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Tedious work is pervasive in creative work, yet it has received little attention in the literature on creativity, including studies of science, innovation, and product development. Drawing from a comparative ethnography of two settings—systems biology and music production—we illuminate tedious work as an essential, previously under-investigated aspect of creative work that becomes increasingly prominent with digitization. Tedious work is repetitive, detail-oriented, and expertise-based, and we classify four types of it: fishing, administrating, polishing, and compiling. We develop a model of how tedious work emerges, why it becomes problematic, and what actors do to reduce its negative effects. Tedious work presents three risks to developing viable, novel outcomes—time drain, disengagement, and information overload—and we identify tactics that actors use to mitigate these risks and support individual creativity and the collective creative process. By unpacking the central notion of iteration and documenting the repercussions of creating novel outcomes with digitization, specifically the potential to amplify tedious work, we provide an important counterpoint to voices that hail digital technology's low cost and unlimited potential for iteration and refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on narrative interviews with late-phase doctoral candidates and early postdoctoral researchers, complemented by an autoethnographic diary, this study analyses the experiences of junior academics. A rational ideal of the doctoral process is identified, and its implications for doctoral students’ identity work are discussed. While the rational ideal of the doctoral process has its uses, it prescribes the preferred conduct of doctoral studies and regulates doctoral identities through preferred conceptions of the self. Consequently, doctoral identity work often involves the construction of one’s self in ways that seek to conform to the rational ideal while continuously failing to do so, making deviance from expectations a prevailing feature of it. These experiences of deviance from the elusive ideal both increase the precariousness of doctoral identities and reproduce the regimes of power in which doctoral students are embedded. Thus, this paper challenges the rational ideal and provides a more nuanced understanding of doctoral studies as a precarious, emotional and embodied identity construction process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context marked by restrictions due to COVID-19 pandemic, this article analyses the impact of COVID-19 on Basque musicians' activity, income, future expectations and life satisfaction. A survey was conducted in 2021 among Basque musicians belonging to MUSIKARI association. Associations among selected variables were analysed calculating correlation rates and conducting inference tests using SPSS software (IBM SPSS statistics). We found that despite the severe damage done by COVID-19 on musicians' activity and income, this damage has been homogeneous among different types of musicians. We also find that future expectations are strongly conditioned by musicians' characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how craft entrepreneurs navigate the precarious conditions widespread in Ghana’s creative industries. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with weavers of Kente cloth and smocks in the Northern, Savannah and Ashanti regions, we focus on the role of spirituality as a significant resource for coping with the extreme challenges and uncertainties faced by craftspeople in this context. Our empirical findings reveal how deploying spiritual narratives, including everyday invocations of God and divine spirits, helped our interviewees attain a sense of purpose and empowerment while further strengthening their communal ties, including care and mutual support for a shared way of weaving life. As our data further reveal, however, these important benefits of spirituality in creative work came with constraining effects, trapping weavers in dismal working conditions and reinforcing gender boundaries and exclusion by tabooing women’s engagement in craft entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precarity has long been a defining feature of the creative industries. Recently, the concept of a (universal) basic income (UBI) has received increased academic and policy interest as a way to mitigate the cultural and creative labour market’s precarious conditions. However, little is known about how artists experience receiving a basic income, and how this affects their work practices. Therefore, we explored such self-perceived effects of a basic income on artists’ professional and personal lives. We interviewed the recipients and the organisers of No Strings Attached – a 6-month experiment offering seven creative workers a basic income – at the beginning, middle, and end of this initiative (n = 22). Contrary to expectations of decreased productivity, our findings reveal three main ways in which respondents allocated their basic income: (1) “buying” time to improve their quality of work, (2) “buying” time to improve their quality of life, and (3) direct career investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic was expected to be particularly detrimental for performing artists, given the nature of their work. The scarce literature on the precarity experiences of performers following the COVID-19 pandemic has predominantly focused on Western and Central Europe. The present article contributes to the literature by investigating the experience of Romanian performers before and after the COVID-19 outbreak through in-depth semi-structured interviews. Romania is a valuable case study, given its