‘Keep hoping,keep going’: Towards a hopeful sociology of creative work

Introduction

Studies of work in the creative industries have proliferated rapidly in recent years (Conor, Gill, & Taylor, 2015; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011; McRobbie, 2016). Although interdisciplinary in nature, creative work scholarship is animated by a rather uniform concern: the investigation of the insecurity, inequality and precariousness of creative work (Gill & Pratt, 2008). Intermittent and insecure project-by-project work, informalized labour markets, low or inexistent pay, and union deregulation have been repeatedly found to cause ‘pathologies of precariousness’ in the creative sector, including burnout, anxiety and depression (Gill, 2011; McRobbie, 2011: 33). Much scholarship on creative work therefore investigates creative workers’ attitudes, subjective responses to and experiences of precarious work. What particularly perplexes sociologists of creative work is the abundant supply of young people who not only tolerate exploitative labour relations but are also remarkably passionate about working in creative industries despite mounting evidence of precarity – unpaid, insecure and contingent work (Mears, 2012; Menger, 2006; Neff, 2012).

Sociologists have attempted to resolve this puzzle by identifying the stimuli for entry into creative work. On the one hand, creative workers are depicted as strategizing risk-lovers, calculating actors and even gamblers who tolerate precarious work conditions on the speculation of future fortunes and bounties. Such theorization builds on the premise that creative labour markets are ‘winners-take-all-markets’ with a skewed (and glamorized) distribution of rewards and benefits, whereby ‘entry into these fields is like a lottery where players overestimate their chances’ of success and fame (Menger, 2006, pp. 776–777). Conversely, creative workers are also portrayed as victims, beguiled into discounted, exploitative and even free labour by the ideology of autonomy and ‘rags-to-riches fantasies’ of creative work (McRobbie, 1998; Mears, 2012; Neff, 2012; Ross, 2003). Scholars subscribing to such a false consciousness thesis argue that creative workers accept precarious working conditions in the present in anticipation of future ‘good work’, as defined by passion, self-expression and autonomy (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011, p. 17).

Regardless of whether scholars subscribe to the ‘cold calculators’ or ‘exploited dupes’ conception of creative workers, what emerges as the dominant, albeit implicit cause for consenting to and even voluntarily embracing precarious work is the forward-looking, future temporal orientation of creative workers. Ybema (2004, p. 832) calls such longing for a blissful future ‘postalgia’ – a mirror image of nostalgia that is inextricably linked to the dominant neoliberal conditions of ‘aspirational normativity’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 164). Aspirational normativity posits a continual affective investment in the utopian belief of future progress, which in turn fuels workers’ present efforts at ‘striking gold’ through the execution of ‘self-exploitative’, flexible and adaptable labour. Creative work scholars have fiercely criticized the aspirational or postalgic dimension of creative work. Ross (2003, p. 142) has most influentially unmasked creative workers’ propensity to accept non-monetary rewards in the present ‘on the promise of deferred bounties’ and ‘future career rewards’ as the main reason for engaging in self-exploitative ‘sacrificial labour’. Similarly, Neff (2012, p. 79) frames creative work as ‘venture labour’ in which ‘aspiring millionaires’ endure limited periods of intense precarity as ‘a financial strategy’ or ‘risky investment’ in ‘a longer-term financial payoff’. Treading in such footsteps, a recent wave of critical creative labour scholarship – usefully but with no further analytical purchase – frames creative work as ‘hope labour’ (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013), ‘aspirational labour’ (Duffy, 2016), ‘provisional labour’ (Frenette, 2013), ‘prospecting labour’ (Fast, Örnebring, & Karlsson, 2016) or ‘speculative labour’ (Gregg, 2015). These studies recognize critically that creative industries capitalize on the future-orientation of creative workers by glamorizing creative work. By disseminating images of celebrities’ affluent and passionate creative work lifestyles, creative industries fuel creative workers’ ‘dreams’ and ‘fantasies’ of becoming ‘the next big thing’ (Neff, 2012, p. 80), which ensnares them into an endless disciplinary state of becoming, and thus of docility. Some scholars even provide compelling evidence that young artists self-reflexively prolong periods of precarity by postponing life-course decisions such as getting married or buying a house in exchange for doing ‘passionate work’ (McRobbie, 2016; Umney & Kretsos, 2015). Only in such a disciplinary regime of temporality can sacrificial investments (long, unpaid hours with no social benefits) in imaginary artistic selves be justified through future prospects and promises.

The political salience of these studies is unquestionable. However, they proffer only a mechanistic and fatalistic understanding of cultural work as contingent on either grandiose fantasies of future stardom or illusory projections of autonomous, passionate labour. The absence of any sustained and reflexive discussion of futurity plagues critical interpretations of creative work. As a consequence, these studies fail to recognize creative workers’ meaningful daily agency and intentions that resist the paralysing and disciplining effects of aspirational normativity and postalgia. Because creative workers’ imaginations, visualizations and constructions of the future are not systematically explored, the understanding of how future-orientated temporality affects creative workers’ meaningful and contradictory engagement with precarious work is rather rudimentary. The need to examine the connection between future-temporality and precarious work becomes ever more salient in light of growing evidence that protracted periods of pay and job unpredictability hamper creative workers’ ability to plan ahead and articulate coherent future professional selves: creative workers have ‘no future’, argues Gill (2011; see also Conor et al., 2015; Taylor & Littleton, 2012).

