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5.1 Spanning the Boundaries of Creative Work

The creative economy is often used as an umbrella concept. It usually includes the contributions of those who are in creative occupations outside of the creative industries too, as well as those who are employed in the creative industries i.e. in artistic and cultural fields and jobs. The idea of care seldom fits into the thinking and discussions about the creative work. But with the new economy also care is changing. In fact, care is one critical nexus through which we can problematize the new economy and its construction.

The contemporary changes in the work and organization of work towards the project based, flexible and short-term workplaces put more emphasis and responsibility to individuals for finding creative solutions in getting a job and keeping in, but also creativity in crafting the job in ways it responds to own skills and capabilities. Creativity at work thus becomes understood in several new ways, when the entrepreneurial risk becomes part and parcel of the job.

One of the researchers of the new cultural social class, Richard Florida, has noted that, contrary to the commonly held beliefs, creative work does not only belong to and originate from the start-up companies, research laboratories or artists’ studios. It can be located in factories and factory workers’ varying solutions in their work tasks. Florida’s studies of highly performing factories in the USA of the 1980s and 1990s served as a springboard for his more general theory of the creative class (Florida 2012). For Florida, the ways the factory workers came up with basic improvements in productivity and performance represented creativity at work, and intellectual capital. There are many studies of creativity and the role of knowledge in the factory, which extend the idea of creativity to the tasks and jobs at hand, from the actual occupational groups (see e.g. Oakley 2006, 2011; Gordon 2000; Zuboff 1989; Kenney and Florida 1990). Mostly, the understanding of the individuals’ worth and the view into the craftsmanship kind of knowledge is at the basis of creativity at work (Sennett 2008). With this type of definition, creative work widens beyond the so-called creative industries and creative economy as such, into continuing involvement and the desire to do ‘good work’, as Sennett argues.

Several authors have recently argued that media and creative industries are at the forefront of economic and technological changes and developments globally (e.g. Neff 2016; Oakley 2011; Ashcraft and Blithe 2010). This may be partly due to the fact that the global economy is becoming increasingly “communicative”, that is, the economic value of services, products and corporations is found in communication, in the ability to mediate the symbolic values to consumers, and in the visual and deeply cultural aspects of the corporation represented through communication (see Poutanen et al. 2016). Indeed, as the economic value is increasingly immaterial and mediated through visual and cultural aspects, the creativity of all work that provides the economic value becomes understood as being more expansive than ordinary artistic work. On the other hand, the gaming industry could claim the same outcome: artistic work is truly an integral part of the game design and gaming industry. The gaming industries and related sectors lean on artistic work of coders and their interpretative capabilities. The artistic work of coders thus reflects and mediates for its part the culture. The web pioneers, designers, web maintainers, bloggers and game designers are all doing this type of new creative work. These jobs and tasks in traditional sense were not even existing prior the digitalization and the Internet.

But creativity at work is much more than a creative job title, and, more importantly, creativity is not determined and restricted by job descriptions. We may well ask how creative work works, and what do people do when they do creative work. The answers most probably vary highly. Indeed, this is the case if creative work is understood to take place in the highly skilled and precise work of surgeons and welders as well as in the highly flexible work of coders, some examples to mention. Florida notes that roughly one third of the current workforce in the developed world can justifiably be classified as members of the so-called creative class (Florida 2002a). Statistics classify most often several industries that can collectively be called the creative industries. The definition of creative industries is not consistent between countries and has also changed nationally, as in the UK and in Australia (e.g. Higgs et al. 2007a, 2007b; Pagan et al. 2008). The occupation classifications included within the creative industries thus vary as well. Indeed, the creative industries have been more changeable over the last decade than many fields of high research intensity, such as biotechnology.

The idea of creative class bundles the creative individuals and ties them together through creative industries and creative economy, which for its part gives rise to the importance of place. Place has indeed importance and increasingly so, as some cities fail to grow ultimately due to lack of tolerance and openness, and regional economic development is based on layers of social and economic fabric, of creativity and abundance of possibilities for creative identity validation (see also Chapter 3). In the contemporary world, the creative class does not form a unified group or ‘class’ in a traditional sense. The digital technologies have enabled the creation of communities and networks of interest, irrespective of whether there is any common denominator for those involved. There is a need to look at the relationship of gender and creative work in relation to wider canvass.

The measurement of how important the creative industries and sectors are in the new economy is indeed an enigma: how to dissect the creative element from other work tasks and activities, especially when work is intangible and abstract. The ways gender is entangled with creativity and creative jobs adds to the complexity of the question. If we take ‘the easy way out’ and look at the statistics, the creative jobs in statistics are considered to include only those working in the creative industries themselves, and who may either be in creative occupations or in other roles at the creative industries, e.g. in finance (Department for Culture 2016). Thus, creative manager Alice – introduced later in this Chapter – would count as a person who works in creative industry also according to statistics, as she works in advertising. Even if Alice is not herself in a creative occupation and does not do creative work because she works with budgets and funding, she is classified in statistics as a creative industry worker.

It is estimated that the number of people who work in creative industries will greatly increase in the coming years, and the key workforce will consist of highly educated and specialized persons. In the UK, for example, the number of people working in the creative sector in the economy outnumbers the skilled workforce with a STEM educational background. The creative industries’ workers and STEM-educated workers hold one thing in common. This is that the skilled work tasks and complex jobs of both creative workers and STEM workers tend to be less susceptible to automation (Sleeman 2016). Research work is often considered creative. Problem solving in science is in fact used as one measure of scientific creativity (Stumpf 1995; Ochse 1990).

Many social scientists point out that the complexity underlying creativity at work often blurs the idea of how and in what ways the job fulfils the idea of creativity. The most common definition for what is a creative job starts paradoxically by excluding what creative jobs are not: when the degree of control over the work tasks is very low and the intrinsic rewards are non-existent, the job is not considered creative (e.g. Kalleberg 2011). Intrinsic rewards reflect the ways individuals find that their skills, capabilities and knowledge are in use. Very often, the ability to set the pace of one’s work is related to the intrinsic value of work. Some researchers relate the ability to use one’s skills in the job to the quality aspect. Several associate creative jobs with high-paying, professional and knowledge intensive fields that require specialized education (e.g. Florida 2002b) and individuals with sufficient cultural and social capital, and work experience (McGivern et al. 2015; Tweedie 2013).

The attempts to measure the value added of the cultural industries and occupations, work and jobs included various classifications have been developed, particularly for the use of the policy makers within governments (e.g. Higgs et al. 2007a). The creative industry groupings and segments derived from statistics of occupations and industries cover often essential parts, but not all of the creative economy, as classifications do not capture the quick changes and developments taking place with mobile platforms and platform economies, and the ways individuals adapt to these forms of work (e.g. McMullin and Dryburgh 2011; McDowell 2008a; Hassan and Purser 2007; Hochschild 1983).