peculiarities in terms of cultural policy. After the fall of communism, cultural policy was characterised by a constant dominant strategic focus on (mostly religious) heritage, while the cultural funding model is particularly detrimental to smaller independent artists and organisations. By focusing on it, the study shows that research on precarity needs to be embedded in the local (cultural) policy context, as it shapes the precarity experiences of artists. Without a proper understanding of the policy context, research will likely fail to offer effective policy recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 devastated the ability of self-employed and freelance live performers working in the UK's live entertainment industries to sustain a living in an already precarious sector of employment. It also exposed the inadequacies of existing ways of conceptualising precarity in allowing a complete understanding of performers' experiences of precarious employment, particularly during such a crisis. Combining research into precarity, recognition theory and qualitative data on how such performers experienced and responded to the pandemic, this article identifies two forms of precarity they experienced: socioeconomic and recognitive. In doing so, it contributes to the sociology of work by demonstrating how these two modes of precarity generated considerable operational and existential challenges for performers while extending the conceptualisation of precarity in such a way as to offer a more nuanced understanding of its impact, not only on the livelihoods of those experiencing it but also on their work identities and sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, we have experienced a renewed public awareness of the importance of creative and cultural work for personal and national wellbeing. Contributors to this special issue turn their attention to the diverse experiences of creative and cultural workers, to understand how creative work has been disrupted, abandoned, transformed or reinvented across distinct cultural and economic contexts. In various circumstances reshaped by the pandemic, creative and cultural workers soon realized that paid work as they knew it would no longer be possible, and they had to quickly recalibrate their breadwinning strategies, in turn affecting their understandings of labour and value. This special issue considers the experiences of workers across Europe, Latin America, Africa and Australia, adding still-needed geographic diversity as part of ongoing efforts in research on creative and cultural work in pandemic times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the precarity of creative work iterate with the precarity of creative spaces? In answer, we examine Covid-19 pandemic experiences of workers across diverse creative sectors in Sydney, Australia, drawing upon qualitative mapping research. Our findings highlight divergent experiences of precarity before and during the pandemic: many suffered, others adapted, some even thrived, depending upon the nature of their work, access to socialisation and networking opportunities, plus whether livelihood precariousness was worsened and overlaid with additional geographic factors, including venue loss, tenure vulnerability, housing insecurity, and access to production spaces. Using conceptual insights from labour and feminist geography, we argue that for the creative sectors to flourish and support diverse, well-remunerated and satisfying work, there must also be discussions of the post-pandemic geography of creative work. Space and social relations within and beyond the work sphere are co-constitutive of precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pós: Revista do Programa de POS-Graduacao Em Artes - EBA/UFMG is the property of Pos - Programa de Pos-graduacao em Artes (PPG-Artes) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article critically examines the construction of the artistic identity and career of Ai-Da, 'the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist'. Engaging with scholarship on posthumanism and creative assemblages, and creative work, identity and expertise, this article conceptualises Ai-Da's distinctive positioning and focuses on the practices used to construct a creative worker identity and career. The article uses qualitative content analysis to examine journalistic coverage, promotional and presentation activities, exhibitions and performances, and social media postings over a four-year period from Ai-Da's first launch to international visibility. The analysis shows how Ai-Da is positioned as a high-profile, border crossing artist, engaging in debates about Artificial Intelligence (AI), art, and the environment. It considers the creative assemblage of Ai-Da as a humanoid robot artist, the creator Aidan Meller and the team working with him, and the wider contextual factors of aesthetic expertise, networks and knowledge of art worlds which have shaped Ai-Da's artistic identity and career trajectory. The focus on how Ai-Da signals expertise on social media helps to frame the specific techniques used to speak about and for Ai-Da on social media platforms and wider media coverage. This includes articulating inspiration, showcasing artistic processes and cultivating audience relationships. In concluding, the implications of connecting critical perspectives on creative work with developments in art, AI and robot artists are explored: firstly, for understanding how the practices for constructing an artistic identity shape the development of robot artists; secondly, for understanding how developments in art and AI can frame reflections on artistic identity and careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores and unfolds the conflicting narratives of the work and competences of creatives in the era of creative industries. Based on a French pragmatic approach, the analysis sheds light on a mismatch between how bureaucrats in the Norwegian business support system valuate creative work, and how creatives valuate their own work. I find that the bureaucrats mobilise a narrow and stereotyped grammar when talking of creative work, while the creatives themselves seem to express far more complex and pragmatic understandings. I argue that the Norwegian creative industries policy seems to have limited capacity to embrace the hybridity and complexity of creative work, which also reduces its relevance and accuracy. