At this point, it is worth recapping the argument with which we opened this book. Economic change in the West has made the directions of working life more difficult to fathom. Jobs and careers that once appeared stable seem more and more precarious, as do skills, both those acquired on the job and through education. In societies where communal and social supports have eroded, people are increasingly made responsible for their own fate. Policymakers and educators have encouraged workers to develop their creative skills, arguing that the West's future prosperity depends on symbolic and intellectual innovation. Such an injunction strikes a popular chord at two levels. Firstly, it accords with a radical critique of soul-destroying, Taylorised work that has its roots in both the 1960s counterculture (a largely middle-class movement) and in working-class resistance to alienated labour. The creativity injunction appears to offer an alternative to moral conformity, mass production and consumption and the conventional scripts of working life. It finds expression in popular culture, particularly televised talent shows (now a subgenre of ‘reality television’), where contestants can find fame in a variety of creative endeavours – singing, dancing, cooking, modelling. Secondly, the creativity injunction appeals to youth, particularly those who resist or don't fit in at school. Such people can easily become lost in the fog in the journey to adulthood and the idea of a creative career suggests the possibility of bridging subculture/ youth culture and adult life. Where once such cultures seemed hermetically sealed against the workaday world – forming a parallel universe where only imaginary solutions to alienated adult life were possible – now youthful symbolic play receives pedagogical and technocratic encouragement. Most of our interviewees related their vocational aspirations to those freewheeling youth cultural practices. In the creative economy even resistant subculture can provide a foundation for life.

To recap, we have argued that behind the rhetoric of the creative economy is a neo- liberal project to transform labour. This has several elements: to habituate workers to new capitalism's churn and upheaval; to encourage them to be optimistic despite their experience of precarity, underemployment and professional/ career abeyance; and to persuade them to be ready to transfer their creative skills, passions and ambitions towards the opportunities the market presents. In the creative economy, workers should give up on any expectation of a steady, long- term job, and instead look at working life as a series of gigs. The increasing influence of globalization and digitization over economic processes, and the weakening of industrial rights, have undermined job stability. So companies expect workers to be flexible and biddable. In one sense they must live like artists – hand- to- mouth – and be ready to bring the same creative energies to work that they apply to their art, even when performing routinized and low- skilled tasks. But in another sense, they must relinquish the artist's suspicion of commercialization. This chapter will consider how capitalism meets this latter challenge – how it brings creativity to market. Following Boltanski and Chiapello (2006), we argue that the system's remarkable durability is in part based on its capacity to absorb critique. Modern capitalism's alienated labour, mass production and consumption provoked various forms of popular resistance, including from artistic, subcultural and countercultural communities. The popularity of the idea of creative work rests in its implicit promise to remedy these ills, and free us from lives of rigid industrial direction.

However, as we have seen, the task of yoking art to enterprise is not straightforward. In this chapter we look at the idea of the social factory in more detail and how it challenges the work/ play binary. In one sense, immaterial labour is everywhere, but, from a neoclassical economic perspective, it is not productive labour until it is harnessed for profit. So how to make it productive? Immaterial labour rarely complies with the rigid directions and techniques of scientific management.

In opening this book we argued that capitalism now flies the banner of creativity, in part because of the increasing importance of intellectual property to corporate prosperity. Companies can no longer rely exclusively on scientific managers to drive innovation, but must look elsewhere for the symbolic and intellectual labour required to make them competitive. In narrow utilitarian terms, the ‘creative economy’ is simply a project to persuade artists to transfer their skills in commercially viable directions – to abandon the garret for the graphic designer's studio or the copywriter's office. But creativity is more than simply a set of skills. From a romantic perspective, it involves expressing the inner self in symbolic form – through, for example, the quest to produce the masterpiece or the virtuoso performance. In this deeper sense, the creative economy is a bid to conscript workers’ cultural, emotional and intellectual energies for post- Fordist work. New capitalism needs more from labour (whether as wage labourers or subcontractors) than ‘skill’ and obedience.