Neff et al. (2005) studied the ways in which the entrepreneurial labour becomes understood as creative work in the new economy through the cultural quality of ‘cool’, autonomy and also foreshortened careers. The media and entertainment industry – as part of the creative economy – is one of the fastest-growing fields in the creative industries. Also the fashion industry, although much smaller than the new media industry, has always thrived in vibrant regions and urban centres, where both symbolic capital (Lash 2002), ‘cool’ and attractive jobs (Gill 2002) and creative class (Florida 2002a) reside and create positive incentives. According to the results of Neff et al., the status within new media industry is not conferred by job title or pay, as the best jobs in the new economy, especially in new media, are both creative and entrepreneurial (Neff et al. 2005). The differences between creative, entrepreneurial work and corporate, non-entrepreneurial work are often associated with risks attached to the work, and with privileges, especially in creative new-media jobs. The risks concerning creative work relate to short-termism and qualifications that may not be transferable elsewhere.

The new attitudes towards job security are present in studies that deal with the contemporary workforce in creative industries (e.g. Brinkley 2016). A growing feature of the new economy in general is the growth of the ‘free professions’, which is visible in the growing number of self-employed and own-account workers. For example, in the UK 2% of the total workforce reports themselves as freelancers, and the increase in the number of freelancers resonates with the overall rise in self-employment (Brinkley 2016). According to the studies, for many the question of freelancing is more about how to get paid and earn a living than how to work as a lifestyle choice (e.g. Vallas 2011).

All the examples of growth in the self-employment in creative jobs indicate how the nature of work has changed (Kovalainen 1995). The question of freelancing in creative industries widens to all industries. The study on freelancing in the European Union (EU) focused on own account self-employed workers and shows that across EU the share of ‘IPros’ – independent professionals – rose from c. 3% in 2004 to 4.1% in 2013. The US labour markets have functioned rather differently. The comparable element between countries is missing, because the definition of freelancers is different in USA in comparison to UK and EU. However, 2016 estimates by Katz and Krueger suggest that there has been a remarkable increase in contingent and alternative work between 2005 and 2015 (Katz and Krueger 2016; Kalleberg 2011). According to these estimates, the net increase in employment in the USA over the past decade has been solely in alternative forms of employment (mainly temporary labour and contract workers). This concerns especially migrant workers (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007).

Moving back to creative industries, a new attitude that is visible in several studies among the creative industries’ workers is reflected also in Neff’s study on venture labour (Neff 2016). As a concept venture labour means the way in which people act like entrepreneurs and carry some of the risks of the company as if they own the shares or have the ownership. This kind of labour embodies the contemporary time where new media workers’ entrepreneurial behaviour reflects cultural shifts in contemporary workplaces. It also reflects the new attitudes towards job security. Employees are increasingly asked to throw themselves into work and use their social and intellectual capital, empathy and passion to keep up the corporation spirit. The insecurity of job turns into an individualized portfolio thinking. Gill’s study of the freelance new media workers in six European countries involved work as digital animation, web design and broadcasting and digital arts and design. The study showed that while the work was considered as ‘cool’, it seldom offered permanency. In addition, the gendered positions and inequality in terms of salary differences between women and men, and career advancement were perhaps even stronger than in the ‘traditional’ media (Gill 2002).

The ways the creative work is recognized and defined, has much to do with artistic, commercial or cultural values of societies, but perhaps even more with temporal factors. Creativity at work was differently understood in the 1970s and 1980s than in 2010 and 2017. It can be noted that cultural industries focus on the commercialization of expressive values of music, television, radio, publishing, computer games and film, these being the key dimensions. The precariousness of commercialization also makes the jobs vulnerable but there are also other trends that shape the jobs in creative sectors. The digital platforms discussed earlier in this book also shape the micro-businesses and self-employment in the digital and creative sectors (Brinkley 2016; Hathaway 2015; Hathaway and Muro 2016).

The new working model of short-termism and temporary work has become one of the signals of the dynamism and innovations in the economy. The digitally enabled gig economy is not only about people working in short-termism, freelance or gig work but also about nesting new economic activities and small-scale entrepreneurship globally through Etsy, Airbnb, Uber and Taskrabbit. The question of creativity is not the same for all those platforms: for Etsy, the classical entrepreneurial small-scale activity and community building is highly present in its platform business model. For Uber, the business model is very different from Etsy, as the Uber driver cannot set the price for the service but is free to do own activities in-between the drives. The spectrum of digital labour and business platforms is wide, and other types of digital platforms further widen the scope of the platform economies.

For creative industries, platforms enable wider reach for audiences and customers and lucrative markets, as showed earlier. Gig economy, for its part, allows short-term contracting, innovative ensembles and non-employer firms to flourish, but not without costs. The production of attractive and informative platforms requires new types of professional skills and capabilities. For example, vlogging through YouTube can at best be highly profitable, and vlogs are definitively part of the creative work created and re-created through digital platforms. The question remains, what types of qualifications do these gig economy works contain, and do these jobs contain any larger employee-driven innovations (e.g. Hoyrup 2012).

The direct financial value of the creative industries can be measured in terms of its economic contribution. Globally, the gross value added of the creative industries has grown and the parts of creative arts such as music, performing and visual arts have grown in importance. The largest constituent parts of the creative industries, such as IT, software, and computer services, advertising and marketing have become both value adding and employing industries, and have grown quicker in comparison to other industrial fields, in the UK as well as in the USA. The share of the creative industries of the UK total gross value added is over 5%, and the creative economy as a whole accounts for over 8% of the UK economy (Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2016; also Bakhshi et al. 2013).

Today, globally the cultural and creative industries are major drivers of the modern economies of developed countries. However, in developing countries also the role and emphasis of creative industries has grown exponentially. Creative sector influences income generation, job creation and export earnings of nations. Indeed, it is estimated that worldwide, the revenues of the cultural and creative industries exceed those of telecom services. It is estimated that the top three employers globally, both as art forms and as businesses, are the visual arts, books, and music (EY 2015). Currently, creative industries develop across borders, cross fertilizing and reinvigorating the cultural fabric of societies. The importance of intangible sector is undisputed. Still, little is known of the creative work as such. It has indeed been argued that this is because the economic weight of cultural and creative industries in mature and emerging economies is only partially described, often misunderstood, and generally undervalued (Lampel and Germain 2016; EY 2015). One aspect is that creative industries necessarily function as other industries and business sectors in their managerial and organizational practices and structures. Research has shown that these also vary among and within the creative industries (Foster et al. 2011).

