Abstract
The informal nature of creative work is routinely acknowledged in the studies of creative labour. However, informality of creative work has been so far treated dualistically: firstly, as the informal governance of creative labour markets and secondly, as the ever-increasing informalization of creative workplaces. In contrast, this article argues for the importance of focusing on informal labour practices as infused in relational contexts so as to understand how creative workers uphold career sustainability and cope daily with contingent, insecure and underpaid work. Drawing on the relational work perspective from economic sociology, I contend that creative workers’ informal labour practices and economic activities are constituted by the meanings and quality workers attach to interpersonal relations. The more socially and spatially intimate and closer the interpersonal relationship, the less the economic benefit. The more socially and spatially distant the relationship, the greater the pecuniary motivation. The article maps relational work dynamics in: (1) informal paid labour practices, comprising work under-the-radar of state authorities, such as cash-in-hand work including online crowd-work, tips-based work, and paid favours and (2) informal unpaid labour practices, practices happening in webs of reciprocity that are not directly compensated with money, such as barter, favour-swapping and voluntary work.
Keywords
Creative work has been widely celebrated as informal: non-hierarchical, bohemian, playful and sociable. The ‘ecstasy-influenced friendliness’ and ‘intoxicating pleasures’ of rave ‘club socialities’ furnished the operational model for the creative industries (McRobbie, 2002: 520; Mears, 2012). In these industries, ‘informal networking’ borders on frenzy: ‘schmoosing [is] pursued with a vengeance’ (Neff, 2012: 111). Informality in dress, managerial style and corporate cultures has become tantamount to an injunction (Neff, 2012; Turco, 2016). Informality, as Gill (2007: 24) has aptly observed, has become ‘the new black’ of work. Despite its centrality in managerial, media and policy discourses, however, the informality of creative work has been examined within the burgeoning field of creative labour studies (CLS) (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; McKinlay and Smith, 2009) in a dualistic and ultimately hype-fuelling manner. The informal nature of creative work is rarely tackled in its positivity, as it is practised daily by creative workers themselves, but via negation, invariably defined in opposition to a standardized and normalized formality. There is thus a rich but two-pronged tradition in the scholarship of creative work, focusing either on the informal governance of creative labour markets (as opposed to markets regulated through formal labour institutions), or on the informalization of creative workplaces (in contrast to bureaucratic organizations where formal rules govern conduct).
Informality has been habitually defined as a characteristic of labour markets. Creative labour markets are thus typically seen as informally governed (Antcliff et al., 2007; Blair, 2001; Menger, 2006; Wittel, 2001). Theorists largely agree that, in an industry dominated by short-term project-by-project employment where no formal labour market regulations exist such as educational credentials, apprenticeship systems or legislated recruitment procedures, entry into a creative industry career is secured informally, through the accumulation of social capital including friends, acquaintances and family (Blair, 2001; Menger, 2006). Informally organized safety nets, which Wittel (2001) calls ‘network socialities’, consisting of fleeting but intense occupational connections, compensate for the erosion of formal labour regulations such as employment protection law, unemployment insurance and welfare benefits (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013). A substantial literature has emerged that conducts network analyses to investigate the structure, size and configuration of social networks in which freelance creative workers are embedded. A wide-ranging consensus holds that social capital is crucial for maintaining employability, since informal connections facilitate on-the-job skills acquisition and learning (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2002; Menger, 2006), bolster reputation and income (Dowd and Pinheiro, 2013; Uzzi and Spiro, 2005), propel project-by-project mobility (Blair, 2001; Wittel, 2001) and even foster occupational solidarity (Antcliff et al., 2007). Critical CLS dispute the positive portrayal of social capital, however, re-interpreting informal, personalized, close-knit network connections as constituting a homophilous ‘old boys’ club’ that instigates racial, ethnic and gender exclusion (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2016).
Informality has also been recurrently defined as a feature of creative workplaces. Virtually all empirical studies of creative work concur that creative organizations are profoundly informal (Neff, 2012; Ross, 2003; Turco, 2016). These studies commonly assert that, when facing the radical uncertainties of creative output, managers unleash workers’ creativity by according them greater autonomy, mainly through the ‘bohemianization’ of workplaces (i.e. by dismantling formal bureaucratic work policies and making work resemble play) and through the informalization of corporate control (i.e. dissolving formal managerial hierarchies and flexing formal work schedules) (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Ross, 2003). The industrial quest to throw ‘the best, wildest, and most outrageous party’ (Neff, 2012: 102) has further strengthened the research focus on the informal – ‘hot’, ‘cool’ and ‘hedonistic’ cultures of creative workplaces. The informalization of workplace bureaucracies has repeatedly been found to represent a tactical strategy for enhancing brand value and attracting young talent (Neff, 2012; Turco, 2016) – a strategy that has readily been mythologized in management manuals. By contrast, critical scholars de-mask the ‘hidden costs’ of ‘compulsory informality’ in the workplace as a primary cause of burnout, anxiety and overwork (Gill, 2007; Ross, 2003).
The informal nature of creative work is thus predominantly interpreted with reference to two distinct theoretical models: market relations and workplace relations. However, the limitations of this dualistic approach are revealed in attempts to account for forms of labour that do not fall within this dichotomy. Creative workers daily engage in a range of informal labour practices that are incompatible with existing definitions of informality. The dominant two-pronged perspective on informality overlooks the fact that creative work does not occur exclusively within the economic systems of (in-formal) labour markets and organizations, but simultaneously also in quotidian, interpersonal, kinship and moral, non-economic contexts. Informality does not only afford labour market entry or stimulate productive workplace relations, it is also central to the very preservation of sustainable and meaningful creative careers, in spite of the profound precarity – insecurity and casualization – of work in creative industries (McKinlay and Smith, 2009). In precarious conditions, creative workers go about their work relationally rather than strictly calculably or economically. In doing so, they transform labour practices into ‘relational practices’, whereby the informal, interpersonal efforts at attending to meaningful social relations become the basis for the accomplishment of economic activities.
In this article, therefore, I theorize the informality of creative work as essentially ‘relational work’ – the efforts people make to match (establish, negotiate or terminate) appropriate interpersonal (kinship, friendship, collegial) relationships with specific labour practices and economic exchanges and their meanings (Zelizer, 2012). When conceptualized as ‘relational work’, the meaning and value of creative work emerges through its informality. If ‘relational infrastructures’, consisting of informal intimate and friendship ties (Mears, 2015: 1103), underlie creative labour practices then relational work becomes vital for maintaining a resilient and meaningful attachment to work. To problematize the dominant two-pronged understanding of the informal nature of creative work, I relocate the investigative lens from subjective responses to and experiences of work’s informality – typically depicted along ‘a pleasure-pain axis’ of passion-burnout, fun-overwork (McRobbie, 2004), to relational work practices. Drawing further on insights about the relationality, multifariousness and fluidity of labour practices as developed within the studies of informal economies (Glucksmann, 2005; Williams, 2009, 2010; Williams and Onoschenko, 2014), I conceptualize informal creative work not merely as a negation of formal work but as a seamless and fluid array of formal/informal, paid/non-paid, market/non-market labour practices. I therefore identify, map and discuss: (1) informal paid work involving unregistered ‘black/grey’ labour practices such as cash-in-hand work, including online-crowd-work, tips-based work and paid favours; and (2) informal unpaid work, involving labour practices with no direct monetary value, such as favour-swapping, barter and volunteering.
