Beyond The Vocational Fragments Creative

The Economic and Labour Relations Review
Beyond Vocational Fragments: Creative Work, Precarious

Labour and the Idea of Flexploitation
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Journal:
Manuscript ID:
Manuscript Type:
Draft
Original Article
Precarious work, Social inequality, Sociology of work, Vulnerable workers
JEL Codes:
J63
This paper considers the ways young people who aspire to work in the socalled creative industries respond to precarious work. It seeks to qualify
the common assumption that workers will invariably resist insecure
employment and to argue that 'precarity' has become normalized in youth
labour markets (including in particular many creative fields). Many young
workers have accepted the idea that that vocational restlessness is a virtue
and that remaining in one place for too long can indicate their career is
faltering. We use data from life history interview research.
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Abstract:
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Keywords:
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http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/elrr
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Beyond the Vocational Fragments: Creative Work, Precarious

Labour and the Idea of Flexploitation
Casualisation profoundly affects the person who suffers it: by making the whole
future uncertain it prevents all rational anticipation and, in particular, the basic
belief and hope in the future that one needs in order to rebel, especially collectively,
against present conditions, even the most intolerable
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Pierre Bourdieu (1993)
...the young demonstrators have seen their parents generation conform to the Fordist
pattern of drab full-time jobs and subordination to industrial management... Though
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lacking a cohesive alternative agenda, they showed no desire to resurrect labourism.
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Guy Standing (2009) writing of the young European precariat who participated in
the Mayday protests in the mid 2000s.
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The flight of manufacturing capital from the western world has been well
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documented, a process that undermined worker and citizenship rights that were
central elements of Fordist societies. The resultant erosion of job security and the
rapid obsolescence of vocational skills are often presented in public discourse as
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structural impositions of contemporary Western capitalism, both of which are

repugnant to working people. Our purpose in this article is to explore the social and
psychological complexity associated with precarious work, and to suggest that, while
job security remains a key demand, many young workers have internalised the
injunction to vocational restlessness and renewal that are central to the discourses of
new capitalism. To these people job security is synonymous with a repetitive
drudgery, alienated labour and which they associate with the sacrifices of their
parents. In qualitative research with young people who aspire to work in the so-called
creative industries we discovered a deep ambivalence towards the job-for-life, the
models of class and masculinity central to social democracy. This problematizes the
idea of flexploitation (Ross, 2009), the idea that insecure, intermittent and
unorthodox forms of employment are impositions on, and resisted by, young workers,
that their ambition is to join the ranks of the core or primary workers and obtain a
steady and predictable income source. While there is no doubt that most seek security,
this is income rather than job security in the conventional sense. Many accept
precarious work as a condition of participation in the creative labour markets, and
perhaps even an essential feature of the sorts of work they perform, or aspire to
perform.
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The Rise of Precarious Work
Precarious employment is a growing trend throughout the Western world (Ross,

2009) and especially in Australia (Burgess et al 2008). The new global division of
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labour has seen an inexorable shift in old manufacturing and labour-intensive

production to the developing world (China particularly). Watson et al show (2003,
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ch.6), labour market churning has become a structural feature of contemporary

labour markets such that, in the course of their working lives, young people will pass
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through many more jobs than did their parents. How this multiplicity of jobs relates to
the category of career (or careers) is a complex question. The experience of casual
and temporary employment in low-paid occupations can corrode life prospects and
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leave people in middle age deprived of economic security (including through home
ownership) that was more available to workers in the mid twentieth century
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(Masterman-Smith and Pocock, 2008). In addition there has been a structural erosion
of the sorts of work-based solidarities and enduring social and ethical values
associated with long-term immersion in work-based communities of practice (Sennett,
1998, 2006). As Standing (2009) wrote:
Policies promoting labour flexibility erode processes of relational and peer-group

