Aside from the obvious assertions that people throw easily around noting that we all have to work, and that work will (has?) consume over one-third of our lives, have you really thought about what work means to you, in the digital age?  Have you thought about what skills and knowledge will you require to adapt to less permanent, more mobile, less tactile, more virtual careers.

Certainly from my memories of my grandfather who worked most of his life in a brewery, the way we work has changed from his day.  He went to work at 7am, had a beer, did his job, had lunch, had a beer after work and came home.  This was a five day a week routine, Monday to Friday.  No weekends, no overtime.  No email to be checked at home after dinner, no Skype meetings late at night.  And the beer he made was sold only in the state of New South Wales, Australia.  There was no export, no time difference, no globalisation, just localisation.  This was a full-time job; there were no casual positions, fractional working or contract labour.

 

From the experiences of creative industries workers, what has work become? Over the last decade, the arts in a number of major economies have consistently experienced reduced recurrent funding, increased reliance on either philanthropic donations or business/commercial income and pressure to survive in an increasingly self-centred and entrepreneurial world.   Both government and philanthropic funding bodies, through grant allocation processes and compliance regimes, have sought to impose ‘for-profit’ practices on the arts and cultural sector in order to seek or continue public funding or to comply with broader cross-sector industry policy shifts within the economy (Johanson 2008).  This has resulted in direct government intervention in the management and practices of the organisation (Weisbrod 1997, pp. 543-5) and the emergence of threats to the organisational mission through the application of ‘coercive… pressures’ (Dolnicar, Irvine & Lazarevski 2008, p. 11) and the drifting of organisational missions (Dalton & Green 2005).  It can be argued that these outcomes may lead to an improvement of the ongoing viability of the organisation, but at what cost?  And how do these changes impact on the role of the worker and the work they do?

 

In a major report commissioned by the Australia Council for Arts entitled ‘Don’t give up your day job’ by Michael Throsby and Virginia Hollister (2003), there were a number of interesting observations about the nature of creative work in Australia, which included the inability of some artists to undertake professional development due to the pressures of money and time (or more specifically the lack of money arising from financial returns of their creative work) and that over half the artists in Australia earned less than A$7000 (around £4500) per annum from their artistic practice.  These relatively low income figures, shifting impermanence of careers and lack of opportunity to develop have been debated consistently through research studies over the last decade (Bennett 2009; Bilton 2007; Comunian, Faggian & Li 2010).

 

So, what has become of arts and cultural work in this new digital environment?  Rather than getting into a long commentary on the philosophical debates around some of the data and research, I thought I would just comment on my observations, made through my own practice and experiences both teaching arts practitioners and working myself in the field.

 

1.Work is transitory

Full-time work is becoming rarer.  Contracts are shorter; workers are becoming self-sufficient managing their own pensions, insurance and businesses.  Portfolio careers are becoming the norm, where arts workers have a variety of jobs (some arts related, others not) to support themselves and aggregate income.  The notion of career development within a job or single employer has shifted markedly, with career leaps frequently happening due to changes in employment between organisations rather than within.  Managing time, presenting a professional image online and reacting quickly to opportunity are hallmarks of this kind of employment.  The use of Linked-in, Facebook or Twitter as business cards for your practice require thought about your professional persona, the image you want to present and how these personas connect with each other.  Transitory work also means you need to be willing to develop and learn skills quickly and be able to apply them without too much practice, which means building into your career time ongoing and regular practice, rehearsal and professional development, led and often paid for by yourself.

 

2. Work is trans-global

Working in your home city or your home country is not necessarily mandatory.  Arts work as it moves to digital environments, or is facilitated by rapidly improving digital communications has moved to using concepts such as virtual studios, cloud collaborations, virtual meetings, technology integrated practice and user generated content sharing.  This makes work trans-global.  A photographer in Sydney can take photos in Berlin, share them on a blog or Flickr and exhibit them anywhere in the world he likes (see my good friend Alex Pekar’s exhibition entitled ‘Abandoned Berlin’ at the Archetype Gallery in Sydney if you are there http://www.archetypegallery.com/now_and_next_chauvel.html).

 

Trans-global work might mean that as an artist I move my practice to where the professional work might be.  This presents challenges in terms of integration, ‘breaking’ into a scene or adapting to changes in language, law or culture.  Whilst work becomes trans-global the attitude to migration (outside the EU) is changing rapidly.  Just ask an Aussie trying to work in the UK!

