Precarity, Biography, and Event: Work and Time in the Cultural Industries

Abstract

This article explores the temporality of work and employment in the cultural, creative, and media industries (‘cultural work’). Building on recent sociological writing on ‘event-time’, I explore the ways in which owner-managers of small creative firms navigate the contingent workplace in a world of allegedly advanced ‘precarity’, yet seek also to maintain their own stable anchorage to a linear ‘biographical’ time marked by continuity and a control of material privilege. It is argued that understanding the political economy of time in cultural work requires theorization of temporal continuity as well as change, not only to avoid making undue epochal judgements but also to ensure continued recognition of social differences in the ways time is being encountered and experienced at work.