interaction that are vital for reproducing skills and constructive attitudes to work. If
you expect to change what you are doing at almost any time, to change employer at
short notice, to change colleagues and above all to change what you call yourself,
work ethics become constantly contestable and opportunistic.
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The rise in precariousness over the last twenty-five years or so has resulted from
employers seeking greater flexibilities in their workforces (Campbell, 2001, 2010).
Burgess et al (2008, p.165) used Australian Bureau of Statistics sources to calculate
there has been an increase in casual employees as a proportion of all of those in
employment from 15.8 % in 1984 to 26.9 % in 2006. Casual work has increased
across the workforce and is particularly concentrated amongst young and female
workers (Burgess et al, 2008, p.166). However, in recent history, the increase in the
proportion of men employed in casual and other precarious forms of employment
outstrips the growth amongst women employees. With the decline in Fordist mass
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production, especially in advanced economies, based on large firms and factories, and
the growth of so-called fast capitalism (Gee, J. et al 1996) with drastically reduced
fixed costs, smaller firms engaged in more tailored types of production whose
principle is adapting quickly to change and re-tooling according to different demands.
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There has been a shift from traditional male occupations, in manual trades/
manufacturing where job security was traditionally stronger to service,
knowledge,
creative
and
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technology-based
employment,
where
precarious
employment arrangements are more prevalent. Along with these production changes
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has come a type of strategic short-termism, greater levels of outsourcing and subcontracting by employers.
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These changes appear to align with what many social scientists have described as the
emergence of the risk society, reflexive modernity and calculative individualism.
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Beck (1992) has argued that late modernity has seen the rise of the risk society
where once solid social institutions have been eroded and increasing levels of
uncertainty characterise aspects of everyday life. In some fundamental but largely
undocumented way, the institutions of society handed back the management of risk
to the individual. This was both a blessing and a curse. He claims collective
allegiances have diminished and individualism has come to guide social action (see
also Giddens, 1991). The old safety net of social structures (especially the modern
welfare state, the nuclear family and the labour movement) cedes to a more uncertain
and competitive milieu. The idea that people must now secure their position for
themselves and their families now seems hegemonic. The modern project of building
the reflexive self (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994) breaks through the old order where
everyone knew their place. However, the contemporary liquid modernity

(Bauman, 2000) is also characterised by much greater uncertainty in terms of how to
establish, fix and reproduce a social identity.
Beck looks to contemporary labour markets to illustrate his thesis (2000), suggesting
that technological change, economic restructuring and lack of job security have
encouraged competitive, reflexive and individualistic dispositions among workers.
Furlong and Cartmel (1997) claim that the new worker, no longer guided by the
fatalism associated with Fordism, now faces a challenge to articulate choice
biographies, compiling portfolio narratives and parlaying diverse experiences into
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coherent career accounts (Dwyer, Wyn and Tyler, 2001; Morgan, 2006). Young
people are told that credentials are essential to vocational success but that even the
best education provides no guarantees. The passage from youth to adulthood has
become increasingly problematic, and the idea of education and work as marking out
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discrete, stable and sequential phases of life is obsolete: education is a lifelong

imperative and unemployment a constant threat (Wyn and Dwyer, 2000). Workers are
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told they need to be occupationally agile and to abandon the collectivism of the past
for the neo-liberal individualism of the future (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997). What is
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valued in the new economy is, in Sennetts words a self oriented to the short term,
focused on potential ability, willing to abandon past experience (Sennett, 2006).
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If risk and uncertainty are omnipresent, then how are people to plan and consolidate?
The rapid structural upheaval in the Australian labour market has undermined the
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ability of networks families, communities of various sorts to guide young people

into employment. This is especially the case for those from working class
backgrounds and/or where parents have experienced extended periods of
unemployment. There is a sort of generational disjunction especially for those from
working class and migrant backgrounds as families/ communities can no longer
provide the road maps required for working life.
One response to this labour market process from social theorists (Leadbeater, 2000,
Landry 2000) is to embrace it, to celebrate rootlessness and the process of breaking
with communal encumbrances. Leadbeater (2000, p.1) writes
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My father had a steady, predictable career which carried him through to a well
earned, properly funded and enjoyable retirement I am not yet forty, I have already
had several mini-careers I am one of Charles Handys portfolio workers I live on
my wits
These sentiments have a normative dimension. Not only does Leadbeater analyse the
processes of individualisation in late modernity, in embracing its potential, he urges
others to do so. However, an increasing body of literature (Skeggs (2004),
MacDonald & Shildrick (2007), Nayak (2009), Australians like Wyn and Dwyer
(2001), Wyn and White (1997) and Jane Kenway (2006) and Anglo American Sennett
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(1998, 2001, 2006) charts the inequalities associated with the new economy,
suggesting it is not a level playing field and the more communal props are removed,
the more vulnerable socially-marginal people become. There are essentially two
points being argued by these writers i) that residual habits/ impulses make it difficult
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for people from working class backgrounds to assimilate to the demands of the new
economy to the entrepreneurial self-direction required to survive ii) that there has
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been a corrosion of collective values based on sustained institutionally-protected