It is difficult to give a simple and straightforward definition of what creative work entails, and who are the people working in creative jobs, and the exact share of the volume of creative jobs, industries, and the economic sector. One reason for the vagueness in exact numbers is due to different ways of understanding what and how creativity is part and parcel of many jobs, occupations and business logics. One way of understanding what creative work entails is to look at the whole creative economy and its importance in the whole economy. The creative economy covers all the creative industries and services, well beyond the arts and cultural goods and services. Currently research and development are often included in the creative economy as well. Some researchers discuss not creative work but creative occupations, while other researchers emphasize the innovative side of creative work that is not bound to occupations classified as creative.

In most countries, ministries and state departments have become conscious of the need to define and think about creativity, both in education and in the ways it determines and defines certain occupations and jobs. This has led to estimate the number of people who work in creative occupations. The estimates are often either based on occupations which are directly connected to creative industry, or individuals who are self-employed, or affiliated with the creative end results. In the UK this estimate is 6% of total employment that is around 2 million people. This figure, based on a definition by the official UK statistics, includes advertising and marketing, architecture, crafts, museums, music, publishing, design in relation to products, graphics and fashion, film, TV, etc.

The size of the creative industry is directly connected to the size of the consumer markets. Even if USA has been dominating the global markets, diversification has already taken place, paradoxically due to global Internet. For example, the Asia-Pacific region is home to 47% of the global online population, and Asia-Pacific countries are among the most connected in the world. All these create possibilities and opportunities for creative work and creative industries. Indeed, the Asia-Pacific region leads the global gaming industry with 47.5% of the global market, and contributes in a major way (82% in 2014) to the growth of the global games market, benefiting from the rise of online gaming (EY 2015).

It has been argued that technological changes set the boundaries between the “elements of the world” (e.g. Hesmondhalgh 2013: 223), such as public and private, care and capital accumulation. Given the wide array of creative work and jobs in contemporary societies the ways creativity relates to innovations in jobs and work is highly complex, ambivalent and even contested. How the creative work manifests itself in technological platforms, how gender becomes displayed and how broad systemic changes become actualized are discussed below.

5.1.1 Case Study: Everyday Technology and the New Economy in Alice’s Life

Alice works as one of the senior advertising/creative managers in a multinational IT corporation. Her work is high-pressure and performance oriented management work where strong analytical and communication skills are required. When asked what type of work she does, Alice talks more about budgets than ideas. She does not directly describe her own work in advertising as creative work. She thinks that her work experience in high tech and training in management, advertising and accounting has led her to a position where she mainly deals with creativity, but she increasingly feels that her own training and occupation is not inherently creative. The pressures of performance exist increasingly in her daily work. However, Alice can be regarded as a member of the creative class in society, as defined by Florida (2002a, 2002b, 2014). In her work, Alice’s ability to influence others is in high demand, and that creates stability amid creative chaos. She feels however that she is at times more an accounting director than a creative director. She enjoys the atmosphere of her unit, and thinks of it as being very creative.

Alice prefers to walk to her office instead of using the tube. This means one hour longer travelling to work daily, and also means that she leaves her home for the office often at 6 am, but she enjoys her daily walking exercise. She no longer needs to carry papers back and forth, only her mobile devices. Versatile technology solutions, such as the cloud platform her company uses, makes her work social, and she feels connected to her team and corporation and to her key clients. Cloud service her company uses enables her work to be mobile, flexible, distant – and always on.

On a personal level, Alice also wears other tech devices than her mobile, which most of the day is in her hand or close-by. Irrespective of her location, Alice checks her fitness wristband regularly during the working day, and sometimes discreetly also in meetings, if she is not in charge of running the meeting. The wristband Alice wears measures her heartbeat and sleep rhythm, counts the steps she takes, the number of stairs she climbs, and the calories she burns during the day and night. Alice has noticed that fitness wristbands are increasingly used by young men, but less commonly by women in her office. Nevertheless, she is determined to keep it on in order to keep track and remain fit. Being fit, energetic, youthful and not fat in her industry is a non-spoken must, as the whole industry and especially her own work environment is highly competitive. She has already decided to purchase a newer version of the wristband, with more functions.

The functions Alice follows are part of her daily routines. Her activity rates, heartbeat, quality of sleep and exercise progress tell her not only about her fitness but also about the need to focus and to exercise. Her exercising is indeed sometimes irregular and delayed due to intensive and long working days, and also to the fact that she visits and takes care of her elderly mother during most weekends. Luckily, the wristband alarms her when the exercises get too irregular. The device synchronizes the data with her other fitness devices, such as the scale which has a wireless Internet connection. The scale’s mobile app in Alice’s phone helps her to track the changes in weight and in body mass index. The synchronization of all data allows Alice to follow up and analyse the progress and changes with her laptop. The GPS of the device, as well as the GPS in her phone, help her to map new, possibly interesting routes for her walks and runs. Overall, the technology and its adaptations help Alice with her personal work-life balance and with almost everything else, but not with the most wanted thing, namely to have more hours in the day.

When we revisit the snapshot of Alice’s life and reflect on the work Alice does, we can ask whether she is part of this creative economy or not. Alice, who works in advertising section of an IT corporation, thinks of herself as a creative manager with work tasks closer to management and financing than creation of new products and services. Simultaneously she notes that she works with innovation people and sees them as an integral part of her own work. Predicting that they have their future in work is partly what Alice does. We can justifiably ask whether her work is creative work. Alice hesitates herself to say this, but after some thought she answers straightaway “yes”, despite the managerial side of her work. Alice sees that the products, their design and the overall image is group work and she is part of that group who, in the process, develops the end product further.

However, in statistics the managerial work Alice does is not classified as part of the creative economy. Even if Alice works in close collaboration with the product and service design and advertising, she is not directly creating products or services. Alice’s job is to strategically oversee, supervise, and in general pull the strings when needed and make sure resources are in line with the tasks at hand. Without her and her job, product design unit might suffer when financial cuts and rearrangements are introduced. Alice’s work is closely aligned with the work of the designers and creative work in general. Making a clear distinction and separation between the enabling input of Alice’s work and creative input of designers would not be possible. The work Alice does is one example of the difficulties in drawing the boundaries for creative/non-creative work in innovative industries such as the IT world.

Our example, and the scale and scope of two critical and often overlapping parts – creative companies and creative occupations – give an understanding of how wide-ranging work in the creative economy is, and how closely it relates to the overall economy. There is a general need for more data and stronger indicators on the role of culture for the development of societies and economies, and for the development of innovations.