This article further examines the relationship between future-temporality and precarity in creative work by introducing the concept of ‘hope’ as developed in medical sociology and anthropology (see also Alacovska, 2018a). Hope is here understood not as a delusional aspiration for upward mobility or prosperous celebrity careers but as a psychosocial temporal resource oriented to the present, an existential attitude that allows one to persist through chronic illness, disrupted lives, destitution and precarity (Mattingly, 2010; Zigon, 2009). Theories of hope redefine hope as the primary operational mechanism and method (Miyazaki, 2004, 2006) employed by workers in adjusting to and building a work-life in highly precarious labour markets (Alacovska, 2018a). Within this framework I focus on the empirical and enacted dimension of hope: how and why creative workers endure in their profession despite disheartening labour conditions and experiences. In extending the arguments of a previous study (Alacovska, 2018a), I here further examine creative workers’ practical, everyday and often mundane strategies of hopeful endurance rather than enthusiastic or strategic projections of fame, stardom or ‘good work’. In so doing I explore the possibility of developing what Back (2015) calls ‘a hopeful sociology’ of creative work, one that requires ‘an attentiveness to the moments when “islands of hope” are established’ amidst a sea of despair.

The article builds on a qualitative study of an ‘extreme case’ of creative work precarity in a less-researched region, i.e. the case of post-socialist creative work in the Balkans. Post-socialist creative work in South-East Europe is ‘doubly insecure’ and therefore radically precarious (Primorac, 2006). In post-socialist societies, precarious creative work (Gill & Pratt, 2008) happens in a context of ‘radical precarity’ itself, characterized by a fragile private sector, inefficient public administration, virtually inexistent welfare protection, rampant unemployment and protracted fiscal crisis (Dragićević-Šešić & Dragojević, 2005; Alacovska, 2018b). Extreme cases render the phenomenon studied readily observable and transparent, since in extreme conditions certain fundamental working principles and operative mechanisms, which might otherwise remain covert, spring forcefully to the surface (Eisenhardt, 1989). In socio-economic contexts where precarity happens in extremis, hope arises ‘most easily and effectively’ (Zigon, 2009, p. 262). Given that temporary, bogus and casualized employment is on the rise in all EU countries (Eurofound, 2014) as well as the USA (Kalleberg, 2012), vindicating Beck’s (2000) early prophecy of ‘the Brazilianization of the West’, this focus on post-socialist creative workers’ hope has the potential to revitalize our understanding of coping with post-crisis precarity in Europe at large.

The deferred economy thesis of creative work

The future-oriented temporality of creative work was most influentially captured by Bourdieu (1998), who defined cultural work as a ‘deferred’ or ‘delayed economy’. The rules of cultural production presuppose an art-for-art’s-sake game that requires the short-term creation of an illusion of disinterestedness in money matters as an entry strategy into the field of cultural production. In the short run, newcomers act contrary to their own economic interests, putting up with precarity (paltry pay, long unpaid hours and dismal working conditions), all the while accumulating social and symbolic capital – making a name for themselves and gaining exposure, prestige and reputation that they hope will be converted at a later stage into pecuniary benefit. By disavowing immediate pay or benefits, creative workers temporarily camouflage – that is, delay – the desire to ‘make it’ (McRobbie, 1998, on fashion designers; Mears, 2012, on models; Aspers, 2006, on photographers). The deferred economy thesis thus presupposes a strategic management of temporality: individual workers endure intense but short periods of precarity ‘in the hope of securing a [future] permanent job’ (Siebert and Wilson, 2013, p. 711) and attaining more regularized careers (Mears, 2012).

The deferred economy thesis has exercised an enormous influence on the ways creative labour studies have conceived of the link between future-orientation and precarity. In accordance with this thesis, future-orientated temporality is typically assumed to be the preserve only of early-career ‘emerging’ artists or ‘newcomers’ and their aspirations to establish an upcoming creative career. Therefore, future-orientation is most typically studied ‘at the threshold of a creative career’ (Taylor & Littleton, 2012, p. 47). Internships have hence become the most salient research site in creative work studies (Frenette, 2013; Siebert & Wilson, 2013). Relatedly, an important empirical focus has recently been placed on creative talent competitions, such as music TV reality contests in which thousands of ‘hopefuls’ vie for the chance of signing a record deal (Cvetkovski, 2015), or hackathons, on-spec app-developing or design events in which young digital designers scramble to get hired by the ‘next cool’ media company (Gregg, 2015; Kennedy, 2012). These studies find that intense, insecure and under-remunerated internships and on-spec work are embraced enthusiastically but also instrumentally by young ‘hopefuls’ because they hold ‘a promissory function’ (Gregg, 2015, p. 191), i.e. they represent ‘one of the few paths for workers to enter the field and, hopefully, get hired’ (Frenette, 2013, p. 365, emphasis added). Internships and competition-based on-spec work are thus studied as a form of self-directed, self-conscious and enterprising management of temporality, but also as a ‘debt-incurring practice’ requiring artists to amass upfront costs (Ross, 2017) through unpaid self-enterprise, including the symbolic capital-mining activities of self-branding, pitching and networking in order to subsidize the prospect of obtaining future employment.