social networks, including those generated through stable employment.
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Study and Method: Narratives of Precariousness
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We conducted single interviews with around eighty young people currently engaged
in training in creative skills (mainly music, design, film/video) or who have recently
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completed such training, most from working class/ minorities. We also undertook
some limited participant observation of the spaces of creative teaching and learning,
both formal & informal. Our aim was to consider the inherited cultural
forms/templates that shape vocational narratives of aspiration. What sorts of values
and dispositions do the research subjects bring to working life? Do they embrace the
short-termism and individualism of precarious work and, if so, in what sense? How
negotiable are their craft identities; how transferable are their skills? How do they
survive
vocational/income
insecurity?
Of
all
contemporary
sociological
commentators, Richard Sennett probably best expresses the dilemmas of the

fragmented vocational (and therefore public) self:
The labours of the modern, flexible workplace pose quite a different challenge to the
task of narrating ones work: how can one create a sense of personal continuity in a
labour market in which work-histories are erratic and discontinuous rather than
routine and determinate? (Sennett, 2001 p.183)
Our research is directed at understanding how precarious labour affects young people,
not just as workers but more generally as social subjects: how it inclines people
towards individualism or collectivism; how it affects their sense of agency/individual
sovereignty. Were interested in how the experience and prospect of precariousness
shapes social bonds both residual and emergent and how it directs decisions and
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dispositions in working life and beyond. Despite the common observation of the
declining importance of work in post-industrial society and post-modernity, we
contend that it remains a powerful source of identification particularly for young men.
We can accept, that in recent history there has been a blurring of the lines between
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work and non-work, a breakdown in the separation between work and life. We can
also accept that vocational identities and aspirations can be part of a larger project of
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self and are formed by influences wider than just those encountered through formal
education and employment. However, there is still a very strong social inference that
what you are paid to do defines you.
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We have conducted life history interviews with young people of a variety of
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backgrounds, but with particular focus on those with creative aspirations. We chose
this focus because of the centrality of creativity and innovation in the discourses of
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economic renewal in the West (Ross, 2009; Leadbeater, 2000). Such discourses are
based on the post-Fordist premise that the value of contemporary commodities is
based more on symbolic/ intellectual investments than raw materials and manual
labour and that, in the global division of labour in which much old manufacturing
now takes place in the developing world, developed nations have become reliant on
the production of symbols and intellectual property than in physical things. Along
with others we have misgivings about the conceptual rigour/ range of the term
creative industries (Clark, 2009) and with the assumptions about the promise/
potential they hold. However, one of the consequences of the discourses of innovation
and creativity is to normalise precarious work. Whereas thirty years ago the creative
precariat did not extend much beyond artists and musicians, now many more people
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live on the edge. The growing importance of creative curriculum in western

educational systems has meant that increasing numbers of young people, including
those from working class and minority backgrounds, are developing ambitions for
creative careers (Morgan and Nelligan, 2012).
Creativity has become the leitmotif of new capitalism. Policy makers have long been
convinced that intellectual property and the creative industries can provide for the
economic salvation of the west. This is reflected in various policy documents and
statements from Paul Keatings Clever Country and Tony Blairs Cool Britannia and
it resonates with a counter-culture critique of standardisation/ Taylorism. The so-
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called creative classes have become the coveted, elusive vanguard of the new
economy and are particularly sought after by those engaged in efforts at urban
renewal/regeneration (Florida, 2002). The idea of creative labour has a strong popular
appeal promising, as it does, a fulfilling marriage of art and work. However, much
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work in creative industries is not creative at all (Clark, 2009). The creative career, like
the creative economy, is about immanence, unfulfilled potential. Workers are
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perpetually restless and oriented to the next big break.
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Creative industries contribute substantially to the ranks of the precariat, based

largely as they are on a reserve army of freelancers and those available to be called up
on short contracts or casual arrangements. As we have seen, some commentators
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proselytize flexibility as a moral virtue (see Leadbeater quote above). The

conventional wisdom of new vocationalism suggests that workers in general need to
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blow with the winds of change, to be prepared to re-skill, retool and reinvent
themselves otherwise they will not last the distance and probably dont deserve to.
However, where an occupation is coloured with the patina of creativity, greater
sacrifice is required: 1) a preparedness to do unpaid work in ones creative field, 2) to
subsidise creative ambition by working in (what are widely perceived as) mundane
service sector jobs and 3) to organise leisure time and friendships around the
networking imperative. This inevitably produces the potential for existential
contradictions on the one hand your creative calling becomes a very visible badge
of self (as precariousness produces the need for self-promotion) on the other hand
your reliance on alternative income sources renders that claim fragile.
Roger
Roger still lives at home with his parents in his mid twenties, a convenient and cheap
option. Easy-going and confident, he enjoys laying out the narrative of his life and
does not present it as a tale of weakness or deficiency. There is not a strong sense of
having to cover up holes or avoid revisiting awkward past developments. He has
had a number of successes for example an event management company with his
friend and he seems confident that others will come along.
Roger values his friendships highly and is close to a number of young men in similar
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circumstances. His creative ambitions are to do with music. He has been in a hip-hop
band with his friends since high school. The band has never made it but this does
not appear to worry Roger. He does not talk about it as if it was his one shot at
success long fallen wide. Rather he sees himself as playing the long game and, in
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career terms, as keeping his options open.
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The other aspect of Rogers portfolio career is his relationship with retail work.
While at school, he obtained a job in the warehouse of a large DIY chain through a
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friendship contact. From there, simply by being around, he progressed to front of

