The study of creative labor or the creative class attracted substantial academic interest in the 1990s. Richard Florida might be one of the first researchers to describe the emerging occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the American creative class.4 In his view, it is a privileged group that not only excels in creativity but leads a modern bohemian lifestyle. Moreover, this unconventional artistic existence is often associated with material comforts, cultural capital, and above-average working conditions. Problematizing the assumption that workers in creative industries are by default creative opens up a new imaginative space for conceptualizing this kind of labor.
David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker’s book on creative labor is perhaps the most recent and comprehensive work to synthesize and problematize the concept of creative labor in the United Kingdom.5 They challenge the assumptions of autonomy, well-paid work, and the high quality of life of the cultural laborer. Moreover, recent debates about the concept of creativity have suggested that it is highly variable and contextually embedded.6 Hence the assumption that being creative is natural when technology and capital are in place is problematic. Similarly, in a study of artists and administrators for digital game companies in a small city in Canada, Laura Murray and others showed that they were often involved in contractual relationships with the audience and hence were swayed by the latter’s feedback, a relationship that challenged notions of autonomous creative genius.7
Creative industries in the United States, which usually involve exporting cultural commodities, are a crucial driver of economic revenue and account for a large portion of the country’s GDP. Other nation-states share these priorities, whereas for some countries, factors such as political interest and the vested interests of autocrats are more important. Yet even in countries like China, where political priorities prevail, cultural exports are seen as a way of exercising soft power and developing the economic power of their media and film industries.8 Under such circumstances, creative labor might benefit from top-down support for their industries, even though key elements of creativity, such as free expression, cultural tolerance, and the marketplace of ideas, may be stringently limited. The intriguing question is whether we redefine or requalify this type of creativity. If so, what specific characteristics might define alternative notions of creative labor?
In an effort to more accurately profile those working in the creative industries, I use the term cultural labor instead of creative labor. Whether it is creative or noncreative depends on the specific sociopolitical context. In China’s political environment, cultural labor is not “creative” enough to construct a virtual game world that would enable universal suffrage and voting. Yet an employee of Netease, a major online gaming platform, explains that Chinese game planners are often smart enough to bypass and outmaneuver constraints imposed by political leaders in order to launch and operate popular games.
In other words, the socio-political contexts in which creative industries are developed and sustained, and in which creative laborers work, produce, and are reproduced, result in different conceptions of creativity. When explained in terms of maneuvering around boundaries, creativity might be very limited; however, when understood in terms of entrepreneurial strategies aimed at navigating both market and political structures, they comprise a broader scope of cultural labor.
