Charles Umney

Creative labour and collective interaction: the working lives of young jazz musicians in London

This article explores the types of work undertaken by jazz musicians in London, categorizing their activities using two axes derived from debates over ‘creative labour’. Firstly, the extent to which different jobs offer scope for creative autonomy and, secondly, the extent to which they involve collective as opposed to individualized working relationships. It focuses on the process of becoming established on the London ‘scene’, presenting qualitative interview data primarily with young workers seeking to build their careers. Musicians may make conscious decisions to pursue types of work which enable greater creative autonomy, but in doing so they may exacerbate fatalism about poor working conditions and undermine professional solidarity. The article also explores how pressures towards ‘entrepreneurialism’ in other forms of music work constitute further barriers to collective contestation of working conditions. Finally, it points towards types of music work where notions of professional economic interest have more traction.

“That’s the Experience”: Passion, Work Precarity, and Life Transitions Among London Jazz Musicians

This article looks at early-career jazz musicians working in London. It links sociological literature on precarity and the life course with a more specific focus on the process of establishing a career in music. It shows how participants sought to embrace and sometimes even manufacture greater precarity in their working lives, and how they contextualized it as part of the life course. Their ability to manage precarity in this way, however, was greatly affected by structural factors, specifically socioeconomic background. Particular elements that are especially pronounced in creative work, such as the prominence of project-based employment and the importance of passion for the job, are important factors leading to the management and indefinite extension of these transitional periods.

The labour market for jazz musicians in Paris and London: Formal regulation and informal norms

This article examines the normative expectations freelance jazz musicians have about the material conditions of live performance work, taking London and Paris as case studies. It shows how price norms constitute an important reference point for individual workers in navigating the labour market. However, only rarely do they take ‘stronger’ form as a collective demand. Two further arguments are made: first, that the strength of norms varies very widely across labour markets, being much stronger on jobs where other qualitative attractions (such as the scope for creative autonomy) are weak. Second, in the Paris case, an ostensibly solidaristic social insurance mechanism (the Intermittence du Spectacle system) had the seemingly paradoxical effect of further weakening social norms around working conditions. Workers’ individual efforts to meet the system’s eligibility criteria often disrupted the emergence of collective expectations around pricing, and in some cases the existence of formal regulation itself was stigmatized as stifling creativity.

Managerial and mobilizing internationalism in the British docks and seafaring sector

This article considers two types of internationalization process among British docks and seafaring unions, distinguishing between ‘mobilizing’ and ‘managerial’ internationalism with reference to two case studies. The article argues that an internationalism which seeks to mobilize membership in an oppositional way is dependent on the framing, by union leadership, of particular material grievances as necessitating an international, rather than national, response. Managerial internationalism, by contrast, sees a more classically bureaucratic division of labour, in which officials administer more general political and regulatory priorities that are derived from membership concerns. The underlying material determinant of these types is argued to be the degree of labour market security possessed by unions involved. Where workers experience a strong challenge to their employment through international labour competition a mobilizing internationalism is more likely to emerge. But these material conditions also engender spatial and temporal limits within which mobilizing internationalism is constrained.

Moral economy, intermediaries and intensified competition in the labour market for function musicians:

This article examines the labour market for ‘function’ musicians in London. It shows how the market encompasses a chain of relationships between clients, intermediaries and musicians, considering how the idea of ‘moral economy’ – a subject of revived interest in employment sociology – fits empirical reality. It shows that function musicians have created a strong moral economy regulating the distribution of opportunities and resources within bands. However, other actors in the chain, particularly agents, are able to impose intensified labour competition on bands. This competition leads trust relationships to fray and social expectations about the distribution of resources to weaken. These tensions are embodied in the role of the fixer: a musician who uneasily straddles market and moral domains.

In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times:

In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives that focus on the objective conditions, as well as subjective and heterogeneous experiences and perceptions of insecure employment. Framed in this way, they present a summary of the contributions to the special issue spanning a range of countries and organizational contexts, identifying key drivers, patterns and forms of precarization. These are conceptualized as implicit, explicit, productive and citizenship precarization. These forms and patterns indicate the need to address precariousness in the realm of social reproduction and post-wage politics, while holding these in tension with conflicts at the point of production. Finally, the guest editors argue for a dramatic re-think of current forms of state and non-state social protections as responses to the precarization of work and employment across countries in both the Global ‘North’ and ‘South’.

Insertion as an alternative to workfare: active labour-market schemes in the Parisian suburbs

Many governments have tightened the link between welfare and work by attaching conditionality to out-of-work benefits, extending these requirements to new client groups and imposing market competition and greater managerial control in service delivery – principles typically characterized as ‘workfare’. Based on field research in Seine-Saint-Denis, we examine French ‘insertion’ schemes aimed at disadvantaged but potentially job-ready clients, characterized by weak conditionality, low marketization, strong professional autonomy and local network control. We show that insertion systems have resisted policy attempts to expand workfare-derived principles, reflecting street-level actors’ belief in the key advantages of the former over the latter. In contrast with arguments stressing institutional and cultural stickiness, our explanation for this resistance thus highlights the decentralized network governance of front-line services and the limits to central government power.

The International Labour Movement and China

This article considers the relationship between Chinese and Western labour activists. It analyses this relationship in reference to ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ divisions of global power, drawing on world-systems and social movement unionism literature to illustrate this. It argues for a conceptual middle ground to develop useful engagement strategies.

Toward a precarious projectariat? Project dynamics in Slovenian and French social services

Project organization is used extensively to promote creativity, innovation and responsiveness to local context, but can lead to precarious employment. This paper compares European Social Fund (ESF)-supported projects supporting ‘active inclusion’ of disadvantaged clients in Slovenia and France. Despite many similarities between the two social protection fields in task, temporality, teams and socio-economic context, the projects had different dynamics with important implications for workers. In Slovenia project dynamics have been precarious, leading to insecure jobs and reduced status for front-line staff; in France, by contrast, projects and employment have been relatively stable. Our explanation highlights the transaction, more specifically, the capacity of government agencies to function as intermediaries managing the transactions through which ESF money is disbursed to organizations providing services. We find that transnational pressures on the state affect its capacity as a transaction organizer to stabilize the organizational field. In Slovenia, transnational pressures associated with austerity and European Union integration have stripped away this capacity more radically than in France, leading to precarious project dynamics and risk shifting onto project workers.

Blocked and new frontiers for trade unions: contesting 'the meaning of work' in the creative and caring sectors

Many jobs feature tensions between workers’ own motivations, and the objectives imposed on them by management or economic imperatives. We call these tensions ‘meaning of work conflicts’. We ask whether trade unions can intervene in them, or whether they are simply too subjective to be a credible campaigning focus. We examine two professional groups in Britain and France, musicians and healthcare staff. Among musicians, workers tend to negotiate meaning of work conflicts themselves, seeing little role for unions in this process. This engenders legitimacy problems that unions have had to find ways around. By contrast, in the hospitals sector, there is more scope for unions to campaign over the meaning of work, thus potentially increasing legitimacy among staff and the public. The difference is explained by the more diffuse and fragmented nature of employer structures in music, and the more chaotic set of motivations found among music workers.