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

21世纪的工作特点是就业不稳定，知识和创意产业的工作岗位越来越多，这需要工人的创造力。这些行业的许多工人在地理上分散的地方作为自由职业者工作。当代经济中工作的这些特征提出了三个问题，这也是本研究的重点：(1)工人是如何发现不安全、不确定的工作环境是可取的？(2)现代组织在不要求员工在单一工作场所工作的情况下，如何控制和组织人们的工作方式？鉴于信息和通信技术在工作场所的重要性，本研究还询问(3)工作场所技术如何影响创造性工作者。为了回答这些问题，本项目比较了两种非常不同类型的工人的工作日——数字媒体中YouTube内容制作人的自由职业者和流行音乐中的音频工程师，以及数字媒体中的数据处理器和流行音乐中的录音室办公室员工。第一组工人做更多的创造性工作，第二组做更多的日常工作，尽管两者都在创意产业工作。研究人员将对这些工人的日常经历进行民族志观察，以更好地了解这些经济上重要的创意产业中的工人的经历。该项目建立在劳动、组织、技术和艺术社会学研究的基础上。针对劳动和工作社会学对组织控制的长期关注，本研究试图解释这些行业中的后官僚主义和“虚拟”组织如何在缺乏明确的等级制度和地理上分散的员工的情况下保持对工作过程的控制。针对艺术社会学的最新发展，该项目侧重于工人对-à-vis组织工件（例如技术和媒体）的审美体验在解释工人对其雇佣条件的同意中的作用。最后，本项目通过研究这些行业中与“创造力”相关的话语和社会物质实践，解决了组织内部与物质和技术相关的理论问题。许多关于创意产业工作的研究只使用采访数据，因此往往排除了工人的具体经历和日常意义。在经验方面，本项目通过24个月的参与性观察、深度访谈和视听数据收集方法（即记录工作日声音的录音和摄影文献）收集的人种学数据，扩展了对创造性工作的研究。

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).