Chapter 15: Redefining Creative Labor – East Asian Comparisons

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Page ID: 175235

Anthony Fung
University of California Press

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People often fantasize about Hollywood’s workforce being composed of innovative people imbued with refined tastes and aesthetics. They are further imagined as being well paid and therefore able to enjoy a rosy bohemian or bourgeois lifestyle, as opposed to other industrial workers. This romantic vision of the hip Hollywood creative may be apocryphal, but few would deny that the industry has long prospered because it has been able to foster and harness the creative energies of its employees.

15.1: Introduction
Introduction to the goal of this chapter: to investigate the values and attitudes of workers in game-related companies in Asia, and how they diverge from the traditional Western model of creativity.
15.2: Problematizing Creativity
Problematizing the model of the "creative class", developed in the 1990s from analysis of American creatives. Considering how varying socio-political contexts of creative industries result in different conceptions of creativity.
15.3: Subcontracting and Subcontracted Creativity
Forming a framework for cultural labor in globalized creative industries that considers how such labor in developing countries is often subcontracted from and subordinated to these global industries.
15.4: Three Major Production Regions in Asia
A brief overview of the historical and modern status of the games industry of three regions of Asia—Southeast Asia, Korea, and China—in relation to the global games industry.
15.5: Modes of Creative Labor
Developing a framework for analyzing globalized labor in creative industries, including subcontracted labor, with two major axes: creative dependence and tolerance for creativity.
15.6: Three Modes of Cultural Labor
Analyzing the cultures of the game industries in the three major Asian production locales, to identify the dominant mode of cultural labor in each: progressive artists in Korea, skilled enthusiasts in Southeast Asia, and contented bourgeois in China.
15.7: Conclusion – Creative Industries With or Without Creativity
Summary of the ways in which creativity is a relative concept, with reasons from globalized economic hierarchies to internal national ideologies.
15.8: Notes