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This article examines identity work in the creative industries as a type of identity formation that has been underexplored in the literature on identity work to date. Based on interviews with performing artists in music and theatre, we show how creative workers feel compelled to perform negative (tortured and despondent) identity work in order to attain a positive (coherent, self-sustaining and self-affirming) sense of artistic self. We argue that the dubious link between mental illness and creativity, propagated not only by popular media and pseudo-scientific accounts but also by art history and the creative industries themselves, has served to undergird a social imaginary of the artist as a ‘tortured’ creator. This imaginary in turn provides discursive resources, behavioral cues and affective stimulation for the performance of occupationally desirable yet perilous tormented creative selves. We identify three distinct identity work strategies undertaken by creative workers, namely self-analysis, self-diagnosis and self-medication, in which social imaginaries purporting an overlap between mental illness and creativity in artistic work play a constitutive role. Our findings contribute to the emergent interdisciplinary literature on identity work in the creative industries and the arts. Moreover, we caution that the negative forms of identity-building practised by our interviewees, underpinned as they are by social imaginaries of the artist as anguished, dejected and agonized, may in fact be dangerously counterproductive for creative workers coping with the higher rates of depression, anxiety and substance abuse found in precarious creative professions.

This article argues the importance of considering wageless life and related post-wage regimes of work in the study of creative and cultural labour. Such consideration is necessary to understand how creative workers persevere in their profession, dedicating substantial amounts of time to making art in spite of prolonged precarity and low, irregular or non-existent wages. The article revisits sociological studies of creative work and finds that although such studies have tended to neglect the wageless life of creative workers they have nonetheless implicitly identified a range of alternative economic activities and ‘consumption work’ practices that go beyond wages and formal contractual employment. These activities include everyday strategies for ‘getting by’, such as barter, self-provisioning, commoning, thrift and downshifting. A systematic and sustained focus on wageless life that treats work as deeply enmeshed in everyday life is needed in order to make manifest the hidden politics of contemporary post-waged creative work.

PurposeThere is growing scholarly discourse towards COVID-19 pandemic and creative entrepreneurship in the perspectives of Global South. Extant literature lacks sufficient empirical evidence on the subject matter. This paper therefore provides insights into business models and business model shifts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic among creative entrepreneurs in Ghana.Design/methodology/approachIn working towards achieving the purpose of the study, a qualitative design was deployed. Four artistic communities in three regions were understudied. The study conducted working interviews, Focus Group Discussions and field observations on the creative entrepreneurs.FindingsThe results showed a unique business model that captured ministries, agencies and departments; traditional authorities, foreigners and the diaspora community as key creative partners. The creative entrepreneurs equally proposed value via quality deliveries, attractive pattern mix, pure handy crafts, mart finishing, imbibing culture into productions and symbolic meanings. Their key activities include cutting and gluing, sewing and coloring, sketching and prototyping, annual Kente festivals, film shooting and editing. The creatives stream revenue through sales, advances, profit margins, contracts, gate proceeds, loans, friends and family support. The results also point at a regime of business model shifts among the creatives, deploying digitalization and diversification in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.Research limitations/implicationsThe research by design is limited to the qualitative tradition; despite knowing well about the quantitative approach that could have provided a wider scope and coverage for effective generalizability. Certainly, it would be of future research interest to design a comparative mix-method study to achieve a wider coverage feat. Indeed, the paper does achieve the goal of providing an original empirical account, hence making a valid contribution to knowledge in the area of study.Practical implicationsThe knowledge on demystified business models relative to the Ghanaian creative entrepreneurs has practical implications for practice: first, it generates a ground-up knowledge as to what creative entrepreneurial business models are, why they exist and exactly how to create one in a Global South perspective.Social implicationsThese creative business models and the COVID-19 induced model shifts among the Ghanaian creative entrepreneurs imply continuous creative livelihoods, sustainable business models and assurance for innovation in creative entrepreneurship space.Originality/valueThe study is of high scientific value, creative entrepreneurial essence and public interest to better demystify creative entrepreneurial business models and theoretically framed them. It offers strong empirical evidence on COVID-19 induced business model shifts. These creative business models and the COVID-19 induced model shifts among the Ghanaian creative entrepreneurs imply continuous creative livelihoods, sustainable business models and assurance for innovation in creative entrepreneurship space.