CLS scholars generally neglect this multifarious and relational array of labour practices as they focus almost exclusively on formal work. When informal labour practices are tackled, the discussion usually takes place within the ‘free labour’ debate wherein scholars theorize informal unpaid work one-dimensionally, merely as ‘internships’ – unpaid work performed in the hopes of attaining future formal paid (registered, contractual) jobs (Frenette, 2013). Moreover, CLS scholars cast informal and formal work practices as mutually exclusive rather than symbiotic. Although McRobbie (1998) recognizes ‘mixed economies of creative labour’, her labour mix consists only of multiple formal jobs such as teaching or administrative jobs (see also Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). When acknowledged, informal ‘black’ work is dismissed as a regressive transitory survival phase – a ‘brief passage’ from unemployment to formal work, from ‘being on the dole’ to securing ‘a proper job’ (McRobbie, 1998: 90–91; see also Umney, 2016). Although some scholars (Starkey et al., 2000) recognize that much creative work happens within ‘latent organizations’ (i.e. hidden social formations based on mutual commitments and reciprocity), they fail to elucidate the interpersonal and moral dynamics in and around creative work in favour of charting fixed network configurations. If much creative work happens within ‘latent organizations’ with no ‘formal regulation’ of fees, contracts or working conditions (Banks, 2006; Umney, 2016), then a more nuanced grasp of informality is needed. This article is a step towards such an understanding.
The article builds on a qualitative study (n = 155) of an ‘atypical’ or ‘extreme case’ (Eisenhardt, 1989; Flyvbjerg, 2006) of creative work, namely post-socialist creative work in Macedonia and Albania. Although the creative economies of these countries are vibrant, with a growing cultural export and intensive foreign investment (UNDP, 2010), they are rarely studied by CLS. They thus represent an atypical but also an extreme case: creative work in understudied post-socialist economies exhibits a high degree of precarity and informality (Primorac, 2008; Svašek, 2002). A range of ‘relational business models’, ‘alternative social currencies’ and ‘solidarity-based economies’ are found to flourish in ‘European transitional countries’ such as Macedonia and Albania, whose creative sectors lack access to loans, intellectual property protection and capitalized markets (UNDP, 2010). Amidst conditions of radical precarity, such as fiscal deregulation, rampant levels of employment, receding welfare states and thriving informal economies (Dragićević-Šešić and Dragojević, 2005), much post-socialist work is performed through a range of informal labour practices, both below the radar of state authorities (moonlighting, cash-in-hand work) and within moral regimes of close social and kinship networks (favour-swapping, mutual aid, barter). Precarity and informality are intimate bedfellows: when precarity reins, informality flourishes (Morris and Polese, 2014; for the importance of ‘social relations’ for survival in (post-)socialism see also Ledeneva, 1998).
If creative work in Euro-America has already been designated as ‘profoundly precarious’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011), then one can expect informal labour practices to abound also in Euro-American creative labour, even though they have remained hidden from scholarly sight owing to congealed dualistic disciplinary thinking (Hollinshead and Maclean, 2007) about informality. As an ‘extreme case’, post-socialist creative work is useful for ‘unfreezing’ disciplinary inertia and for illuminating the importance of studying informal labour practices as a strategy for coping with precarity also in the Euro-American creative sector. In Euro-America, an intense post-crisis precarization of work (Kalleberg, 2009) has triggered the ‘informalization of professional work’: ‘the regime of informality has hit the West with full force and is making serious inroads into all sectors of employment’ (Breman and Linden, 2014: 928). In current conditions of precarity/informality, a post-socialist case study thus becomes valuable in providing ‘more information about the phenomenon studied’ and in introducing relational work as a ‘basic mechanism of action’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 229) in the study of creative labour.
Relational work perspective
A relational approach to the study of work has been proposed by the ‘total social organization of labour’ (TSOL) approach (Glucksmann, 2005). This approach acknowledges work as a multifarious array of labour practices inseparable from personal relations of kinship, friendship or community. The TSOL view thus emphasizes the interconnectedness of work undertaken in otherwise contrasting socio-economic spheres: market/non-market, formal/informal, public/private. In this view, labour practices, paid or unpaid, are always entangled in meaningful interpersonal relational infrastructures, in addition to being embedded in impersonal markets. To chart the fluid overlap of multifarious (formal/informal, paid/unpaid) labour practices, Williams (2010, also Williams and Onoschenko, 2014) suggest treating economic activities as a seamless array depicted along two cross-cutting spectra: first, ‘along a spectrum from relatively formal to more informal labour practices’; and second, along a ‘spectrum from wholly non-monetized, through gift-exchange and in-kind labour’, barter, favour-swapping to ‘wholly monetized labour practices’ (Williams and Onoschenko, 2014: 23). I use the spectrum approach to map the plurality and fluidity (as opposed to the duality) of informal creative work (Figure 1).
Spectrum of informal/formal creative labour practices.
According to Zelizer (2012), the interconnectedness between the contrasting market/non-market spheres is accomplished through ‘relational work’. Zelizer (2012: 149) defines relational work as ‘the creative effort people make establishing, maintaining, negotiating, transforming, and terminating interpersonal relations’ as the basis of their economic activities. In this view, all economic practices are relational practices inasmuch as every interpersonal relation has its own appropriate economic transactions and payment media. All labour activities thus involve creating and negotiating meaningful social ties (friendships, love and collegial relationships), marking certain transactions (wages, barter, gifts) as appropriate to those relationships and adopting certain commercial media (money, in-kind payments, favours) to facilitate economic transactions within those relations. The meaningful and appropriate connection between these elements constitutes what Zelizer (2012: 151) calls ‘relational matches’. Relational work thus refers to the strategic alignment (matching) of economic transactions and payment media with meaningful social ties. The management of relational matches primarily entails the performance of emotional and boundary work, story-telling, discursive framing, and the mobilization of cultural scripts that help link meaningful social relations with apposite economic transactions and payment media. Following this approach, Haylett (2012), in her work on the interplay between economic (market) and intimate (non-market) relations in egg donation, examines how egg donors and fertility clinic staff perform relational work by concocting stories that invoke dominant cultural scripts and ideologies of motherhood so as to re-frame the meaning of egg donation from being seen as a purely monetary exchange and bodily commodification (the donor as a profit-seeking seller) to being perceived as an act of female solidarity and mutuality (the donor as moral agent).
In addition to studies of bodily commodification, the relational work approach has been usefully applied in labour process analysis. Mears (2015) demonstrates that when morally dubious forms of labour exchange prevail, such as in the work of female fashion models in VIP nightclubs, ‘doing relational work’ represents a strategy that helps women justify their work as friendship-cherishing, leisure and personal enjoyment, as opposed to outright prostitution (Mears, 2015). Fruitful instantiation of relational work in labour analysis, albeit with no explicit reference to Zelizer’s work, is also found in studies of informal economies. Studies on informal labour within local communities (Williams, 2009), whether western or post-socialist, investigate how people draw symbolic boundaries around meaningful social relations in order to determine the appropriate type and size of payment media. In ‘small town’ and ‘destitute America’, it is the nature of the interpersonal relation that determines if and when a service, such as snowplowing or lawn-mowing, should be monetarily compensated (Nelson and Smith, 1999). Nelson and Smith (1999: 11–12) described how one of their informants marked social relations by differentiating payments (e.g. snowplowing for free for a friend, bartering snowplowing with a neighbour for a car repair, snowplowing for a token payment for elderly neighbours so as to cancel out any connotations of charity).