Precarity through this lens represents only a transient problem or transitory phase from unemployment to formal employment, one which is to be strategically managed, usually by members of the privileged classes who can mobilize family, network and financial resources to cross-subsidize periods of underpaid/unpaid work when ‘making-a-name-for-themselves’ (Friedman, O’Brien, & Laurison, 2017). Although the deferred economy thesis accords creative workers agency to act upon their aspirations, creative workers are nonetheless depicted as victims of ‘cruel optimism’. Creative workers attach themselves to compromised, even paralysing conditions of possibility, such as a deferred self-expressive and self-realizing job that may in fact never materialize (Berlant, 2011). Indeed, ‘cheerful optimism’ and ‘compulsory positivity’ have recently been reaffirmed as one of the most insidious tools for subjugation in the creative industries (Duffy, 2016; Scharff, 2016).

Besides the compromising and subjugating side of cheerful optimism, however, there is a flip side – the ordinariness of ‘hopefulness’, of getting through the adversities of life via constant everyday struggles: ‘the time of not-stopping’ in the face of despair (Berlant, 2011, p. 169). It is these ordinary daily struggles, nonetheless involving imaginative responses to precarity, that have been neglected by creative labour studies under the influence of the deferred economy thesis. In conditions of prolonged crisis and hopelessness (as is the case with post-Yugoslav societies) it is only through a focus on the ‘ordinary’ – practical yet resourceful daily pursuits – that one can reasonably aspire to understand post-socialist workers’ ‘yearnings in the meanwhile’ or their ‘residual hopes’ (Jansen, 2015). Treading in these footsteps, I also focus specifically on such ordinary hope. In doing so, I treat precarity neither as a transitional phase to be superseded in the future nor as a temporary plight afflicting emerging early-career workers. Instead I treat precarity as an enduring feature, ‘the new normal’ of contemporary work (Taylor & Luckman, 2018) that permeates the whole of workers’ lives irrespective of their age.

When precarity is no longer relegated to a state of exception but becomes long-standing or constantly recurring, then the meaning of desires, fantasies and aspirations needs to be rethought. If there is no possibility of post-precarity, meaning that a calculative, strategic and grandiose future-orientation ceases to be a practical, emotional or cognitive resource for traversing from precarity to stability, how can the future-temporality of creative work be conceptualized? This article builds on the concept of hope as elaborated in medical sociology studies of long-term disease (Mattingly, 2010; Smith & Sparkes, 2005) and anthropological studies of hope within destitute communities (Miyazaki, 2004; Zigon, 2009) to theorize the future-temporality of creative work as everyday praxis.

In pursuing this line of enquiry I contribute to recent scholarship that advocates the study of creative work in a less grandiose way that purposefully divests creative work of mediated exuberant desires for future glamour and fame. McRobbie (2016, p. 156) has recently called for studying creative work in ‘a way that is not flashy, not spectacular or flamboyant’ and which recognizes the ‘modest and down-to-earth idea of working life in the creative sector’. Some scholars have already noted, albeit in passing, that the majority of creative workers, after initial exuberance with aspirational creative futures and promises of autonomy, ‘scale their aspirations down’ and ‘cool themselves off’ (Aspers, 2006, p. 57; Faulkner, 1973/2003, p. 154) and so start hoping for unspectacular goals. British theatre actors have recently been found to diffidently redefine career success in the context of widespread unemployment ‘as the basic ability to work, and work consistently’ (Friedman et al., 2017, p. 1000).

The concept of hope

The concept of hope is not yet a self-standing category in sociology (Swedberg, 2017). Hope, as opposed to career aspirations and expectations which are goal-oriented, entrepreneurial and teleological, is hypothetical – ‘always irrealis, … that is non-factual or non-actual’ (Smith & Sparkes, 2005, p. 1095) – and therefore elusive, indeterminate and intangible (Coleman, 2017).

Despite these obstacles, social science scholars have fruitfully grappled with the category of hope, especially as it operates in relation to chronic illness (Mattingly, 2010), disrupted lives (Becker, 1998) and economic and social crises (Miyazaki, 2004; Zigon, 2009). This scholarship treats hope as a powerful psychosocial resource for dealing with the present as permeated by life’s adversities and economic hardships. Hope imbues the whole of everyday practical experiences and mastery of time. Therefore, hope furnishes the wherewithal and the capacity to act in the face of hardship. Hope engenders persistence and a vitalistic attachment to life that makes life bearable (Becker, 1998, p. 122). Along these lines, Zigon (2009, p. 258) succinctly defines hope as ‘the background attitude that allows one to keep going and persevere through one’s life’.

Through this perspective hope possesses a dual temporal structure. On the one hand it entails a background commitment to a hopeful ‘being-in-the world’; on the other, it entails intentional and ethical action to fulfil its potentiality (Crapanzano, 2003; Zigon, 2009, p. 266). Hope is thus manifest both in enduring quotidian routines of work-life and in a range of practices that actively and intentionally sustain hope. Sociologists and anthropologists of hope accordingly treat hope not so much as a passive attitude (bounded to the theological understanding of hope; Crapanzano, 2003) but as a practice, involving practical experiences of precarious living conditions and affirmative affective engagement with defeating realities (Coleman, 2017). According to Mattingly (2010, p. 3), hope is ‘a strenuous moral project’ that presupposes the moral imperative of living ‘lives worth living’, both because and in spite of present conditions of ‘embittered despair’. To cease hoping in the face of predicament represents a ‘failure to take a responsible action’ (Becker, 1998, p. 122). In other words, hope is about envisaging and imagining meaningful, ethical and alternative modes of living and persevering even in the face of the most trying circumstances. Hope entails finding purpose and a reason to act in precarious conditions.