The creative enterprises and industries include also non-profit cultural organizations and commercial businesses that produce and distribute products in which the creative content defines their market position and audiences. In addition, individuals who are self-employed are often part of the creative economy. In the statistics, however, only those directly involved in creative activity are included. Classifying those employees who are responsible for routine and non-creative functions and jobs for every successful creative enterprise is more complex. Alice, our advertising manager is typically in a job where her belonging to creative class can be questioned. Defining the borders permanently is difficult.

A creative enterprise is often defined as a company for which the primary or major value of its products or services is rooted in its emotional and aesthetic appeal to the customer or the markets. A creative occupation is often defined as a job in either a creative industry or non-creative industry, and in which the work itself is inherently creative or artistic. The creative economy encompasses both of these groups, which also overlap, as the case below shows.

5.1.2 Case Study: Gigle – Creative Art Production Platform

Gigle Inc. was established by Inkeri Borgman and Janne Matilainen in 2015. The company platform and the forthcoming app by Gigle searches and delivers the best artists and performers for any events and festivities. The origins of the start-up were in the paternity leave of Mr. Matilainen, who, prior they had their twins, worked as game designer in a game company in Finland. Having developed successful games for the company over several years, he was ready to try something new. Ms. Borgman has both education and work experience in culture production. As Mr. Matilainen was on paternity leave the couple started discussing and developing their joint business idea: bringing culture to work places, weddings, birthday parties and other festivities. Their ambitious aim is to launch a platform that offers services not only in Finland but elsewhere. They wish to become a global player and platform in the culture production. Gigle mediates cultural activities and brings together the culture experts, artists and those who wish to use those services, consume culture and arrange cultural events or other events that would use artistic production as part of the event. Gigle is in the launch phase, and as with many start-ups, the finances and contents are in constant flux. For the couple, Gigle as a platform is an intermediary organization but also a market where shared interests meet. The business model and the ways to handle the complexity of the cultural platform are currently under construction.

Creative work today gets even more entangled and increasingly complex to define, as our examples show. Work most often includes elements that are not as such ‘creative’ but which are necessary for the creative outcome of the work process, such as budgeting, financing and project planning. More so than earlier, creativity and innovation is also group and teamwork building on previous innovations, achievements and experiences.

It is often quite straightforwardly assumed that many of the changes in the society or in the economy can be traced back to globalization and technological development, and thus, these two – globalization and technological development – become containers for all kinds of changes. Analogously, the new economy has come to epitomize myriad things, any new technology, ICT, software work and immateriality of economy, all leading to similarities in labour, work and personhood relations, as shown in both the case descriptions above.

5.2 Care and Technological Innovations

The ways in which the new economy and technological platforms function in care work and in healthcare more generally are numerous and the whole issue is a multi-layered phenomenon with complex involved history and expanding future. Partly due to that, our focus in this chapter is on questions of whether we can distinguish the new economy within the field of care, what does it possibly entail, how technology changes care work and whether the distinction is relevant in the field of care and wellness, as technologies change care and care work in multitudes of ways.

The intersections between new types of transnational work, migrating workers, gender and new types of global dependencies and interdependencies have been discussed widely in relation to changing care work and care chains (e.g. Huang et al. 2012; Yeates 2008, 2012; Dahl et al. 2011; Isaksen 2011; McDowell 2008b). Care as work is shaped by the social and political institutions and contexts, especially when we talk about global care chains that have become reality in the global economy (Wallerstein 2014; Tronto 2011; Walby 2009).

Care has always been part of human activity: formal care as profession and informal care as part of family or kin relations, as act of love and as obligation as well. Care and caregiving are gendered as practices and gender is very much also about caring. Providing care is often considered as an activity that somehow requires feminine qualities, and femininity is indeed often considered to have a caring nature. As formal and paid work, care was feminized due to its close relations to traditional idea of women’s role in caring and biological nurturing relations. Even when care activities are paid, the work remains undervalued: care occupations have traditionally been not only women’s work, but have also involved lower wages than non–care occupations. Thus, one of the key elements in care is in how many ways the gender is attached to care and how the possible effects of the technology influence on care and on gender. In the following, we will look at the general effects of technologies into the gendered care as work, in relation to the new economy.

Common aspect to all care in new economy as well as in the old is the labour intensity of the work, and the timely aspect of it: care cannot be postponed or transferred but it is situated and time-bound person-centred work. Technical solutions and innovations are helpers in solving the care puzzle, but do not take away the core idea of the care: humanity. The labour intensity of care effects to the ways care is organized. One solution to the increasing cost of care is technology. The technology has become part of care and care work in many ways. The presence of technology ranges from devices and diagnostics of healthcare, drug development and medical treatments to the ways care is understood both highly personal care. In personal care work, the effects of technology are often mediated. The technological aspects in healthcare, in all forms of care and in wellness are strongly gendered by nature: irrespective of the form or type of care – be it then healthcare, social care or actual work and jobs in these fields – gender has a role to play in each of these aspects.

Technology is crucial for care, and technology helps not only those who are cared for but also carers. Technology is great enabler, as State of Caring UK 2011 report showed: an overwhelming majority (72%) of the carers who used technology noted that it gave them greater peace of mind, irrespective of whether the question was of technology assisted medication, health monitoring at home, or safety (www.carersuk.org 2016).

At the macro and population level, of all the socio-economic factors that influence health and wellbeing, gender is particularly significant. While women at the population level have in general lower mortality rates than men in Western countries (e.g. Annandale 2014), women also experience greater morbidity at the population level, and they are in general over-represented in healthcare statistics as care recipients (Dahl et al. 2011). Gender in general has a significant effect on health differences and disparities in care. These differences are not, however, simply differences between men and women. Gender-related factors also lead to significant divisions within each gender, thus reflecting various other societal factors producing and reproducing inequalities. Gender analysis is crucial to distinguish between biological causes and social explanations for the health differentials between men and women, and to understand that these gaps are outcomes of the unequal social relations between men and women, and not merely due to consequences of biology.

Gender analysis in healthcare and in medicine often provides information on the deviations in diagnosis, treatment and prevention. There is a well-documented history of male bias in medical diagnostics, such as cardiovascular disease and use of aspirin, done with over 22,000 male physicians only, and multiple risk analysis on coronary heart disease, also done on a male sample only (Rosser 1994; Schiebinger 2000). Even if the diagnostics in medicine are based on gender sensitive analyses and take women into account in the medical testing and diagnostics, there are still several blind spots. One of the key points of departure is how new gender sensitive research questions are introduced, and how much time is given to revamp the methods and trends in the natural sciences. Development of gender sensitive and gender specific indicators for illnesses is indeed part of the gender analysis (e.g. Lin and L’Orange 2012; Ettorre and Kingdon 2012).