store work and, eventually, to a sort of deputy section manager. Roger has developed
a relationship with this store and has been there off and on for nearly a decade.
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This itself is noticeable. Retail trends come and go, and firms massify in a way
familiar to monopoly capitalism. However, sectors also endure to a certain extent. At
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least for the sorts of time scales Roger is calculating over, the large chain store is
stable. This is an important part of how he can play things.
In a sense we would argue Roger is trying to reverse engineer the old Fordistworker contract. Instead of the worker reproducing him/herself ready to be called up,
Roger expects the DIY chain to endure and to welcome him back when he is ready.
He has skills and, importantly, experience. This reduces the companys costs in
finding a worker and their training budget. He can guarantee them that he can pick up
where he left off with no extra training. Part of this strategy is to not cut all ties when
at one point he left the firm:
Page 9 of 24
So when I left there I didn't quit officially I was just still casual so I was still on the
books, [I went for] this other job, stayed on the books, once I knew I was not liking it I
called up [the DIY chain] and got more hours there
Of course there are trade offs and these have to be negotiated in their specificity. It
may not be possible to come back at the same level or with the same guaranteed
number of paid hours. Roger does not care much about these marginal differences in
pay and so far he seems to have avoided most of the traps. Still, it is a competitive
labour market there too and he has to be aware that there are other young unemployed
workers waiting for a start.
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The chain store also has a number of job/lifestyle advantages for him. It is a relaxed
working environment and their advertising shows they pride themselves on taking a
modern attitude to diversity and to a relaxed view of how people can dress at work.
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There is something of a shop floor culture that Roger now feels part of. He likes the
fact that he is known there and that they seem to encourage him to take more
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responsibility. He happily admits it is not exactly taxing. He finds the people he has to
manage mostly have the same vibe. So he can be loyal to them and to his idea that
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everyone knows it is all bullshit. In other words he can do the job mostly in a way
that he is happy with without feeling that he has to sell out to get on. Here is how
Roger talks about the job and his co-workers:
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obviously your appearance isn't a huge thing as long as you get in there do your job
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and pretty much do everything as required. The people there are a lot cooler I get on
with them a lot better, I know what I am doing down there, it is a lot more
comfortable there I know where I am at, everyone is good, close to home, and again it
is a lot more flexible, if I need time off to do a show I can do it.
It has occurred to Roger to undertake a trade apprenticeship but in his mid twenties he
feels he is past that. But in another way he is part of the world of manual labour in
that he is servicing the needs of tradespeople as well as those of weekend
handymen/women. Roger seems to be working with another job criteria. He thinks of
himself as an active person (he has various sporting recreations) and he likes to move
around. To him the worst type of job physically would be to be stuck behind a desk.
White-collar employment has grown in importance in the west but Roger thinks that
being chained to a workstation for forty years would be hellish:
I am more of an active person either sport, music, more of a hands-on - doing your
whole tradie type of career. Obviously if you dont start that when you are kind of 16
or 17 you have kind of wasted the opportunity, because who wants to go back to eight
dollars an hour when you are 23 so the whole tradesman kind of apprenticeship thing
doesnt really work kind of once you get past that.
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Although his fathers job was stable and sedentary, he is thankful that his working life
wont be like that. What emerges from the accounts of Roger and some of the other
young people we talked to is that precarity and unreconstructed Fordism are not a
stark either/or. Because modern work is being re-structured by precarious relations,
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this does not mean the desired opposite would be a return to the Fordism. That
would be as deadening to Roger in its way as sitting behind a computer. In his
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narrative these jobs would not suit his trademark individuality and personal
