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CULTURAL studies
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Volume 12(5): 419–431
DOI: 10.1177/1367877909337862

Co-creative labour

● John Banks
Queensland University of Technology, Australia

● Mark Deuze
Indiana University, USA
Leiden University, The Netherlands

A B S T R A C T ● This article introduces a special issue on the topic of co-

creative labour. The term co-creation is used to describe the phenomenon of
consumers increasingly participating in the process of making and circulating
media content and experiences. Practices of user-created content and user-led
innovation are now significant sources of both economic and cultural value. But
how should we understand and analyse these value-generating activities? What
are the identities and forms of agency that constitute these emerging co-creative
relations? Should we define these activities as a form of labour and what are the
implications and impacts of co-creative practices on the employment conditions
and professional identities of people working in the creative industries? In
answering these questions we argue that careful attention must be paid to how
the participants themselves (both professional and non-professional, commercial
and non-commercial) negotiate and navigate the meanings and possibilities of
these emerging co-creative relationships for mutual benefit. Co-creative media
production is perhaps a disruptive agent of change that sits uncomfortably with
our current understandings and theories of work and labour. The articles in this
special issue follow and unpack the often diverse and contradictory ways in which
the participants themselves use and remake the social categories of work and
labour as they seek to coordinate and contest co-creative media practices. ●

419
420 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5)

KEYWORDS ● co-creation ● cultural industries ● cultural work ● labour

Consumers increasingly participate in the process of making media as co-

creators of content and experiences across professions as varied as journal-
ism, advertising, public relations, marketing communication, television and
movie production, fashion, and game development (Deuze, 2007). Over the
past decade we have seen the emergence of consumer-created content and
processes of user-led innovation as significant cultural and economic phe-
nomena influencing and in part explaining the production of culture world-
wide. In The Wealth of Networks (2006), Yochai Benkler proposes that
such commons-based forms of peer production networks are no longer
marginal cultural or economic activities, but are moving from the periphery
to the core of contemporary economies. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004)
argue that value is increasingly co-created by both the firm and the cus-
tomer. Today, media consumers, fans and audiences are redefined as ‘the
drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engage-
ment and participation is actively being pursued, if still imperfectly under-
stood, by media companies’ (Green and Jenkins, 2009: 213; see also Grabher
et al., 2008; Hartley 2009a,b; Jenkins, 2006; Von Hippel, 2005).
A 2007 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) report titled ‘Participative Web: User-Created Content’, after
acknowledging the cultural and economic value-generating potential of user-
created content, notes the disruptive force and implications of these trans-
formations in the relations among producers and consumers. Based on
research among particularly young EU citizens, the report suggests that a
more participatory media environment pushes changes in the media content
industries towards models of ‘decentralized creativity’ and ‘organizational
innovation’. Co-creative activities of producers and consumers in constantly
shifting roles challenge and reshape our understanding of how the media
work, and generate exciting new ways of creating and marketing compelling
content and experiences. But all of this begs the question to what extent
these trends turn consumers into workers for the industry, and whether the
labour market for professional producers thus gets diminished – both trends
that primarily seem to benefit the firms and companies that control the dis-
tribution of (and access to) such content and experiences. In December 2006,
Time Magazine celebrated the millions of people contributing to social
network platforms that draw on user-created content such as YouTube,
Wikipedia and MySpace by announcing ‘You’ as the person of the year. But
this creative participation was not figured as simply play, consumption or
entertainment. The Time article noted that these activities position creative
consumers as ‘working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game’
(Grossman, 2006). It is in this particular context of work and labour that we
seek to address the shifts and transformations in recent years, occurring
across all major media content industries, from the production of content to
the increasingly interlinked control of distribution and provision of access
 Banks & Deuze ● Co-creative labour 421