At the same time, gender-specific knowledge and the gender bias currently embedded in medical research has become more visible, even if the phenomenon itself is well recognized as an ‘old’ problem. Questions such as women’s lack of control over their bodies and inequalities in health status between men and women are among the major concerns that require research and political intervention and change. These aspects are important, and are also related to gender in care in general.

The ways in which the new economy and technological platforms function in care work and in healthcare more generally are numerous, and the whole issue is a multi-layered phenomenon with a complex history and an expanding future. Partly due to that, our focus in this chapter is on questions of whether we can distinguish the new economy within the field of care, what it might entail, how technology changes care work, and whether the distinction is relevant in the field of care and wellness as technologies change care and care work in many ways.

Why is care as gendered work interesting in relation to the new economy and technological developments and innovations? The care work requires the embodied presence of the carer and the person who is cared for. Care as work and as labour carries in itself power as well as dependency and vulnerability. The new developments in care work, often discussed as manifestations of the new economy, such as short-termism of work contracts, fragmented work practices and transnational gendered care may all for their part put forward their strains to care as labour and as work. Care has already become global labour through the global care chains, being partly market-based and commoditized and partly fragmented work through contracts, but these facts are not enough to change the nature of the required embodied presence in the care work and the embodied location of the care. Care work still takes place in personal contact between carer and cared-for, but this embodied relationship carries in itself, apart from the labour intensity, also larger set of social relations within which the caring is done, perceived and assessed by others.

Healthcare services are rapidly growing and needed globally, especially in the global North, much due growing elderly population. Globalization processes overall, and more specifically the worldwide demographics bias in the global North all set new demands for healthcare and for social care. In addition, the higher standard of living has fuelled the number of innovations in healthcare technologies and also for its part increased the global migration of professionals in the healthcare sector. Contemporary aspect of the global trends in the new health economy is the global migration of care workers (e.g. Esplen 2009; Kingma 2006; Khadria 2007). The health professional mobility and migration is one aspect of this phenomenon. The health professional migration also reflects the deep socio-economic and political divisions that are often discussed as global North-South–divide. This unequal division of possibilities, despite the high level of education, has led to the migration, the patterns of which for healthcare professionals go along the North-South–divide. While affluent households may have the option of paying for care, in poorer households intense care needs are often met only by women’s informal work input. These divisions and income differences reign throughout the globe.

Healthcare services are globally also becoming a highly productive sector of the world economy, despite the labour intensity of the sector. Globalization processes and the worldwide increase in demand for personal care and healthcare have together not only fuelled the spread of technologies globally, but also started a new, different global trend. The global care chains mean the migration of expert healthcare labour force, resulting also the global migration of healthcare workers beyond the professional groups such as doctors and nurses. Thus, not only medical doctors and nurses but also child-minders, elderly care workers and cleaners have become globally mobile workforce. According to OECD statistics, the migration of healthcare professionals has dramatically increased in scale mostly due to the liberalization of markets and changes in population dynamics over the past two decades (OECD 2007; Eckenwiler 2009). Active recruitment in many countries has additionally increased the number of those migrating: for example, international nurse recruitment and migration based on systematic recruitments have been increasing in the last decade. Recent trends show an increase in the migration of nurses from developing countries to developed countries, resulting in a worldwide shortage of nurses (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007; Dywili et al. 2013).

The migration patterns are difficult to picture accurately but various studies indicate a pattern that is characterized by global migration from global South, that is, from low- and middle-income countries to global North, high-income countries in North America and Western Europe. The OECD study showed that nearly all European OECD countries have increasingly relied on recruiting health workers from abroad to fill their shortages already ten years ago (OECD 2007; Favell 2007). There are currently several factors contributing to and causing the global migration of care work and care workers, apart from the factors above. Research has shown that better remuneration for work abroad, professional advancement prospects and better career opportunities, a safer working environment and a better quality of life are the main reasons for migration (Dywili et al. 2013; Isaksen 2011). Additionally, one such factor is the ways the governments structure their policies around the questions of care. Countries with strong welfare state support and provisions for care have less demand for private care than in countries with weak welfare state structure. However, the strong welfare state can invite migration of the skilled care workers due to other reasons, such as relatively high salaries and insufficient number of care work professionals available at the national labour markets.

It has been estimated that the global migration of healthcare work professionals will continue and increase exponentially with the new technology helping to alleviate language and work culture problems. For example, in the USA, the number of overseas-educated medical doctors has grown in seven years from 2002 to 2009 by 70%, and in most OECD countries, the share of foreign-trained medical doctors has been increasing in recent years as well (OECD Observer 2010). The mobility figures tell also about the excellent human capital through training and mobility upwards in societal ranks across the borders.

Several European countries, for example UK and Spain, have established bilateral agreements to recruit health workers. These shifts of labour can have both positive and negative implications, depending on the country’s role in the migratory scheme. Indeed, even in strong welfare states where the support for the dependent and their caregivers is professionalized, or formalized, there is more demand for migrant workers than where the schemes for care are more informal (e.g. Cuban 2013; Dahl et al. 2011).

In order to say something about the phenomenon, it is essential to know who those healthcare professionals are who migrate and where do they migrate to. According to recent large-scale global study 57% of the respondents migrated to a country where the same language is spoken. Of them, 33% migrated to neighbouring countries and 21% migrated to former colonizing countries, even if the language was different to mother tongue. Women medical doctors and nurses, and male and female nurses migrated to neighbouring countries, nurses and older and highly educated healthcare workers to former colonizing countries and highly educated health workers and medical doctors to countries that have a language match (De Vries et al. 2016). It seems that the high education and qualifications do not stop the migration, but on the contrary, they give good possibilities for migration, as the education and the language skills are assets at the global care markets.

Professional healthcare mobility and migration are highly gendered, to the extent that gender has in care work and professions given rise to the global care chains. The term global care chain was first introduced by Hochschild (2001) to remark how migrant care workers replace and fill in the care deficits borne out of two main reasons: the increasing number of women at the paid labour markets and the inabilities of the states to respond to this with public measures. Care work is not piece-meal assembly line factory work, but highly interpersonal, temporally bound and intimate work with sick, frail or fragile people. Thus becoming accommodated and acclimatized to the receiving society or locality seems to be one key element of being able to do the demanding care work.