autonomy. Roger is not longing to be recuperated. His style and identity construction
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depends partly on keeping the straight job at bay. To be a 9 to 5er would potentially
signal the end, it would be the death of his rebellious and artistic self. He shares a
view commonly expressed by others in our sample that no artist/creative worker
could, without irony, take a routine job seriously.
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As with any snapshot of a life there are some caveats. One factor is chronology and
age. Post modernity notwithstanding, even new economy careers are successive, at
least in the temporal sense. Things may not be linear but they are successive. How
else would the category of experience work for resumes and employers alike?
Whether it is a retail store or a caf you have to have worked in a place before you
can meaningfully be said to have experience there and to do so takes time. Individual
and psychological notions of maturity are less useful to this analysis but it is also true
that Roger cannot be in his twenties forever. In common sense terms people do tend
to periodise their lives in this way and people feel the parallax in their own lives when
they see people left behind or passing them. You pass the furlong markers of life
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Page 11 of 24
whether you view it in those terms subjectively or not. Interviewing Roger in mid life
would be a useful addition to the method.
What we have tried to emphasise is that Roger is not a victim of an unstoppable and
wholly negative set of historical and social evolutions. He is sanguine in our terms.
Looked at in one way, Rogers ease with his situation, and his apparent confidence
that he can always make it work for him, seems hubristic; or maybe it is just learned
optimism. Either way, it would be inaccurate, and therefore wrong, to describe Roger
as merely put upon. Rogers relationship to precarity is not a one-way street.
Precarity is real enough for an increasing number of people. It has emerged as a
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condition for many workers in just the way we have alluded to (hence the fastgrowing body of social science literature on the topic). In the effort to try and take full
measure of the compounding impact of these several changes to work, employment
relations and personalised risk, some theorists have come up with a concept of
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precarity that is sometimes too overarching. Social structure is not just an iron cage.
There has to be a space for agency. Plans may go wrong but they are still plans.
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Roger and others in our sample are purposive and have taken stock of the relations
and structures within which they can navigate.
Hayley
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Hayley grew up near Penrith, a working class suburb in Sydneys outer west. She
went to her local high school, completed year twelve and then worked in shops and
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offices. Hayleys parents did not pressure her to find secure work, rather she was
encouraged to find her calling, Ive always gone with the flow and mums always
just been, do whatever you like, whatever makes you happy, and dads kinda chilled
like that too. However, by her mid twenties she was being encouraged to do a degree,
mum gave me the application form and said cmon, do something. She studied
media and communications and now has three insecure jobs: university tutor,
freelance filmmaker and directors assistant with a television station (largely publiclyfunded).
She acquired the third of these after working briefly at the television station as an
unpaid intern, along with a group of others. During this time she made a concerted
11
attempt to separate herself from the other interns and to ingratiate herself to the
managers with whom she was dealing, and then by volunteering to work extra hours
without pay. As a consequence she was offered paid but precarious work.
In her late twenties, like Roger, she still lives at home with her parents, an
arrangement that allows her to endure precarious economic circumstances. Teaching
is contract-based and the directors assistant position is causal. Hayley suggests there
was an opportunity to her to obtain more secure employment with the television
station but was strangely ambivalent about this:
r
Fo
I had that moment, working [at the television station] and making all the film stuff
where I thought my gosh maybe this is what Im meant to do and now Im like I dont
know wouldnt like to work [there] full-time, dont want to end up like one of those
Re
sour people that work there wouldnt want to work in TV unless I was making the
show, directing the show, hosting the show like an independent sort of project. Id
vi
have to be a director or producer and definitely work up and not my equal