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with creatives and bureaucrats on a local level and contributes to the knowledge on the individual bureaucrats as non-creative outsiders, but still, actors highly significant to creative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese creators and Douyin (a prominent Chinese short-video platform) are building a strong relationship in cultural production. Based on the social exchange theory, this study tries to explore the process and mechanism of monetization in Chinese platforms. Using the app walkthrough method and in-depth interviews with 19 full-time creators, we contend that Chinese creators and Douyin engage in a repetitive but unequal exchange with the common goal of earning income. Douyin works with creators to cultivate their thirst for revenue over time, while mastering the creative labor, before finally tying them to monetary gains. Douyin not only binds exposure and allocates Internet traffic to new creators, but also develops Dou+, a traffic marketing tool that leverages the affordances of creative work visibility. Douyin first enhances the creators' income expectations through this step. The platform then directs creators through the Star-Chart content trading system, and establishes the platform-advertiser-creator transaction chain. When the exchange between Douyin and creators becomes stable, the platform sets up an uncertain revenue mechanism. Douyin's commitment to creating a standardized assembly line of production and financial benefit for creators has established an exchange mode between the platform and creators at the expense of innovation and diversity. We argue that this standardized labor process eliminates the autonomy of cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Iuridica Lublinensia is the property of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The change in preferred work models that occurred during the pandemic and post-pandemic period has meant that both creative and reproductive work now takes place in stationary, hybrid, and fully remote conditions. Employees, both those performing creative and reproductive work, in teams or individually, increasingly have to function efficiently in virtual reality, and thus in conditions of physical loneliness. Therefore, this article aims to identify how performing work remotely contributed to changing the preferences of creative and non-creative employees towards performing professional duties of a creative versus routine nature, individually or in teams. The research was carried out using the CAWI survey method among 1,000 respondents in Poland, examining their opinions on the preferences for performing work of various types in remote conditions. The study showed that each of the four types of work examined is a challenge for employees who work remotely, with the majority of respondents declaring that each type of work (creative individual, creative team, routine individual, and routine team) is more difficult for them than in the pre-pandemic reality. Moreover, it was found that the more creative the nature of the work performed, the more negatively employees assessed the preferences for performing creative and routine work, both in teams and individually. Managing creative and reproductive work is one of the most important challenges for modern managers. Currently, many scientific discussions concern what work can be automated or entrusted to artificial intelligence, and what should remain in human hands. This article may be of interest to managers as well as psychologists and creativity educators, whose task will be to prepare work teams to perform creative tasks (work of a creative nature) in remote conditions. The original value of the presented work is such a broad approach to research issues, considering both preferences for creativity and reproduction of work in conditions of individual remote work and remote teamwork. The article takes into account aspects that are important from the perspective of human resources management, management of creative teams, and employee creativity management with the increasing use of hybrid and fully remote work models in organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-employment is much more frequent among artists and creative workers than other occupations. This has led to the emergence of the notion of the 'artist-entrepreneur,' which associates these workers with autonomy and independence and the ability to choose their own career paths. This study explores motivations for self-employed artistic work by using data from five waves of the Contingent Worker Supplement to the Current Population Survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using Coarsened Exact Matching, we compare artists to non-artists in predicting motivations for self-employed work. We find that artists are different than non-artists in terms of their entrepreneurial motivations. Artists are less likely to seek self-employment for economic reasons as compared to other motivators. They are more likely to do so for reasons related to independence, time flexibility, and personal reasons. However, the preference for