Studies of post-socialism investigate how underpaid and overworked professional workers perform relational work in order to frame disreputable economic exchanges not only as appropriate but also desirable in conditions of precarity. Williams and Onoschenko (2014: 26–27) show how underpaid medical doctors in the Ukraine earmark cash-in-hand payments from patients as relation-enhancing ‘tokens of gratitude’ rather than relation-corrupting ‘bribery’, while Humphrey (2002) elucidates how low-paid building inspectors discursively legitimize the fraudulent acceptance of under-the-table payments as morally superior ‘helping-a-friend’ behaviour. According to Zelizer (2012: 150), reason-giving in the form of explanations for and justifications of (dubious) economic activities performs relational work: it is ‘a way of creating, maintaining, transforming, or terminating interpersonal relations’. In this sense, ‘relational earmarking’ of money (i.e. categorizing payments in accordance with specific relationships; Wherry, 2016), helped post-socialist workers justify morally-dubious relational matches as a source of securing a livelihood in conditions of precarity. The mutual indebtedness and reciprocity of interpersonal relations turn labour practices into simultaneously instrumental and altruistic actions, whereby economic transactions follow the rules of both moral economies and impersonal markets (Ledeneva, 1998).
This article analyses the relational work of creative workers. It elucidates the ways in which creative workers develop labour practices by virtue of interpersonal relations with a range of social actors such as colleagues, venue-owners, clients, friends, audiences and local communities. The analytical locus is on reason-giving: the justifications, moral assumptions and cultural scripts that creative workers mobilize to negotiate and frame the social relations that underpin their efforts to garner a liveable wage, remain employable and sustain a creative career.
Methods
The empirical data (n = 155) were gathered in a research project investigating the experiences of precarity in post-socialist creative labour. The data-gathering took place in Macedonia and Albania, in Southeastern Europe. This region was chosen because it represents an emblematic case of ‘radical precarity’ and ‘informality’ in creative work (Primorac, 2008).
To ensure the validity and appropriate size and diversity of the sample, informants were drawn from three creative industries. Performing artists, actors and musicians working in the theatre and music industries were interviewed. The performing arts, namely the theatre and music industries, were chosen because of the profoundly precarious nature of work within them, a condition owing to the limited market for cultural goods in the region at a time when state subsidies are dwindling or non-existent (Primorac, 2008). Interviews were also conducted with new media workers such as 3D animators, web-, game- and visual effects developers, primarily because the audio-visual industries constitute the backbone of government campaigns to attract foreign investment by promoting cheap creative labour. Fashion designers were interviewed because the regional fashion industry is an important sub-contractor for global fashion brands, featuring centrally in governmental investment campaigns. A total of 83 performing artists (40 female), 44 new media workers (17 female) and 28 fashion designers (22 female) were interviewed. The median age of the interviewees was 38.
The informants were initially contacted through a regional not-for-profit association of professional creative workers, after which snowballing sampling was used. All of the informants either made or strove to make the majority of their income from creative work. The duration of the interviews varied from a minimum of 50 minutes to a maximum of 2.5 hours. All the interviewees were guaranteed anonymity, hence the use of pseudonyms in this article.
The research design was abductive, involving the ‘systematic combining of induction and deduction’ in an integrated case study approach (Dubois and Gadde, 2002: 555). The integrated approach postulates two stages of research: first, matching a theory with a specific reality; and, second, redirecting the study in light of ‘contradictory and paradoxical evidence’ (Eisenhardt, 1989: 546). Following this systematic combination, the study first set out to test the theories of precarious creative labour in a socio-economic context of (post-socialist) radical precarity. A theory-driven semi-structured interview guide was prepared and qualitative interviews were conducted in Macedonia (n = 105). On the basis of mainstream creative labour theories (see Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011), I distilled the following six thematic axes, later to become the principle coding nodes in the analysis: (1) insecurity; (2) pay and benefits, including work-for-free; (3) passion for creative work, as well as burnout and anxiety; (4) working hours, and socializing after work; (5) relationships with managers and sponsors; and (6) unionization.
The theme of informal labour practices emerged from, not prior to, the theory-testing data collection, in ways markedly inconsistent with the dualistic understanding of informality in CLS. This theme seemed especially important because it directed scholarly attention to how informants mobilized relational ties to combat precarity through engagement in a range of informal labour practices. The accessibility of accounts about informal work, which occurs by definition ‘under the radar’ and in intimate socialities, was ensured by establishing an immediate social connection with the informants. The author (and research assistants) originate from the region and spoke the languages, which provided a common socio-cultural affiliation that encouraged informants to speak with no fear or self-censorship (see also Sarpong and Maclean, 2017).
To probe the theory-building potential of the emerging theme, I corroborated the credibility, internal validity and transferability of the data (Lincoln and Guba, 1984) by ‘redirecting’ the study towards an investigation of the new phenomenon in a ‘contiguous setting’ (Dubois and Gadde, 2002). The initial findings served as a blueprint for the structured qualitative interview protocol (available online as supplementary material) concentrating on informal labour practices. Fifty interviews were conducted in Albania – another ‘extreme’ setting with rampant precarity/informality (Primorac, 2008). This research confirmed the consistency of the findings. Following the redirection, inductive coding was applied and relational work was gradually established as the central feature of informality.
Findings: The multifarious and relational informalities of creative labour
Using the spectrum approach, I situate the informants’ labour practices along two axes: a vertical axis ranging from ‘paid’ to ‘unpaid’ and a horizontal ranging from ‘formal’ to ‘informal work’.
There are no strict boundaries between these practices. Rather, they overlap seamlessly and are to be understood in and through the relational infrastructures in which they are infused. The practice of ‘playing music’, for example, can take place in all the realms of the above spectrum, while the degree of informality and economic significance of this practice will depend on the relational work undertaken by the music-players (see also Taylor, 2004). In this article, I focus solely on work taking place on the under-researched right-hand side of the spectrum: (1) informal paid work, encompassing economic activities unregistered with employment and tax authorities, such as cash-in-hand work, including online crowd-work, tips-based work and paid favours; and (2) informal unpaid work, encompassing economic exchanges with no direct or immediate monetary benefit, such as favour-swapping, barter and voluntary work.
There was little variation in the frequency of engagement with informal work practices across the creative industry sectors studied (see Table 1).
Engagement with informal labour practices.
The quality and meaning of interpersonal relationships determined the economic and labour outcomes across sectors. Indeed, what most squarely brought the relational work perspective onto the researcher’s radar was the somewhat counterintuitive answers the informants in all sectors gave to a rather straightforward interview question: ‘How much do you charge for your gigs?’ Instead of extolling a market ‘supply and demand’ rationale for the economic value of their work, such as ‘newbie artists’ working for free or for less than established artists (Gill, 2007), the informants uniformly couched gig-pricing in relational infrastructures: ‘How much I charge depends on who I work for.’ This is most evident in the ways informants marked and differentiated social relations through payment media. The price of a gig was adjusted in line with the quality and closeness of relational ties rather than formalized market norms that govern the relationship between anonymous sellers and buyers. The more distant the relationship, both socially and spatially, the closer creative workers would get to the market price of their labour. The more intimate and spatially close the relationship, the greater the labour discount. For example, musicians would charge ‘a random stranger’ around 600–700 EUR (plus unlimited drinks and food) to perform for a night-long wedding party, while neighbours and acquaintances would be charged 300–350 EUR for the same; and for close friends and relatives, the musicians would play either for free or for the price of instrument transport. Payment was deemed inappropriate to close kinship ties. Yet to prevent relational mismatches (if the ‘music favour’ was difficult to reciprocate), token payments were accepted.
