Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor

Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges confronting actors, editors, electricians, and others. The authors take on pressing conceptual and methodological issues while also providing insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, it examines working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering broad-ranging and comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in such places as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad. The collection also examines labor conditions across a range of job categories that includes, for example, visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from such leading scholars as John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, and Tejaswini Ganti, Precarious Creativity offers timely critiques of media globalization while also intervening in broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.

L A B O R 1 4 . 3 8 2 those considered the elite staff-such as producer, director, screenwriter, and actorsfrom the lower-status technical, manual, and craft workers such as art director, director of photography, composer, editor, camera operator, and many others.
What the current volume does well is to dramatically upend that archaic scheme with a number of provocative and convincing alternatives. John T. Caldwell takes the measure of the "blended labor systems in contemporary film and television" by conceptualizing what he calls "spec world, craft world, and brand world" (37). Craft world valorizes the scarcity of workers while guaranteeing "a high level of quality and predictability" as well, controlling relatively high rates of pay. Brand world denotes the process by which corporations control their product and ensure low production costs "by deregulating scarcity-to change the relatively rigid conditions upon which production workers once maintained their value" (40). Spec world "refers to vast new cultural arenas in which professional participants and production aspirants alike are expected to produce creative works on spec" (41), that is, without any guaranteed compensation.
Toby Miller reprises still another angle: Alvin Toffler's concept of the "prosumer," a blend of consumer and producer, celebrated by cybertarians: film, music, and virtual creations in any media all converge "under the sign of empowered and creative fans" (22). Unfortunately, these superfans need income, and what happens is that interns, volunteers, and even contestants create "cool stuff" that earns more money for the corporations, according to Ross, whose Nice Work If You Can Get It percolates through this and a number of the essays (28).
While all of the essays attempt to take the measure of "precarious creativity," or the relentless march toward a world in which "workdays are growing longer, productivity pressures are more intense, and creative autonomy is diminishing" (2), the arena of these factors varies from essay to essay.
A number of the essays foreground workers whose status fluctuates, such as the situation in Czechoslovakia where the feature film and TV shoots use Czechs in belowthe-line positions while their immediate supervisors are American or British, and the above-the-line positions are inevitably American. An essay on "Talent Agenting in the Age of Conglomerates" focuses on these paraprofessionals essential to the preproduction stages, while an analysis of the New Orleans TV series Treme demonstrates how the goal of hiring local results in an economy of extras or low-paid or scarcely-paid "fillers" in scenes. Already established units, like the Writers Guild of America, are discussed in the context of global organizations of media professionals.
Other essays emphasize the locus of the struggles, whether in the workplace or in other arenas. "Film/City," for example, develops "the fusion of cinematic infrastructure with urban architecture evident in Indian cities and towns that have, or are planning to have, a film city in their master plans for urban development" (49, emphasis original). In Latin American television industries, the economic tension is between the major networks and "indie houses" or studios.
Changes in traditional and innovative modalities inform other essays. In Australia, games production has shifted from the dominant model of large studios toward what might be called a craft model in which "innovative and creative jobs can also be stable and good jobs" (197). In China, precariat labor is clearly identified with millions of factory workers, but the culture industry had been caught in a number of contradictions, especially in a country where government regulation and censorship dominate. Precarity then becomes a function not of a scarcity of jobs but of the difficulty in retaining a job if one's work oversteps politicized boundaries.
Many of the American essays involve ongoing ideological and public-policy issues. Thus Hollywood's so-called postracial climate must confront a long history of "precarity as the historical state of being for marginalized men and women of color" (172). Similarly, media advocacy for Hispanic representation in the industries is itself a precarious activity, as activists find that early successes in placing Hispanic staff erode while they themselves are consumed with fundraising and policy negotiations. Two other essays, "Precarious Diversity" and "The Precarity and Politics of Media Advocacy Work," sum up the history and progress of advocating for diversity in media.
The current volume is overdue, because it not only assumes the rise of the worldwide precariat, but it also scrutinizes vastly different cultural practices, many of which have not received critical attention in any depth. The editors offer a collection that "attempts to expand the geographic and intellectual range of screen media studies, moving past romanticized assumptions about creative work in favor of more incisive discussions about power, equity, and collective action" (15).
Other books, such as the British Film Institute's Global Hollywood series (2001,2005), have pursued how precarious labor affects both traditionally physical craft workers and intellectual/artistic staff: "Hollywood is assuredly operating on a global scale. The impact may be visible on screen, but it is also felt at a bodily level by the labour that makes it happen" (Global Hollywood, London: British Film Institute, 2001, 219). But the volume under review extends that industry analysis by scrutinizing in separate essays on a local level, as is the editors' goal, those cultural products whose workplaces can be dangerous-such as women at risk when they begin working for the first time in Afghan news studios-or protean, when the once-extensive adult-film industry in California turns to "erotic dance, webcam, escort, and novelty" services (161), or almost invisible, as workers creating online gaming in Southeast Asia are employed by both the tiny virtual shops we might expect and companies with more than a thousand workers.
Similarly, David Morley and Kevin Robins's Spaces of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1995) anticipated the volume's essays on how communications technology changes cultural identity. Tejaswini Ganti's "No One Thinks in Hindi Here" discusses the paradox of Bollywood, a Hindi film industry in which the Hindi language is giving way to English among performers and crews. Or Marwan M. Kraidy's "Revolutionary Creative Labor," in which the context of the Arab uprisings provides the contrast between "assembly workers' creativity" and "creative insurgency"-that is, between workers "eking out a living" and revolutionaries "eking out a dignity, a political agency" (235).
Early on, the editors write that it is difficult to "even conceive of labor" in a culture "when meaningful opportunities for creative endeavor now appear ubiquitous to those who champion the shady boundaries between producers and consumers, professionals and amateurs, work and fun" (10). Readers of this volume will nonetheless encounter stimulating rehearsals of these new modes of creative precarity.