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Networks, Social Capital and the Burden of Performativity

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Independent Television Production in the UK

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Abstract

Networking is central to work in independent television production. Cultural workers in the field find work, maintain their careers and seek to advance through networks, and the sector itself is reliant on networks to function. This chapter explores the classed, exclusionary nature of the networked labour market in the ITPS, which favours individuals with high levels of social and cultural capital. The chapter provides an analysis of networked labour in the mid-2000s, and then advances the analysis by ten years, drawing on new interviews with the research participants. In doing so, it explores how the networked nature of the labour market has changed, as well as the impact on participants’ subjectivities of being within a networked, performative environment over a significant period of their working lives. The analysis looks at the psychosocial impact of the increased ubiquity of social media, from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter to LinkedIn, on the labour process in television work. Do the new modes of networking provide a greater range of opportunities for individuals to access the labour market and to stay connected with it; or do they force individuals to perform a ‘meat mask’, creating new burdens and demands for workers?

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  1. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    David Lee

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Lee, D. (2018). Networks, Social Capital and the Burden of Performativity. In: Independent Television Production in the UK. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71670-1_6

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