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(Re)Negotiating creativity: Sustaining digital and creative careers over the life course

(Re)Negotiating creativity: Sustaining digital and creative careers over the life course
(Re)Negotiating creativity: Sustaining digital and creative careers over the life course
Attaining and sustaining a career in the digital and creative industries is hard. Training that is often expensive and difficult to navigate, informal hiring practices, precarious employment, and long, intense, and inflexible hours, all come together to limit access and progression for many people. Moreover, as these conditions interact with people’s changing priorities and needs over the life course, the ability to sustain work is often not possible, reflected in the high rates of worker attrition (Carey et al., 2020; Steele, 2022). With a critical labour shortage in these industries, tackling the loss of older workers by addressing the challenges of digital and creative work is important. While there is much recent literature which speaks to the challenges (for example Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020; Wallis, van Raalte and Allegrini, 2020), less is said about those people who have managed to sustain their careers in the face of these challenges, whose circumstances present examples of the conditions which are needed in order not to be ‘filtered out’. This thesis addresses this gap, exploring the strategies that older workers in the fields of Video, Games, and Websites have been able to use in order to sustain their careers.
Thesis, Creative Industries, life course, Film & TV, Games, Websites, Sociology, inequalities
University of Southampton
Thomas, Ben
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Thomas, Ben
72392380-0059-41ab-934e-fd233eeb042f
Leonard, Pauline
a2839090-eccc-4d84-ab63-c6a484c6d7c1
Taylor, Rebecca
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Thomas, Ben (2024) (Re)Negotiating creativity: Sustaining digital and creative careers over the life course. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis, 257pp.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

Attaining and sustaining a career in the digital and creative industries is hard. Training that is often expensive and difficult to navigate, informal hiring practices, precarious employment, and long, intense, and inflexible hours, all come together to limit access and progression for many people. Moreover, as these conditions interact with people’s changing priorities and needs over the life course, the ability to sustain work is often not possible, reflected in the high rates of worker attrition (Carey et al., 2020; Steele, 2022). With a critical labour shortage in these industries, tackling the loss of older workers by addressing the challenges of digital and creative work is important. While there is much recent literature which speaks to the challenges (for example Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020; Wallis, van Raalte and Allegrini, 2020), less is said about those people who have managed to sustain their careers in the face of these challenges, whose circumstances present examples of the conditions which are needed in order not to be ‘filtered out’. This thesis addresses this gap, exploring the strategies that older workers in the fields of Video, Games, and Websites have been able to use in order to sustain their careers.

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More information

Published date: 21 May 2024
Keywords: Thesis, Creative Industries, life course, Film & TV, Games, Websites, Sociology, inequalities

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 490262
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/490262
PURE UUID: 644c2ce6-19f6-4e8a-a178-65c9229117ff
ORCID for Ben Thomas: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-5240-7521
ORCID for Pauline Leonard: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-8112-0631
ORCID for Rebecca Taylor: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-8677-0246

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 22 May 2024 16:31
Last modified: 21 Sep 2024 01:59

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Contributors

Author: Ben Thomas ORCID iD
Thesis advisor: Pauline Leonard ORCID iD
Thesis advisor: Rebecca Taylor ORCID iD

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