Parallel to the ideas of work in the new economy, the questions of transnationalism and globalization relate to the ways work is presently understood and organized globally. The question of what is counted as promotable new economy and what counts as old economy, and how transnationalism relates to these two forms of thinking the gendered work, becomes even more pertinent, given the fact, that for example, it is estimated that over 50% of the global workforce can be defined as working in the informal sector (Williams 2011). While we can claim that highly interdependent national economies are increasingly becoming a single market economy, at least in Europe, for highly skilled and highly educated professionals, other types of gender-differentiated and local labour markets in care are also emerging (Williams and Round 2008; Williams et al. 2012). These types of work are often assumed to be located among the less skilled or poorly skilled, among women and even in the shadow economy (Cuban 2013). Much of this work is informal care work that exists in all societies. Thus, care work, transnationalism and globalization are not reducible to one issue only, but relate to several things such as locality and dependencies of different types (extended familial ties, relatives). The ways in which technology is related to and entangled with care today, is thus also layered and not reducible to one meaning only. Technologies may change the practices but not the orientations to work. Indeed, in empirical interview studies, care professionals themselves do not consider their work ethics or practices as dependent on the contractual nature of the work, nor on the type of work contract they have (Kovalainen and Österberg-Högstedt 2013).

To critique the rigid division into ‘old’ and ‘new’ economies, the relationship between old and new needs to be more carefully carved out and contextualized. As referred earlier, the ‘new’ most often refers to the digital and software sectors and parts of the economy, in contrast to manufacturing, piece work and labour intensity. The inherent assumption is that all work that is governed by and done within these sectors is part of that new, or the old, economy. But, and our thesis is, nothing in society is untouched by any other; the old and new economies blend into each other. The Filipino or African woman who has migrated to the USA to work as a ‘shadow mother’ (Macdonald 2011) or household cleaner /gardener uses technologies provided by the new economy when sending money through the SWIFT system from the States back home to a local bank or to family through mobile banking system. The old economy jobs and work and the contents – gardening, cleaning, caring or cooking for children and spending time with them – have not changed, but they have submerged in themselves the devices and services provided by the new economy.

Through the care work, the idea of the work and its radical change in the new economy can indeed be problematized. Care in the new economy does not entail qualitatively different elements than the work done in the old economy, as shown in the analysis by Poutanen and Kovalainen (2014). Yet, the change in the institutional contexts shapes also the forms and ways of working in the care. Their analysis shows how the care constantly requires presence and bodily work, and how the technologies of care and power are in differing ways inherently present in those work activities. It can be argued that the gendered care work resists and challenges the often made strong division and classification into the old and new economies (Poutanen and Kovalainen 2014).

Interestingly to the new economy thesis, some large corporations have adopted the ‘old’ informality as part of their inherent corporate strategy (Williams 2011: 3). As an example of this, salaries even in many global corporations in many countries can still be paid in two lump sums, declared pay and undeclared ‘envelope wages’ (Williams 2011). This example of wages paid in two formats – formal and informal, not hidden – shows distinctively not only how the old economy inherently exists within the new economy, but perhaps more importantly, how the domestication processes of globalization spread and function. In this specific case of wages paid in two formats, it also shows how culture is engraving the contours of the new economy (Sweet and Meiksins 2012) that take different shapes in different contexts.

The arguments of the new economy and gender often state that the dynamics of the new economy have provided gendered opportunities and constraints, for women as well as for men (e.g. McDowell 2008a, also McDowell 2008b). It is true that gender relates to and is constituted by and within the new economy in so many ways it becomes difficult to disentangle the various threads and discussions, so no general overview is given here either. Understood most broadly from a feminist point of view, the new economy as part of globalization has facilitated and enabled new spaces, institutions and shared rhetoric where universality, through globalization, in terms of human rights has become one justificatory principle (e.g. Walby 2002, 2009). The major advances in the feminist theorization of globalization – covering some aspects of the new economy as well – have been mainly twofold: to systematize the gender effects of globalization (Tronto 2011; Naples 2008), and to intersect globalization theories and gender theories with contextualized interrelationships (Bair 2010; Yeates 2012).

One example of the complex contextualized interrelationships is shown by Isaksen’s analysis of migrant care workers in Italy (Isaksen 2011). The tradition in Sicily, Italy has been that care workers were recruited from neighbouring villages away from the direct local community. Today according to Isaksen, these ‘neighbourhood wives’ are replaced with ‘neighbouring country’ wives. Contemporary patterns of informal care mean today the crossing of national borders instead of villages and payment related to different foreign currencies. In Central Europe, the traditional ‘neighbourhood wives’ taking care of the inferior and intimate care work came from lower social classes (Isaksen 2011). Migrant care workers, ‘new neighbourhood wives’ have in most countries become partially integrated into the local economy and work force, partially living far from their homeland country. Global markets thus bring in a new care economy in terms of migrant care workers (OECD Observer 2010), and with that, an institutionalization of temporality and distance.

5.2.1 Case Study: Lisa, Alice’s Mother

Alice’s mother Lisa suffers from several illnesses that restrict her ability to be fully independent and manage without some home help and some assisted care. She lives in her own house where she has been living most of her adult life since her marriage. Her house is impractical, as it is large with several stairs and so she needs help to live and to maintain the house. Currently she is attended by a home care helper two to three times a week. The home care and care professionals from a care company help Lisa with cleaning and maintenance of the household, grocery shopping and other everyday activities once or twice a week. That is the amount of help Alice can afford to purchase to her mother.

Even if Lisa still manages perfectly well at home, the family discussion about Lisa moving to an assisted apartment is ongoing. So far technology helps her to maintain her independent living, and she prefers that. Lisa also continuously wears a wristband, but her wristband is a very different type and for very different purposes than her daughter’s. Lisa’s wristband monitors her movements and alarms if no movement takes place. Alice has had a security camera, door alarm and a surveillance system installed at Lisa’s house. The security system is not necessarily needed as the neighbourhood is safe, but it gives Lisa a feeling of safety.

Alice can no longer think of her life – or her mother’s life – without the technological devices and technological help such as the tracking and monitoring systems, which help her in many ways. The tracking devices help her to keep in contact with her mother from a distance, but also help her to focus on her own health and wellbeing. Similarly, Alice cannot think of her life – or her mother’s life – without some sort of wearable technology such as the wristband. The technology helps her to cope with her own everyday life. Technology does not, however, provide company to her mother in the evenings. But Skype and Facetime calls help to stay connected. Overall, the new technology helps Alice to organize her mother’s everyday life and wellbeing. The care company contract concerning the services Alice and Lisa purchase for Lisa’s welfare also states the increasing use of technology in services such as in the monitoring of Lisa’s wellbeing and needs. With the use of technology, the care company is able to reduce the number of individual visits it makes.

