Description
Book SynopsisMichael L. Siciliano draws on nearly two years of ethnographic research as a participant-observer in a Los Angeles music studio and a multichannel YouTube network to explore the contradictions of creative work.
Creative Control explains why “cool” jobs help us understand how workers can participate in their own exploitation.
Trade ReviewFilm and media scholars who study industries must read
Creative Control. Siciliano leverages cultural sociology and meticulous ethnography to masterfully unpack the considerable contradictions of media creation in the platform era. His focus on creative routinization exposes film studies' exceptionalism as a strawman, ill-equipped to make sense of online media. -- John T. Caldwell, author of
Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/TelevisionSome scholars argue that creative work enlivens local economies, while others emphasize that it exemplifies the precarious employment spreading across national economies. Siciliano deftly navigates those divergent depictions by turning to the workers themselves—illuminating the attraction that creativity holds for them, as well as the challenges it brings. As a result, he rightfully moves us from abstract notions of creative work to the embodied and everyday activity that it actually entails. -- Timothy J. Dowd, Emory University
With
Creative Control, Michael Siciliano joins the finest of ethnographic traditions—the study of labor in our times. This fresh perspective on cultural work unpacks the reality behind our algorithmically defined entertainment future, the content treadmill that seduced the emotional and professional repertoire of a generation. -- Melissa Gregg, author of
Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge EconomySiciliano’s thoughtful, compelling book deserves to be a major reference point in studies of creative labor and in research on work in an age of digital platforms. It combines careful ethnography with an impressive range of reading to provide fresh perspectives on longstanding problems of alienation, exploitation, and control. -- David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds
Michael Siciliano's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the culture industries. This ethnography documents firsthand how various actors within culture-producing firms grapple over power, profits, and final products. What we create and consume,
Creative Control convincingly demonstrates, derives as much from collective control as it does individual creativity. -- Jeffrey J. Sallaz, author of
Lives on the Line: How the Philippines Became the World's Call Center CapitalThe book is well researched, well written, and very timely to better understand subordination and attractions to jobs in the platform economy and creative production...I hope this ambitious and detailed study finds a wide readership; it is a required reading for scholars interested in contemporary creative labor in platform economies and cultural production more generally. * Acta Sociologica *
The case studies in
Creative Control capture the changing nature of information-age creative labor and operationalize sociological concepts to describe its new modes of managerial control and increased alienation and precarity, providing a framework for further research into a wider array of creative contexts. * Critical Studies in Media Communication *
Has important and wide-ranging implications for how we think about creative labor, and I expect the findings to be of great interest to sociologists of culture, work, and technology. * Contemporary Sociology *
A rich empirical account of precarious work in the culture industries and crafts a novel framework connecting the affective rewards to the costs of contemporary creative labor. * American Journal of Sociology *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Part I: Introductions1. Creative Control?
2. Conflicting Creativities
Part II: SoniCo’s Social Regime3. SoniCo’s Positive Pole: Aesthetic Subjectivities and Control
4. SoniCo’s Negative Pole: Mitigating Precarity and Alienated Judgment
Part III: The Future’s Quantified Regime5. The Future’s Positive Pole: Platform Discipline, Transience, and Immersion
6. The Future’s Negative Pole: Compound Precarity and the (Infra)structure of Alienated Judgment
Part IV: Conclusion7. Toward a Theory of Creative Labor and a Politics of Judgment
Methodological Appendix: Attending to Difference in Similarity and Gender’s Access
Notes
References
Index
