Banks & Deuze - Co-creative labour
Banks, J., & Deuze, M. (2009). Co-creative labour. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12(5), 419–431.
This article introduces a special issue of IJCS on the topic of co-creative labour. As such, it is useful as an overview of the field. The term ‘co-creation’ describes consumers increasingly participating in making and circulating media content and experiences. Practices of user-created content and user-led innovation are now significant sources of both economic and cultural value, but it is still not clear whether these value-generating activities should be defined as a form of labour. Also, what are the implications and impacts of such co-creative practices on the employment conditions and professional identities of people working in the creative industries?
In answering these questions, the text and the special issue argue that careful attention must be paid to how the participants (both professional and non-professional, commercial and non-commercial) negotiate and navigate the meanings and possibilities of the emerging co-creative relationships. This should be done for mutual benefit, since co-creative media production is perhaps a disruptive agent of change that sits uncomfortably with our current understandings and theories of work and labour. The articles in this special issue follow and unpack the often diverse and contradictory ways the participants use and remake the social categories of work and labour.
Banks & Deuze “Co-creative labour”