Striding with this scholarship, I define hope as a temporal, quotidian and ethical practice of coping with precarious working/living conditions (Alacovska, 2018a). If apprehended as practice, the concept of hope does not naively deny the disillusioned realities of workers’ precarious existence. Nor does it reduce creative workers to mesmerized dupes or crude calculators. On the contrary, it alerts us to the practical everyday agency of creative workers and the moral imperative to make their working lives habitable and bearable in spite of hardship and hopelessness. In line with such thinking, Miyazaki (2004, pp. 16, 9) defines hope as ‘a method of engagement with the world’ and as ‘a common operative in all knowledge formation’. Through this prism, hope is neither a subject of knowledge nor an object of desire but ‘a method of radical temporal reorientation of knowledge’ (Miyazaki, 2004, p. 5). Once the analytical focus is recast from uncertainty, turbulence and rupture to the capacity to act morally and judiciously in given circumstances, then creative workers’ hopeful reorientation of knowledge and temporal adjustment of horizons become readily visible. As I will show in the analysis, in conditions of radical precarity creative workers reorient their self-knowledge from attaining future stable permanent employment to quotidian ‘making do’ – from a future stellar career to present sustainable work, from a good life to a ‘normal life’, from aspirational attainment of artistic autonomy to present dependency on informal relational infrastructures and ‘economies of favour’ (Alacovska, 2018b).

Hope is a universal feature of human consciousness but one that nonetheless possesses social, cultural and historical specificity (Crapanzano, 2003; Miyazaki, 2006) and thus has to be studied in all its singularities and empirical specificities, contradictions and ambivalences as being bound to concrete life (Back, 2015; Coleman, 2017). Below I present the specificities of post-socialist creative workers’ practices of hope. I have elsewhere tackled the multifarious sources of hope (Alacovska, 2018a). I elaborate here in more detail on three dominant types of practical and ethical engagement with precarious conditions: first, creative workers’ therapeutic attachment to hope; second, their hopeful maintenance of relational ties as the basis for economic activities; and third, their moral attachment to progressive, socially engaged art. I thus analyse the ways in which creative workers reorient (self-)knowledge towards alternative and moral versions of economic sustainability, social change and solidarity.

Methodology

The empirical data (N = 155) for this study was gathered under the auspices of a research project funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in the period 2014–2016 to investigate experiences of precarity in post-socialist creative labour. The data were gathered in South-East Europe, specifically in the countries of Macedonia and Albania. This region was selected because it represents an emblematic case of ‘radical precarity’ in creative work (Primorac, 2006) prevailing at the same time as regional creative industries experience accelerated growth and vitality (UNCTAD, 2010).

To diversify the sample, informants were drawn from a range of creative industries. First, performing artists, actors and musicians working in the theatre and music industries were interviewed. These two industries are among the most precarious in the region, in part owing to a debilitating transition from state-subsidized to market-driven art (Primorac, 2006). Second, new media workers were interviewed, such as 3D animators, web, game and visual effects developers, primarily because the audio-visual industries are central to governmental foreign investment campaigns resting on the promise of a vast supply of cheap labour. Third, fashion designers were interviewed, since the regional fashion industry is targeted by ‘race to the bottom’ outsourcing initiatives on the part of prominent global fashion brands, resulting in flagrant gender discrimination, deteriorating labour conditions and ‘widespread precarity’ (Bonfiglioli, 2014, p. 10). The sample was further diversified by employment categories (freelancers, subcontractors, self-employed), a multiplicity of genres and different regional creative hubs. In total, 83 performing artists (40 of whom were female), 44 new media workers (17 females), and 28 fashion designers (22 females) were interviewed. The median age was 38.

A regional not-for-profit association of professional creative workers served as an initial contact point with informants. Snowballing sampling was subsequently used. All of the informants made or strove to earn the bulk 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 except 29 of the interviews were transcribed verbatim, since some informants refused to be recorded. Copious notes exist for these interviews. All the interviewees were guaranteed anonymity, hence the use of pseudonyms.

The research design was abductive, following the procedures of an integrated case study approach (Dubois & Gadde, 2002, p. 555). The integrated approach has two stages. In the first stage, a specific theory is tested in given empirical circumstances. In the second stage, the study is redirected in light of ‘contradictory and paradoxical evidence’ arising (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 546). In accordance with this systematic combination, our study first set out to test through qualitative interviews (n = 105) the theories of precarious creative labour on an extreme, ‘atypical’ and under-researched post-socialist socio-economic context. The theme of the future temporal orientation of creative work in general, and hope in particular, emerged from the initially collected data (together with the theme of informality; Alacovska, 2018b). To probe the theory-building potential (as opposed to the initial theory-testing motivations) of the emerging theme of hope, the study was ‘redirected’ towards an investigation of the new phenomenon (Dubois & Gadde, 2002), and therefore additional interviews (n = 50) were conducted that explicitly introduced the theme of temporality and hope.

