ABSTRACT
Drawing on interviews with web designers in the North-West of England, 1 this chapter is concerned with the work biographies of creative workers. Much has been made of such biographies, not least because they are routinely located as paradigmatic of new forms of the ordering of life, and especially economic life, in post-Fordism. Thus, portfolio and/or precarious patterns of work, a lack of discernible boundaries between working life and home life, life-world detraditionalization, continuous patterns of skilling and re-skilling, as well as the positioning of work as a self-managed, self-directed, unfolding event, have all been taken to indicate the decline of the proprietary skilled worker and corresponding culture of training and lifestyle (or the decline of the standardized collective work biography) and the emergence of do-it-yourself biographies. In short, creative biographies have been taken to be exemplary of processes of individualization in regard to economic life, including its contradictions and exclusions. In this chapter, however, I raise a number of questions regarding this assumption. I do so by enquiring as to the status and relevance of biography for the study of work and working lives in the context of individualization and the decline of the proprietary skilled worker and I do so despite the widespread use of biography as a methodological device for tracking, mapping and describing creative working lives. More specifically, I raise questions regarding the methodological efficacy of biography for the study of creative workers and cultural work not least because biography orders events in a fashion that is more akin to the rhythms of industrial society than those of post-Fordism. In short, this chapter locates biography as an anachronistic methodological device for the study of creative labour, one which not only eschews the restructuring of time paradigmatic of post-Fordist production but also consistently confuses this time with evidence of pervasive individualization. In this chapter, I therefore also question the widely held assumption that creative labour is paradigmatically individualized labour.