The informants reported on a range of reasons for negotiating and cherishing interpersonal ties as the basis of work and economic activities. The reasons given were simultaneously both instrumental and altruistic, ranging from purely economic motives to care for the other (the community, the environment, the local artistic scenes), resource redistribution, collegiality and mutual aid. Table 2 gives an overview of the informal labour practices as differentiated by and contingent on the meaning, substance and quality that our informants ascribed to their interpersonal relations. The table thus summarizes the informants’ reason-giving for engagement in relational work. To Zelizer (2012: 150) ‘reason-giving’ is the essential mechanism of relational work: ‘how and why people offer explanations, excuses, justifications, and accounts’ of their interpersonal and eo ipso economic behaviour (see also Wherry, 2016).
Cross-industrial summary of relational work as linked to informal labour practices.
Relational work conditions all informal creative labour practices. Even when creative workers engage in informal labour practices for primarily economic or instrumental reasons (with socially distant others, for example), they are not exonerated from doing relational work. As I will show in the analysis, engaging in cash-in-hand or tip-based work (for which the primary reason for engagement was economic) means that the informalized (non-contractual) labour relations have to be solidified by elaborate efforts aimed at creating interpersonal conviviality through friendship-making and gift-exchange. Informal creative labour thus happens predominantly locally, and in the spatial proximity of relational actors. In this way, it is embedded in relational infrastructures such as local communities, artistic scenes, kinship ties and webs of collegiality and mutual aid. However, despite this general rule, I observed a sector-specific variance in the management of spatial closeness that can be ascribed to the nature of creative work in different creative sectors. The performing arts and fashion design presuppose prevalently embodied work with requisite spatial proximity and bodily co-presence (Becker, 1982), as opposed to new media work that presupposes the deterritorialization of interpersonal ties (Gregg, 2011). Owing to the computer-mediated nature of their work, new media workers engage disproportionally more in online crowd-work (requiring relational work with socially but also spatially distant or deterritorialized clients) than fashion designers or performing artists who execute cash-in-hand work only with spatially and socially close others. Only 5% of the fashion designers we interviewed and none of the performing artists reported having engaged with spatially distant others in online-crowd work. Rather, they engaged relationally with spatially close (bodily or physically co-present) but socially distant others (clients, audiences) through tips-based work that, as I will show below, required the strategic performance of relational work. Indeed, precisely because of its immanent need for relational management of spatially close but socially distant others (for whom tips are avoidable expenses), tips-based work represents for mainstream economics an essentially ‘mystical’ economic practice (Lynn, 2015). However, despite the prevalence of relational work with spatially distant others, new media workers were also somewhat more likely than performing artists and fashion designers to engage in voluntary work within spatially close, local communities and neighbourhoods for reasons of wealth redistribution, community obligation and infrastructure development. Across all sectors, the payment for creative labour by spatially and socially close others (who would typically be absolved from payment), as in the practice of paid favours Williams (2009), did not sully the relationship (see Ledeneva, 2008) as the engagement was driven less by economic reasons than relation-enhancing motivations, namely the moral codes of reciprocity and care.
I focus below on the lived dynamics of relational work while drawing on illustrative examples from the data. I pay particular attention to the complexities and ambivalences of reason-giving – the explanations of and justifications for matching labour practices and economic activities with the meaning of interpersonal relations.
Informal paid work
Informal paid work, often dubbed ‘black’ or ‘hidden work’ (Umney, 2016), refers to monetized economic activities that are unregistered, fully or in part, by social security, tax and labour authorities (Williams and Onoschenko, 2014: 25). Informal work arrangements entail no social security benefits. Their existence depends entirely on well-maintained, constantly negotiated relational infrastructures rather than labour law or employment relations regulation (Morris and Polese, 2014). I here describe the relational work performed by informants in cash-in-hand work, including online-crowd work, tips-based work and paid favours. Informal paid work was undertaken mainly for reasons of profit-making, though also for redistribution, care and sociality.
Cash-in-hand work
Cash-in-hand work is based on informalized employment relations. To become efficient and sustainable, the informal, non-contractual, work relations between creative workers and job-givers (clients, managers) needed to be refashioned into a binding interpersonal bond lubricated by gifts and strategic intimacies. Informalized work arrangements entail performing relational work with socially and spatially close others. In interviews across sectors, intense discourses of friendship permeated the discussions of informal paid work, which was thus constructed as a web of reciprocity mediated by various payment media: perks, freebies, favours and care.
Igor, a 45-year-old musician, has played background music at a restaurant for 14 consecutive years ‘with no written contract’ and always for ‘cash-in-hand’. The ‘taboo exchange’ entailed in this essentially illegal work arrangement (Rossman, 2014) was rhetorically justified through discourses of friendship, while elaborate care practices ensured the longevity of the informal economic relationship. Maintaining the friendship was paramount for both men: for the musician to ‘keep the money rolling’, and for the owner to ensure loyalty:
We’re really friends with Filip [restaurant owner]. We’ve known each other for ever. Our bond is pretty strong. We go fishing together on his boat. He treats my family to winter stay in his mountain hut. We are friends really . . . The only condition for the work is that I don’t play anywhere else. The friendship is sacrosanct. I abide . . . It is not about a contract, it is about not losing face.
Care for the relationship in the form of gift-exchange became regularized: fishing and mountain tours to nurture a sense of obligation and mutuality. Instead of labour law, the informal paid work was regulated by informal social norms and deep moral concerns, whereby any attempt to detach economic relations from intimate relations of care would result in shaming (or ‘losing face’ in Igor’s words). Mila’s story encapsulates well the often complex dynamics of care in informal work. Mila, a 33-year-old fashion designer, holds a lowly-paid permanent job in a large company while simultaneously moonlighting ‘off the books’ for a fashion start-up:
We’re friends with the start-up founder. He helps me make ends meet. I’m a single mom and have to provide for my son. My other job doesn’t pay much, but it covers the health insurance. I moonlight for money, but also because I care for the start-up. I volunteer to work on more demanding cuts. I do painstaking embroidery at night to assist colleagues. I also usually clean the studio.
Mila not only frames her informal paid work as an act of friendship but also engages in elaborate caring practices for the other – her son, her boss, her company – which helps her de-taboo the ‘black’ labour relation. Mila thus expounds a set of ‘relational skills’ such as caring, helping out, connecting – all relation-maintaining activities on which her economic survival is contingent.
Online crowd-work
The cash-in-hand work for new media workers usually took the form of online crowd-work. All of the new media workers (n = 44) interviewed performed piecemeal and undeclared work online, mainly by competing for short-term assignments on freelance recruitment websites such as oDesk or Elance. For some (n = 17), online-crowd work was the main (informal) source of income, and for some (n = 27) it was a form of moonlighting to generate extra revenue alongside their formal employment. Online crowd-work entailed relational work with socially and spatially distant clients. Hence, all new media workers confessed to having performed unremunerated work for clients on online platforms as a way of forging intimate and close relationships and of securing a favourable position in online relational infrastructures. As one informant explained: ‘Once you have a good portfolio accompanied by friendly client feedback, the money will start rolling in.’ Doing strategic relational work online helped workers accrue ‘friendly’ client-proffered ‘reputational tokens’ – positive evaluation and assessment of their work that would be convertible into cash in the longer run.
