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Jeffrey C Dixon, Review of “Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 3, March 2022, Page e3, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab093
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Michael L. Siciliano’s Creative Control examines what Siciliano calls “creative labor,”—that is, “human capacities for interpretation, action, improvisation, and judgment using symbols and signs within the context of waged work” (p. 6). This study involved 84 in-depth interviews and “twenty months of extensive participant observation” between 2013 and 2018, among other data collection methods (p. 19). Using an extended case method, it compares and contrasts two cases based in the US, “SoniCo” and “The Future,” which are respectively a music recording studio and a YouTube management network.
One of the book’s arguments is that creativity is an “ideological mechanism of control” (p. 30). According to Siciliano’s interpretation of in-depth interview data, workers and managers alike seem to embrace the general notion of creativity, but differ in what it means to them: Whereas some workers believe creativity is akin to creating something from nothing, managers hold a more limited view, allowing workers the “freedom” to be creative within the confines of organizational goals. Relative to research using closed-ended survey questions on worker autonomy, a strength of this book is that Siciliano uses methods that allow him to gauge people’s meanings of creativity in their own words.
