16.2: Contextualizing Precarious Creativity

The notion of precarity and the neologism precariat have emerged in academia over the past decade to account for the way the labor market is reorganizing in many developed economies in response to flexible forms of capitalism; for instance, an increasing number of jobs are listed as casual without fixed incomes or benefits. Skills learned in schools and universities, such as reading and theorizing, are losing value in occupations that rely on on-the job learning.⁴ When this argument is extended to art, design, and media sectors, we are informed of the condition of “precarious creativity.” On the surface, this coinage conjures up a dark side to creativity. In contrast to a wide-ranging consensus among educators, psychologists, and business leaders that creativity is positive and aspirational, there are now negative externalities to consider, among which is the apparently transient nature of employment in many creative sectors. Many scholars opt to use precarity as a corrective to euphoric claims associated with the creative economy, particularly that it is expanding globally and generating more meaningful jobs.⁵

When used to refer to cultural and creative labor, precarity normally picks up on the employment insecurity of workers in industry sectors affected by technological convergence—for instance, music, film and TV production, online games, and design—rather than those providing lower-level service jobs in the same industries.⁶ Of course, creative work itself is difficult to define, and it is beyond the scope of this essay to investigate gradations of creative labor intensity. What can be argued, however, is that creative products and services sold to consumer markets are generally produced by people with specifically acquired skill sets. My own research into media parks and creative clusters in China identified that 95 percent of creative workers had tertiary degrees, mostly undergraduate (54 percent).⁷ Moreover, such technical and managerial skills can be easily learned or transferred when businesses move offshore, particularly when R&D sharing is part of the market entry equation.⁸ For instance, AnnaLee Saxenian has characterized the migration of the Taiwanese integrated circuit (IC) supply chain to Shanghai in the early 1990s as “perhaps the greatest transfer of managerial and technical skills in human history.”⁹

In China, where the nation’s capital stock has accumulated largely by virtue of “sweat industries,” the discourse of creativity juxtaposes productivity gains and labor market transformation. It promises a way to lift masses of people out of polluting, repetition-based industries and move them into value-adding service sectors while at the same time revitalizing domestic cultural and content industries by making them internationally successful; it offers what might be termed “cultural soft power” dividends.¹⁰ Indeed, gains in expertise and innovation in new media sectors, which are less burdened by regulation, are assisting the Chinese government in its mission to extend the nation’s soft power internationally. The key factor is knowledge—or more specifically, know-how. The concept of know-how is by now fairly well entrenched in management literature. In speaking of China, moreover, it is worthwhile noting the epistemological distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how, as elaborated by Gilbert Ryle in the 1940s.¹¹ Knowledge-that constitutes propositional knowledge, things that we know about the world. Ryle believed that knowing-how is a “higher-grade disposition,” associated with “abilities and propensities” as well as “capacities, habits, liabilities and bents.”¹²

Many view the challenge in terms of “catching up” with and learning from advanced soft-power nations in terms of acquiring more know-how. While the Chinese government is reluctant to openly identify such “know-how-rich” nations, there is no doubt that most practitioners in the creative industries target Western developed economies as well as Japan and South Korea. These have become China’s “soft power competitors.”¹³ The acquisition of foreign know-how, in addition to codified intellectual knowledge (knowledge-that), readily obtainable from reports and scholarship, offers a key that can unlock secrets of innovation.

For a Chinese person, the chance to work in a foreign company may be the means of acquiring both crucial know-how and know-that. But how long the worker stays with a company depends on salary, job satisfaction, and career expectations. The inclination to change occupations can be explained in terms of “compensating differentials,” that is, the coexistence of monetary and nonmonetary elements of employment.¹⁴ People undertake jobs for a variety of reasons: in many creative industries, some work for less or work long hours because they enjoy the work they are doing and the people they associate with. Moreover, in a market like China, where there are plenty of job openings in new media sectors, workers can experience significant mobility. Taking knowledge gained, including IP, elsewhere is therefore another variant of precarious creativity. In short, the Chinese government hopes that the transfer of international knowledge together with an understanding of markets and consumer preferences might contribute to the rise of Chinese media influence. Whether this rise signals the receding influence of international media in China is a moot point.