Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Introduction: can creative labour be good work? 1.1 Good and bad work in the cultural industries 1.2 Creativity as doctrine 1.3 The critical backlash, the debate and our own approach 1.4 Definitions and boundaries 1.5 Research design: selection of industries and cases 1.6 Methods: interviews and participant observation 1.7 Outline of the book Part 1 2. A model of good and bad work 2.1 Marx on work and alienation 2.2 A sociological concept of alienation 2.3 Towards a model of good and bad work beyond alienation 2.4 Good products as good work 2.5 Autonomy as a feature of good work? 2.5.1 Two accounts of workplace autonomy 2.6 Self-realisation as a feature of good work? 2.7 Post-structuralist critique of work and the problem of values 2.7.1 Good work: critique of a critique 2.8 Subjective experience 3. The specificity of creative labour 3.1 Outline of the chapter 3.2 Three approaches to cultural production 3.3 General neglect of labour in studies of cultural production and possible reasons 3.4 Political economy and the specificity of creative labour 3.5 Raymond Williams on the specificity of creative labour: The communication of experience 3.6 A critical conception of creative autonomy and its two variants 3.6.1 Variant 1: Aesthetic autonomy 3.6.2 Variant 2: Professional autonomy 3.7 Creative work and social class 3.8 Cultural studies on creative labour: Subjectivity and self-exploitation 3.9 The debate about creative work Part 2 4. The management of autonomy, creativity and commerce 4.1 Creativity, commerce and organisations 4.2 The creative management function 4.3 Managing creative autonomy: Magazines 4.4 Managing creative autonomy: The case of music recording 4.5 Pressures of Autonomy (1): Marketisation in broadcasting 4.5.1 Television documentary and factual television 4.5.2 Television drama 4.6 Pressures on autonomy (2): The rising power of marketing 4.7 Anxieties about autonomy 4.8 Pressures on autonomy (3): The obligation to network 4.9 Conclusions 5. Pay, hours, security, involvement, esteem and freedom 5.1 Quality of working life in the cultural industries 5.2 Pay, working hours and unions 5.2.1 Pay 5.2.2 Working hours 5.2.3 Unions 5.3 Security and risk 5.4 Esteem and self-esteem 5.4.1 Self-doubt 5.4.2 Cool and glamorous 5.5 Challenge, interest and involvement 5.5.1 Pleasurable absorption 5.6 The experience of autonomy 5.7 Ambivalent experiences 6. Creative careers, self-realisation and sociality 6.1 Decline of the career? 6.2 Finding the right creative occupation 6.3 The fragility of creative careers 6.4 Defining yourself too much through creative work 6.5 Teamwork, socialising, networking 6.6 Isolation 6.7 Self-realisation and sociality: Ambivalent features of modern creative labour 7. Emotional and affective labour 7.1 Immaterial labour, affective labour and 'precarity' 7.2 Emotional labour 7.3 Media labour and symbolic power 7.4 The talent show: Budget, commissioners and independents 7.5 Emotional labour and the anxieties of star-making 7.6 Pleasure and sociality on the production team 7.7 Affective labour and immanent co-operation? 7.8 Conclusions 8. Creative products, good and bad 8.1 Questions of quality 8.2 Pleasures and satisfactions of making good cultural products 8.3 Conceptions of good texts 8.4 Bad texts: Frustration and disappointment 8.5 Conceptions and explanations of poor quality work 8.6 Negative and positive experiences of quality 9. Audiences, quality and the meaning of creative work 9.1 Creative workers thinking about what audiences think 9.2 Magazines: is the reader everything 9.3 Music: a communicative thing or a private thing? 9.4 What can audiences handle? 9.5 Television and audience size: ratings tyranny? 9.6 Audiences, ambivalence and projection 10. The politics of good and bad work 10.1 The hardest way to make an easy living? 10.2 Unions and the struggle for good creative work 10.3 Work and life: choosing not to self-exploit? 10.4 Spreading good and bad work: how intractable is the social division of labour? Bibliography Appendix: The Interviews.