independence and time flexibility is not associated with self-employed artistic work more than it is associated with other types of self-employed work. The main difference between self-employed artists and non-artists is in the likelihood of choosing self-employment for lack of choice and for economic reasons. The findings make us question the notion of the 'artist-entrepreneur' by showing that both self-employed artists and non-artists have similar motivations related to seeking professional self-determination, but that self-employed artists are more likely to be motivated by their precariousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the limited research on solo self-employed (SSE) workers, who strive to collectively address social and labour rights issues while preserving their autonomy. It examines a unique case within the French context, the Syndicat National des Artistes Plasticien·nes (SNAP), a trade union created in 1977 within the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) to represent self-employed visual artists. Through extensive ethnographic research conducted both online and offline, the study explores how SSE artists organise collectively to improve their access to social rights while protecting their autonomy, which is particularly crucial for creative workers. The findings show how SSE workers can unite to advocate for social protection while redefining the promise of professional autonomy embedded in the so-called ‘enterprise culture’. Additionally, it sheds light on an early example of SSE workers organising, which may provide useful insights for other groups of SSE workers, who are rapidly growing across Europe.

Popular culture leads to the creation of culture that is produced and presented in large quantities with the help of production, distribution and mass access technologies so thatit is easily accessible to the public. This research aims to answer the motivation of the millennial generation in choosing creative jobs and explain that these jobs are a sign of the existence of popular culture in the city of Padang. This research uses a qualitative method with a phenomenological approach with snowball sampling. Data was collected through literature study, observation, interviews and documentation. The research results illustrate the motivation of the millennial generation in choosing creative work in the form of ideals, talents and means of self-development. In a broader scope there is economic motivation and opportunities to develop in the future with the work they are involved in. Their behavior that prioritizes balance between work and doing other things outside of work (work-life balance), being a role model and reflection, and maintaining popularity is the behavior that gives birth to and maintains popular culture.

According to Lipovetsky and Serroy, beauty has risen to a new ontological requirement: the aesthetic phenomenon has expanded beyond its traditional boundaries, influencing reality and above all the economic dimension. The result has been an art market in which the aesthetic work responds to unprecedented hierarchies of value and the author finds himself assuming professional postures fueled by innovative deontologies. This contribution intends to investigate the transformations that the aesthetic job undergoes within the late capitalist and post-Fordist logic through a close reading of Michel Houellebecq's La carte et le territoire. In the novel it is possible to observe the professional attitudes of three different artists: the photographer and painter Jed Martin, the fictional writer Michel Houellebecq and - through a metanarrative refraction - the narrator Michel Houellebecq. All three face the professionalization of the artistic activity oscillating between the poles of a dialectic that is difficult to resolve between artisanal and industrial work, creativity and methodicalness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to show how Adorno's thought can illuminate our reflections on the future of work. It does so by situating Adorno's conception of genuine activity in relation to his negativist critical epistemology and his subtle account of the distinction between true and false needs. What emerges is an understanding of work that can guide our aspirations for the future of work, and one we illustrate via discussions of creative work and care work. These are types of work which cater to persistent human needs, albeit ones that are distorted under present social conditions. Adorno's thought helps us to understand why this is the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative work is a social process that requires effective collaboration between individuals. Accordingly, theories account for the ways creativity takes place in teams and groups and the role that social networks play in shaping creativity. However, scholars have largely overlooked the role that dyads play in creative work within organizations. This article builds theory on how intimate co-creation occurs and how it influences the generation of creative ideas over time. I theorize that as people create together, they engage in intimate creative interactions, which under certain circumstances lead to the development of a shared interpersonal boundary (i.e., a sense of "we"). This shared interpersonal boundary influences creativity by circumscribing a closed, safe space in which the dyad can explore divergent ideas and manage the paradoxes of creativity; it also enables shared scripts and schemas that help the dyad move through creative blocks. By integrating theories of intimate interactions, psychological ownership, and interpersonal relationships, this article advances our understanding of how dyads—specifically, intimate co-creation—influence