Darian, a 33-year-old developer, gets the work done even before he makes the bid on oDesk. Once the work is ready, Darian sends it to the client with the following cover letter: ‘I’ve enjoyed very much reading the specification for your project and have got most of it done. I’ve enjoyed it so much that you don’t have to pay’:
People get hooked when you make them believe that you aren’t in it for the money. I even make a video of me working in my bedroom on their project. I bond with those people and after my initial friendly-geeky approach they start trusting me, and even pay on average 50% on top of the quoted price . . . I meticulously choose what work to commit to. Thorough, long requirements and specifications indicate geek-clients that value labour of love. The idea is to bond close enough so they’ll get you on Skype. Once you have a direct contact, you can get off oDesk.
Darian engages in elaborate relational work to establish meaningful ties with socially and spatially distant clients. By appealing to cultural scripts about the ‘geeky lifestyle’, he disavows monetary gain in favour of community affiliation and bonding. Here, the goal is not merely to accumulate a ‘good’ reputation or elicit ‘heartfelt extra pay’, but rather to develop long-term relations of gift-exchange that turn the client–contractor relation into ‘a mutually-beneficial friendship between likeminded geeks’ (Darian). The goal of such relational work is to disentangle the relationship from the crowd-work platform (to avoid mediation costs and labour competition) and re-establish it as a ‘direct relationship of partners and friends’.
Some fashion designers (n = 5) engage in crowd-work online. Zora, a 37-year-old fashion designer, started doing online custom-tailoring two years ago for a global digital clothing marketplace and now owns her own-name virtual shop. After having spent three years of ‘barely breaking even’ while forging invaluable ‘friendship relations’, Zora now employs two designers to work on outsourced design for ‘foreign partners’.
In contrast to new media workers’ computer-mediated relational work with spatially and socially distant others, performing artists have to negotiate spatial closeness, bodily co-presence and interpersonal intimacies with socially distant others as the basis of their economic activities. This is most evident in tips-based work.
Tips-based work
Tips, voluntary micro-payments or ‘gifts of money’ from audiences – spatially close but socially distant others (Lynn, 2015) – comprised one of the most significant sources of informal income for our informants. Tips-based work was most clearly evident in the work of live performances by musicians and actors. Many performing artists (n = 73) undertook copious amounts of relational work with audiences, involving efforts at managing spatial closeness and constructing elusive yet meaningful relations in order to elicit tips. Working out the ‘game of tips’ (i.e. developing effective ways to assess and increase the likelihood of audiences giving tips) was considered a source of both professional pride and economic success, making the solicitation of tips a veritable form of relational work. Boris, a 32-year-old violin player who performed in bars ‘for tips and not a proper wage’, expounded as follows on his tip-eliciting relational work:
But how do you elicit ‘tips’?
Ingratiation! We make the guests happy. We build up the atmosphere and try to measure the guests’ sonic pulse and guess their heartfelt song. It’s important that the band knows how to perform every song – whatever the song – in Macedonian, English, Serbian and even Hebrew. If you guess the heartfelt song right then they reach out for the wallet.
Can you give us an example of how you ‘guess right’?
While I play I pay close attention to how the guests are dressed and what kind of mobile phone and car keys they put on the table. All of that is enormously significant. If they order poached fish – that’s the most expensive thing on the menu – or expensive foreign wine, then that table is the target for the night. The more they enjoy the music, the more they drink. The more they tip, the more they pay – and the happier everybody is!
As part of their relational tip-eliciting strategies, many performing artists (n = 68) reported getting physically closer to the audience, playing the instrument and singing close to their ears and constantly smiling. Indeed, the skill of eliciting tips was perceived to be tantamount to adeptness at forging instant intimate relations with the audience. Musicians and stand-up comedians described eliciting tips as an act of ‘seducing’ or ‘flirting’ with audiences. ‘Tips are like kissing but without the saliva’ quipped one informant when asked what the meaning of tips was for him. When clearly earmarked by audience members as tokens of appreciation, creative workers considered tips to be a metric reflecting the quality of their performance. But tips were also a morally ambiguous commensuration mechanism between ‘the profane’ – the money – and ‘the sacred’ – the art (Rossman, 2014). When payments were accompanied with lewd remarks and sexual advances, tips forcefully changed the meaning of the relationship between the performer and the audience members from artistic performance to sexual work. Many female performing artists (n = 38), tried thus to discursively shift the meaning of tips from morally inappropriate payment media to ‘tokens of gratitude and appreciation’ by referring to tips as ‘gifts of money’. To preclude the slippage of meaning, performers undertook boundary work, erecting symbolic distinctions between different categories of tip payments and their professional identities. Such designation was salient because some categories of tips explicitly marked relational mismatches (i.e. ‘instances of differing expectations resulting from interpretive misalignments of relationships, meanings, media and boundaries’; Mears, 2015: 1114). An unusually high tip, for example, openly threatened a performer’s professional/artistic self-understating and sense of worth by transforming the meaning and experience of economic exchange from professional pride in favourably adjudicated performance into a proposition for paid sexual work. High tips (payment media) were perceived to cross a symbolic boundary into morally contestable realm of sexual exchanges. When her night club performance was over, a man approached Maria, a 40-year-old folk musician, and tucked a 500-euro bill into her hands. When Maria realized how unusually high the tip was, she immediately sensed a relational mismatch enacted by the tip and became distressed:
Tips are not just money. They whisper something to you. I get a tip and that is like a pat on the shoulder saying: ‘Keep up the good work, Maria!’ But when I saw the 500-euro bill in my hands and his hand on my hips, my guts revolted: ‘I am not a prostitute’ my inner voice protested. I immediately returned the money and escaped.
Some performing artists (n = 10) considered ‘playing for tips’ to be generally inappropriate since the monetized payments sexualized them (‘made me look like a gigolo’), dehumanized them (‘you are effectively a jukebox – a coin-operated machine’ accommodating ‘musical wishes’), or patronised them (‘I am not a slave to comply with their ludicrous wishes’). They reported on their efforts to ward off ‘disreputable exchanges’ (Rossman, 2014) with tipping audiences by dissolving the relationship: avoiding eye contact, escaping shaking hands and leaving early. Yet not all performing artists felt that tips necessarily crossed the symbolic boundary of ‘the sacred’. Some (n = 28) actually reported embracing relational work with audiences in a sexualized form. Studies in economics find that a waitress’s friendliness and bodily attractiveness is a strong predictor of restaurant patrons’ tipping behaviour (Lynn, 2015). Similarly, live performers resorted to flirtatious strategies and fashioned themselves as friendly while accentuating their bodily attractiveness and ‘erotic capital’. One female musician reported that she ‘dressed to impress’ and danced provocatively to ‘generate that interpersonal chemistry and so amass tips’. At the same time, however, the live performers developed discursive strategies, such as looking ‘friendly but neither too close nor aloof’ to their audiences, or speaking about their distressing family life in between songs, in order to avert sexual advances without jeopardizing the tip.
Tip-driven work rendered performers vulnerable to audience’s whims when relational mismatches occurred. When audiences felt their tip was incommensurate with the quality of the music or the stand-up comedy shows they received, the relation, in some cases, was terminated with verbal and even bodily insults.