(Miller et al., 2005; Schiller, 2000). For this special issue on ‘Co-creative
Labour’ we bring together research from a variety of disciplines and per-
spectives that aims to come to grips with the conditions and opportunities of
consumer co-creative practices through the frameworks and perspectives of
labour and work.
Understanding and analysing the practices of media consumers as a form
of labour is not new. Dallas Smythe (1981) and Miller et al. (2001), for
example, describe how the attention and activity of consumers generates
value for the media industries, and they use the category of labour to frame
the politics that shape these exchanges. In the context of new media, Lev
Manovich (2001: 16–17) argues that a defining feature of new media digital
objects includes a mode of representation in which we are interpellated as
users rather than just viewers or readers. He then proceeds to suggest that
these features of new media objects encourage an overlap between produc-
ers and users and asks how these dynamics are perhaps functioning to shift
labour from the company to the customer and may therefore indicate a sig-
nificant change in the relationship between the domains of work and leisure,
the professional and the amateur (Manovich, 2001: 44, 199). Manovich,
however, does not assume that these shifts in the identity of consumers and
producers are in any sense necessarily liberating, democratizing or exploitative.
He carefully opens for our consideration a terrain of difficult and demanding
questions without finally resolving or settling them.
Much of this co-creative activity takes place in the context of commercial
platforms and media products owned or controlled by global new media
companies, such as Google, Sony, Electronic Arts, and Yahoo!; user-created
content gets deliberately incorporated into the practices and products of
these media companies – and not necessarily wholeheartedly embraced by
the professionals involved (Banks, 2009; Jenkins and Deuze, 2008). Critical
scholars propose that rather than only constituting greater consumer agency,
the harnessing of user-created content by media businesses involves the
extraction of surplus value from the unpaid labour of the consumer co-
creators as a form of outsourcing, and may therefore contribute to the precar-
ious employment conditions of professional creatives (Scholz, 2008;
Terranova, 2000). Andrew Ross (2009: 22) argues that in social network con-
tent production platforms such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and MySpace ‘the
burden of productive waged labour is increasingly transferred to users or
consumers’ and asks us to consider what happens to labour and the labour
conditions of professional creatives in the context of amateur created con-
tent. Ross comments that this ‘free or cut-price content’ is:
a clear threat to the livelihoods of professional creatives whose prices are
driven down by, or who simply cannot compete with, the commercial min-
ing of these burgeoning, discount alternatives. (Ross, 2009: 22)
By framing this activity as ‘work’ questions are raised about the motivations
and incentives of the consumer participants. Why are they contributing
422 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5)

content to these commercial platform providers? Are they in effect

working for free? Is this an outsourcing strategy through which media
enterprises harness the surplus value generated by the work of these
consumers-turned-producers? If so, are such media enterprises exploiting
activities that more properly belong to a non-market and non-commercial
gift-economy?
At the core of these transformations and disruptions associated with co-
creative relationships is the question and problem of the participants’ iden-
tities. What are the modes of agency constituted and produced through
these relationships that blur and unsettle the division between media pro-
duction and consumption? Furthermore, if we define these co-creative
activities as a form of labour, then what are the implications and impacts of
these practices on the working conditions and professional identities of
people employed in the creative industries? User-created content may well
disrupt the relations of cultural production that defined the broadcast era
by unsettling the expertise, employment, and identities of established media
and knowledge professions. Consumer co-creative participation today is
part of media professionals’ every day work environment – whether they
like it or not. Their work practices and routines are unsettled and chal-
lenged by the need to integrate and involve increasingly demanding and
unruly users in the process of making and circulating media content. The
very identity of professional media workers is therefore at stake in these co-
creative media networks (Deuze, 2007, 2009). The success of media pro-
duction may increasingly rely on effectively combining and coordinating the
various forms of expertise possessed by both professional media workers
and creative citizen-consumers, not displacing one with the other. This
requires media companies to both recognize and respect the contribution of
media consumers’ expertise in the context of a co-creative relationship for
mutual benefit (Banks, 2009; Burgess and Green, forthcoming). Rather
than a zero sum game in which a gain for participatory consumers is fig-
ured as a loss for professional creatives, can these co-creative dynamics be
more helpfully approached as a non-zero sum game growing benefits and
opportunities for all participants?
Scholarly perspectives on user-created content and its circulation within
social networks generally fall along classical development versus dependency
theories, as much work can be characterized by debates and discussions
between those scholars emphasizing consumer empowerment and recogni-
tion of fandom, and those who tend to be more sceptical of the unequal power
relationships that remain between a handful of media corporations and
the multitude of consumers. Authors such as Jenkins (2006), Bruns (2008),
Hartley (2009a,b) and Benkler (2006) generally foreground the democratiz-
ing potential of this increased user participation, although in very different
ways; they suggest that participatory culture trends may empower con-
sumers by providing them with control over media content. Jenkins (2006),
for example, argues that:
 Banks & Deuze ● Co-creative labour 423

convergence requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about

what it means to consume media, assumptions that shape both program-
ming and marketing decisions … media producers are responding to these
newly empowered consumers in contradictory ways, sometimes encouraging
change, sometimes resisting what they see as renegade behavior. And con-
sumers, in turn, are perplexed by what they see as mixed signals about how
much and what kinds of participation they can enjoy. (Jenkins, 2006: 19)

