding of "cultural politics" within the context of transnational neocolonial capitalism. This perspective contributes to an overall critique of traditional approaches to modernity, development, and linear liberal narratives of culture, history, and democratic institutions. It also frames a set of alternative social practices that allows for connections to be made between feminist politics among immigrant women in Britain, women of color in the United States, and Muslim women in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Canada; the work of subaltern studies in India, the Philippines, and Mexico; and antiracist social movements in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. These connections displace modes of opposition traditionally defined in relation to the modern state and enable a rethinking of political practice in the era of global capitalism. Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Nandi Bhatia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chungmoo Choi, Clara Connolly, Angela Davis, Arturo Escobar, Grant Farred, Homa Hoodfar, Reynaldo C. Ileto, George Lipsitz, David Lloyd, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Aihwa Ong, Pragna Patel, José Rabasa, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Jaqueline Urla

In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this ‘turn to cultural work’ has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to ‘self-exploitation’. While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. Theorizing Cultural Work instead views cultural work through a specifically historicized and temporal lens, to ask: what novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent? The contributors to this volume also explore current transformations and future(s) of work within the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future. This book challenges more affirmative and proselytising industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them, to locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and industrial relations, as well as management and business studies, cultural and economic policy and development, government and planning.