For workers, long denied any semblance of vocational fulfillment, the idea of creative work appears to hold the promise that they might (a) salvage a modicum of craft satisfaction from the ruins of Taylorism (b) participate in the traditional arts from which they were long excluded or (c) make a living from their cultural/ subcultural enthusiasms even where these involve protest and resistance. It is not easy for capitalism to conscript energies that originate in the private, communal and recreational spheres, especially because most available ‘creative work’ does not satisfy these ludic/ craft/ bohemian/ subcultural ideals. The jobs do not match the passions, nor even the training and skills.

To overcome this reticence, capital must shift the definition of the term ‘creativity’ – to extend its lexical range – so as to encourage workers to reassign their ambitions, skills and energies in new and unanticipated directions. This relies on the idea that creativity is not simply an intrinsic quality of a task but a product of the discourse surrounding the labour.

Factory Lad – George Morgan

In September 1979 I returned to live with my parents after a gap year in Europe, and needed to make some quick money before starting university the following February. Newcastle, New South Wales, was a smokestack city built around the Broken Hill Proprietary Steelworks, now long closed, but which at that time employed many thousands of men, including some of those I had finished high school with the year before. Production had slowed after the world recession five years earlier but there was still plenty of unskilled work. It was dirty and hard, but the pay was good.

I applied for labouring work and promptly received a letter inviting me to an interview for a job in the ‘Number One Merchant Mill’. The problem was that I only intended to stay for five months before going off to study, and didn't want them to know this. As a skinny, nerdy 19-year-old, I bore little resemblance to anyone's idea of factory fodder. So I clearly needed a plan for the interview and decided (with a youthful arrogance I cringe to recall) that I would need to conceal my instinctive eagerness, intellect and all-round talent! It would be vital, I thought, to masquerade as an inarticulate, working-class youth, slightly perplexed by the situation in which I found myself. Otherwise, I reasoned, they would see me for who I was: a high-achieving, middle-class kid, with big plans for his future, likely to grow restless and leave.

Fronting the drab company offices a short walk from the blast furnaces on a sweltering afternoon, I was summoned before a fierce-looking man in his fifties who had probably served his time on the shop floor before graduating to a desk job. He quizzed me about my work experience – to that point restricted to minor retail and clerical jobs – and I responded with mumbles and fragments, avoiding eye contact. This seemed to furrow his brow. ‘So, where are you going with your life? Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?’ he barked.

Most creative aspirants from working-class and minority backgrounds have grown up in places remote from the epicentres of the creative economy, and must undertake journeys if they are to fulfil their life plans. Such journeys are archetypal – the stuff of youthful fantasies – but they can provide both economic and social challenges. The journey forms part of the classic Bildungsroman narrative of the passage from adolescence to maturity. It is not just geographical, but also social and cultural. It can require aspirants to remake themselves, to change their image, in order to fit in with new urban scenes. The informal and improvised relations of the new economy mean that to be seen as cool or hip is not only important for accessing particular peer social groups, but also the networks through which vocational opportunities are allocated. In this chapter we argue that, far from being the egalitarian sphere that some have suggested, the new economy can actually accentuate existing power relations and sources of disadvantage. Those who are deemed not worthy rarely get far and the social and economic costs associated with ambition can be high. Our interviewees, most of whom grew up in Sydney's western suburbs, generally experience their neighbourhoods/ communities as places of comfort, but also of cultural sterility, as lacking the dynamism of the creative scenes and networks that operate in the inner city. The metropolitan journey therefore appears to be crucial if they are to break into those scenes and networks and access the opportunities that might lead from them. While to the greenhorn the journey appears to offer the chance for magical change, the experience can often be demoralizing. We will look at the cases of two young women, Nada and Tanja, who, after receiving lucky creative career breaks, experience a sharp sense of cultural vertigo, of being out of place and inadequate, in their new workplace settings. With the metropolitan journey comes the pressure to make unpalatable sacrifices.

The adjective ‘creative’ and the abstract noun ‘creativity’ have been on a wild ride just lately. Where once they referred almost exclusively to artistic practice, in recent times they have become the buzzwords of new capitalism. There is hardly a corporate vision statement, a ‘master plan for restructuring’, or job advertisement that does not refer to creativity. Additionally, it has become a lifestyle zeitgeist in an era of increasingly precarious employment. The shelves of bookshops in hipster neighbourhoods are littered with self-help and career-advice books with creativity in the title (Barton, 2016; de Bono, 2015; Ingeldew, 2016; Judkins, 2016): Liberate your creative instincts! Take control of your life! A word that once signified independent self-expression has now become both a motto of neo-liberalism and a panacea for its consequences.

