Measuring and managing creative labour: Value struggles and billable hours in the creative industries

Frederick Harry Pitts*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)
215 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Creative labour is often characterised as hard to measure and scientifically manage. As ‘immaterial labour’, its time breaches the working day’s boundaries and produces uncertain outputs. These conditions, claim postoperaists, precipitate a ‘crisis of measurability’. Drawing on interviews with workers at graphic, brand and strategic design agencies in the UK and the Netherlands, this article disputes claims creative labour eludes quantification. It deploys Marxian value theory to demonstrate that the billable hours system of pricing and allocating work in creative agencies establishes ‘fictitious norms of timing’ reminiscent of the Taylorist factory that mediate the labour-process with reference to standards of socially-necessary labour-time set in the market. Rebureaucratising and socialising creative labour, billable hours help creative agencies face overcome measurability as a problem, not a crisis. The article first surveys postoperaist claims of a measurability crisis through a reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Assembly, charting its application to ‘immaterial labour’ in the creative industries. Considering the relevance of traditional forms of industrial organisation like scientific management to creative labour, the article then proposes an alternative perspective based on the concept of socially-necessary labour-time. The case study demonstrates how creative agencies overcome the problem of measure through billable hours and the processes of formalisation and standardisation they imply, including timesheets and time-tracking technologies. The article concludes with a discussion of the possible forms of resistance the conditions uncovered in the case study might incubate, distinguishing between organizing approaches that make claims on value and those that seek to break it.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1081-1098
Number of pages18
JournalOrganization
Volume29
Issue number6
Early online date17 Dec 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Oct 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Thanks to the Editor and three anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily insightful and supportive comments, aswell as Werner Bonefeld, Ana Dinerstein, Jeff Henderson, Theo Papadopoulos, Greg Schwartz, Peter Turnbull and Patrizia Zanoni for comments on various previous iterations. Thanks also to participants and discussants at the International Labour Process Conference (March 2018), the Academy of Management Annual Meeting (August 2016) and the Work, Employment & Society Conference (September 2016), aswell as presentations of earlier versions at the Centre for Organisations and Society, Durham Business School (November 2018), the Global Political Economy Research Cluster, University of Manchester (October 2018), the Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change, University of Leeds (April 2018) and the Fairness at Work Research Centre, Alliance Manchester Business School (February 2017). The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by Economic and Social Research Council grant number ES/J50015X/1 (The Social Validation of Abstract Labour-Time: A Case Study of Billable Hours in the Design and Advertising Industry), with additional support from a Short-Term Scientific Mission funded by EU COST Action IS1202: The Dynamics of Virtual Work (‘E-Rhythms in Freelance Creative Work’) and an ESRC Impact Accelerator Award (‘Beyond the Billable Hour: Alternatives to the Timesheet’).

Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by Economic and Social Research Council grant number ES/J50015X/1 (The Social Validation of Abstract Labour-Time: A Case Study of Billable Hours in the Design and Advertising Industry), with additional support from a Short-Term Scientific Mission funded by EU COST Action IS1202: The Dynamics of Virtual Work (‘E-Rhythms in Freelance Creative Work’) and an ESRC Impact Accelerator Award (‘Beyond the Billable Hour: Alternatives to the Timesheet’).

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.

Research Groups and Themes

  • Cultural Work
  • Digital Societies
  • Perspectives on Work
  • MGMT Work Organisation and Public Policy
  • MGMT theme Work Futures

Keywords

  • Creative Labour
  • Creative Industries
  • Measurement
  • Value
  • Time
  • Marx

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