creative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who cares for cultural and creative workers (CCWs)? This paper considers the impact of a declined welfare support system across European states on CCWs and investigates the role played by creative intermediaries in providing care for those employed within the sector. Building on both quantitative and qualitative data taken from a range of European creative intermediary organisations, the paper applies Joan Tronto’s politicised framework of care to articulate how work undertaken by intermediaries can be understood as a form of care work. The findings highlight the range of creative intermediaries working to support CCWs across Europe and illustrates their role in conducting research on the sector in response to the lack of available robust data at a more official governance level. It explores how these organisations are filling both a welfare and knowledge gap however, that this support is ad hoc, supported by various funding models which place the intermediary organisations themselves in a precarious position. In response to this, the paper calls for investment in collaborations between higher education, policy makers and creative intermediaries to strengthen support for CCWs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars exploring the entwinement of "authenticity" and "race" in cultural production demonstrate that artists are frequently evaluated according to racialized standards, whereby differences in musical expression are believed not only to be the result of cultural differences but to be rooted in ethnic and racial differences in the popular imagination. Heretofore, the research has focused either on evidencing that authenticity is entirely a social construct or on tracing racially informed discriminatory practices against artists of color. Exponents of an artform traditionally associated with a racial group other than their own are frequently deemed "inauthentic." However, less attention has been devoted to investigating whether, and if so how artists resist, or otherwise deal with, this racialized construction of authenticity. This article contributes to the literature on authenticity, race, and identity in creative work by examining the ways in which artists navigate racialized representations of authenticity in Western art music. The analysis is informed by qualitative research conducted among 75 Japanese musicians in France, Poland, and Japan. It draws on performative theories to conceptualize both authenticity and race as something that people "do" and "redo," rather than "have" or "are." My findings demonstrate that Japanese artists are doing authentic music self through race by self‐aligning with a Western personality, a Western sense of music, and by training their bodies to fit Western instruments. The various means available to an artist to resist racialized preconceptions and appraisals are additionally examined and their feasibility and effectiveness assessed. I argue that an artist has considerable, albeit limited, agency and that the hierarchical racial divisions in Western classical music can therefore be temporarily dissolved to make it more inclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes from all around the world in any activity are supposed to accept changes and respond being ready for them, by developing specific skills, knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and experience. Based on bringing new ideas and creativity, human capital could obtain long-run leadership performance, becoming leaders for others and motivating them to do the same. Leadership and creativity could be the essential variables to overcome intellectual competition keep close the valuable customers, be a model to follow for other members of the organization and obtain individual and organizational performance. To get performance, the organization needs performance employees; thus, to have creative organizations, must have visionary leaders. This article will analyze educational creativity, the necessary environment to have innovative leaders, creative work, creative thinking, and the importance of visionary leaders in obtaining performance. This article is an examination of leadership and creativity in organizations. Its aim is to reflect on creative leadership and its contribution to stimulating performance. Despite the importance to researchers and organizations of how creativity contributes to efficient leadership and how leadership contributes to group organizational and educational creativity, our understanding regarding this interrelationship remains limited mainly. An analysis of the literature based on both theoretical information and empirical evidence shows that studies exploring the intersection between performance and creative leadership in organizations are disagreeing in terms of how they conceptualize this relationship. Therefore, the essential goal of this article is to understand how leaders in distinctive settings can promote creativity among their followers and stimulate organizational performance. The analysis of the subject literature was used to achieve the aim of the article and verify the hypotheses. The review of the results of the empirical research of different authors has confirmed the research hypotheses that a leader has the role of learning how to stimulate the creativity of employees and rewarding their innovative behavior. The article contains three related studies of distinctive researchers. Study I is a quantitative study focused on the effect of creativity on the work environment. Study II and Study III are correlational studies. Study II examines two behaviors: personality traits and creativity in different work fields. Study III looks at the relationship between individual or group creativity and innovation at work.

