Beyond the Social Centrality of Work and Post-Work Conditions : Perceptions of Meaningful Employment in the Cultural and Creative Industries

The primary aim of this presentation is to advance an understanding of the changing social conditions and perceptions of work in the creative workforce of Hong Kong – an exemplary case of advanced capitalist and multicultural society – and to compare this to the state of creative labour globally. Following 50 in-depth interviews with Hong Kong creative labourers over the past twelve months, the study addressed the prevailing issues of individual workers' subjective experiences, reflections and resistance in terms of the perceptions of their working lives in the context of broader public issues and structural problems. The analytical focus is on the television, print media, public relations and advertising industries since they represent substantial economic worth and constitute a significant employment rate in Hong Kong. Beyond their significant economic contribution, these selected cultural and creative industries represent three different logics of production. In Hong Kong these industries appear to be the ones that have an incongruent image, while practitioners suffer from high vulnerability and precariousness of work where, for instance, the project-based contact nature of creative work provides limited security for workers. Yet, despite the fact that these industries seemingly make a significant contribution to the local economy, the project-based and contract nature of employment means that practitioners on an individual level often lack agency and experience work precarity as work hours and working conditions in general are unregulated and unprotected, whilst fringe benefits are non-existent. Theoretically, this paper will investigate an increasingly troubling contradiction between the persistent centrality of work in late capitalist society and the challenges to stable and satisfying employment in selected creative industries. In order to understand this situation, a exploratory ethnographic interview sample contained a mix of seniorities and job functions representing a range of job roles and contract status to observe and obtain situated narratives of working conditions in these sectors. Findings suggest that creative workers experience ambivalent working conditions in terms of long hours, relatively low pay and lack of security and consistent investment in their career progression resulting in a relatively high job turnover. Also, creative workers often buy into the mythic glamour of these industries and after investing time on creative education and gaining the job of their dreams find that the harsh working reality is far from their aspirations, yet often absorb this and in the absence of unionisation they start to accept this as the new normal. The lack of agency on the part of young creative workers means that they tend to have no loyalty for their organisation and often jump ship for a few dollars more. Also evidence emerged of small, independent and large-scale agencies attempting to accommodate their workers by creating a work life balance. Hence, the more traditional, hierarchical management approaches in these industries are changing and moving away from classical management principles to more progressive, flat organisational management styles in response to a new worker demographic and the digitisation of the communication landscape requiring faster response times in servicing client needs.