Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 209214

Learning to (Love) Labour: Production

Cultures and the Affective Turn
Melissa Gregg

This paper provides a brief introduction to the concept of ‘‘affective labour’’ in media
and cultural theory with a view to broadening the ethical horizon of current research
into production cultures. It begins with an overview of two discernible trends in the
field: the fan tradition pioneered by Henry Jenkins and a range of other media
scholars, and a developing area of research which studies the ‘‘immaterial labour’’ of
the contemporary workplace. Drawing connections between these two trajectories,
I suggest research into production cultures must begin to acknowledge academics’
own participation in a range of instances of unpaid, performative, and sacrificial
labour as part of their implication in the cultures of reward and success in the
workplace. Just as cultural studies of fan behaviour urged academics to recognise
their complicity in the leisure cultures of consumption they sought to explain, I argue
a companion move is necessary in studying the production cultures of the
contemporary workplace for improved epistemological and political benefits.

Affective Labour: Two Histories

Work of Media Consumption
In media and cultural studies, affective labour has most often been illustrated in
studies that reflect the amount of energy and time that fans dedicate to discussing
and consecrating love of a particular book, character, series, game, brand, or
application.1 Here affective labour is used to explain meaningful and productive
human activity that does not result in a direct financial profit or exchange value, but
rather produces a sense of community, esteem, and/or belonging for those who share
a common interest. These practices have enjoyed accelerated scholarly interest in the
wake of technological changes and the amount of ‘‘user generated content’’ now

Melissa Gregg is the author of Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006) and co-editor of The Affect
Theory Reader (with Gregory J. Seigworth, forthcoming Duke UP). Melissa currently works in the Department of
Gender Studies at the University of Sydney, where she is finishing ‘‘Working From Home’’*a three-year
empirical study of new media technology and white collar work. Correspondence to: Melissa Gregg, ARC
Discovery Fellow, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, Main Quadrangle Building A14, University of
Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: mel.gregg@usyd.edu.au

ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2009 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/14791420902868045
210 M. Gregg

being produced online.2 Tiziana Terranova was among the first to note the trend for
new media industries to deploy the free labour of fans in the service of profitable
designs and innovations.3 The ‘‘gift economy’’ characteristic of online and hacking
cultures fits neatly with the profit-seeking, crowd-sourcing aspirations of both
established and budget-conscious start-up media companies.
Lately, Mark Andrejevic suggests that interactive websites such as Television
Without Pity harness fan labour to a new level.4 He observes content producers
incorporating user recommendations to adapt scripts and communicate with fans
who take such recognition as further encouragement to perform what amounts to
unpaid market research. Indeed, for Andrejevic,5 the most pernicious and highly
developed form of affective labour to date is the ‘‘work of being watched,’’ where
consumers embrace the participatory ethos of reality television and ‘‘Web 2.0’’ to
willingly engage in peer-monitoring, behaviour broadcasting and self-surveillance
through television, digital platforms, and online social networks. While ostensibly
reporting activities and tastes for the knowledge of friends, such practices also
provide an intricate archive of cultural preferences for savvy marketers to exploit.
Terranova describes affective labour as a combination of specific technical skills
which are often unpaid and self-taught with ‘‘forms of labour we do not immediately
recognise as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters, and so
on.’’6 Her account complements the history of fan activity represented by Jenkins and
others such as Matt Hills, who argue that researchers regularly blur the line between
expert and fan in studies of media texts and their accompanying subcultures.7 This
area of research is notable for showing that ‘‘academic knowledge remains permeated
by forms of ‘common sense,’ ’’ displaying ‘‘tacit ‘subcultural’ assumptions’’ that
decide which forms of labour will be recognised and financially rewarded.8 Hence one
of the foundational premises of cultural studies approaches to media and popular
culture has been to recognise that the distinction between scholar and fan is often
secondary in understanding how something works. Cultural studies insists that the
judgment of the scholar is itself affected by the culture of which they are part. By
admitting this from the outset, researchers can be held to account for the benefits and
limitations of the techniques they adopt to study others.

