Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: Introduction: Beyond the 'Creative Class' Vision -- A Brief History of Knowledge Work and Creativity -- The Economic Crisis, the Recession and the 'New Economy' -- Notes -- Chapter 2: The Rise of a Freelance Economy -- Businesses of One -- Self-employment and Freelancing in Context -- From Brand You to the Startup of You -- Notes -- Chapter 3: Reputation, the Social Capital of a Digital Society -- What Is Reputation? -- A Reputation Society -- Reputation and Social Capital -- The Notion of Trust in the Reputation Economy

Exploring the new professional scenes in digital and freelance knowledge, this innovative book provides an account of the subjects and cultures that pertain to knowledge work in the aftermath of the creative class frenzy. Including a broad spectrum of empirical projects, The Reputation Economy documents the rise of freelancing and digital professions and argues about the central role held by reputation within this context, offering a comprehensive interpretation of the digital transformation of knowledge work. The book shows how digital technologies are not simply intermediating productive and organizational processes, allowing new ways for supply and demand to meet, but actually enable the diffusion of cultural conceptions of work and value that promise to become the new standard of the industry.

Abstract
In the old economy, reputation was considered an important but somewhat underestimated intangible asset. In the digital economy, the significance of reputation is expanded in scope. It enables the building of trust among "quasi-strangers" who engage in an economic transaction. Reputation scores, usually in the form of feedback, ranking and rating systems, facilitate the building of trust in the absence of a direct relationship between sellers and buyers. Concomitantly with the rise of social network sites and the proliferation of metrics and analytics of all kinds, the era of the "reputation economy" has dawned. A good reputation usually brings further good evaluations. On the other hand, a bad reputation can be a long-term setback for a company. Having no reputation means virtual non-existence in the eyes of today's consumers. Professional reputation management is therefore a core task that makes a decisive contribution to the success of a company.

What are the distinctive traits that characterize work(ing) through (and for) a digital platform? In the burgeoning debate on the 'gig economy', a critical examination that comprehensively addresses this issue beyond specific examples or case studies is currently missing. This article uses labour process theory – an important Marxist approach in the study of relations of production in industrial capitalism – to address this gap. Supported by empirical illustrations from existing research, the article discusses the notions of 'point of production', emotional labour and control in the gig economy to argue that labour process theory offers a unique set of tools to expand our understanding of the way in which labour power comes to be transformed into a commodity in a context where the encounter between supply and demand of work is mediated by a digital platform, and where feedback, ranking and rating systems serve purposes of managerialization and monitoring of workers.

Existing research shows that self-branding in the knowledge economy is a key promotional device for the pursuit of self-realization in a context that reifies entrepreneurialism as the main ideological stance. However, there is still reluctance to fully acknowledge the processes of sociality that constitute self-branding practice. While the relationship between branding and the affective dynamics of social production of value fostered by the diffusion of Web 2.0 is widely acknowledged in the literature, there still seems to be a lack of understanding of the extent to which self-branding relates to social relationships in the production of socialized value for individuals. The study of self-branding practices across digital freelance professions in the knowledge economy reveals how social media has come to represent a working tool that serves the curation of a professional image and the management of social relationships via the enactment of performative practices of sociality, which exist around a shared notion of reputation as value. Here, self-branding becomes an investment in social relationships with expected return for the acquisition of a reputation. This substantially equates self-branding with what social theory calls social capital, being instrumental to secure employment in the freelance-based labour market of the digital knowledge economy.

"In recent years research into creative labour and cultural work has usually addressed the politics of production in these fields, but the sociotechnical and aesthetic dimensions of collaborative creative work have been somewhat overlooked. This book aims to address this gap. Through case studies that range from TV showrunning to independent publishing, from the film industry to social media platforms such as Tumblr and Wattpad, this collection develops a critical understanding of the integral role collaboration plays in contemporary media and culture. It draws attention to diverse kinds of creative collaboration afforded via the intermediation of digital platforms and networked publics. It considers how these are incorporated into emergent market paradigms and investigates the complicated forms of subjectivity that develop as a consequence. But it also acknowledges historical continuities, not least in terms of the continued exploitation of 'support personnel' and of resulting artistic conflicts but also of alternative models that resist the precarious nature of contemporary cultural work.
Finally, this volume attempts to situate creative collaboration in broader social and economic contexts, where the experience and outcomes of such work have proved more problematic than the rich potential of their promise would lead us to expect.

