25 - The Future of Creative Industries and Labour

Summary

Introduction

When asked in early 2020 to write about the future of creative industries and labour, it would have been quite difficult to predict what lay ahead. Like so many other sectors of the economy, the creative industries have been greatly impacted by COVID-19 (Banks, 2020; Comunian and England, 2020; Florida and Seman, 2020). Described as a ‘calamity on top of a crisis’ (Meyrick, 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on many of the structural tensions that define the contemporary nature of work in creative industries (Banks, 2020; Comunian and England, 2020; Eikhof, 2020). In particular, the chapter focuses on contemporary inequalities in creative labour. With sites of creative production and consumption moving in and out of lockdown, estimated job losses due to COVID-19 range from nearly one third of all creative economy jobs in the US (Florida and Seman, 2020) to three quarters of creative and performing arts jobs in Australia (Coates et al, 2020).

It is a unique – and indeed, challenging – time to reflect upon the nature of work in creative industries and propose an agenda for moving forward. Yet, in order to think about where we might be going, we also need to know where we’ve been. To that end, this chapter is structured in three parts. First, I begin by reviewing the core tenets of creative economy theory in economic geography, before introducing the important critique of feminist economic geographers who have laid the foundation for critical study of labour in creative industries. Here, contemporary inequalities in creative labour are explored with a focus on the importance of intersectionality in driving these experiences. Building on this, and in light of the ongoing impact of COVID-19 on creative industries, I share new research on the evolving nature of work in the creative industries during the pandemic through a case study of the Australian fashion industry. The chapter concludes by providing a number of potential avenues for future research.

An introduction to the study of creative industries

With the cultural turn in geography and the social sciences more broadly, there has been significant and growing attention paid to the cultural and creative industries, bringing with it a range of debates and studies of production, consumption, aesthetics, representation, identities and more (compare Aitken and Valentine, 2006; Leslie, 2012).