Immaterial Labour?
Terranova’s influential perspective also develops from a tradition of theory which uses
affective labour to describe the work of those employed in the service of information
or symbolic manipulation in the new economy. Mario Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, and
Hardt & Negri write about so-called ‘‘immaterial labour’’ drawing on principles from
Italian autonomist Marxism. This writing highlights the shift to ‘‘more immaterial
and cybernetic forms of labour, flexible and precarious networks of employment, and
commodities increasingly defined in terms of culture and media.’’9 A further feature
observed by these writers is the growth in labour activities ‘‘that are not normally
recognized as ‘work,’’’ ‘‘in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and
fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more
 Learning to (Love) Labour 211
10
strategically, public opinion.’’ In this way the notion of immaterial labour
contributes to, at the same time as it sits uncomfortably with, an already strong
legacy of writing on affective labour in feminist research.11 This awkward relationship
stems from the problematic division in conventional economic theory that segregates
private (unpaid) and public (paid) spheres, implying that work in the home is less
‘‘material’’ than that in the formal workplace. The affective labour of the household
sector has in these formulations often been measured in terms of ‘‘consumption.’’
Leopoldina Fortunati offers the clearest evidence that ‘‘the real promoters of the
recent discourse on immaterial labour have been feminists’’ because debates in other
circles ‘‘completely ignored the material labour of the domestic sphere . . . as well as
the other fundamental parts of the immaterial sphere (affect, care, love, education,
socialization, communication, information, entertainment, organization, planning,
coordination, logistics).’’12
Feminist studies have been vital to overturning the conceptual divisions under-
pinning these assumptions.13 Key among these achievements has been highlighting
the significance of the ‘‘emotion work’’ involved in care and service jobs such as the
airline and retail industries. By explaining the consequences for workers whose job it
is to manage the concerns and feelings of customers, Arlie Hochschild has offered
exemplary studies to prove that ‘‘working with affect’’ can be physically tiring in the
same way as apparently more physical, ‘‘manual’’ work.14 Service industry jobs rely
on the emotional lives of employees for company benefit*as captured in the adage,
‘‘service with a smile.’’ With this realisation, research is now beginning to explore how
other industries, such as the entertainment professions, also involve a high degree of
affective labour.15 These scholars join others interested in the workplace cultures
developing in the new economy,16 including those who describe the role of
management in inaugurating the fulfilling creative workplace by rewarding
entrepreneurial and self-directed employees.17

Emotionally Invested: Studying Production Cultures

What remains to be acknowledged in this literature is how academics’ work lives are
also influenced by this regime of individualised responsibility for the organization.
Indeed, as Andrew Ross argues, it is the extraordinary ability of academics to excavate
working hours from a range of times in the day that has provided a model for the
flexible work arrangements now formalised across many sectors.18 ‘‘Sacrificial labour’’
is clearly ingrained in an industry where the notion of ‘‘service’’ neatly obscures the
amount of unpaid work inherent to major activities like journal publishing.
Combined with the performative labour of defining deliverables and actioning
outcomes, the modern workplace involves a raft of tasks that amount to preparing
and asking for potential work*while also reiterating the significance of past work*
on top of the workload that has always been expected.19 Discounting the amount of
time their job takes from other pursuits, academics have often been guilty of
normalising the self-exploiting tendencies now mirrored in further segments of the
white collar demographic. This makes it difficult for researchers to understand such
212 M. Gregg

behaviour in terms of labour politics, let alone provide grounds for critiquing the
motivations for the affective labour engaged in by others.
The language of affective labour is nonetheless important for a range of employees
to describe the new kinds of commitment demanded by the information workplace.
For academics in particular, affective labour explains how the university draws on the
psychological lives of staff to both exploit and disguise the ‘‘immaterial’’ dimensions
of working life. Productivity demands placed on academics rarely acknowledge the
human factors that complicate the tasks of thinking, writing and delivering the timely
outcomes crucial to individual and institutional success. Meanwhile, the language of
campus mission statements and marketing campaigns promote ‘‘creativity’’ and
‘‘innovation’’ as the university’s asset base, emptying out the discursive terrain in
which employees may have once expressed admiration or commitment to the
institution.
In Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices, I expressed concern that without ongoing
attention to the forms of labour practices and exploitation conducted in its own
name, the field of cultural studies looked set to face problems of generational
continuity. The potential for academic production cultures to perpetuate a
destructive combination of workaholism, frequent flyer lifestyles, and constant
connectivity has been at the forefront of my thinking ever since.20 To see the
peculiarity of this ‘‘workstyle’’ is admittedly only likely when there is enough time to
think beyond the imperatives of the present, which is to say the long hours of the
typical workday. But life under neoliberal efficiency regimes has been structured to
prevent just these unproductive exercises in thinking and imagination, and it is
precisely towards such moments of freedom and reflection that feminist interests
must align.
Recognising their own implication in the work cultures they study*including the
feelings of insecurity and vulnerability produced by the corporate university*is a
necessary part of academics’ efforts to document the affective labour, including that
of the information workplace. At a time when scholars are noting a heightened sense
of ‘‘precarity’’ attenuating the privileges and entitlements once enjoyed by the middle
class,21 research can further benefit from noting how academics’ experiences fit in
these wider changes*especially when these amount to a diminished terminology to
speak of work limits. But perhaps more importantly, contextualizing our own work
cultures to account for the peculiarity of ‘‘scholarly affect’’22 is a means to improve
our credibility in attempting to speak of the labour of others. In the wake of the
affective turn, as the ‘‘immaterial’’ workplace is increasingly taken as the new norm,
critical/cultural studies must raise its sights beyond the limited horizon of the
academic workday to remember the very different and far less fulfilling work lives
upon which a global knowledge economy depends.