This article examines imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in film industries in Ghana. To understand how these imaginaries are spatially shaped and locally defined, we carried out in-depth qualitative research with fifty filmmakers in four regions of Ghana. Digital and platform technologies have long been optimistically celebrated as a way for marginalized creative entrepreneurs, particularly in Africa, to break into global markets and reach unprecedented levels of business success. However, far from being universally adopted by African creative entrepreneurs, these global techno-optimistic imaginaries are continually reworked, contested and subverted in practice. In this article, we show how Ghanaian filmmakers mobilized, deployed and resisted imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in their efforts to make sense of their situated entrepreneurial practices and to imagine the future of their creative businesses. We found that rather than naïvely adhering to techno-optimist imaginaries, through their practices, Ghanaian filmmaking entrepreneurs challenged the power geometry of the current platform ecosystem dominated by major Silicon Valley players. We contribute empirically rich data on how filmmaking entrepreneurs use and imagine platform technologies, as is necessary when African digital entrepreneurs are surrounded by hype but inadequate data. We also contribute to the literature about how individual platforms and platform types have unique affordances and how these affordances are shaped by the location and socio-economic position of the entrepreneur.

The paper proposes that artistic practices engaging with datasets on which machine learning (ML) systems are trained can provide caring or curative resistance to digital toxicity and furnish models for imagining more equitable digital futures. The paper provides a critique of harmful practices of data mining and data extraction in ML system development by focusing on artworks that engage pharmacologically, that is critically and restoratively, with these technologies. The three works analyzed are ImageNet Roulette (2019) by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, This Person does Exist (2020) by Mathias Schäfer, and Feminist Dataset (2017-ongoing) by Caroline Sinders. These works, we ague, use defamiliarization as a critical practice when engaging with datasets and ML, providing vital counter-narratives and curative strategies, yet in some cases also deepening and exacerbating the very same technological toxicity they set out to remedy.

In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives. In this theorisation we draw on McKenzie Wark’s account of ecological speculative fiction, Elizabeth Grosz’s bioaesthetics and Bernard Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’. We outline a range of speculative, inventive, utopian, atmospheric, enactive and sensory methodologies for the sociological study of climate fiction as an affective potentiality. By employing these methodologies, we argue, researchers will be better attuned to the affective intensities and atmosphere of anticipation, speculation and collective enactment of dreams of better climate futures that climate fiction is poised to catalyse in social settings of environmental activism.

This article investigates creative work from an ex-centric perspective, bringing insights from experiences of work in the Ghanaian creative industries to bear on the understanding of creative work as a relational labour of care and caring. We argue that the ethics and aesthetics of care in creative work can best be captured and appreciated through the use of innovative arts-based methodologies that afford researchers the opportunity to explore care-fully the relational aspects of creative work. Accordingly, we base our findings on insights generated from the organisation of and participation in an artistic research workshop in Ghana. We show that artistic workshops themselves constitute a caring and socially useful form of empirical research that upholds the principles of “creative justice” by fostering more respectful, attentive, and affective relationships among research participants and between researchers and participants.

Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour platforms, rather than being entirely controlled by depersonalised, anonymised and algorithm-driven labour market forces, is also infused in relational infrastructures whose upkeep, solidity and durability depends on the emotional efforts undertaken by workers to match economic transactions and their media of exchange to meaningful client relations. By applying a relational work perspective from economic sociology to the study of platform-mediated gig work, the article elucidates the micro-foundations of creative work in the digital gig economy, including how labour inequalities are produced and reproduced within and around micro-level interpersonal interactions.