Lisa has several types of devices at her home that support her independent living at home, despite her chronic rheumatism. The devices range from remote alarm system to smartphone and far-field voice control. As Lisa spends a lot of time at home, she has learned to enjoy the company of online radio, for example, and she often uses the Internet also through the voice control devices, either in the living room or on her cell phone. The voice control device answers her questions of the phone numbers, weather around the globe, and it even reads her audiobooks and the news. With the device, she gets the weather reports and opening hours of the local shops, etc. In fact, there is little the voice controlled far-field system does not do, but they do make mistakes – or Lisa does when asking one thing and getting an answer to an entirely different matter. Hence, it is about learning to specify questions and being simple. The devices seem to develop and the current remote voice control Lisa has can even control the lights of the house and the thermostats, but those qualities Lisa has not tried yet. For Lisa, it is not an option that her phone or voice controlled device would keep her the only company, though and so far, the devices have not yet replaced a human contact for her.

The snapshots above of Alice’s and Lisa’s everyday lives narrate a more general picture and rather usual mix of informal and formal care arrangements in a many Western countries: adult children keep contact and even do the distant-care for their elderly parents. Even if Alice is not considered directly as family caregiver, as her mother, Lisa, manages mostly on her own, she sometimes feels stressed due to her mother’s care and support requirements. Several research reports evidence how the adult children and family caregivers cite higher levels of perceived stress, and most often the caregivers are women. Also, the difficulty to find time to care for oneself, the feeling of social isolation and the lack of work-life balance, result in a negative impact to their overall emotional well-being (e.g. Tao and McRoy 2015). The research carried out by Carers UK showed that majority (72%) of the family members who use technology in care mentioned that it gave them ‘a greater peace of mind’. However, technology is not available for everybody in caring work in similar manner: 2011 Survey by State of Caring showed 46% of carers in the UK did not know how to access supportive technological solutions, even if these solutions would have been financially or otherwise available (www.carersuk.org 2016). The short glimpses to Alice’s and Lisa’s lives exemplify also how closely technology in general, the various uses of technology, its innovative adaptations and the huge progress in the ways the technology is available in special, is entangled with wellbeing and also with modern care in Western societies. The new economy includes several aspects that disrupt, change and rearrange the previous arrangements and established understandings in those economic fields where gender is most involved, especially in care work and in creative work. But does technology wipe away the gendered nature of care work, and to what extent technology can change the gendered patterns of informal care? This chapter has discussed the new economy and the transformation of the gendered care in general. And as the snapshot of Alice’s and Lisa’s lives showed, these are not so far from each other.

5.3 Hybridization of Care Work

In everyday life the differentiation in the gendering of the technology is highly visible in the wearable gadgets and technical devices attached to the clothing. The fitness tracking which started with devices that originally measured the steps taken, has since developed into measuring the intensity of activities and numerous bodily functions. The bursts of exercises, for example, are much more important for the sports activities than just measurement of length of the exercise. Rather soon in the technology development, gender differentiation was taken into account, for example by embedding the tracking devices into clothes such as sports bra. The devices – no matter where they are in your sports clothing, usually measure the heart rate and breathing rhythm and prompt you accordingly. The algorithm in the wearable technology lets you know when you are training in your best zone by measuring your exercise based on the cadence, steps, pace, stride length and calories burned, for example.

Would you like to check from your phone how you feel? Do you wish to have an algorithm to know when your next period starts, or do you possibly have the symptoms of PMS coming instead of ordinary headache? The mood changes in relation to menstruation are no longer viewed as a natural period of hormonal imbalance but they have become medicalized as a bunch of symptoms of premenstrual tension (PMT) and thus treatable and traceable with the help of apps. These examples are first and foremost about gathering data of oneself with help variety of sensors, apps and other technology. But will you really learn to know yourself through a ‘datafied and quantified self’? (e.g. Neff and Nafus 2016; Nafus and Sherman 2014; Profita et al. 2013; Topol 2012).

Health monitoring and self-monitoring, with the help of wearable technology, and the mapping of the individual’s bodily functions with the data gathered with wearable technology are two recent examples of the contemporary, data-driven trends in the healthcare and wellness self-monitoring. The global markets for health self-monitoring technologies have grown exponentially, to the extent that both the technological devices and the apps are seen the as the biggest shake-up in the personal healthcare, health monitoring and prevention of several illnesses as the market opportunities for new health self-monitoring products and technologies are globally growing. Indeed, the digital health has emerged as one key dimension of contemporary healthcare policy and delivery in many countries.

While the telemedicine has generally become a standard part of the healthcare policy, breaking the national boundaries in new ways, the new applications of digital services in tele-medicine, have spread exponentially. Telemedicine in general involves the use of digital and other technologies to encourage patients to self-monitor their medical conditions at home (e.g. Oudshoorn 2012; Barta and Neff 2015). Another part of the telemedicine is the expert interpretation done of medical cases through the Internet (remote experts interpreting x-rays or other medical images). As one example of the new trends in human-machine interfaces and sensory modalities, the biofeedback trend has grown exponentially (Swan 2012).

The ‘connected care’ integrates all parts of the healthcare system, from patients and carers to doctors and hospitals, and as it has been claimed, even to insurers and government with real-time networks. A study on the spread of telemedicine estimated that 61% of US healthcare organizations have adopted telemedicine solutions such as remote monitoring and diagnosis consultations (HIMSS, 2016). The three biggest perceived barriers to connected technology adoption in healthcare according to professionals are the cost of devices, the privacy concerns (data security), and health system bureaucracy (FHI 2016).

Biofeedback uses the information from technological devices and/or sensors that receive and monitor information (feedback) of the body (bio). The growth of biofeedback use has during the last few years grown into new intensity with several new wearable technologies and apps that enable the monitoring. Several applications have been around quite a long time to measure health, fitness and other types of data, ranging from blood pressure and calories intake to blood glucose and alcohol content. All of these are advertised as new ways to learn about yourself through the data you collect (Ramirez 2013). By measuring the heart rate, breathing levels and, for example, the indicators of stress, biofeedback technology has developed psychologically conscious video games with stress-control techniques that help to fight tension. It is another matter if video games are the best way to fight the tension, but increasingly self-help materials in video and in YouTube are used for alleviating stress.

For many, such as for Alice, the activity trackers and with them the monitored data have become one key dimension in maintaining health and wellbeing and it also includes fitness data, exercise data, food entry, sleep data etc. Advocates of digital health and wellness technologies argue that individuals as consumers are an integral part of the digitalization that is about to occur or has already occurred in healthcare, and that they should play an active role in ‘digitizing’ their bodies and its functions (e.g. Topol 2012; Swan 2012). These devices also represent the Internet of things: monitoring devices are most often synced wirelessly with a computer or smartphone for long-term data tracking. The downsides of the activity trackers are several and equally, several of them are about complex ownership of the data, permission to gather digital data from apps, and more generally, the privacy matters. Issues such as apps for some activity trackers not only transmit personal data, but also private address lists to servers on the Internet without notifying or asking the user’s permission.