Notes
[1] See, for instance, C. Lee Harrington and D. Bielby, Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making
Meaning in Everyday Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); C. Harris and
 Learning to (Love) Labour 213

A. Alexander, Theorizing fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton
Press, 1998); Nancy Baym, Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000); E. Saxey, ‘‘Staking a Claim: The Series and its Slash Fan-
fiction’’ in Reading the Vampire Slayer: The Unofficial Critical Companion to ‘‘Buffy’’ and
‘‘Angel,’’ ed. Roz Kaveny (New York: Tauris Park, 2001), 187210. J. Gray, C. Sandvoss, and C.
Lee Harrington, eds, Fan Audiences: Cultural Consumption and Identities in a Mediated World
(New York: New York University Press, 2007); M. Deuze, C. B. Martin, and C. Allen, ‘‘The
Professional Identity of Gameworkers,’’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research
into New Media Technologies 13,4 (2007): 33553.
[2] A. Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York:
Peter Lang, 2008). For more critical accounts of this trend see S. M. Peterson, ‘‘Loser
Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation,’’ First Monday 13 (2008); and
K. Jarrett, ‘‘Interactivity is Evil! A Critical Investigation of Web 2.0’’ in M. Zimmer, ed,
‘‘Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0,’’ First Monday 13 (2008), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/
cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/263/showToc (accessed March 8, 2009).
[3] T. Terranova, ‘‘Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,’’ Social Text 18
(2000): 3358.
[4] M. Andrejevic, ‘‘Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans,’’
Television & New Media 9 (2008): 2446.
[5] See also M. Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004); M. Andrejevic, I-Spy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007).
[6] Terranova, ‘‘Free Labour,’’ 38.
[7] H. Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Cultures (London: Routledge,
1992); J. Tulloch and H. Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching ‘‘Doctor Who’’ and ‘‘Star
Trek’’ (New York: Routledge, 1995); C. Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in
America (New York: Verso, 1997); H. Jenkins, T. McPherson, and J. Shattuc, eds, Hop on Pop:
The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
M. Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002).
[8] M. Hills, Fan Cultures, xii.
[9] M. Hardt, ‘‘Introduction: Laboratory Italy,’’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics,
ed. M. Hardt & P. Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4; M. Hardt
and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge: London, 2000).
[10] M. Lazzarato, ‘‘Immaterial Labour’’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed.
M. Hardt & P. Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133; cf. M. Hardt,
‘‘Affective Labor,’’ Boundary 2 26,2 (1999): 89100; P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
[11] U. Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World, Monthly Review Press,
2003); L. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, trans. H. Creek, ed. J. Fleming (New York:
Autonomedia, [1981] 1995).
[12] L. Fortunati, ‘‘Immaterial Labour and its Machinization,’’ Ephemera: Theory and Politics in
Organization 7 (2007): 139, 144.
[13] See also J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique
of Political Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
[14] A. R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1989).
[15] E. Dowling, R. Nunes, and B. Trott, ‘‘Immaterial and Affective Labour: Explored,’’ Ephemera:
Theory and Politics in Organization 7 (2007), http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-
1index.htm (accessed March 8, 2009); J. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity
and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
D. Hesmondhalgh and S. Baker, ‘‘Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television
Industry,’’ Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2008): 97118; V. Mayer, ‘‘Guys Gone Wild?
214 M. Gregg

Soft-Core Video Professionalism and New Realities in Television Production,’’ Cinema

Journal 47 (2008): 97116.
[16] For instance, A. McRobbie, ‘‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture
in Speeded Up Creative Worlds,’ Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 51631; A. Ross, No-Collar: The
Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2002); R. Gill, ‘‘Cool,
Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-Based New Media Work in Europe,’’
Information, Communication and Society 5 (2002): 7089; R. Gill, Technobohemians or the
New Cybertariat? New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade After the Web (Amsterdam:
Institute of Network Cultures, 2007).
[17] M. Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); L. Boltanski and
E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005).
[18] A. Ross, Low Pay, High Profile (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
[19] M. Gregg, ‘‘Function Creep: Communication Technologies and Anticipatory Labour in the
Information Workplace,’’ New Media & Society (forthcoming).
[20] See M. Gregg, ‘‘Banal Bohemia: Blogging from the Ivory Tower Hotdesk,’’ Feature Report,
Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (forthcoming); M. Gregg,
‘‘Freedom to Work: The Impact of Wireless on Labour Politics’’ in Media International
Australia, Special Issue on Wireless Technologies and Cultures (November, 2007).
[21] L. Berlant, ‘‘After the Good Life, the Impasse: Human Resources, Time Out, and the
Precarious Present,’’ Public Lecture, University of Melbourne, August, 2008; R. Gill and
A. Pratt, ‘‘In the Social Factory?: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,’’
Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2008): 130.
[22] M. Gregg, Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (London: Palgrave, 2006).