Studies of creative industries typically contend that creative work is profoundly precarious, taking place on a freelance basis in highly competitive, individualized and contingent labour markets. Such studies depict creative workers as correspondingly self-enterprising, self-reliant, self-interested and calculative agents who valorise care-free independence. In contrast, we adopt the ‘ethics of care’ approach to explore, recognize and appreciate the communitarian, relational and moral considerations as well as interpersonal connectedness and interdependencies that underpin creative work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with creative workers in a range of marginal socio-cultural contexts, we argue that creative workers cultivate and sustain a diverse array of practices of care arising from an affective concern with the well-being of others. Far from being merely individualistic and crudely competitive actors, creative workers enact practical ethical responsibilities and affectivities towards a range of human and non-human others, including families, local communities and neighbourhoods, colleagues, artistic scenes and their adjacent genres, and surrounding national and linguistic cultures. In emphasizing the fundamental and structuring role of care in contingent labour markets our approach accords with recent trends in the social sciences that ‘affirmatively’—as opposed to ‘negatively’ and ‘suspiciously’—recognize that mutuality, solidarity and affectivity are powerful drivers of action on a par with or even exceeding market-driven self-centredness.

The article offers a qualitative examination of compounded precarity in creative work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with twelve creative workers operating in the creative industries in Ghana, we examine one of the most prevalent practices for navigating, coping with, and managing compounded precarity: that of hustling. We empirically identify and discuss three interrelated practices of hustling in creative work: digitalization, diversification, and social engagement. We present a new way of conceptualizing creative work in precarious geographies by theorizing hustling, and the associated worker resourcefulness, improvisation, savviness, hopefulness, and caring not merely as an individualized survival strategy, but rather as an agentic and ethical effort to turn the vicissitudes of life into situated advantages and opportunities, and even social change.

This article investigates the diverse and heterodox array of labour practices and economic activities in artistic work. Existing studies contend that artistic income is highly skewed, with the majority of artists living in poverty, and that artistic work is intermittent, project-by-project based and precarious, with artists juggling multiple jobs. However, these prevalent perspectives typically foreground only formal contractual employment while neglecting the variegated range of informal, alternative and relational economic practices. Building on a mixed method study of Danish visual artists’ livelihoods and drawing on the total social organization of labour perspective, the article maps a diverse spectrum of labour practices ranging from formal paid/unpaid work to informal cash-in-hand work and non-monetized barter exchanges, to wholly non-commodified everyday practices of mutual aid and favour-swapping, as well as ‘consumption work’ such as thrift and self-provisioning. Heterodox economic practices are the primary mode by which artists cope with and manage precarious artistic livelihoods.

This paper examines the dynamics of hope in creative industries in the city of Accra in Ghana. Building on theoretical insights from geography, anthropology and sociology that have mobilized the concept of hope as an analytical category, we examine the economic actions and entrepreneurial behaviour of creative entrepreneurs working in “precarious geographies”, i.e. locations where precarity is not a deviation from the norm but a constant and longstanding feature. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we contend that in conditions of radical and pervasive precarity, hope represents a distinct form of work in which the potentialities of the moment extend the present into the future, while the future, however hazy and unimaginable, affects the economic vitality of the present. By unpacking three dominant practices of hopeful orientation to futurity enacted by creative workers in Accra, namely hustling, waiting, and spiritualizing, we demonstrate the usefulness of hope as a concept in analysing economic action and labour dynamics.

This article considers the analytical potential of a concept of care that foregrounds human interdependencies, relational ties and the needs of others as the basis for action in analysing work, such as creative work, which is neither directly nor obviously associated with care provision. Work in the creative industries has recently become a central concern in sociology. Much of this scholarship reproduces or extends the idea of creative work as a paradigm of individualized work in contemporary societies that is characterized by high levels of worker autonomy, passion, self-expression and self-enterprise. This article challenges such theorizations by calling attention to the role of caring in creative work, understood both as an ontological phenomenon and as a relational practice of sustaining and repairing the world. Drawing on a qualitative study of socially engaged art in South-East Europe, I argue that creative work manifests itself as a labour of care and compassion.

Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspective’ on creative work. An ex-centric perspective does not merely aim at multiplying non-West empirical case studies. Rather, it aims at destabilizing, decentring and provincializing the taken-for-grantedness of some entrenched notions in creative labour studies such as informality and precarity. An ex-centric perspective, we contend, offers a potential challenge to many of the claims about creative work that have taken on the status of general truths and universal principles in spite of them being generated from limited empirical evidence gleaned from research sites situated almost exclusively in the creative hubs of Euro-America.

