Does Immaterial Labour Work?

The cultural industries are often seen as a key testing zone for theories of creative labour. If creative work in general is precarious, as some would argue it is (because creativity is supposedly dependent, in any industry, on innovation and therefore its results and returns cannot be predicted with certainty) then work in the cultural industries might be particularly prone to high levels of risk and casualisation. However, along with new theories of 'precarity', there is much theoretical talk at the moment of the new capacities of 'immaterial labour' for new forms of solidarity. Such speculations are rarely based on empirical work. This paper reports on empirical work in three different cultural industries: television, recorded music, and magazine journalism. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, it asks: what forms of precarity and solidarity are apparent in these supposedly archetypal 'creative industries'? How is such precarity and solidarity constructed, negotiated and internalised in different industrial, institutional and genre settings? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]