The concept of hope as a resource for meaningfully coping with precarity surfaced as ‘a first-order construct’, i.e. an emic conception used by the informants themselves to ascribe meaning to the circumstances of precarity that surrounded them at the time of the interview (Aspers, 2006). More importantly, this ‘first-order construct’ emerged in ways inconsistent with the theorization in extant creative labour studies of aspirations, fantasies, strategies and dreams relative to work in creative industries (all of which are ‘second-order constructs’ or analysts’ categories that our data did not support). The theme of temporality more generally, and of hope more specifically, seemed particularly important because it significantly influenced how informants related to work precarity while forging meaningful relations to present conditions of work, and also because this theme is not adequately treated in extant studies. Following the redirection of the study, inductive techniques of coding were applied while mainly adhering to a phenomenological approach in the analysis. A phenomenological interpretive analysis is suitable for revealing the subjective temporal structures, lived sensibilities, orientations and intentions of social actors that construe meaning in everyday life (Aspers, 2006; Van Manen, 2007). According to Van Manen (2007, p. 20), hope falls into the domain of ‘pathic knowledge’, i.e. knowledge that is not cognitive or deliberated but sensed, embodied and routinized, but which nonetheless ‘provides opportunities for evoking and reflecting on practice’. Following the phenomenological approach, the entirety of interview data was re-read with a view to capturing the meaning and practices of hope in the daily struggles, ‘contingent, moral and relational situations’ described and experienced by the informants (Van Manen, 2007, p. 21).

Keep hoping, keep going

For the creative workers interviewed, hope was far removed from fantasies of golden futures or dreams of ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011). For many, economic hardship, predicament and uncertainty precluded a confident and optimistic self-projection in the future. Instead, the enforced presentism of precarity turned hoping into a structuring mechanism of an immediate liveable present. Hope was predominantly framed as an ethical determination to live ‘sanely’ and ‘acceptably’ in situations of precarity (Zigon, 2009). Indeed, the majority of our informants harboured mundane and unexceptional hopes of a ‘normal life’, ‘hope in health’, or an even vaguer faith ‘that everything would eventually fall into place’ (see also Alacovska, 2018a; Jansen, 2015). Hope was therefore found to be an attitude that enabled workers to endure the present rather than to imagine elated utopian futures.

Jana is a 42-year-old freelance violinist who graduated from the music conservatorium and has 20 years of professional experience as a symphony orchestra player. Jana was at pains to present a coherent future self beyond an immediate ‘burning’ pressure ‘to pay the bills’. At the same time, however, she actively cultivates an elusive hope that all will ‘eventually somehow get sorted’:

Dimi, a 57-year-old theatre actor, expounds forcefully on his hopes for ‘normal life’. The linear, forward temporal movement from the ‘stifling’ socialist past to a ‘radiant’ capitalist present has been interrupted by tectonic shifts to the system that have inflicted a sense of despondency yet also strengthened the determination to stay afloat and indeed maintain ‘a sane life amidst all that chaos’. Hope for Dimi was somewhat diffuse and vague, having to do with forbearance and patience:

I was an actor also in socialism. It was difficult, yes, but I could not imagine even in my wildest dreams that desperate times like this would ever come. You always think the future will be better. But you have been proven wrong decade in and decade out. … Now all I do is seek to stay sane amid political pressures by the theatre management and dismal pay.

As shown in the above excerpts, hopeful engagement with the future involves both an acknowledgement of the hopelessness of present conditions and a predisposition to steadfastly pursue the practicalities and ordinariness of daily work-life. The experience of hoping necessitates experience of hardship. Many informants were keenly aware that stable, permanent and secure employment ‘was a relic of a bygone socialist era’, and so they had forsaken hopes of returning to past unfulfilled promises of workers’ unionization and better jobs (Burawoy, Krotov, & Lytkina, 2000). Only 17 of 155 informants were members of unions, for example. However, once informants had adopted the dominant view that ‘precarity was there to stay’, they reoriented knowledge and individual experiences of economic hardship towards intentional and ethical action geared towards ‘making do’ within local communities, or what Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy (2013) call ‘surviving well together’. It is through active hoping in the reciprocity and mutuality of interpersonal relations in everyday life that creative workers persevere through ‘troubled times’. In what follows, I concentrate on what Back (2015) calls ‘islands of hope’, whereby hope, an elusive and slippery category, has been reworked by the informants into a practice – an active ingredient for the reorientation of knowledge (Miyazaki, 2004) and the daily accomplishment of moral projects (Zigon, 2009).

Reorientation of self-knowledge: Hope as therapeutic practice

In the context of an apathetic and depressed experience of everyday work-life, hope transpires as contradictory, involving a constant and active redefining and readjusting of one’s career dreams, but at the same time inducing a sense of impotence, passivity and helpless waiting for something ‘miraculous’ to happen. For some of the creative workers interviewed, ‘the daily grind of work’ had rendered upbeat and extraordinary hope-fulfilling action futile, yet also allowed for a set of therapeutic practices to flourish.

Elena, a 44-year-old fashion designer, accepted that hoping is the only viable practice in the midst of ‘an embittered reality’. Elena is a freelancer, often working simultaneously for a range of renowned international fashion brands on informal, piecework and low-paid employment contracts in what she describes as ‘miserable working environments, freezing cold in winter, sizzling hot in summer’. Amid such disheartening conditions she started cultivating religious faith (Crapanzano, 2003):

I feel like a hamster running on a wheel. Everything spins out of control. I run after job opportunities like crazy, and the target keeps moving away. I see no exit! The daily grind eats me up. I have to work hard to afford a normal life … for example a sea vacation in the summer is a far cry for me. Before, I dreamt of living abroad, working for the catwalks in Paris or London. Now, I accept the reality. One has to adapt. But I don’t lose hope. God is big. Hope dies last.