 

3.Work is trans-discipline

Some of the skills of work are now free from disciplinarily or specific industry contexts.  Whether it be demonstrated through graduate attributes (see the Greenwich Graduate Initiative for examples of this kind of approach (http://www2.gre.ac.uk/about/schools/eddev/support/graduate), transferable skills or professional practice sets, some of the skills of work are now transferable between contexts, generic and applicable to a variety of levels of work.  Covering skills such problem solving, information technology, social media, collaboration, content generation and research (inquiry), trans-disciplinary skills support both the transience and the trans-global nature of modern work.  McWilliam, Hearn and Haseman (2008) identifies a number of trans-disciplinary spaces within creative industries practice including;

–          Technology, which includes the use and application of new devices, software platforms and new media

–          a social/human component, which includes how we interface with each other and technology, how we do business, how we engage with each other and the environment and the ways in which we regulate activity

–          a content component – how we innovate content such as performance, design, look, feel, roles we play (McWilliam, Hearn & Haseman 2008)

 

I would add to that a cultural component about interacting and engaging with the culture around us, an emotional component centring on how we react to situations, how we build and sustain relationships and how we chose to act as a professional and finally a creative component, supporting the development of new ideas, problem solving, critical thinking, inquiry and curiosity and analysis.

 

4. Work is transformative

When my grandfather worked, the transformations that occurred in his work practice were in the creation and mashing of raw materials into something completed different (hops, wheat, malt and water into beer).  I am not sure how much of his life was transformed by his practice.  As arts professionals, there is a blurry line between what we do as artists, what we live as artists and what we passionately want to share as artists.  The notion of work simply to earn an income or to mark time between 9am until 5pm is in some instances dated.  Work transforms who we are, the way we live our lives and the way we engage with other aspects of our everyday existence.  My wife often will interrupt a conversation and say ‘Peter, stop using your teacher voice!’  But for me the practice of teaching signifies in a number of ways who I am.  Being a teacher has had a transformative effect on my relationships, my values and my personality.  The same can be said for my arts practice.  I took a long time to have the confidence to call myself an artist, even though I had been engaged in creative practice for decades. But the on-going impact of my creative practice on my professional identity, the way I worked and the way I developed myself in terms of education was too big to ignore by dismissing arts as ‘dabbling’.

 

Mezirow (1997) in a seminal article about transformative learning argues that transformations can occur within the frames of reference we operate in (work for example) and encourage is to be more ‘inclusive, discriminating, self-reflective, and integrative of experience.’  The transformative nature of work shouldn’t be underestimated, and once again, integrating it with the changes occurring from trans-globalism, trans-disciplinarily and transience the new world of digital work within e-workplaces, e-commuting, e-learning and e-collaborative space is looking less and less like the brewery floor in the 1950s.

 

Work is more than a site where money is earned in exchange for activity or labour.  Work harnesses creativity, originality, learning, expression, research, desire and passion.  Work can facilitate the mode and spaces of living you choose.  Work can develop, challenge, evaluate and apply new knowledge and skills.  Work can shape our professional image and transform our confidence, our interactions and our relationships.  The work we do today probably won’t be the same as the work we do in 10 years time.  The days of going home with chalk dust all over my clothes is long gone, technology has shaped and changed the way I engage with materials, talk with colleagues and find stuff out. What makes the process interesting and perhaps fun is having the scaffold of skills that you allow you to adapt, to build and to innovate and invent yourself.

 

NOTE: If you are interested in these kinds of discussions and issues, or just interested in employer engagement, then you should consider attending the University of Greenwich ‘Employer Engagement in a Digital Age’ conference on the 4^th July 2012 at the Maritime Greenwich campus in London.  For more information you can check out the website 

 

Bennett, D. 2009, ‘Careers in dance: Beyond performance to the real world of work’, Journal of Dance Education, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 27-34.

Bilton, C. 2007, Management and creativity: From creative industries to creative management, Wiley-Blackwell.

Comunian, R., Faggian, A. & Li, Q.C. 2010, ‘Unrewarded careers in the creative class: The strange case of bohemian graduates’, Papers in Regional Science, vol. 89, no. 2, pp. 389-410.

Dalton, B. & Green, J. 2005, Sweet charity and filthy lucre: the social construction of nonprofit business venturing in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States – CACOM Working Paper no 72, Centre for Australian Community Organisations and Management – Univeristy of Technology, Sydney.

Dolnicar, S., Irvine, H. & Lazarevski, K. 2008, ‘Mission or money? Competitive challenges facing public sector nonprofit organisations in an institutionalised environment’, International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 107.

Johanson, K. 2008, ‘How Australian industry policy shaped cultural policy’, International Journal of Culutral Policy, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 139-48.

McWilliam, E., Hearn, G. & Haseman, B. 2008, ‘Transdisciplinarity for creative futures: what barriers and opportunities?’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 247-53.

Mezirow, J. 1997, ‘Transformative learning: Theory to practice’, New directions for adult and continuing education, vol. 1997, no. 74, pp. 5-12.

Throsby, D. & Hollister, V. 2003, Don’t Give Up Your Day Job: an Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Australia Council for the Arts.

Weisbrod, B.A. 1997, ‘The Future of the Nonprofit Sector: Its Entwining Private Enterprise and Goverment’, Journal of Policy Analysis and Government, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 541-55.