In one sense, there is nothing remarkable about this semantic slippage. Language is never fixed; all words change meaning through use. But this particular transition is historically important: it is symptomatic of capitalism's epochal quest to reorganize relations of production and reconstruct labour power. However, as we argued, the brave new world of the creative economy is as yet more planned than realized. Its proponents point to digital renewal, and in particular the success of Silicon Valley ‘unicorns’ like Apple, Google, Amazon. But there is little evidence of widespread social benefits from the tech boom. The core creative workforces employed by such companies are very small when compared with the numbers employed by Fordist enterprises in the mid-twentieth century. So without widespread reasonably paid creative employment it is difficult to argue that the benefits of the sort of economic restructuring craved by policymakers will flow to workers.

The quest to marry art and economy is formidable. In bridging the void that separates the old and new economies, employers and policymakers face the problem of how to conscript cultural energies and practices that, as Bruno Gulli (2005) has argued, were traditionally situated outside the wage relation. Creativity is not easily summoned up by strict managerial direction. How does capitalism harness workers’ ludic and imaginative impulses, and their intellectual curiosity, to the project of building the new economy?

The changes in work and working life are well known but it is worth restating them here. Contemporary Western societies (Watson et al., 2003) have seen a decline in manufacturing-industry and blue-collar work, especially in the manual trades that were the bedrock of working-class communities. For a period in the mid-twentieth century, large Fordist employers offered relatively stable and abundant jobs such that Western societies experienced something approaching full employment. It was around such stability that the citizenship and welfare arrangements of social democracy were built. Those who suffered two world wars and the Great Depression agreed to perform repetitive manual work in return for a good wage, with a welfare safety net to cover them against misfortune.

This was only a fleeting moment (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008; Campbell, 2013), however, in the history of labour. In the West, the process of deindustrialization began in the 1960s and has continued inexorably over 50 years. Although blue-collar work continues to be important – especially the building trades – there has been a shift in the occupational profile towards employment based on services, knowledge, creativity and technology. In 2005, The Economist reported that less than 10 per cent of the workforce was employed in manufacturing, down from 25 per cent in 1970.1 In New York City, only eighty thousand people work in manufacturing where once a million did. Governments face the challenge of mitigating the effects of long-term decline in employment, a trend that has hit workers particularly hard.

This tale of economic restructuring can also be told in the register of working-class post-industrial melancholy. It is captured in numerous ballads of rustbelt decline and is symbolized most poignantly by cities like Detroit, where the car factories rot to the ground and many downtown architectural reminders of mid-century prosperity lie derelict, along with the dwellings that once housed the workers. The narrative of the flight of capital is familiar: the factories have moved to the developing world and in the West we no longer make things anymore; capitalism has succeeded in globalizing the mentalmanual division of labour and so the old skills learned by apprentices on the job, and the communities of labour built around those skills, are no longer required.

In the early 1970s, fewer than one in three Australian children remained at school until the end of year 12. Today, more than 80 per cent do (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2013). The UK and United States have also increased their retention rates, though not so spectacularly.1 The politicians tell us that this is evidence of intellectual maturity, a stronger base for the knowledge economy, that people of all backgrounds are seeing the value of staying in formal education for longer. There is genuine family pride communicated in the narratives of academic achievement that measure intergenerational progress. The father, who left school at 15 to be apprenticed in a trade, can be proud if his son or daughter completes an engineering degree. Such stories are the stock-in-trade of the newer universities, particularly those who draw their students from low socio-economic backgrounds and minority communities. They describe the project of social mobility, the realization of aspiration. But more particularly, they serve to reconcile a generation, who viewed the white-collar bureaucrat and the credentialed expert with suspicion and hostility, with the civilizing project of higher education.

But behind the good-news narratives of educational achievement is a wider sociological context: simply put, people persevere with formal education because there is no real alternative. There are just not enough jobs to soak up the number of school leavers who would prefer to work full time than to study.