Similar to Elena, many informants viewed hope as possessing restorative power: power not only to repair their broken relationship with troubled work realities, infused with managerial exploitation, harassment and overwork, but also to compensate for aborted youthful dreams of success and grandeur. Invoking God was a common discursive strategy to indicate stoicism and to fuel the stamina to endure. Yet while such invocations of God may be a manifestation of ‘abstract hope’ (Crapanzano, 2003, p. 10) – a kind of hope with ‘transcending quality’ (p. 9) summoning an ever-receding horizon of accomplishment – it was nevertheless requisite for the maintenance of a proactive pragmatic attitude to precarity (Alacovska, 2018a).

To cultivate hope through intense spirituality and religiosity did not imply succumbing to despair or resignation but rather an active pursuit of dignity and decency. Diana, a 54-year-old actress famous locally for her musical performances, grew increasingly disillusioned with theatre work after experiencing professional degradation and age-based discrimination. Amidst what she described as ‘denigrating working conditions’, she found her ‘island of hope’ in ‘an alternative evangelical congregation’ that helped her reorient her ‘damaged’ and ‘ageing’ professional self-image:

[The religious community] is my only island of hope … the rare ray of light. I am not ashamed of who I am. I am old and unattractive now. But my voice is still great. … They [theatre managers] refuse to give me good roles. Lately, I had two miniscule degrading roles! A mute whore and a beggar! … I sing in the church. I make people happy again. That keeps me sane!

Neither for Diana nor Elena was hope either passive or abstract. Both of them refused to passively resign themselves to a bleak outlook on their respective careers; but they were also wary of investing in bold and enthusiastic trust in passionate, autonomous and lucrative future work. Hope for them was not a matter of daydreaming but rather a constant re-examination of present work realities. Diana became an activist in a faith-based organization, campaigning against ageism and gender discrimination. She thus reoriented her debilitating work experience into hopes for social justice and social equity. Hope was therefore not only an individualized therapeutic practice of coping with precarity but was also, as I show below, a relational practice that involved trust in interpersonal relations, community-based economies, mutuality and reciprocity.

Reorientation of work: Hope as informal labour practice

One of the most common practices of hopeful engagement with the realities of precarious work was a reorientation of agency and knowledge from the despair of unprotected, unsecure and underpaid formal work to the conviviality of interpersonal relations that underpin a diverse array of informal, alternative non-market labour activities and transactions, such as barter, in-kind payments, self-provisioning and favour-swapping. (For an overview of informal creative labour practices, see Alacovska, 2018b). According to Guyer (2017), hope in emerging economies such as post-colonial West Africa or the post-socialist Balkans can most clearly be observed in ‘transactional events’, since it is here that people’s resilience manifests as an inventive survival practice rooted in mutuality and reciprocity (see also Harvey, 2000). By the same token, Gibson-Graham et al. (2013, p. 22) have argued that spaces of hope within the capitalist economy arise from people’s commitment to creating ‘community economies’ in which one thinks and acts ethically in relation to the other and the environment. My informants have indeed actively and resourcefully reimagined economic hardship by practising commoning (Federici, 2011), infusing their economic and labour activities in local relational infrastructures such as extended families, communities or neighbourhoods. Community economies are entirely based on a principle of responsibility to each other, cooperation, mutuality and reciprocity (Federici, 2011). Such relational ties are in turn predicated on the anticipation of future affirmative action and a sense of moral obligation intrinsic to the temporality of gift exchange (Miyazaki, 2006). Informal labour practices embedded in community economies have thus revitalized and in a way collectivized individual workers’ hopes of getting by in professional daily life.

In conditions in which access to bank loans, capital and labour protection was severely limited, the informants resorted to community economies to procure otherwise expensive equipment (such as a guitar or a powerful computer), to cover operating expenses (such as rehearsal space, software packages), to provide for raw materials (such as fabrics), or to provide for inexistent social services (such as healthcare) (see also Alacovska, 2018b). A hopeful engagement in community economies was rendered observable in a range of alternative non-market economic activities and informal labour practices. Favour-swapping or reciprocal labour involved mutual aid and non-monetized work obligations: for example a musician playing ‘for free’ at a fashion designer’s annual catwalk show on the promise of getting ‘free clothes for stage performances’. Barter entailed the commensuration of disparate objects and activities: one graphic designer, for example, reported having designed a complete digital marketing campaign for a local paediatric practice in exchange for regular medical check-ups for her children. A professional theatre actor reported having been ‘involved in promotional work’ that involved him dressing up as a clown to entertain children at a local dental practice twice a month in exchange for discounted dental work for family members. One of my key informants, a 35-year-old theatre actor and stand-up comedian, revealed that he only rarely gets paid for his gigs in ‘hard cash’ and on time. The last time he performed a regularly commissioned stand-up gig he was promised a pay cheque of €100. After ‘waiting for half-a-year or so to get paid’, he was eventually paid €50 cash-in-hand plus ‘a massage voucher’:

I perform and then I hope they will eventually pay … pay one way or another. … This is the way we creative workers survive around here. If you refuse the in-kind payments, however delayed, they will never hire you again. You can always make use of them anyway. I’ve been paid for my work in beers, chicken-wings, beauty salon visits, bus tickets. … My wife was happy to use the massage voucher that I was given for my latest gig.

