Title
Workstyles in the Media Production Industries: Mapping Media Work
Word Count: 7,989
Abstract
Culture creation is quickly becoming the core industrial (and individual) activity in the
globally emerging cultural economy. This process gets amplified through the increasing
conglomeration of media corporations, as well as the widespread diffusion of information
and communication technologies. This paper combines insights from research on
(professional and amateur) media production from disciplines as varied as institutional
sociology, organizational psychology, cultural economy, management, media studies and
economic geography to present a review of trends, developments and values co-
determining media work. The concept of media logic is used as a mapping tool,
articulating contemporary institutional, technological, organizational, and cultural trends
as they co-determine media work. This hermeneutic analysis identifies principal
components of workstyles in the media production industries across disciplines and
genres, including journalism, advertising, film and television, and digital game
development.
Keywords
Media industries, Labor, Work, Media production, Sociology of work, Social theory
Body Text
On April 4, 2006 U.S. comic artist Dave Coverly published a cartoon in his widely
distributed “Speed Bump” series on media work. In the image, a concerned parent listens
to a college counsellor, who dispenses the following advice: “Your son is smart and
curious and has no attention span whatsoever … I’d say he had a bright future in the
Indeed, what does it take to work in the media production industries? This is not
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Convention