Measuring and managing creative labour: Value struggles and billable hours in the creative industries

Abstract

Creative labour is often characterised as hard to measure and manage. As ‘immaterial labour’, it breaches the working day’s boundaries and produces uncertain outputs. These conditions, claim postoperaists, precipitate a ‘crisis of measurability’. Drawing on 33 interviews with workers at 10 graphic, brand and strategic design agencies in the UK and the Netherlands, this article disputes claims creative labour eludes quantification. Responding to calls to reconnect organisational research with the study of value, it deploys Marxian value theory to demonstrate that the billable hours system of pricing and allocating work in creative agencies establishes ‘fictitious norms of timing’ reminiscent of the Taylorist factory that mediate the labour-process with reference to standards of socially-necessary labour-time set in the market. Rebureaucratising and socialising creative labour, billable hours help creative agencies overcome measurability as a problem, not a crisis. But the timesheeting practices around which billable hours are organised internally are marked by antagonisms. The combination of clear measures around which to bargain and their pivotal economic role has implications for how we conceptualise the capacity of creative workers to collectively organise, make claims on value and create the potential for a realisation of the conditions of crisis postoperaists describe.