The non-monetary exchange of otherwise incomparable objects and favours, wrapped nonetheless in considerations of monetary value, testifies to workers’ ingenious, resourceful and hopeful attempts to stay employable by decoupling creative work from direct capital investment. These informal exchanges oblige the participants to enter into ‘hopeful’ relationships of trust – relations essentially based on the hope that the gift/favour will be reciprocated at a later stage (Miyazaki, 2006). Informal labour thus turns hope into a matter of interpersonal, intentional and ethical practice (Zigon, 2009). And, by the same token, hope re-socializes and re-moralizes the economic relations underpinning creative work (Banks, 2006). Hope redefines creative work as ‘moral work’, which according to Banks (2006, p. 462) is always embedded in relations of ‘sustainability, mutuality and a sense of moral obligation’.

Reorientation of agency: Hope as a socially engaged arts practice

In a context of institutional malfunctioning and protracted fiscal crisis, accompanied by long-term austerity measures and unemployment, conditions that would normally be paralysing for most people, radical expressions and practices of hope in social change abounded. These were mostly manifested in socially engaged art. These socially engaged practices signify a shift from artistic goals towards social goals, caring and mutual aid. Creative work-cum-art-for-social-change enshrines active hope that a better world is possible and that creative careers are nonetheless viable in circumstances of total despair. By actively participating in spaces of benevolence, the informants reoriented professional work towards social and political activism, which was their primary method of keeping going. Art-for-social-change has thus become a resource for the hopeful sustenance of both creative careers and local communities (Alacovska, 2018b; Harvie, 2013).

To this end, many informants have reoriented their professional self-image from artists into social entrepreneurship, while retooling their artistic skills for community-based work. In doing so, creative workers have traded ‘audiences’ for ‘participants’, ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘workshop clients’, whilst substituting theatre and concert halls for ‘spaces of hope’ such as prisons, brothels, ghettos and refugee camps, where hope is to be actively cultivated and cherished (Mattingly, 2010). In a veritable confirmation of the ‘artrepreneur’ figure (Harvie, 2013), post-socialist creative workers imaginatively but also entrepreneurially reinvented themselves as ‘inter-ethnic peace facilitators’, ‘same-sex marriage evangelists’, ‘art therapists’, ‘freedom of expression educators’, ‘artists for social change’ and ‘programmers for a better world’ (Alacovska, 2018a: 57). Those were just a few of the hopeful labels with which our informants reoriented professional self-knowledge. Professional reinvention was the primary mode of hopeful engagement with precarious work.

Whilst never denying the inherent publicity or self-branding value of these activities, many informants reported being regularly engaged in pro-bono work, mostly in fund-raising events intended to ‘give other people hope’:

People have lost hope that things will get better. As an artist I feel it’s my responsibility to instil hope in others. … I play humanitarian concerts. For example, this weekend we give a concert to cover the expenses of brain surgery for a three-year-old boy. If the institutions won’t help, then the artists will.

Other informants were politically motivated actors who deployed their professional skills to propel actual political transformation. Vera, a 56-year-old accomplished opera singer and actor, is a founding member of a self-organized social movement group – an activist city choir. The choir, consisting of creative workers, uses urban singing in public spaces to raise awareness of and challenge instances of abuses of power, discrimination against workers, corruption and nepotism. At the time of the interview, the choir was vociferously protesting a governmental imposition of higher income tax on freelance contracts. Vera identified the choir as her ‘last refuge of hope’. Through Vera’s hopeful lens, even ‘dark times’ are propitious ‘because you end up singing about those’:

Eh, back then I was lost in reverie about conquering the world, winning an Oscar. … then all around me went to hell. I was unemployed for a long time, started taking drugs, got divorced … now I see myself as an activist. I am an eager member of the activist city choir. … We all subscribe to that thesis by Mayakovski that art is not a mirror but a hammer with which to shape society. There must be light at the end of this tunnel.

Miyazaki (2004, pp. 14–15) argues that active hope involves commitment to changing the world. By deploying their work in progressive social action, creative workers both preserve hope in individual creative work and also in self-organized communitarian action and solidarity. Recent scholarship increasingly recognizes that social practice art opens up important spaces for building alternative worlds and forging solidarities. In performance studies, Harvie (2013, p. 111) describes how community-engaged arts practice breeds ‘micro-utopian possibilities for cultural change’ within vulnerable and deprived communities. In sociology, McRobbie (2016: 137) argues that ‘in downtime’ art has been positively turned into a ‘radical social enterprise’ that reinvigorates community cohesion by putting itself in the service of civic society, care for the elderly and young, and environmental improvement. While social and political themes have always been central to art, social practice art is now becoming one of the dominant sources of hope in sustaining individual creative careers and community solidarities (Lingo & Tepper, 2013).

Discussion and conclusion: Towards a hopeful sociology of creative work

This article has highlighted the usefulness of the concept of hope for understanding the connection between the future-oriented temporality of creative work and precarity. I have thus approached hope as a moral practice and a mode of existence that enables creative workers to endure in the face of work insecurity and economic hardship. Under conditions of chronic precarity, creative workers hopefully reorient, readjust and retune their self-image, knowledge and agency as a method of constructing habitable, modest, sane and ‘normal’ work-lives.

