Doctoral Dissertation Research: Organizational Control and Worker Experience in Creative Industries

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Work in the 21st century is characterized both by insecure employment and increasing numbers of jobs in knowledge and creative industries that require creativity on the part of workers. Many of the workers in these industries work as freelancers in geographically dispersed locations. These characteristics of work in the contemporary economy raise three questions that are the focus of this research: (1) how do workers come to find insecure, uncertain work situations desirable? (2) how do modern organizations control and structure the way people do their work in the absence of requiring workers to be in a single work place. Given the importance of information and communication technologies in the workplace, this study also asks (3) how workplace technologies affect creative workers. To answer these questions, this project compares the working days of two very different types of workers- freelance work performed by YouTube content producers in digital media and audio engineers in popular music compared to data processors in digital media and recording studio office workers in popular music. The first group of workers do more creative work and the second group does more routine work though both work in creative industries. The researcher will conduct ethnographic observations of these workers' everyday experiences to develop a greater understanding of the experiences of workers in these economically important, creative industries. This project builds upon research within the sociologies of labor, organizations, technology, and art. Addressing the sociology of labor and work's perennial concern regarding organizational control, this research seeks to explain how post-bureaucratic and "virtual" organizations in these industries maintain control over work processes in the absence of clear hierarchies and geographically dispersed employees. Addressing recent developments in the sociology of the arts, this project focuses on the role of workers' aesthetic experience vis-à-vis organizational artifacts (e.g. technology and media) in explaining workers' consent to their conditions of employment. Last, this project addresses theoretical concerns related to materiality and technology inside organizations by examining the discursive and socio-material practices associated with "creativity" in these industries. Much research on work in creative industries uses only interview data and thus tends to exclude the concrete experiences and everyday meaning making of workers. Empirically, this project extends research on creative work by drawing on ethnographic data gathered through 24 months of participant observation, in-depth, interviews, and audio-visual data collection methods (i.e., audio recordings documenting the sounds of the working day and photographic documentation).