The article attempts to analyze philosophical and poetic works of V. Ivanov and M. Voloshin concerning “mysteries of Eros”. It is concluded that V. Ivanov sang “the praise of eternal love rapture” while M. Voloshin didn’t perceive Eros only as a passion and opposed it to sex and sensuality. Ivanov perceived love in its intimate and religious aspects. He wrote about the universal pathos of unity with a beloved woman and God, as well. The final goal is the high love unity of mankind which can be realized by Church. The article deals with Ivanov’s poetic book “Eros”. It’s main theme is love as a creative basis which contains high joyfulness and inevitable sufferings, while Voloshin was writing about love based on Platon’s treatise “Feast” and also an antroposophic teaching. So his poems “Nympths Grotto”, “Cave” and “Maternity” are analyzed in the article. The author traces creative relationship of two poets and especially marks Voloshin’s cycle of verses “The Star of Wormwood”. Directly or polemically, each of them associates with Ivanov’s lyrics.

This paper examines practices and narratives of hustling in the creative industries. We draw on two illustrative cases: independent female filmmakers in Nairobi, Kenya, and independent female fashion designers in Toronto, Canada, with a combined 69 interviews. Taking a comparative, intersectional approach, we explore both the practices and narratives that entrepreneurial creative workers construct. In doing so, we contribute to ongoing conceptual debates regarding the contemporary nature of work in creative industries. We define hustling in the creative industries as entrepreneurially navigating precarity to build and sustain creative businesses. We argue that hustling is not merely a "stage" of work and life to be moved past or overcome, but instead an ongoing, entrepreneurial creative practice. This fact has implications for how we think about success and creative work: hustling is not a deviation from the good life, but a way of making a good life in precarious circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research of arts and literature had moved from a striving for exact, structuralist handlings of its objects to observations of the world as mediated and experienced by humans. Research in aesthetics and literary studies not embedded in structuralism is often interdisciplinary in its nature and draws on a host of inspirations (anthropology, epistemology of imaginative processes, ontological transformations of existential meanings, etc.). The creative process and its product – the literary text – can be handled from various viewpoints. Traditionally, literary studies approached the text in terms of its structure, aesthetics, and poetics. Such observations do offer a systematic way in which the functioning and form of the literary work can be described; however, they are much less capable of grasping the ontological sources and origins of aesthetic experience. The latter are inherent to the engagement with an aesthetic object and as such need to be taken into account in the creation of knowledge and value of the literary work. Respecting the psychological subject of the writer and of communicative configurations of the literary text is crucial in this context. The article looks under the surface of textual structures and concentrates on imaginative processes in connection to the reception intention of the literary work.