Tipping was also present in fashion work. Elvira, a 27-year-old fashion designer specializing in wedding dresses, performed relational work with her clients in order to solicit ‘tips’. She positioned herself as her clients’ ‘confidante, a shoulder to cry on’ in order to conjure up both conviviality and economic sustainability in their relationship: ‘the closer our bond, the bigger the tip’. In her own words, she ‘cares about the client as a friend, doing all the things two girlfriends do’: drinking coffee together, helping out with the wedding party, even ‘becoming friends on Facebook’. Friendliness of this kind did not always instantly pay, but it nurtured an obligation with clients who repeatedly return to her studio for non-nuptial dress-making.
Paid favours
Many informants reported having been paid small amounts of money (below the market price of their labour) in exchange for accomplishing an artistic service (favour), such as playing at a baptism party or mending a dress, for socially and spatially close others: local colleagues, kin or neighbourhoods. However, the money did not shift the meaning of the relationship, as such ‘paid favours’ were neither profit-oriented nor market-like (Williams, 2009). The main reasons the informants gave for engaging in paid favours were redistribution and mutual aid (when creative workers realized someone was not able to afford the service), or even friendship-cementing (when the money exonerated the receiver from an obligation to reciprocate the favour that could jeopardize the relation). For some creative workers paid favours also meant supporting financially friends by procuring work for them. Jordan, a successful 39-year-old app designer, gives money to his ‘friend – a suffering artist’ by paying him ‘above the market wage’ for doing ‘small music favours’ such as composing jingles. By paying for favours, Jordan lubricates the friendship while circumventing presumptions of charity. Such a not-for-profit rationale makes paid favours look akin to unpaid non-monetary exchanges, to which I turn below.
Informal unpaid work: Non-monetary exchanges
Informal unpaid work is unregistered work with state authorities, involving labour exchanges that are not (or at least not immediately) monetary in nature. I here examine the workers’ care for and negotiation of mutuality and reciprocity as evinced in a seamlessly overlapping range of informal unpaid labour practices, such as barter, favour-swapping and voluntary work.
Barter and favour-swapping
In its crudest form, favour-swapping took the form of intergenerational solidarity, whereby older family members supported the creative enterprises of younger relatives by providing them with access to working space, materials or readily available cash. Amid general conditions of economic hardship and limited access to capital (Humphrey, 2002), many informants (n = 92) across sectors could not rely on privileged family ties and so resorted to barter as a self-provisioning tactic (i.e. to procure expensive equipment, rehearsal space or raw materials indispensable for staying afloat and maintaining a creative career). Oleg, a 40-year-old guitarist who also runs a do-it-yourself recording studio, described the dynamics and rationale of such non-monetary exchanges as follows:
The biggest problem for musicians is liquid cash. I rarely receive money for my recording work. I get whatever they can offer, an old car, babysitting favours . . . I barter. Once I couldn’t afford a new guitar so I exchanged my dog plus a free wedding party gig for a guitar . . . I also gave him two pigeons.
A dog, two pigeons and a wedding party?
It was a hunting dog worth about 600 Euros. The pigeons cost around 300 in a pet shop . . . All that for a guitar! Yes. That’s the only way I can keep working as a musician.
Barter exchange happens through elaborate relational work. The informants often bartered recurrently with the same partners over long periods of time. In order to secure fair dealing in the future, protracted barter relations were lubricated with gift-giving. Oleg indeed reported ‘being generous’ with his ‘wares’, giving away ‘freebies, extra gifts’ so as to strengthen mutual trust and so develop future strategic alliances with his barter partners. Many informants (n = 78) frequently bartered their creative work for specific services they could otherwise not afford. A fashion designer bartered the creation of a dress in return for German-language tuition. An actor secured a year’s worth of dental treatment for his children in exchange for playing as a clown at the dental practice every Sunday. A musician traded dinner-party entertainment for free accounting services. A web designer developed a full visual identity for a travel agency in exchange for ‘an expensive vacation’, while another helped a construction company with the website design in exchange for full refurbishment of his apartment. In all cases of non-monetary exchange, creative workers relationally redefined the boundaries of what constitutes ‘proper worker-employer relationship, economic transactions and payment media’ (Zelizer, 2012: 153). The bartered work implied the erasure of the worker–employer relation in favour of ‘small town’ intimacies (Nelson and Smith, 1999) entangled in webs of mutual aid and indebtedness, lubricated by alternative currencies, such as a sea vacation or dental service, that acquired their meaning and value only within that specific, local and situated, interpersonal relationship.
Relational work was thus most evident when creative workers negotiated collegial-cum-intimate ties within spatially-close creative communities or scenes. A set of economic transactions such as compensation, borrowing and lending were accomplished through diverse payment media such as in-kind payments, time and favours. Tina, a 46-year-old fashion designer, not only ‘pays’ her models in clothing and jewellery instead of a wage but also uses in-kind payments to settle mutual obligations in a chain of creative enterprise partners-cum-friends:
You know we are all friends around here. The creative scene is small. We all know each other rather intimately. We go out and drink together. We never actually pay each other. All is compensation.
Can you give me an example of how compensation exactly works?
For example, a jewellery-maker is my fashion week sponsor. I always make their logo visible, give them tailor-made dresses for Christmas and Easter, so they can make their seasonal catalogues. They pay back, so to speak, with jewellery. I give necklaces to my models, or sell them as fashion accessories. Sometimes I give bracelets and necklaces to the stocking-making company. The owner is a friend. So it all circulates around.
Tina thus justified her reliance on alternative payment media by conflating economic activities with her care for upholding local ‘small town’ intimacies (Nelson and Smith, 1999; Zelizer, 2012). As one informant put it: ‘We have to help each other, otherwise we can’t stay in the business! If we hadn’t helped each other, the creative scene in this god-forsaken city would have been long extinguished.’ ‘You are no one without close friends’ was a commonly heard mantra throughout the interviews. The relational work involved in unpaid informal labour relied heavily on moral considerations for the common occupational ‘good’ and ‘camaraderie’, especially in circumstances of weak public support for the arts and inefficient cultural institutions. Vasil, a critically acclaimed 46-year-old jazz musician, organizes a yearly jazz festival ‘for no monetary compensation’ but for reasons of moral obligation – to help strengthen the local music scenes:
It’s insane to believe you can survive in our region by playing alternative music. We can’t survive without collegial support. That’s why I work gratis for the festival. I play together with younger artists. They learn the ropes and together we raise money to support their education at the music conservatorium.
Interpersonal collegial and friendship ties underlie the practice of deep care for the nurturing of the local creative scene. Interpersonal relationships are thus also marked as instances of occupational solidarity. It was in voluntary work, however, that care for the community through creative work were most evident.
Voluntary work
The community-based non-monetary exchanges recorded in the research most commonly took the form of ‘voluntary work’, a kind of work defined by the spatially close, local and contextual social relations of communities or neighbourhoods (Taylor, 2004). A large number of informants (n = 121) reported being involved in unpaid ‘doing social good’ activities, from fund-raising concerts to help cover the hospital expenses of a bereaved family to designing a casual fashion line to save a local park from being urbanized. Although the informants rarely concealed the utilitarian motive behind their engaging in non-reimbursed social practice art, including the motives of advancing their careers, boosting their reputation, gaining recognition and developing brand-value, they said they primarily felt compelled to participate in voluntary work owing to a sense of moral obligation – of ‘helping out’ and ‘gifting labour’ to the community, especially in troubled times of dwindling welfare provisions. Nina, a 36-year-old new media worker, ‘works for free’ on the development of a children’s app for a not-for-profit organization. For Nina, engaging in unpaid work represents a moral obligation and reciprocal action:
My family couldn’t afford to send me to school. I became a software design professional because of community scholarships and neighbourhood support for housing and food. Now, as my own business grows, I want to give something back to the community.
