This paper uses a case study of how labour time is measured in the creative industries to restate the relevance of the concept of value as a means by which we can connect what goes on in the workplace at a HRM level with what goes on outside in the market, and the determination of the former by the latter. Drawing on 33 interviews with workers at 10 graphic design, brand design and strategic design agencies in the UK and the Netherlands, including 9 freelancers, it considers how the decisions made by managers in the creative industries about who, what and how to measure are not made in a vacuum, but impacted upon by the specific social, economic and political contexts to which creative labour is subject at a sectoral, corporate, national, local and contractual register.
In so doing it addresses two very different perspectives on the specificity of contemporary labour of which work in the creative industries is typically taken to represent: labour process theory (LPT) and postoperaismo. Whereas the first centres the workplace as the locus of continuity in capitalism, the latter centres the workplace as the locus of change. In so doing the former has traditionally stood as an opponent of the claims of novelty found in the latter and its cognate schools of thought- no more so than today in the reappearance of many of postoperaismo’s key ideas in contemporary ‘postcapitalist’ thinking.
But in one respect LPT and postoperaismo share a key commonality: the stress placed upon the content of labour as the arbiter of wider changes or continuities in capitalism, and not the specific commodified forms this labour and its results assume in the market. This is expressed in their respective ambivalences around the Marxian theory of value. For the postoperaists, notably, the conceptual pre-eminence granted labour’s content is the basis for the claim that the character of contemporary ‘immaterial labour’ is such that it sparks a ‘crisis of measurability’ whereby work is beyond all measure, leading finally to a crisis in the law of value. Here the rejection is empirical, based on an observable change.
For LPT, meanwhile, the core theory rejects the Marxian understanding of value not as empirically outmoded, but as a logical dead end in and of itself from which certain elements such as exploitation can be rescued. But what these two ambivalent treatments tend to preclude, in both theoretical instances, is an appreciation of what makes labour specific in capitalist society- the particular value-bearing form it and its products take.
The preoccupation with the content of labour leads postoperaismo to extrapolate from microscopic changes in the character of work a crisis in capitalism tout court. The creative industries are taken to exemplify the tendencies that produce this crisis. Meanwhile, the same preoccupation with the content of labour leads LPT to disregard the reason why this crisis of measurability cannot be so. This is that the ultimate arbitration of how work is managed and measured is not to do with the labour itself but with the imperatives placed upon it by the forms in which it results. The measure is forced upon work by the framework of value to which it is subservient. Value is therefore suggested as an indispensable conceptual tool to understand the relationship between the workplace and its context, beyond the labour process to the valorisation process of which it is a part.
This argument is made on the evidence of an in-depth case study of HRM practices in ten creative agencies in the UK and the Netherlands, specifically with reference to how forms of measurement are sustained in spite of the inscrutability of creative labour. They are sustained, the paper suggests, with reference to the specific socio-economic and political-economic context of crisis, competition, regulation and so on in which creative agencies find themselves at the precipice of both external product and labour markets. They are particularly susceptible to global, national and local institutional factors arising from outside the firm owing to their pivotal position in addressing the most sensitive area of capital enterprise: the realisation of value in the buying and selling of products of labour as commodities in the market. This means they act as a vector for the accumulated pressures of other actors in this outside context.
The paper identifies five areas in which this is so, all of which relate in some way to the commodified form assumed by the particular service the agency offers or, alternatively, the particular commodified good the service is rendered in order to help to sell. In enforcing the continued measure of creative labour, managers have to confront and resolve a series of contradictions in each:
Sectorally, the particularly kind of creative agency impacts upon the particular pressures managers face in measuring labour. High-turnover large global media conglomerates, their subsidiaries, independent agencies, smaller ‘boutique’ agencies and, finally, freelancers, all experience and enforce different kinds of measurement- but it proceeds in each case nonetheless in spite of claims otherwise in the literature.
Nationally, agencies are subject to the specific working cultures in which they are located, although, as I show, in the case of Dutch and British agencies, flows of individual labour from the latter to the former subtly restructures expectations around work intensity and extent.
In the specific corporate contexts in which they find themselves owing to the clients they work with, agencies act as a conveyor belt for the importing of sector-specific pressures from elsewhere. Public sector clients demand accountability which requires a greater emphasis on producing paper trails of time served. Construction companies have least affinity with the ins and outs of the creative labour process, requiring constant justification of the work completed on the basis of hourly chunks of time worked. Fast Moving Consumer Goods firms, the principal source of income for the agencies studied, exist in perpetual contingency and thus place great pressure on agencies to conform to the constantly unexpected in time and effort. Tobacco companies, another central source of revenue, are constrained by new laws and regulations that in turn standardise the content of labour performed by designers working on tobacco packaging. Finally, in dealing with commodities and chemicals companies, agencies are compelled to act as the good conscience of controversial market actors, plugged into the feedback loop of public sentiment and forever on call to put out CSR-related fires. All these specific contextual complexes wield an effect on how work is managed and measured internally.
Locally, the process of creative clustering and the cycle of gentrification associated with it inducts agencies into a spiral of initial cheap rent and plentiful labour gradually replaced by rising rent, overheads, and competition as creative talent is leaked to more liberated upstart studios taking advantage of cheap rent elsewhere. At each stage the imperatives on management to measure to either invest or cut costs issue from outside the labour process and sculpt it from without.
Finally, different kinds of contract from different kinds of client impact upon how the graphic design, brand design and strategic design agencies covered in the studies manage and measure the work performed within. Larger multinational clients more likely insist on a retainer relationship which creates a closer sense of time budget with attendant impacts on the work conditions creatives experience. Medium sized firms might be more comfortable with a typical billable hours way of working, where a notional amount of hours feeds down through the agency hierarchy and structures work in turn. And for the smaller luxury brands with which boutique agencies work, jobs may be priced by the piece which induces an apparently more creatively liberated way of work- although not without complications of its own.
Each of these impact on measurement in a certain way that stems from the form labour and its products assume and in which they are valued, rather than the labour itself. HRM is performed in service to these contexts, its expectations and actions crafted by the form rather than the content of labour. What this goes to show, I suggest. Is that the value of ‘value’, specifically in its Marxian understanding, is that it does the theoretical underlabour for understanding how what goes on day to day in the workplace relates to what goes on outside. I suggest that the evidence given in this paper suggests a productive meeting point between Marxian value-form theory and institutional analysis, insofar as the value-form can be taken to itself act as a regulative mechanism placing certain barriers, limitations and compulsions on managers and their attempts to measure creative labour. This would provide a valuable counterpoint to optimistic postoperaist and postcapitalist portrayals of the kind of work found in the creative industries and the purported crisis of measurability it precipitates, which seem to suggest that the labour they celebrate is no longer governed by capitalist social relations or social forms, uprooted from any institutional influence whatsoever.
I close with consideration of the wider political and practical implications of this analysis. For the understanding of capitalism and the possibility of its replacement, a form perspective on contemporary labour does not permit utopian schemes based on perceived changes in the content of labour as precipitating a postcapitalist or postwork society. For worker struggles in the area studied, the analysis poses important and probing questions for how the new forms of work organisation being developed by creative workers can confront challenges that emit from outside the workplace in the market and society as a whole.