Precarious Creativity

"Precarious Creativity provides a corrective to previous, U.S.-centric attempts to understand the global media economy by offering a bracing look at the dark underbelly of life for most media workers today. Creative labor must navigate not only the future shock of new digital media technologies and practices but also the impact of enhanced globalization, resulting in long hours, dangerous conditions, and unstable futures. The blurred distinction between amateurs and professionals, the proliferation of brand-content hybrids on streaming video platforms, and the glut of international coproductions that target non-union workers are each taking a bite out of the once potent talent guilds in the United States, while nullifying the protections once afforded by government-supported local culture industries."—Denise Mann, Professor, Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, UCLA

"Wide-ranging, diverse, and authoritative, Precarious Creativity enlarges the terms in which we understand the changing nature of film, television, and digital media globally. Setting its task as untangling the nuances of increasingly precarious creative work across different industry sites, scales, and countries, this book succeeds in building a balanced and comprehensive portrayal of the reshaping of the contours of work and industry organization under the twin circumstances of digital disruption and a globalizing media system. Connecting working conditions and concerns of creative workers and businesses to their advocacy organizations and guilds, as well as governmental policies and initiatives, Precarious Creativity makes working lives and the perspective of work in organizations central to our understanding of and conversations about the screen media industries."—Tom O'Regan, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland

"In this timely and telling collection, Curtin and Sanson bring together top media industry scholars to consider how the consolidation of corporate control and the dispersal of creative labor are reshaping film and television production--and the labor force itself--on a worldwide scale. Every case study is an eye-opener, and no other book comes close to Precarious Creativity in assessing the plight of creative workers in the era of global conglomerate Hollywood."—Thomas Schatz, University of Texas at Austin