Genres organize and facilitate cultural, creative and media production and consumption but are rarely central categories in extant research on creative industries. With this editorial article, we aim to reassert, reassess and revisit the salience of genres for understanding inequalities in the cultural and creative industries. We argue that genres, as classificatory devices, structure and order a gendered and racialized division of labour and occupational practice. Genres sanction what is and what is not aesthetically and ethically appropriate to do and think within specific textual categories and, hence also, within genre-specific production cultures. Genres draw boundaries, shaping and normalizing the gendered and racialized professional values and norms that underpin unequal patterns of access, distinction and career advancement within creative occupations. Cultural producers, in turn, are compelled to forge professional genre identities at the same time as constantly having to negotiate their gender and racial fitness to work and prosper in specific categories of cultural production. The contributions to this special issue elucidate, through a plethora of methodological and theoretical approaches, the links between genres and persisting inequalities across the book, screen and music industries.

This work examines how enterprises and artists have engaged with each other. The report details historical and contemporary examples grouped under three headings: residing, consulting and embedding. These headings reflect different relationships be-tween artists and industry, ranging from those where the artist work remains separate to the business practices, to those where the artistic and business practice are indistinguishable. Through the examples the report suggests five areas of further study necessary in understanding and potentially harnessing artist industry engagement for the digital transformation. These are; understanding the intentions of each actor, navigating the asymmetric relationships that exist between actors, understanding the competing measures of success that may apply, negotiating the complex structures that dictate the rules of the collaboration and exploring the policy frame-works that can help to promote beneficial engagements.

This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers make sense of and justify their career transitions away from the metropolis, while reassessing reflexively over their lifespan the shifting meaning of their career success. We propose the adoption of Nussbaum’s capability approach in the study of such career transitions as a means of strengthening current theorizing about the role played by urban contexts in individual conceptualizations of career success and meaningful professional identities. Applying this analytical lens, we tease out the ways in which our informants perceived the influence exerted by different urban contexts on their capacity to enact a set of capabilities for the attainment of well-being and quality of life at different stages in their careers while striving to preserve a stable professional identity as creative workers. We argue that a good life evaluation, which includes a reflexive and comprehensive reassessment of the capabilities to live life well while pursuing a creative career, underlies creative workers’ shifting interpretations of geographical career transition that contravene conventional measures of career upward mobility, development and growth.

This paper explores how the arts may instil or impede change for better or for worse, drawing parallels from previous thinking on transformation achieved through the arts with the current set of challenges our society faces as part of ongoing digital transformation. We propose a set of four interrelated mechanisms through which the arts are intertwined with processes of change, finding that the arts foster empathy and a notion of care while radically empowering imagination and bestowing capabilities to act on change. We then proceed to discuss these mechanisms in the light of digital transformation and put forward a set of proposals regarding the agency of the arts. These proposals will be empirically validated and leveraged in the subsequent field work and innovation phases of the project. This overview will conclude with some key findings as well as an outlook on critical questions for future research on the potential of the arts for empowering positive change in the context of digital transformation.

This article explores the relationship between future-oriented temporality and precarity in creative work. Existing sociological studies implicitly assume an unproblematic causal link between creative workers’ future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation. This article problematizes this link and offers a more nuanced reassessment of creative work’s futurity by arguing for the analytical potential of the notion of hope in gaining a better understanding of creative workers’ hopeful – affective, practical and moral – responses to conditions of protracted precarity. Building on theories of hope, the article conceptualizes hope both as an existential affective stance and an active moral practice oriented towards the present – an orientation that enables workers to keep going in spite of economic hardship and job uncertainty. From ‘an atypical case’ study of creative work in South-East Europe, hope emerges empirically as the central quotidian practice of coping with precarity. Three practices of hope are discussed: (1) hope as therapeutic practice; (2) hope as informal labour practice; and (3) hope as socially engaged arts practice. In so doing, the article explores the possibilities of practising ‘a hopeful sociology’ of creative work.

