Back to the future of journalist work? Entrepreneurial subjectivity and freelance journalism in Sweden

Abstract

This article adds to our knowledge of precarious journalist work in advanced welfare states. By drawing on the literature on neoliberal governmentality, it explores how entrepreneurial subjects are constituted, and the particular role of freelance work in this process. The article is based on interviews with 52 freelance journalists in Sweden. The study illustrates how the impermanent and marketized forms of freelance work enforces an entrepreneurial subjectivity onto the individuals who engage in it – a subject position which in turn seems to be necessary when it comes to making it in a fierce freelance market. In this way, the neoliberal discourse of entrepreneurship has a performative effect in that it helps to produce the kind of entrepreneurial subjects needed in order for a competitive precarious labour market to function. At the end of the article, I discuss how the particular role of the Swedish setting, that is, an advanced welfare state with strong worker protection, paradoxically seems to amplify the precarious work done by some professionals as it only protects those on the ‘inside’ of traditional employment, while leaving increasing groups of outsiders, such as freelance journalists, exposed to precarization.