[My-ci] My Research on Creative Industries

Ned Rossiter makes some good points in discussion of why his research is relevant... was for a job talk, but subsequently sent to MyCI - have a look at the whole thing, its not too long...

[My-ci] My Research on Creative Industries:
"In studying the relations between labour-power and the creative
industries my interest has been twofold: first, at a theoretical and
political level, I have sought to invent concepts and methodologies
that address the question of the organisation of labour-power within
network societies and informational economies. Here, my research
relates to and has been informed by what the political philosopher
Paolo Virno calls 'the thorniest of problems: how to organize a
plurality of 'social individuals' that, at the moment, seems
fragmented, constitutionally exposed to blackmail - in short,
unorganizable?'[3] Out of an interest in new forms of agency in the
creative industries, I have investigated the political concept of
"organised networks", which can be understood as emergent
institutional forms whose mode of organising sociality is immanent to
networked forms of communications media.[4]

Secondly, my research has investigated the double-edged sword of
precarity within post-Fordist economies, of which the creative
industries belong as a service economy modulated through
informational relations.[5] The precarity of labour-power within the
creative industries is double-edged in the sense that it enables the
attractions of flexibility - the escape from the Fordist time of the
factory and the firm - yet accompanying these relative freedoms is
the dark side of what researchers such as Beck, Lash, Urry and Butler
have variously called uncertainty, insecurity, risk and complexity.
Such fields of inquiry resonate with the concept of organised
networks, both of which are rarely addressed from within creative
industries research "

Rossiter- May 2006 (Thanks Ned)
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