ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a theoretical and critical framework for understanding the term ‘creative labor’ as it can be applied to the screenwriting profession. It examines how cultural studies, sociologies of work and political economy have been employed to understand the changing experiences of work in recent decades and particularly how the work of artists and ‘creatives’ is now constituted and experienced within the ‘new cultural economy’. Theoretical accounts of creative labor drawn from political economy, cultural studies and critical sociology can, at their best, provide an incisive basis for an analysis of the ‘new cultural economy’, creative labor and the political investments made in new kinds of cultural policy making. Beyond general discussions of industrial reflexivity or self-exploitation, some more recent and nuanced accounts of work in the cultural industries have extended the range of concepts used to consider inequality and subjectivity in creative labor.
