15.3: Subcontracting and Subcontracted Creativity
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- Anthony Fung
- University of California Press
A comparative perspective on creativity labor should also take into account the new international division of cultural labor in relation to creative industries, which is a result of cultural globalization. 9 Florida, in the new edition of his book, also mentioned the global effects of the creative class, 10 acknowledging that cultural globalization would inevitably create differences between people working in the center and those working on the periphery. The difference is a reflection of the dependence of new creative satellite cities or nations on the global media hub or transnational creative industries. As a value chain of cultural industries, it is a strategy for big transnational companies to search for the cheapest locations to “manufacture” cultural products using low-cost, labor-intensive processes in developing countries. However, for creative industries, the relocation of production is not simply a direct transference of manual labor from the established economy to developing countries. Game industries, for example, involve highly skilled labor in programming, computer graphics, and artwork. Thus contracting companies from the United States have to ensure that the skills and techniques in programming games are adopted by the contracted companies, and the aesthetics of the artwork have to be consistent throughout development. It is quite common that multiple subcontractors are used, but this doesn’t mean that all those working on the project share a collective vision. The contracted labor will most likely feel complacent about the arrangement; they often feel diffident about adopting the aesthetics of the giant lead companies. For example, Disney often subcontracts for artwork and Nintendo for animation, using many small- to medium-size teams for numerous aspects of a production. Moreover, the exploding popularity of online gaming among Asian consumers has further stimulated an expansion in the number and variety of companies operating in the gaming industries.
Despite the energetic growth of the gaming sector, Asian cultural labor is largely subordinated to global creative industries. The latter set the overall agenda for developing popular titles and prescribe aesthetics for the subcontractor to follow. In other words, global companies subcontract their version of creativity to game developers who must uncritically accept guidance from above. This involves standardization of both the professional knowledge needed to produce the work and the values and aesthetics needed to appreciate and legitimize the production. To understand the complex workings of market-submarket and prescribing and prescribed creativity requires a theoretical model that takes into account both the value-free cultural work and the potential commodification and fetishization of mass cultural production.
Reconciling critical theory, neo-Foucauldian, and liberal-democratic approaches, Banks’s critical framework on cultural work is useful here for examining the de facto nature of creativity and cultural labor across the neoliberal and capitalist markets dominated by multinational enterprises. In the context of Western cultural economies, he argues that there are always tensions between autonomous production on one side and corporate functionality of production and governmental prescription on the other, and this creates a spectrum of arguments from the discourse of moral, empowering cultural labor to the subordinated, alienated workers, with some alternative and moderate discourses in the middle. 11
Putting the global context of cultural production of game industries in Banks’s framework, we can assume that while there are relatively free autonomous cultural workers in the major market of Western Hollywood production, there are also subcontracted cultural workers struggling in many other parts of the world, where the conditions for subcontractors vary by firm, location, and job. To understand the uneven and diverse terrains of game labor, it is important to critically survey differences in the condition of cultural labor among geographic locales without assuming that their lives, wages, working conditions, and (dis)empowering possibilities are equal. What follows is an overview of three important production locales: Southeast Asia, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China. As we will see, government policies, market dynamics, and cultural specificity all have a significant impact on working conditions and on the attitudes and values among game company employees.