Research in management and organization may only gain by being inspired from arts, culture and humanities in order to rethink practices but also to nourish its own perspectives. Life in organizations is artificially separate from ordinary life: all of mundane objects are thus conducive to astonishment, inspiration, and even problematization. The unplugged subsection “voices” gives the opportunity to academics and non-academics to deliver an interpretation about an object from the cultural or artistic world. Interpreted objects are or not directly related to organizational life, resonate or not with the moment, but share some intriguing features. These interpretations suggest a patchwork of variations on the same object.

This symposium consists of four presentations. Presentation 1-3 provide insights into recent research findings on the topic of gig work relevant in the context of careers, organizational behavior, ...

This article introduces the notion of genre as an analytical category for the study of gender inequality in creative work. Research on gender and creative labour typically identifies external, systemic and structural causes for gender inequality in media industries. In contrast, I argue that genres, by virtue of their internal, structural and discursive patterning, play a constitutive role in regulating media producers’ gendered professional identities, shaping their struggle for recognition and structuring their economic sustainability. Rather than being merely outcomes of production processes, genres shape gender inequality: They possess gendering power that influences how media producers work, think and feel. Gendering and gendered genre norms that privilege ‘masculine’ over ‘female’ values are so hard-wired in occupational practice and professional codes of conduct that the genre itself becomes a control and boundary ascription mechanism that implicitly governs, sustains and reproduces gendered identity formation, career aspirations and biographical standing. Drawing on in-depth interviews with female producers of Scandinavian crime fiction, globally branded as Nordic Noir, I examine how female writers in Denmark have coped with and experienced the gendering effect of the genre in which they work and to which they are financially beholden. I also tease out the ways in which crime fiction, a masculine genre, causes anxiety of authorship and affects female producers’ identity and boundary work. This focus on the gendering power of genres may potentially help us understand the gender disparities in media industries – disparities that endure despite efforts at policing fair access and equal opportunity.

This article charts the historical stability and continuity of participatory and crowdsourcing practices. Theoretically, it suggests that the blurring of the boundaries between audiences and producers, with the ensuing result of user-generated content, is by no means solely the upshot of new media technological affordances but largely a function of relatively stabilized, genre-specific formal and functional properties, or ‘genre affordances’. Certain referential and performative genres enable interaction between audiences, texts and producers independently of new media technologies because these genres constitute what matters for both producers and audiences in specific historical circumstances. Genres make available shared cultural, social and pragmatic resources for appropriate and desirable being, doing, feeling and thinking. Empirically, this article builds upon an archival study of co-production related to the specific genre of travel guidebooks. It investigates (a) audience feedback in the form of handwritten letters sent to John Murray, a venerable 19th-century British publishing house, and (b) the ways in which John Murray’s yesteryear guidebook producers actively solicited and implemented reader-authored content in professional production practice.

Creative work has been defined and critiqued as essentially future-oriented ‘hope labour’: underpaid work executed in the present on the assumption/speculation of future employment. This chapter outlines a theoretical framework for capturing the performative role of hope in sustaining creative careers amidst widespread precariousness and work casualisation, approaching hoping as a practice of getting through the hardships of the concrete realities of work–life. It outlines the ways in which creative workers resort to and mobilise hope to restore hopeful engagement with work amidst technological disruption, institutional failure, industrial collapse, and global competition for creative work. The study is based on a rich data set of interviews with fashion designers, musicians, actors, and new media workers in the post-socialist Balkan states of Macedonia and Albania.