Many informants (n = 121) thus reframed the notorious passion for creative work (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 1998) as compassion: a relational concern for others in need, entailing a professional duty of care and moral obligation ‘to give hope’. Bobi, a 43-year-old musician, regularly pursues socially engaged art projects: ‘I owe it to the people’ he says. He eloquently captures the relational dynamics of voluntary work as a mechanism of resource redistribution:
If I am a famous musician or actor and can make two hundred people come to my concert or performance and pay for a ticket, then I can give a humanitarian concert . . . for that poor sick-child family that cannot afford the expensive medical treatment. We are people. We artists have social responsibility. When our state is dysfunctional we are obliged to give these people hope.
Bobi confessed to maintaining prolonged relationships of care and friendship with the children for whom he gave concerts: ‘I take them out for a play date at least once a year.’
Relational work in the voluntary work sphere helped the informants carve meaningful spaces for professional action. Marko, a 40-year-old graphic designer, ‘excused’ his monetary dependence on a morally dubious job for an advertising agency by extolling his ethical commitment to voluntary, pro-bono work, for an anti-air-pollution civic movement:
I’m deeply disturbed. I’m extremely good at what I do, and I’m paid well for it . . . but it still torments me to work on things that contradict my moral stances. I’ve just completed work on an advert for a bakery that sells cancerous bread. That isn’t right, is it?
But how do you live with yourself then?
Well, I have to live, don’t I? . . . I then use my skills more thoughtfully after work. For example, I’m the main designer of the new media advocacy material of a non-profit organization fighting air pollution in the capital city. I designed their online campaigns and websites. All pro bono! It helps me think that not all is wicked!
Relational concerns, moral beliefs and care for others shaped Marko’s labour practices. He justified the financial mark-up of his labour practices by bringing socially significant others (also others outside of the domestic sphere such as the environment or the city) to the forefront, as he recognizes (takes accountability for the fact) that they may be positively or negatively affected by his professional work. The practice of informal voluntary work thus represents a clear case of ‘relational earmarking’ (Zelizer, 2012), since creative workers make labour and economic decisions by constantly referencing moral obligations and relational codes of conduct.
The informants across sectors (n = 73) engaged in voluntary not-for-profit social art work that involved trading traditional artistic spaces such as theatres and stages for hospitals, prisons and refugee shelters. They reported on their voluntary ‘after work’ engagement in a wide range of socially-engaged art, including work with socially disadvantaged and vulnerable communities.
Discussion and conclusion: What are the benefits of a relational work perspective for CLS?
The key contribution of the present research is in its highlighting a relational work approach to creative labour in order to understand the informal nature of work in creative industries. I have argued that informality in creative industries is not only a matter of gaining access to the labour market or upholding productive workplace relations (as current studies contend), but a day-to-day practical accomplishment involving the negotiation, establishment and nourishment of interpersonal relations as the basis of labour, economic and financial practices. I have employed a ‘relational work’ approach (Mears, 2015; Zelizer, 2012) to argue that creative labour practices are embedded in informal spheres consisting of webs of reciprocity, kinship commitments, mutual obligations and care, moral considerations and solidarity, in addition to formal, market or workplace spheres. A relational work perspective paints a more complex picture of creative work’s informality by shifting the analytical pivot to socially differentiated economic activities and the diverse set of motivations for negotiating, establishing and re-shaping interpersonal relations for the achievement of both instrumental outcomes (such as maintaining employability, increasing profit, self-branding and gaining access to capital) and non-monetary considerations (such as reciprocity, care and moral obligation). Through a relational work lens, the informality of creative labour emerges as a seamless array of informal paid and unpaid labour practices that are contingent on the meaning and spatial closeness of interpersonal ties. The more intimate and closer the relationship, the less the economic benefit. The more spatially and socially distant the relationship, the greater the pecuniary motivation.
The ways in which the meaning of interpersonal, informal, relations affect creative work practices has hitherto been underexplored in CLS. The germs of a relational work approach exist in the work of Ursell (2000: 813), who, following Ledeneva’s (1998) study of post-socialist non-monetary exchanges, identifies but does not dwell on the tendency of creative workers to manage the precarity of creative labour by engaging in an informal ‘economy of favours’ where ‘money is not the prime or sole mechanism of exchange or expression of value’. In advocating a relational work perspective, I reanimate Ursell’s nascent ideas. A relational work perspective advances our knowledge of the informal nature of creative work by alerting us to the ways in which: (1) informal, ‘hidden economies’ support resilience and sustainability in a creative profession in spite of widespread work precarity; (2) mutuality, reciprocity and a sense of obligation have a binding effect that redefines creative work as a mechanism of resource redistribution, ‘moral work’, ‘caring labour’ and ‘social enterprise’; and (3) the matching of (meaningful) interpersonal relations with payment media via specific economic transactions can obfuscate abusive creative labour arrangements.
Sustainability and resilience in creative work
A relational work perspective can help us better understand the individual but socialized informal responses to work precarity (i.e. lack of secure formal jobs, no formal access to capital, inexistent welfare benefits and social protection) (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013). In this article, I have shown that interpersonal, non-monetary exchanges, as well as informalized (hidden, black) work, are not merely aspects of a transient passage from unemployment to permanent formal work but instead permeate all creative labour practices. A relational work approach problematizes the dominant definition of creative work as a progressive succession of multiple formal jobs (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; McRobbie, 1998). Through a relational work lens, creative work appears to be a quotidian, interpersonal effort to maintain career sustainability, involving a range of informal paid/unpaid exchanges that are geared towards ‘making do’ (as opposed to ‘making it big’) in a creative profession (see Nelson and Smith, 1999). Therefore, the concept of relational work provides a microfoundation for understanding how labour process and career-related economic exchanges are accomplished in practice (Bandelj, 2012). Informal non-monetary exchanges such as barter or favour-swapping bear witness to workers’ resourceful attempts to keep doing creative work by decoupling the means of production from direct capital investment. Informal monetary exchanges such as tips-based work and cash-in-hand work provide a buffer against the arbitrariness of market regulation (Ledeneva, 1998) and the vagaries of state subsidies (Svašek, 2002), and hence further reinforce workers’ imaginative adaptation and resilient responses to precarity and institutional instability.
