Workers in cultural industries often say that the best part of their job is the opportunity for creativity. At the same time, profit-minded managers at both traditional firms and digital platforms exhort workers to “be creative.” Even as cultural fields hold out the prospect of meaningful employment, they are marked by heightened economic precarity. What does it mean to be creative under contemporary capitalism? And how does the ideology of creativity explain workers’ commitment to precarious jobs?

Michael L. Siciliano draws on nearly two years of ethnographic research as a participant-observer in a Los Angeles music studio and a multichannel YouTube network to explore the contradictions of creative work. He details how such workplaces feature engaging, dynamic processes that enlist workers in organizational projects and secure their affective investment in ideas of creativity and innovation. Siciliano argues that performing creative labor entails a profound ambivalence: workers experience excitement and aesthetic engagement alongside precarity and alienation. Through close comparative analysis, he presents a theory of creative labor that accounts for the roles of embodiment, power, alienation, and technology in the contemporary workplace.

Combining vivid ethnographic detail and keen sociological insight, Creative Control explains why “cool” jobs help us understand how workers can participate in their own exploitation.

"The book is well researched, well written, and very timely to better understand subordination and attractions to jobs in the platform economy and creative production...I hope this ambitious and detailed study finds a wide readership; it is a required reading for scholars interested in contemporary creative labor in platform economies and cultural production more generally." - Acta Sociologica

"The case studies in Creative Control capture the changing nature of information-age creative labor and operationalize sociological concepts to describe its new modes of managerial control and increased alienation and precarity, providing a framework for further research into a wider array of creative contexts." - Critical Studies in Media Communication

"Has important and wide-ranging implications for how we think about creative labor, and I expect the findings to be of great interest to sociologists of culture, work, and technology." - Contemporary Sociology

"A rich empirical account of precarious work in the culture industries and crafts a novel framework connecting the affective rewards to the costs of contemporary creative labor." - American Journal of Sociology

"Provides new ways of understanding the relationship between creative labor and management that both challenge established ways of thinking and open up new avenues for understanding the future of work in the creative sector." - Administrative Science Quarterly