Abstract
This chapter focuses on the vocational narratives of creative graduates. Using qualitative interviews from Australia and the UK, it reflects on how vocational identities are produced by creatives and how they understand the relationship between creative skills and employment more broadly. Using the concept of “narratives of employability” and reflecting on the inability of creative graduates to use their educational credentials, we highlight how the “lived and narrated experience” that is not only reported but continuously performed and embodied, becomes a key object of analysis. The findings highlight that such narratives balance a set of common oppositions, such as commitment/flexibility, autonomy/instrumentalism, and personal effort/constraints of social context. We observe that vocational narratives are used in relation to managing (financial) risk and “embedded” forms of creative work, allowing graduates to fine-tune their vocational identity within creative work in and outside of the creative industries.
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Notes
- 1.
The social proximity between interviewer and interviewee in the field of creative labour studies is something of an “open secret” in the field, with many creative labour researchers working in university programmes that are themselves significant agents in the cultural sector, and which clearly have an interest in creative sector employment.
- 2.
This research was supported by the Australia Research Council Discovery Project “Working the field: Creative graduates in Australia and China” (DP#150101477 2015–2017).
- 3.
All the names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity.
- 4.
This is clear when we consider the case for transferable skills has long been made in relation to numerous disciplines across the arts and sciences, such as the humanities , natural sciences, and mathematics, and that such an argument has never entailed any claim to such graduates being “embedded” representatives of a particular skill set (e.g. that historians, naturalists or mathematicians are “embedded” in the Public Service or Secondary School system).
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Brook, S., Comunian, R. (2018). “Dropping Out and Working”: The Vocational Narratives of Creative Graduates. In: Martin, L., Wilson, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity at Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77350-6_6
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