This article presents a paratextual analysis of a genre-specific case of the book publishing industry, namely that of travel guidebook publishing. Paratexts refer to all the ‘accompanying’ textual instances that gravitate around, but never completely pertain to, the ‘primary’, authorial text. In contrast to prevalent theorisations of paratexts as simultaneous hermeneutic and marketing frameworks that regulate a reader’s interpretive practices (reception) and/or media purchasing habits (consumption), I suggest that paratexts are vehicles through which media production companies engage in auto-communication, that is, self-interpret with a view to legitimating an ethical, virtuous and authentic institutional self. I furthermore suggest that a media company’s paratextual legitimation efforts unfold in reference to the genre, under the label of which its media products are produced, promoted and distributed. Genres are central to media institutions’ legitimacy, while the paratext is the principal conduit through which legitimation is conveyed, This article presents a paratextual analysis of a genre-specific case of the book publishing industry, namely that of travel guidebook publishing. Paratexts refer to all the ‘accompanying’ textual instances that gravitate around, but never completely pertain to, the ‘primary’, authorial text. In contrast to prevalent theorisations of paratexts as simultaneous hermeneutic and marketing frameworks that regulate a reader’s interpretive practices (reception) and/or media purchasing habits (consumption), I suggest that paratexts are vehicles through which media production companies engage in auto-communication, that is, self-interpret with a view to legitimating an ethical, virtuous and authentic institutional self. I furthermore suggest that a media company’s paratextual legitimation efforts unfold in reference to the genre, under the label of which its media products are produced, promoted and distributed. Genres are central to media institutions’ legitimacy, while the paratext is the principal conduit through which legitimation is conveyed.

This article explores how the concept of genre can enrich our understanding of gender inequality in media industries. All media work takes place within genre-specific production worlds, which seem to be gender-segregated. By examining the gendered and gendering ideology of genres, an outcome of genre-gender discursive, historical and cultural crossover, we obtain a holistic view of the complexities of the psycho-biographical gender dynamics of media work. To this end, I trace the ways in which the andocentric genre of travel writing (a genre based on a masculine ideology) causes professional anxiety and constrains female travel writers' biographical identity work. By treating genres as mediators of work experiences and practices, I elucidate how contemporary female travel writers experience and cope with genre-induced anxiety.

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.

The aim of this article is to reexamine the processes of cultural production and consumption as reconfigured at the intersection of the print and digital eras. The article attempts to understand the complex interplay between audiences, labor relations, changing authorship patterns, technological shifts, and genre specificity in travel guide(book) publishing as a model and a particular case of digitization in creative/cultural/media industries. On the basis of qualitative research, it combines political economy with cultural and media studies and genre analysis with cultural economics. The goal is to grasp the implications and paradoxes of the convergence between the creative labor of professional travel writers and the cocreative labor of users-cum-aspiring-writers as taking place within a specific, locally and historically situated, genre culture.

All media production happens within ‘genre-specific worlds’ (Tunstall, 1993: 201). Most of the discourses that float in and around production worlds—whether aesthetic and ethical or economic and managerial—in fact belong to genres (Bruun, 2011, 2010; Dornfeld, 1998: 91). Genres are thus an emic conceptual force with which production studies must reckon. Most current sociological studies, however, either completely disregard genres or treat them conveniently as outcomes of production and utilitarian labels by which managers, directors and marketers label and promote classes of cultural products as ‘genres’ (Bielby and Bielby, 1994). Yet by treating genres merely as imposed classification systems that link producers and audiences on the market, we preclude the possibility of enriching the analytical repertoire of production studies with a category that possesses structural, formal and ontological autonomy. In this way we forfeit a potentially nuanced and comprehensive understanding of how producers work in practice in genre-based production worlds, cope daily with workplace anxieties, and forge professional identities as genre-specialists.

At the heart of the frenetic activity of the record industry and of all the conflictin opinion to which this activity gives rise, lies a common goal: popular success. This also provides the key to the paradoxes one encounters when one studies the economic aspects of the record industry in France. What does the achievement of success involve in actual fact ? Economic, sociological and musicological analyses tend to evade this issue rather than explain it. Can the ability to achieve success be attributed to a more or less innate sixth sense ? Does it reside in the superiority of the smaller producers over the larger ones ? Is success achieved through bribery, through massive 'plugging', through a dulling of the senses or through conformism, as the ritual claims of the press would have it ? Is it a by-product or profit, of standardisation, of alienation or of the prevailing ideology, as marxists argue ? The sociology of mass media and culture explains it in an equally wide variety of ways (...).