ILPC 2026

This article explores the labor process and new strategy of labor control in the Chinese fast-rising new industry – the cultural and creative industry. Based on our intensive fieldwork at a TV show production company which locates in Shanghai City, China, from the June 2015 to the Feb 2016, this article depicts the everyday working lives of intern labour and analyses how the management make the students involve into the unpaid and heave work with enthusiasm and why they consent to their own exploitation.

The main findings of this article are that, compared with traditional industries, in the labor process of cultural and creative industry, the aim of the management is to make certain experience, and the labor control was based on several cultural facts – intimate relation, atmosphere, feeling, rather than organizational institutions. We focused on three mechanisms, by which the wonderful experience was made: firstly, with the mechanism of “relational work”(Zelizer, 2012), the management in the project team mad friends with interns and pleased them, which mad interns would like to follow after them; secondly, with the mechanism of “atmosphere creating”, the management made interns immerse in the sensory stimulation, and then transform the heavy labor to exited entertainment; thirdly, with the mechanism of “sublimation”(Zizek, 1989), the management made the entertainment labor detached from fun, which made interns felt they were closing to some noble longings. Finally, with these three mechanisms work together, intern workers worked for more than 60 hours a week with enthusiasm – sometimes they need to work for 30 hours continuously, in their three-months long project. And because of the making of a wonderful experience, the depressed work had been transformed to fantastic entertainment.

Through the case study of intern labour, our theoretical contribution is to point out another logic of ideological domination in the labor process. This kind of ideological domination is not like “Marx – Althusser” type, under which the management shaped a certain perception through the labor process, covered up real labor relations with a false consciousness. The logic of this ideological domination is similar to “Lacanian - Zizek” type: through certain experience, these intern labour trapped into the ideological fantasy, and they happily pursued the surplus-enjoyment in an ideological reality. Although few interns had challenged the labour control and even withdrawn from the project team, however, because of the lack of public discussion and the individual attribution tendency of other team members, it’s impossible for them to overthrow the symbolic order.

When Neil Postman presented the point view of “amusing ourselves to death”, he had criticized the media culture which was constructed by the show business, however, he didn’t refer to the entertainment labor hided behind it. And we found interns in the TV show production company experienced another form of "amusing themselves to death" and devote themselves to their own exploitation.