Oxford
Oxfordshire OX3 0BP
UK
Developments of the critical discursive tradition within social psychology offer both a conceptualisation of a gendered contemporary subject and an analytic approach to talk and text data, including media representations. In this paper I discuss representations which centre on a new worker as a gendered variant of two other idealised figures, the entrepreneur and the creative artist. The figure of the entrepreneur, eager to pursue opportunities and take risks, is central to the market-driven accounts of economic development associated with neoliberalism. The image of the artist following a creative vocation underlies many of the now-established understandings of careers and work practices in the contemporary cultural and creative industries (CCI), a global sector first identified in the late 20th century. I argue that the discursive drift between enterpreneurship and creative work valorises the new worker as a feminised, though not inevitably female, figure. I suggest that media representations invite identification with this new worker figure through a ‘new mystique’, promising autonomy and creative fulfilment as compensation for the precariousness and difficulty of freelancing and self-employment on the margins of contemporary economies.
Stephanie Taylor is the author of Narratives of Identity and Place (Routledge, 2010), Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work (Ashgate 2012, with Karen Littleton) and What is Discourse Analysis? (Bloomsbury, 2013). Her research employs a narrative-discursive approach to explore identification and a complex gendered subject, following theoretical and methodological work in narrative and discursive psychology. She has presented her innovative work on research methods and conducted methodology workshops in Turkey, Switzerland, Finland, Ireland and the UK, including at the ESRC Research Methods festival in Oxford (2011, 2012) http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/TandE/video/stats.php http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/TandE/video/stats.php.