colleagues but my bosses [there] have been good to me and its not often that I burn a
ew
bridge and by working with people in the industry I get industry recognition so I
dont completely want to let them go and they said theyd always have work for
me and with my job you have to use it or lose it so I have to go back
On
Hayley, indicates a view of her working life as a process of self-actualisation. Work
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means much more to Hayley than earning a living. As McRobbie says, it

incorporates and takes over everyday life, that it supplants, indeed hijacks the
social detaching people from more settled socially rooted ways (McRobbie,
2002: 99). The quest for permanency, for enduring work relations, is as Leadbeater
suggests based on the quest for a closed, nostalgic communitarian society,
something that kills off innovation (Leadbeater, 2000: ix-xi). For Hayley the choice of
whether to persevere with precarious work or commit to more permanent, fulltime
employment is a difficult one. On the one hand a permanent job provides a regular
income and stable work patterns, on the other, it binds her not only to a single
occupation but also to a particular workplace community that at some point she may
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like to supersede. There is a sense in which to embrace stability is to relinquish a

degree of vocational sovereignty: the ability to steer her career and enrich her stock of
human capital.
Hayley is a consummate networker. Social networks are a key organisational force of

creative industries workforces (See Blair, 2001, 2003, 2009; Christopherson, 2008,
2009). In order for networks to be fruitful, they need to be maintained and
replenished. For Hayley to remain networked, she must remain mobile and available
to take up any opportunity that comes her way. This means that redundant contacts,
according to Blair, should fall away and be replaced by contacts that provide
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generative social ties and employment opportunities (2009). In this sense, if she
works in one place for too long, Hayley not only risks becoming occupationally idle
but also reducing the effectiveness of her networks. Contacts, in a networked society,
are capital and thus should be generative and productive, not stale and redundant,
Re
which means ongoing replenishment and transcendence. For people like Haley, lifes
a pitch (Gill, 2010): every social interaction should be an opportunity to network.
vi
The diminishing number of those employed on a full time basis in the television
ew
industry are expected to engage in task repetition and teamwork, things which run
counter to Hayleys vocational inclinations. From the point of view of neo-liberal
vocational discourse, such workplaces disrupt processes of self-actualisation and the
On
production of a portfolio career. Hayley suggests that for her the job for life can be
crippling and can produce embitterment: she wishes to avoid ending up like one of
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those sour people who have remained too long in a single job. This suggestion of the
corrosive and embittering effects of long term employment runs counter to Sennetts
claim, that it is the constant impermanency of flexible capitalism that corrodes
peoples characters and their ability to connect with others (1998). For Sennett the
enduring bonds of loyalty to fellow workers are the foundations of fulfilment. In the
discourse of the flexible, restless post-modern worker, that Hayley so clearly
exemplifies, exactly the opposite is true.
By virtue of the route she took to enter television work, Hayley also recognises that
full time work also means being submissive to paternalistic authority and power that
gave her the break; that she will remain the protg of decision-makers. Under such
13
employment conditions, she knows that she will never attain the vocational autonomy
or the individual sovereignty that she craves and that she perceives as norm. This,
however, is complicated by feelings of obligation. She says that her bosses were
good to her, suggesting she owes them a debt, despite undertaking the internship and
working for free. This makes difficult for her to sever the relationship completely. She
is also bound to the television station because, in creative labour markets, reputation
and social capital matter. One the one hand, Hayley wants to supersede the workplace
based network, to extend her connections and take stock of her vocational trajectory,
but on the other, is bound to the job because she cannot afford to cut ties with the
industry people that she knows. If she does, she may compromise one opportunity for
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another and one social connection for a potential other. So in Hayleys words, she
does not completely burn her bridges, but does not commit to fulltime work either.
Tanja
vi
Re
Tanja, in her mid 20s, an outgoing and confident young woman, grew up in the
working class region of Liverpool in western Sydney. A talented dancer at school, she
ew
was offered the chance to teach young children her skills. She describes this break as
serendipitous, a narrative trope that cropped up several times during the interview:
I didn't even want to be a dance teacher, it just fell in my lap, I just got offered a job I
On
was fifteen and they said we will pay you thirty bucks an hour and I thought wow I
can be rich, that is a lot of money when you are fifteen..
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After completing school she had some interest in studying to be a primary school
teacher, like her mother, a second generation Italian migrant, but heard from a cousin
who was working for a company that staged shows in Australian fashion week that a
job had become vacant. She decided to put other ambitions on hold, applied and was
offered the job:
Yeah I seemed to get a lot of I don't know a lot of opportunities seem to fall in my lap,
touch wood, so if something comes along like that I don't I am not the sort of person
to say oh no no I am doing this, I will just take it that is why I have done so many
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things... Because I think you never know what is around the corner and what if you
don't dip your toe
This is typical of the language about the magical opportunity that we heard very
frequently from young people who have enjoyed a measure of success. Her variegated
career is explained as a consequence of things just falling in her lap. Dipping the
toe in the water is metaphor implying an openness to experience rather, a certain
intrepid disposition. This is very different from the strategic career building subject
and is more akin to the idea of the subject of the new economy, flexible and malleable
in viewing their skills as transferable and their pathways as negotiable and contingent,
r
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not as singular and fixed.
For a time she was excited by the prospect of working in fashion and sought advice
from more experienced co-workers on how to build a career. They advised her:
Re
Don't stick around because you need to meet new people and it is all that social
vi
networking especially in the fashion industry so the more you are out and about
and you are changing jobs going from here to there the more people you are meeting,
ew
and the more networking you are doing and the bigger jobs you can land, but the jobs
only go for a specific amount of time
On
She learns then, that, in order to be successful, the new worker has to embrace
precariousness. To remain loyal to a single employer meant depriving yourself of the
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sorts of broad contacts required to maximise career opportunities. In some industries