This article aims to raise education researchers' self-reflection about their treatment of teachers as workers through introducing the term "creative work ethic." At its core, the creative work ethic is the belief that good work entails innovation. Additional features of this ethic are the prizing self-motivation, work done individually, and a flexible schedule that mixes labor with leisure activities. The danger of the creative work ethic is a tendency for self-exploitation and devaluing workers who do not fit into the ethic. After defining the features of the creative work ethic and describing its drawback, the paper reads closely three education papers in order to show how this ethic colors their analysis of teachers' work or their prescription for better teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to contemporary debates on self-entrepreneurship in cultural work by focusing on project-based theatre actors in Italy. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the study considers performing artists' narratives of success, unsuccess, and future expectations to shed light on how entrepreneurial projects are negotiated in neoliberal cultural work. The article expands current research by considering how self-entrepreneurial projects are lived out in insecure working environments, taking into account a geographical area and a creative sector often overlooked by studies of creative labour. In a context where precariousness is normalised, actors' discourses point at the emergence of disaffection towards neoliberal entrepreneurial ideals of autonomy and competition and to the loss of a progressive idea of biographical projects. The research highlights that an ongoing status of insecurity can mine optimistic and entrepreneurial orientations, questioning the sustainability of neoliberal ethos of work as a future-oriented project in times of enhanced insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term cultural entrepreneurship is increasingly used in academic research to address the intersection of business developments and creative work. However, the concept itself is disputed. Unpacking varying definitions of the term, this article revisits literature on the topic, searching for the figures of the cultural entrepreneur that scholars create. The article suggests that the literature is dominated by hero figures, who are based on retrospective analyses of successful individuals, and tragic hero figures, who summarize the situation for most self-employed creatives, establishing a bleak outlook. As an alternative, the article suggests seeing cultural entrepreneurs as catalyst figures.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how social media presence and platform engagements inform and affect creative workers' sense of professional agency and craft. Focusing on Finnish theatre, film and TV actors' perceptions of their social media interactions, the article proposes the concept of platformed intimacy to capture the simultaneous importance and ambivalence of mobile attachments that characterise actors' platformed lives. The research participants consisted of 15 freelancers and theatre employees, aged between 29 and 64 years. The analysis was based on the diary-interview method and close reading. In this article, we suggest that to understand the complexities involved in creative workers' presence on social media platforms, it is important to broaden the investigation from self-promotion to questions of professional identities and communities. The concept of platformed intimacy captures how actors experience social network sites and apps, such as Instagram and Facebook, as 'grey areas' in which they deal with the frequent uncertainty about the meaning of social media visibility for their employability and future collaborations. For actors in our study, social media presence is intimately entangled with their sense of professionalism and desire of to belong to a professional community of peers. As such it articulates senses of proximity and reciprocity as well as feelings of discomfort and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewing psychoanalytic psychotherapist Shifa Haq's book In Search of Return: Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir, Willow Pearson Trimbach illuminates windows of faith embodied through mourner-survivors' collective political resistance and creative work. Haq presents and situates the stories of three mourner-survivors and their families in the context of militarized violence and collective trauma in Kashmir, advancing the psychoanalytic theory of mourning as she recognizes and shines a light on memorializing remembrance and the imagination of the petitioning unconscious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development and application of technologies such as robots and artificial intelligence drive a shift toward non-routinized, creative work. A stylized narrative is that a few regions dominate the making of these technologies and enjoy a virtuous cycle of increasing employment, innovativeness, and in-migration of the creative class. Regions merely applying these technologies may get into a vicious cycle of increasing unemployment, out-migration, and decreasing innovativeness. Following the normative governance turn in regional political economics, this theoretical policy paper pitches a framework of three complementary institutions to direct the technology-driven structural change for regional catching-up. Firstly, a system for innovation and entrepreneurial activity creates jobs by supporting exploitation of complementarities of application, co-development activities, and product innovation within mature and emerging sectors. Secondly, education provides creative and entrepreneurial skills to exploit technological opportunities and upskills workers for emerging sectors. Thirdly, labour market and social security institutions are to allow rationalization in mature sectors, incentivize hiring and learning on the job, as well as encourage innovative ventures, notably in emerging sectors. Challenges of implementation of the framework due to path-dependence, co-evolution, and multi-scalarity as well as applicability in different varieties of capitalism are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term cultural entrepreneurship is increasingly used in academic research to address the intersection of business developments and creative work. However, the concept itself is disputed. Unpacking varying definitions of the term, this article revisits literature on the topic, searching for the figures of the cultural entrepreneur that scholars create. The article suggests that the literature is dominated by hero figures, who are based on retrospective analyses of successful individuals, and tragic hero figures, who summarize the situation for most self-employed creatives, establishing a bleak outlook. As an alternative, the article suggests seeing cultural entrepreneurs as catalyst figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]