By emphasizing the empirical importance of relational work in forging meaningful and sustainable attachments to work, this article contributes to the research on ‘sustainable careers’ and worker resilience (De Vos and Van der Heijden, 2015). Studies of sustainable careers recognize the importance of ‘one’s broader life sphere’ and ‘the broader societal context’ (De Vos and Van der Heijden, 2015: 5), and thus a relational work approach can help us explain how in broader life constellations workers develop resilience and adaptive capacities necessary for the maintenance of creative careers. A relational work approach therefore provides a coherent framework for the apparently accidental findings in recent CLS. Some scholars have recently discovered that post-crisis creative work in the UK no longer involves bold projections of future bounties but a modest hope to ‘simply work’, to sustain ‘the basic ability to work, and work consistently’ (Friedman et al., 2017: 1000). These scholars have registered distinct relational work patterns of career perseverance in the form of ‘intergenerational gifting of capital either “in vivo” or through inheritance’ (Friedman et al., 2017: 1000), whereby middle-class actors tap into kinship ties to access housing, studio space or childcare (for a similar account of London-based jazz musicians, see Umney and Kretsos, 2015). Umney (2016) registers strong informal work patterns in jazz music in Paris, such as moonlighting to avoid taxation and stay afloat. The ailing Dutch film industry, according to Ebbers and Wijnberg (2009), is replete with implicit ‘relational contracts’ that deflect immediate cash payments with in-kind gift exchange – a practice that prevents both an organization’s demise and an individual’s career collapse.
The moral economies of creative work and relationships of care
If we conceptualize creative work as taking place within non-market relational infrastructures, then creative work resembles a moral economy. If creative labour practices are infused in interpersonal quotidian realms, then moral judgments and actions appear to regulate work. This is in stark contrast with the prevailing understanding of informality as a function of social networks whereby creative workers are typically portrayed as individualistic network-maximizers and status-seekers building strategic connections geared towards reducing risk, bolstering economic performance and increasing employment prospects. ‘It’s-not-what-you-know-but-who-you-know’ and ‘you-are-as-good-as-your-last-job’ are adages so frequently repeated that they have become devoid of explanatory power (Blair, 2001; Menger, 2006). Network and social capital analyses have already been critiqued (Bandelj, 2012; Zelizer, 2012) for being reticent about the substance, content and lived internal dynamics of network relations, failing thereby to recognize the mutuality, reciprocity and morality of a range of creative labour practices. A relational work perspective promises to redress this by pursuing Banks’s (2006) plea for ‘the re-moralization of creative work’ and approaching creative work as essentially constituted by relationships of care.
In this research, I have found that deep-seated moral sensibilities such as mutual aid, community responsibility and resource redistribution serve to make both individual careers and local creative economies self-sustaining. Banks (2006: 462) has previously shown that creative workers, in addition to being individualistic and strategic network-economizers, ‘make social and economic relations based on sustainability, mutuality and a sense of moral obligation’. Through this prism, individual economic and career instrumentality happily co-exist with communitarian values and progressive social action. As I have shown in the analysis, the informants were acutely aware of their embeddedness in specific local, political and geographical milieux that necessitated specific kinds of economic exchanges infused in reciprocal local community relations. Creative workers often justified their voluntary work as meaningful practices of care or ‘caring labour’ (i.e. ‘labour undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of immediate pecuniary reward’; Folbre, 1995: 75). Such care practices involve copious amounts of relational work aimed at maintaining, continuing and repairing social relations within local communities. Creative workers thus strived to align their work with meaningful social relations while drawing boundaries around labour practices and so justifying these practices as ‘helping the community’, ‘building local creative scenes’ or ‘assisting someone in need’. Such moral practices of care were also practices of self-care involving the accumulation of entrepreneurial values in the form of outreach and exposure, name and brand recognition as a means of coping with an individual worker’s precarity.
‘Social practice art’, a form of socially engaged artistic labour driven by care for community and neighbourhood revitalization, is not only specific to the ‘post-socialist condition’ but is also rapidly on the rise in post-crisis Euro-America (Lingo and Tepper, 2013; McRobbie, 2016). A recent Creative Economy Report by UNDP (2010: 8) finds strong evidence of a ‘solidarity-based economy’, involving the use of alternative currencies and ‘exchange of obligations’, to be the dominant response to post-crisis precarity, not only among creative workers in transitional countries but also throughout the developed world. As relational business models and socially engaged creative work flourish, the theoretical apparatus must also evolve. The relational work perspective can help us reconstruct the moral economies of creative work and so challenge the dominant view that creative workers conduct autonomous work within ‘winners-take-all markets’ based on individual talents devoid of social obligation or ethical commitment (Banks, 2006). By embedding work within elaborate relationality, we are able to take stock of creative workers’ quotidian, often invisible, labour practices that blur the lines between work, political activism and community organizing, which is currently the most vigorous career-sustaining model (Lingo and Tepper, 2013). In so doing, we can reconceptualize creative work as ‘social enterprise’ (McRobbie, 2016); that is, as not-for-profit social service provision – a conception better aligned with how creative workers practically go about building sustainable careers. Future studies should further investigate the relational dynamics of care.
Inequality in creative work
A relational work approach can also help us better understand the unequal power relations in and around creative work beyond the current explanation of creative workers’ tendency to ‘work for free’ as a form of self-exploitative false consciousness. Beguiled by the psychic rewards of creative work, such as self-fulfilment, self-expression and fame (McRobbie, 1998; Menger, 2006), creative workers, it has been argued, become complicit with their own exploitation, accepting ‘bulimic work schedules’, long unpaid working hours and even consenting to working ‘for free’ (Gill, 2007; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). However, this is a mechanistic conception of labour inequality, where creative workers are depicted as dupes or irrational gamblers and so devoid of any real agency. The latest work in economic sociology posits that the application of a relational work perspective, by differentiating between payment media, social relations and economic transactions, can better qualify the prevailing practice of working for free and so explain labour inequality relationally and not merely through psychic rewards (see Mears, 2015, on nightlife club economies). When alternative payment arrangements (gratuities or in-kind payments) compensate for creative work, then the worth of creative labour emerges as a function of social relations, since it is only within these relational spaces that work can be valued. Relational work between owners/managers/audiences and creative workers, reinforced by gifts, intimacies and shared local histories, re-frames the employment relation as a meaningful social relationship (‘friendship’, ‘activist camaraderie’ or ‘intimate partnership’), which, in turn, commands specific appropriate payment media (i.e. discount wages or in-kind payments). The acceptance of underpayment and overwork is justified relationally through the ethically superior obligation of kinship or friendship, of ‘helping a friend’ or ‘local scene development responsibility’. When the employment relation is framed as a friendship, sanctioned by moral codes rather than labour law, the relational work sustaining the informal work contract obfuscates labour abuses and inequalities (Childress, 2017; Rossman, 2014) by provoking long-term acquiescence in dismal working conditions to ‘honour friendship’ and ‘not lose face’ (as in Igor’s story). Relational work can also conceal gender discrimination in morally-dubious economic exchanges by blurring the boundaries between moral conduct and the need to stay employable (as in Maria’s story). Creative industries are notoriously unequal and abusive (Gill, 2007), and therefore the future study of relational mismatches could potentially help us design meaningful policies for more inclusive and equitable creative work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to my local research-assistance team for their diligent help with the interviews. I especially thank: Strezo Stamatovski, Jana Lahtova, Biljana Trajkovska, Kalina Sotiroska, Delina Nano, Jasmina Bilalovijk and Ranko Ratkusinovski. Andy Pratt and Rosalind Gill provided invaluable mentorship and inspiration at the early stages of this research. Lea Sgier, Dan Kärreman, Dennis Schoeneborn, Eric Guthey and Thilde Langevang provided constructive criticism on advanced drafts. Mathew Sheep, the Human Relations Associate Editor and three anonymous reviewers were crucial in developing this article further. Many thanks to all of them!
Funding
This research was supported by funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (grant number: MKD_211, RRPP).