there is even a formula. Another interviewee, a young recruit to new media/
advertising, told us that three years is widely accepted as the right length of time to
remain in one job: not too short for future employers to suspect that you are flighty
and unreliable, or that you were released by a previous employer once they became
aware that your skills and performance were inadequate; but not too long to become
stale and taken-for-granted.
After working in the position for two years Tanja decided the prospect of compulsory
vocational restlessness was not to her liking. She also became aware that people
15
employed in positions similar to her own were almost exclusively young. This
sharpened the sense of having a short shelf life:
I think working in the fashion industry it has just really it is not very secure and there
is a lot of it is a young job, like a lot of young people, like once you are in your
thirties if you don't own your own little company you are not really sort of [secure]
She recognised that those who were successful in the fashion industry had
entrepreneurial inclinations, and embraced the challenge of networking and selfpromotion. Tanja had little desire to emulate them. Additionally she became aware of
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the informal cultural judgements and networks of class-based patronage that operated
to limit the chances of someone like her, from a modest family background:
a lot of the girls didn't know where you were from but they could tell where you
Re
were, like they had their expensive Louis Vuitton bags and that sort of thing and
I didn't wear any label sort of clothing
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These experiences were sobering. Tanja came to feel would be unable to assimilate to
ew
the competitive individualism of the fashion world, and so revived her earlier
ambition and enrolled in a teacher education course. She thought this would give her a
point of anchorage against a tendency to become captivated by every sparkling
On
opportunity that presented itself. Teaching would give her some control over her
working life, the chance to avoid the fate of a fragmented and disparate precarious
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Page 16 of 24
career. Far from being the sovereign, strategic and versatile new economy worker,
Tanja characterised herself as easily wooed by the flattery of serendipitous
opportunity. In describing this impulse she uses the vocabulary of the romance
narrative, with herself almost as the tragic romantic heroine:
I need something that is a little bit more stable I think, because I just get swept off
on a tangent and fall in love with something else
However, at another point in the interview she seeks to recover her skittish
impulsiveness as a virtue. These qualities, she suggests, give her the disposition to be
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a versatile teacher, to bring a range of skills that will give her a role beyond the
classroom:
I want to be involved in a lot of things within the school because just being a teacher
in the classroom would drive me insane, like I need to be doing different things like
organising you know the dance, or you know running cross country or I need to be
doing different things all the time
Analysis
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These three cases illustrate the subjective complexity associated with precarious work
in the new economy. Most of our interviewees, far from seeing the unorthodox
insecure creative employment as perverse, and to be collectively resisted, accept it as
endemic to the industries in which they found themselves. There is also a tacit
Re
acknowledgment that insecurity is a condition of youthful working life and that the
pursuit of a creative career is an intrinsically youthful activity. Most have experienced
vi
job insecurity while working in retail and hospitality, sectors in which the great
majority of young Australians find their first jobs, and where they have few rights to
ew
continuing employment. To some extent this habituates them to the power relations
that operate in creative fields, where work is scarce and where the power of
gatekeepers is enormous and often arbitrarily exercised.
On
The case studies provide an interesting gender contrast. The narratives of Hayley and
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Tanya are filled with magical happenstance, and this reflects a complicated form of
agency. Roger displays much less nave eagerness. He is much cooler about the idea
of the big break. The young women express excitement at being the beneficiaries of
opportunity, but far from being passive vocational wallflowers, waiting to be
discovered or swept off their feet, they are very active in seeking to capitalize on
those opportunities. However, neither is rigidly strategic, seeking to engineer a career
around a set of pre-determined inflexible goals. In many ways the eagerness for
variety and vocational discovery, the sense of being versatile and open to possibilities,
makes them ideal subjects of the new economy.
17
Hayleys narrative describes the role of protg, the one who seeks mentorship and
initiation to the secrets of the craft/ vocation. By contrast with the figure of the
apprentice, whose skills were forged in relatively stable work groups, housed by
Fordist employers, the creative protg works in the precarious and hierarchical
structures of the creative enterprise; s/he lives or dies by patronage and informal
judgment. The role of creative protg is always fragile tied as they are to those who
pursue managerial/entrepreneurial goals and the gift of mentorship can be
withdrawn at any time. By contrast the master-apprentice relationship, although
unequal, nevertheless produces bonds that are independent of, and often counterposed to, managerial power and which emerged historically in stable communities of
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practice with traditions of craft-based independence. Hayleys tension with the longterm employees, over whose heads she was promoted, is symptomatic of the
contradictions faced by the creative protg. Unable and disinclined to build bridges