The answers to questions such the one addressing how and by whom the vast amounts of data produced in the health and care technology is used, include ideas and business start-up possibilities. Most apps programs ask – when logging in and selecting any data type for review using program access – whether the company can read, maintain and storage your data. After granting permission, a visual display of the data you have gathered yourself is available to yourself and to any other you permit access to your data. This data can be highly personal, or it may also refer to population averages, in order to locate and allow for comparisons to take place.

Another dimension of the technology becoming part of the everyday life, health and social care is the wearable technology. Wearable technology means technology that is integrated to the clothes and clothing materials. Intelligent clothing is clothes and clothing materials where additional tracking and data mediating, gathering and creating materials have become part of the clothing and clothes (e.g. Malmivaara 2009). The boost to do research on wearable technology was supported by DARPA (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) and research started with highly technical emphasis, with development of wearable computers, minimization, virtual reality and augmented reality (McCann and Bryson 2009). It was only after the beginning of 2000s when design of clothing became part of the wearable technology developments, with many different types of experiments following. Today the digital tailoring and conductive fibres have expanded the wearable tech into diversification and individualization which both emphasize the potentiality of technology. Technology can take many forms and be part of the everyday life in many ways, indeed, wearable technology strands range from protection (patient care, prevention care for elderly, and for high-impact sports) to prohibition of injuries, support, active self-monitoring and health maintenance and lifestyle support (active population).

In recent years, the increasing social impact and interconnection of care work with care markets, carers (actors), and institutions have been all understood under the broad concept of social and healthcare and its transformation or different forms. Moving from globalization to the new economy, the connection is close. The new economy and its workings presuppose globalization, and globalization for its part feeds into the new economy, which seems to be inherently assembled as part of the globalizing processes. So the assemblages of the new economy/old economy, gender, care work and globalization become interesting to explore further, as we have done above albeit briefly. We have argued, through the intersection of gender, care work and economy that the clear-cut divisions such as the new economy/old economy do not work in complex analysis.

More importantly, care work as embodied labour challenges the basis of the claimed foundation of the new economy vis-à-vis the old economy. The assumed broken relationship between the personhood and labour does not hold true as principled difference between the two, but accommodates both in the embodied presence of care work/labour. In this chapter, we have shown through examples that the rigid division between the old economy and the new economy is challenged and rejected by the gendered care work and labour. By focusing on the question of personhood and the new economy, we also wish to evoke the more general question of whether we can make such as clear and analytical distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ economies, as often assumed? We have argued for a different solution, through the powerful example of care work.

The question we have interrogated relates more widely to methodological questions and challenges. The growing interrelatedness of nation states is visible in the shifts that have taken place through the last decade from isolated containers to supranational actors (e.g. the idea of the European Community) and from fortresses to horizontal interdependencies and new power constellations (e.g. the recent global financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis within Europe’s euro-using countries, such as Greece and Spain) that call for specificities and defined social contexts. These specificities and defined social contexts should not assume any given causality between global changes and locally bound activities as such. This discourse of changing institutions is in alignment with the growing critique on the nation-state container theory of society, which seeks to move beyond the view of the states as container units of analysis. The analysis of the processes of the adoption of common policies and ‘travelling policies’ show us different kinds of domestication processes taking place. Can we therefore talk about the same, global or European policy, for example (Morel et al. 2012)? The simultaneity of engagement in activities across and beyond nation states, for example, as in migration, sets additional methodological and theoretical challenges for research on globalization, transnationalism and the new economy.

Several authors have argued that specific entrepreneurial behaviour of workers relies on ‘venture labour’, not on actual entrepreneurial activities within organization (e.g. Neff 2016). This behaviour reflects a broader transformation in society in which economic risk shifts away from collective responsibility and toward individual responsibility. The platforms do not employ, nor do they own the means for production. They become assembled as initiators and igniters for individual economic activities. The paradox in these activities is that they are formatted activities, following the script of contract with no entrepreneurial freedom existing within a script. For that reason, entrepreneurial and innovation related vocabulary is not suitable in describing the work in the labour platforms.

In the new economy, risk and reward takes the place of job loyalty throughout the labour markets (Sennett 1998). Some researchers label the management of the risks of contemporary work as ‘venture labor’ (Neff 2016). What exactly is venture labour? Neff defines it as the investment of time, energy, human capital and other personal resources that employees make in the companies where they work (Neff 2016). The ways the workers adapt to new technologies and mold the work, the emerging posts and positions in the new economy into their own is highly contingent, and adaptable, resembling the entrepreneurial values of non-entrepreneurs. The possible risk that related to the short-termism and fixed positions was framed in a study by Neff – not in terms of financial gains from working in the start-ups but in terms of desire to work in creative environment. The ways people take up the idea of ownership – without having any formal ownership – of their workplaces can range from off-hours commitment, as in many workplaces, to social networks promoting the companies on free time.

The concept of venture labour leaves out the downside of the venture capital, which is, losing the capital. As for venture funding, there is a possibility to insure the capital against particular risks and losses, and for gains the margins are usually calculable. But for labour as ‘capital’ the venturing does not function in a similar manner as for other types of capital: the deep commitment to the corporation does not necessarily bring in better possibilities for staying within the corporation in the economic turmoil or recession (Sennett 2006). The transferable skills and capabilities can offer better chances in the future labour markets.

One of the central concepts for creative work is a deep commitment to the actual work. Indeed, work identity is used as a concept to refer to a work-based self-concept, constituted and constructed in the making and defined in the literature in multiple ways (e.g. Martin and Wajcman 2004). As a construct, work identity overlaps with other constructs used in the studies of creative work, such as occupational identity so that they are often used interchangeably (e.g. Levine 2010). How to get a grasp of work identity? As an elusive concept, work identity is difficult to measure. The articulations of work identity take place in the processes of meaning-making within organizations, when individuals contextualize and situate their occupational skills relative to the skills and capabilities of their co-workers and the organization and its needs. The questions of identity and identity construction connect to work through several layers and activities. For many, job and career building are intertwined with creative work and more so, self-worth (e.g. Beech 2008). Having to re-manufacture your worth every day at work is exhausting and hollowing out experience in the venture labour times.

The idea of identity work builds on Goffman’s (1967) concept of social encounters. Social encounters allow people to enact who they are. A wider question then is how people’s identities become meaningful to themselves and others. Questions about willing hybrids’ professional identities lead them to challenge and disrupt institutionalized professionalism, and use and integrate professionalism and managerialism, creating more legitimate hybrid professionalism in their managerial context.