Acknowledgments
Part I: Introductions
1. Creative Control?
2. Conflicting Creativities
Part II: SoniCo’s Social Regime
3. SoniCo’s Positive Pole: Aesthetic Subjectivities and Control
4. SoniCo’s Negative Pole: Mitigating Precarity and Alienated
Judgment
Part III: The Future’s Quantified Regime
5. The Future’s Positive Pole: Platform Discipline, Transience, and
Immersion
6. The Future’s Negative Pole: Compound Precarity and the
(Infra)structure of Alienated Judgment
Part IV: Conclusion
7. Toward a Theory of Creative Labor and a Politics of Judgment
Methodological Appendix: Attending to Difference in Similarity and
Gender’s Access
Notes
References
Index
Michael L. Siciliano is assistant professor of sociology at Queen’s University.
Film and media scholars who study industries must read Creative
Control. Siciliano leverages cultural sociology and meticulous
ethnography to masterfully unpack the considerable contradictions
of media creation in the platform era. His focus on creative
routinization exposes film studies' exceptionalism as a strawman,
ill-equipped to make sense of online media.
*John T. Caldwell, author of Production Culture: Industrial
Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television*
Some scholars argue that creative work enlivens local economies,
while others emphasize that it exemplifies the precarious
employment spreading across national economies. Siciliano deftly
navigates those divergent depictions by turning to the workers
themselves—illuminating the attraction that creativity holds for
them, as well as the challenges it brings. As a result, he
rightfully moves us from abstract notions of creative work to the
embodied and everyday activity that it actually entails.
*Timothy J. Dowd, Emory University*
With Creative Control, Michael Siciliano joins the finest of
ethnographic traditions—the study of labor in our times. This fresh
perspective on cultural work unpacks the reality behind our
algorithmically defined entertainment future, the content treadmill
that seduced the emotional and professional repertoire of a
generation.
*Melissa Gregg, author of Counterproductive: Time Management in
the Knowledge Economy*
Siciliano’s thoughtful, compelling book deserves to be a major
reference point in studies of creative labor and in research on
work in an age of digital platforms. It combines careful
ethnography with an impressive range of reading to provide fresh
perspectives on longstanding problems of alienation, exploitation,
and control.
*David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds*
Michael Siciliano's book is a must-read for anyone interested in
the culture industries. This ethnography documents firsthand how
various actors within culture-producing firms grapple over power,
profits, and final products. What we create and consume, Creative
Control convincingly demonstrates, derives as much from collective
control as it does individual creativity.
*Jeffrey J. Sallaz, author of Lives on the Line: How the
Philippines Became the World's Call Center Capital*
The book is well researched, well written, and very timely to
better understand subordination and attractions to jobs in the
platform economy and creative production...I hope this ambitious
and detailed study finds a wide readership; it is a required
reading for scholars interested in contemporary creative labor in
platform economies and cultural production more generally.
*Acta Sociologica*
The case studies in Creative Control capture the changing nature of
information-age creative labor and operationalize sociological
concepts to describe its new modes of managerial control and
increased alienation and precarity, providing a framework for
further research into a wider array of creative contexts.
*Critical Studies in Media Communication*
Has important and wide-ranging implications for how we think about
creative labor, and I expect the findings to be of great interest
to sociologists of culture, work, and technology.
*Contemporary Sociology*
A rich empirical account of precarious work in the culture
industries and crafts a novel framework connecting the affective
rewards to the costs of contemporary creative labor.
*American Journal of Sociology*
Provides new ways of understanding the relationship between
creative labor and management that both challenge established ways
of thinking and open up new avenues for understanding the future of
work in the creative sector.
*Administrative Science Quarterly*
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