Studies of hope in sociology are generally sparse. Recently, however, eminent sociologists have turned to the notion of hope to explain people’s imagination of the future in conditions of austerity (Coleman, 2017) and unequal economic exchanges (Swedberg, 2017). This article complements and hopefully adds to such emerging efforts by investigating hope in relation to precarious labour. By describing meaningful, moral and practical creative work dynamics as unfolding in ‘islands of hope’ in a sea of precarity, this article accords with recent efforts at building a ‘hopeful sociology’ (Back, 2015) – a sociology that cherishes the possibility for the existence of alternative ways of working or living in contexts of deep-seated creative labour inequalities and precarity (Conor et al., 2015). The immediate compulsion of the critical sociology of creative work to translate future-orientated temporality to masochistic optimism and self-exploitation should be redressed by providing thicker and richer descriptions of the practical dimensions of futurity. We should therefore explore futurity as both positive and negative in order to reckon the political and managerial abuses of creative labour while also respecting creative workers’ emic justifications and motives for staying and persevering in precarious jobs.

‘A hopeful sociology’ would serve to elucidate the multifarious, informal, commoning and inclusive – as well as joyful – modes of practising creative labour. In anthropology, Hage (2002, p. 171) argued for the need to focus on ‘joyful hope’: ‘a hope that emerges from a refusal of the capitalist logic of deferral’ that reduces hope to utopian dreams of upward mobility and bold aspirations for ‘a good life’. In our case, this refusal translates into a rejection of practising creative labour as a ‘deferred economy’ (Bourdieu, 1998) whereby futurity represents merely a technique of neoliberal governmentality (Scharff, 2016). A hopeful sociology of creative work eschews the cynicism and resentment found in critical studies in favour of the study of an ‘ethics of joy’ – the cultivation of actions and practices which err ‘on the side of life’ even in ‘bad times’ (Hage, 2002). In cultural geography, Anderson (2006, p. 733) has already convincingly argued that ‘thinking from and through hope’ captures something that ‘remains elusive to an act of explanation or description’, since ‘being hopeful’ involves ‘dimly outlining the contours of something better and therefore enacting potentialities and possibilities’ (p. 749). A hopeful sociology would thus shed light on the ‘dim outline’ of people’s potentialities and vitality. Only in this way can we appreciate creative workers’ quotidian, ethical, social and political responsibilities, potentiality and agency, however modest, unspectacular or infinitesimal.

The category of hope seems well poised to elucidate the complexities of work experiences in ‘bad times’. When ‘bad times’ not only represent transitional passages but are instituted as ‘the new normal’ of work-life, then patterns of informal economic activities, community economies and social change art emerge as the most vigorous modes of revitalizing hope in the possibilities of alternative and habitable creative work-lives. In this sense, hope engenders spaces in which creative work can be practised outside self-regulating markets. In spaces of hope, creative workers refuse to abide by the logic of capital accumulation and individualism (Hage, 2002) and so practise creative work as ‘moral work’ (Banks, 2006), i.e. work infused with informal communitarian norms, care, moral and social welfare values (McRobbie, 2016). Hope has been already recognized for the possibilities it offers for progressive politics and moral economies (Hage, 2002; Miyazaki, 2004).

There are distinct pitfalls involved in doing a hopeful sociology of creative work, however. For while more scholarly attention should be paid to the role of hope in engendering alternative, not-for-profit models of community economies, welfare provision, social protection and communal self-help as a method of coping with precarity, we should be careful not to romanticize hopeful engagements with embittered realities as a heroic practice. It is crucial that a hopeful sociology of creative work recognizes the contradictory politics of hope on at least two planes. First, that hope should be reflexively separated from resilience; and second, that it should be differentiated from social work.

On the first plane, the political importance of hope should be teased out carefully through a critique of resilience. If hope predisposes creative workers to become infinitely adaptable agents adept at seamlessly navigating industries and social milieus that are radically uncertain by design, then the analytical risk of turning the category of hope into another metaphor for resilience looms large. Hope should not be taken to imply brutal resilience, assuming unconditional acceptance of and adaptability to conditions of precarity though the banalization or routinization of hardship. Resilience has been repeatedly criticized as an insidious neoliberal form of governmentality precisely because neoliberalism posits ‘a resilient subject’ that must constantly accommodate itself to, rather than challenge, ever-increasing societal complexity, economic chaos and ontological uncertainties (Chandler, 2014). Biopower administers and governs life and subjectivities through resilience (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2016). Hope, by contrast, resists biopower by generating more generous and politicized alternatives to adaptability. Hopeful creative labour opens up agentic spaces for building alternative possible worlds and forging solidarities.

On the second plane, a hopeful sociology of creative work should critically reassess the hope-based interventionist intentions of art, known by a plethora of labels and movements such as participatory art, art-for-social-change, relational aesthetics, community art or activist art, all of which are based on care for collectivities and participation. Such a reassessment should recognize the ‘micro-utopian potentialities of art’ within communities, but also resist casting creative workers as social workers and fashioning social practice art as a dubious antidote to poverty and exclusion (Harvie, 2013). Hopeful artistic engagement within communities should not serve as yet another excuse for minimizing public investment in social security and community services, or in art itself.