Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Making Media: Production, Practices, and Professions
- Production
- Research
- 2 Media Industries: A Decade in Review
- 3 Media Production Research and the Challenge of Normativity
- 4 Access and Mistrust in Media Industries Research
- 5 Cultural and Creative Industries and the Political Economy of Communication
- 6 The Platformization of Making Media
- Economics and Management
- 7 The Disappearing Product and the New Intermediaries
- 8 Value Production in Media Industries and Everyday Life
- 9 Transformation and Innovation of Media Business Models
- 10 Shifts in Consumer Engagement and Media Business Models
- 11 Media Industries’ Management Characteristics and Challenges in a Converging Digital World
- Policy
- 12 Global Media Industries and Media Policy
- 13 Media Concentration in the Age of the Internet and Mobile Phones
- Practices
- Innovation
- 14 Making (Sense of) Media Innovations
- 15 Start-up Ecosystems Between Affordance Networks, Symbolic Form, and Cultural Practice
- Work Conditions
- 16 Precarity in Media Work
- 17 Making It in a Freelance World
- 18 Diversity and Opportunity in the Media Industries
- 19 Labour and the Next Internet
- Affective Labour
- 20 Affective Labour and Media Work
- 21 Affective Qualities of Creative Labour
- 22 A Business of One or Nurturing the Craft: Who are You?
- Professions
- Music
- 23 Music in Times of Streaming: Transformation and Debate
- 24 Popular Music, Streaming, and Promotional Media: Enduring and Emerging Industrial Logics
- Television
- 25 Show Me the Money: How Revenue Strategies Change the Creative Possibilities of Internet-Distributed Television
- 26 Flexibility, Innovation, and Precarity in the Television Industry
- Social Media
- 27 Creator Management in the Social Media Entertainment Industry
- 28 #Dreamjob: The Promises and Perils of a Creative Career in Social Media
- Public Relations and Advertising
- 29 Redefining Advertising in a Changing Media Landscape
- 30 Perceptions and Realities of the Integration of Advertising and Public Relations
- Digital Games
- 31 Game Production Logics at Work: Convergence and Divergence
- 32 Reflections on the Shifts and Swerves of the Global Games Industry
- Journalism
- 33 ‘It Never Stops’: The Implicit Norm of Working Long Hours in Entrepreneurial Journalism
- 34 Transmedia Production: Key Steps in Creating a Storyworld
- Conclusion
- 35 Making Media: Observations and Futures
- Author Biographies
26 - Flexibility, Innovation, and Precarity in the Television Industry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Making Media: Production, Practices, and Professions
- Production
- Research
- 2 Media Industries: A Decade in Review
- 3 Media Production Research and the Challenge of Normativity
- 4 Access and Mistrust in Media Industries Research
- 5 Cultural and Creative Industries and the Political Economy of Communication
- 6 The Platformization of Making Media
- Economics and Management
- 7 The Disappearing Product and the New Intermediaries
- 8 Value Production in Media Industries and Everyday Life
- 9 Transformation and Innovation of Media Business Models
- 10 Shifts in Consumer Engagement and Media Business Models
- 11 Media Industries’ Management Characteristics and Challenges in a Converging Digital World
- Policy
- 12 Global Media Industries and Media Policy
- 13 Media Concentration in the Age of the Internet and Mobile Phones
- Practices
- Innovation
- 14 Making (Sense of) Media Innovations
- 15 Start-up Ecosystems Between Affordance Networks, Symbolic Form, and Cultural Practice
- Work Conditions
- 16 Precarity in Media Work
- 17 Making It in a Freelance World
- 18 Diversity and Opportunity in the Media Industries
- 19 Labour and the Next Internet
- Affective Labour
- 20 Affective Labour and Media Work
- 21 Affective Qualities of Creative Labour
- 22 A Business of One or Nurturing the Craft: Who are You?
- Professions
- Music
- 23 Music in Times of Streaming: Transformation and Debate
- 24 Popular Music, Streaming, and Promotional Media: Enduring and Emerging Industrial Logics
- Television
- 25 Show Me the Money: How Revenue Strategies Change the Creative Possibilities of Internet-Distributed Television
- 26 Flexibility, Innovation, and Precarity in the Television Industry
- Social Media
- 27 Creator Management in the Social Media Entertainment Industry
- 28 #Dreamjob: The Promises and Perils of a Creative Career in Social Media
- Public Relations and Advertising
- 29 Redefining Advertising in a Changing Media Landscape
- 30 Perceptions and Realities of the Integration of Advertising and Public Relations
- Digital Games
- 31 Game Production Logics at Work: Convergence and Divergence
- 32 Reflections on the Shifts and Swerves of the Global Games Industry
- Journalism
- 33 ‘It Never Stops’: The Implicit Norm of Working Long Hours in Entrepreneurial Journalism
- 34 Transmedia Production: Key Steps in Creating a Storyworld
- Conclusion
- 35 Making Media: Observations and Futures
- Author Biographies
Summary
In TV production there has been a worldwide move from a system based on established broadcasters to a system requiring outsourcing to independent production companies. According to the theory of flexible specialization, this would promote flexibility and innovation in TV production. Testing these claims in the UK market – which has a large independent sector and international reputation for innovative reality TV formats – this chapter finds them to be largely false.
Introduction
Recent debates have questioned the extent to which existing theories, particularly Marxist political economy and cultural studies theories, are able to explain changes in media production (see Dwyer, 2015, 2016; Fuchs, 2016; Garnham, 2011, 2016; Murdock & Golding, 2016). This chapter examines one of the most frequently adopted theories of media production, flexible specialization (hereafter, FS) (see Storper, 1993; Barnatt & Starkey, 1997; Karlsson & Picard, 2011). It focuses on the way the key concepts of FS theory – innovation and flexibility – have been used by academics, policymakers, practitioners, and industry lobby groups to explain and/ or justify the move from vertically integrated broadcasters to a system requiring outsourcing to independent production companies.
This chapter examines the extent to which FS theory provides a good explanation for the trend towards precarity of employment – freelance or casualized work, often with poor terms and conditions – in TV production (Banks et al., 2013). How far can this precarity be said to have been driven by the need to achieve innovation in TV programming through flexible processes of media production? The UK offers a good case study for investigating and understanding trends internationally, as it has a media industry with a prominent role for public broadcasting, a complex production network that is both local and globally networked, and a moderate level of professional organization of media workers.
First, the key policy documents which created the UK independent TV production sector are reviewed to illustrate the way first cost efficiency, and then increasingly flexibility and innovation were advanced as reasons to support the growth of the sector and the accompanying precarity of employment. The underlying theory of FS is then reviewed to identify the proposed relationship between flexibility and innovation and to identify measures with which to test whether the move to independent production has been associated with greater innovation, flexibility, and precarity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making MediaProduction, Practices, and Professions, pp. 347 - 360Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019