"

Dating apps promise a 'digital fix' to the 'messy' matter of love by means of datafication and algorithmic matching, realising a platformisation of romance commonly understood through notions of a market's rationality and efficiency. Reflecting on the findings of a small-scale qualitative research on the use of dating apps among young adults in London, we problematise this view and argue that the specific form of marketisation articulated by dating apps is entrepreneurial in kind, whereby individuals act as brands facing the structural uncertainty of interacting with 'quasi-strangers'. In so doing, we argue, dating app users enact a Luhmanian notion of interpersonal trust, built on the assessment of the risk of interacting with unfamiliar others that is typical of digitally mediated contexts dominated by reputational logics. From a sociocultural perspective, dating apps emerge as sociotechnical apparatuses that remediate the demand to rationally choose a partner while at the same time reproducing the (im)possibility of doing so. In this respect, far from offering a new form of efficiency, they (re)produce the ontological uncertainty (Illouz, 2019) that characterises lovers as entrepreneurs.

This article discusses the cultural conceptions of trust underpinning the experimentation of blockchain startup applications beyond the financial sector. Based on qualitative research undertaken in the context of the so-called "Blockchain 2.0" scene, we show how a peculiar conception of trust, which blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the neoliberal culture of competition and meritocracy that is typical of the startup world, underpins these implementations. As a result, we argue that "Blockchain 2.0" entrepreneurs ultimately fail to recognize the eminently social nature of the trust-building process. They emerge from our observation as unable to comprehend the extent to which the implementation of blockchain in a societal (i.e., not purely financial) context cannot do away with considerations about what kind of "social" the technology intervenes within, and find difficult to effectively conceive of how this technology embeds in existing social relations and power structures.

In recent years research into creative labour and cultural work has usually addressed the politics of production in these fields, but the sociotechnical and aesthetic dimensions of collaborative creative work have been somewhat overlooked. This book aims to address this gap. Through case studies that range from TV showrunning to independent publishing, from the film industry to social media platforms such as Tumblr and Wattpad, this collection develops a critical understanding of the integral role collaboration plays in contemporary media and culture. It draws attention to diverse kinds of creative collaboration afforded via the intermediation of digital platforms and networked publics. It considers how these are incorporated into emergent market paradigms and investigates the complicated forms of subjectivity that develop as a consequence. But it also acknowledges historical continuities, not least in terms of the continued exploitation of "support personnel" and of resulting artistic conflicts but also of alternative models that resist the precarious nature of contemporary cultural work. Finally, this volume attempts to situate creative collaboration in broader social and economic contexts, where the experience and outcomes of such work have proved more problematic than the rich potential of their promise would lead us to expect.

This introduction considers those situations when popular artists and cultural workers collaborate at a time when creative production is being reconfigured as an increasingly business-oriented process. Noting how recent research into creative labour and cultural work has tended to address the politics of production in these fields, it argues that socio-technical and aesthetic dimensions have not been subject to the same kind of sustained enquiry. What happens now that boundaries between 'art' and 'business' are blurred? How has work in the creative industries been reshaped by the managerialised emphasis on collaboration that characterises the current landscape? This introduction also asks in what ways might cultural production be transformed by the convergent dynamics of digital intermediation and consumption in the contemporary creative economy? It highlights two prominent strands of discussion – the growing body of work that investigates the diverse forms and functions of media production and also research concerning the political economy of creative labour. Detailing how attention has focused on the rise of 'collaboration' as the buzzword of the creative economy (alongside its sibling buzzword 'sharing'), the article explains how contributions to the book Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries individually contribute to a deeper understanding of the field.