with fellow employees she expresses the fear of going sour by remaining too long
Re
with one employer, and the desire to move on: the cycle of renewal and restlessness
that characterizes the postmodern career.
vi
Tanja told us that, while she was eager to capitalize on the breaks that come her way,
ew
she was not prepared to play the role of protg. She was unfamiliar with the informal
codes on which much career advancement is based (I didn't know what to expect in
fashion like I had to go out there on my own wing and do it) and refused to
On
dress/present herself according to the styles of others in the fashion industry. Nor did
she kowtow to her boss and as a result became involved in conflict:
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Page 18 of 24
I had clashes with my boss I just started to give her attitude and I wouldnt finish
doing bits and pieces of my job and would talk back I would get told well you can't
say no to her you are bottom of the rank.
The decision to resign the job (and withdraw from an associated technical college
course) and commence an education degree reflected Tanjas aversion for the cutthroat individualism she saw operating in this workplace. Although she craves the
stability of a familiar career modeled on that of her mother she does not do this
just to escape precariousness but out of a realization that she is not consumed by the
ambition that appears to be part of creative careers:
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Page 19 of 24
I think I will always have a creative flair from my parents and from my passion for the
creative arts but I don't see myself excelling in that field, I don't think I am that top
notch person that really wants to strive
Roger the musicians attitude to work and career (as defined broadly) shows more
signs of being modeled on the tradition of worker independence based on (largely
masculine) Fordist communities of practice (which a band could be seen as an
analogue). The job in the hardware store is sufficiently flexible to shrink and expand
according to the wax and wane of his musical career. His ironic distance from the
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corporate culture and his fondness for the informality of this workplace echoes the
blue-collar/ white-collar manual/mental divide that preoccupied twentieth century
industrial sociology. He is able to use practical manual skills in dealing with do-ityourself and tradespeople customers, suggesting that the hardware store is a vague
Re
proxy for the factory floor. Unlike Hayley and Tanya, he does not describe his
creative musical exploits in the vocabulary of fate and serendipity, but rather appears
vi
more instrumentally disposed. There are clear gender dimensions here. The women in
our sample generally embrace the role of protg more readily, whereas the men are
ew
less inclined to accept mentorship from those who exercise corporate power and
leverage in the creative industries. Thus many, particularly men from working class
backgrounds, appear less able than women to conform to the flexible individualism,
On
the pressure to reinvent themselves frequently and to view their skills and experiences
as transferable.
Conclusion
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In this paper we have argued against the notion that young people who have creative
vocational aspirations will always resist intermittent and unorthodox forms of
employment in the creative industries; that their ambition is to join the ranks of the
core or primary workers and obtain a steady and predictable income source. In the
early stages of their creative careers, most accept that the fields they aspire to enter
are inherently precarious and that this presents certain advantages. To some extent the
acceptance of the condition of vocational restlessness is a reaction to the popular
memory of Fordism, of being condemned to places and patterns of work that endure
19
across decades. However, it is also based on the idea that a creative career is
synonymous with youth, and that job insecurity is intrinsic to this phase of life. It is
also synonymous with the idea that the shape and direction of the career is vague and
unforeseeable, that it cannot be completely engineered and that the creative aspirant
should be open to diverse possibilities. The youthful protg is a key discursive figure
of the creative industries. But as we have seen, in the volatile and ephemeral work
situations in these fields, the favour and mentorship of those in power is fragile and
conditional. These things are based upon power relations that can undermine
solidarity and trust with co-workers. If the job is precarious it is likely to be viewed
only as a stepping-stone to the next thing. Each of our interviewees described
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different strategies in response to these conditions. Hayleys individualistic

dispositions give her an advantage over other creative aspirants, but when she is given
a break this has the effect of separating from co-workers. These experiences sharpen
her sense of the need to move on, not to be reliant on one employer. Tanja is happy to
Re
take advantage of a fortuitous and unforseen creative opportunity but is not prepared
to make the sacrifices and play the games required to progress in the fashion industry.
vi
Opting for a career in education is less about escaping precariousness than entering a
field in which the cultural rules are more familiar and work relations less competitive.
ew
Roger has little inclination to be the protg and is less sanguine about the idea of the
magical break. He uses his day job to hedge against the strong possibility that the
creative career, unachieved as yet, will never bear much fruit. This work is based on
On
single interviews at one point in time and so is limited in scope. It would be useful to
see qualitative longitudinal research conducted in future that looks at the evolution of
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creative aspiration and seeks the reflections of those who have obtained secure
employment on their earlier precarious vocational experiences.
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