Authors such as Terranova (2004), Scholz (2008), Scholz and Lovink (2007),
and Ross (2009), however, are concerned that such assessments overlook the
political economy implications of media companies’ endeavours to extract
considerable economic value from these consumer participatory practices.
Critical perspectives on the use of creative users are often proposed and
explored in terms of labour and work. Allen (2008), for example, argues that
these participatory culture relations advanced under the catch-phrase Web
2.0 ‘validates a kind of advanced, promotional entrepreneurial capitalism
that binds users to profit-making service providers via the exploitation of those
users’ immaterial labour’. Questions are also raised about the characteristics
and nature of this subjectivity or identity constituted through our participa-
tions in these co-creative networks. Are these participations generating com-
pliant and flexible neo-liberal working subjects, well suited to the demands
and requirements of a post-industrial, informational and networked global
capitalism? Kylie Jarrett (2008) provocatively suggests that, ‘participatory
media can thus be associated with the production of flexible subjectivities,
aligned with the needs of the culturally intensive capitalist industries associated
with neoliberalism or advanced liberal economies’.
These co-creative relationships, however, cannot easily be reduced to one
of simple manipulation at the hands of corporations and firms, and critics
such as Ross and Jarrett seldom reduce the problem to one of straightforward
exploitation. In No Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Cost, an
ethnography of Razorfish, a new media company in New York’s Silicon Alley,
Ross (2003) offers a compelling study of the informational economy work-
place. He maintains the tensions, uncertainties and contradictions in the cre-
ative workers accounts of both the potential to reinvent the meanings and
experiences of work in a more creative and empowering direction, alongside
the realization that this simultaneously may explain the fact that people find
themselves often working incredibly long hours, invading and disrupting their
non-work lives. Ross (2003: 225) describes the problem that as work
becomes ‘sufficiently humane, we are likely to do far too much of it, and it
usurps an unacceptable portion of our lives’. The strength of this account is
that it foregrounds the participants’ complex negotiations of how the mean-
ings, values and experiences of work and labour are changed and unsettled.
In this context, Ross (2003: 217) also notes that companies benefit from this
blurring of work and leisure as they draw on the digital content produced by
the ‘voluntary labour of amateur users’.
424 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5)

Even a cursory reading of Terranova’s (2000, 2004) much cited article,

which is a key reference for many of the articles in this special edition, ‘Free
Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’ finds that she fore-
grounds tensions and contradictions as these ‘productive activities … are
pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’
(Terranova, 2004: 216). She carefully maintains the complexities shaping co-
creative relations by pointing out that this affective labour is neither directly
produced by capital, nor developed as a direct response to the needs of cap-
ital. The process should not be understood as a straightforward incorpora-
tion or appropriation of the free labour of an otherwise authentic fan
culture. Rather, as Terranova (2004: 80) proposes, these dynamics reconfig-
uring relations between production and consumption are played out within
a field that ‘is always and already capitalism’; they are immanent to the net-
works of informational capitalism. This free labour has not been seamlessly
appropriated but voluntarily given. The relations are much more nuanced
and complex than the language of manipulation or exploitation suggests.
Terranova (2004: 94) writes, ‘ … such processes are not created outside cap-
ital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex
history where the relation between labour and capital is mutually constitu-
tive, entangled and crucially forged during the crisis of Fordism’.
The complex history that Terranova refers to should also remind us of the
disciplinary and institutional history and politics through which these cate-
gories of labour and work are articulated to the problem of co-creative
praxis. A pressing issue in all of this is whether these particular theorizations
of labour and work provide us with explanatory traction and power as we
grapple with the various problems associated with co-creative media rela-
tions. Transformations in the relations among media producers and con-
sumers, as well as between professionals and amateurs, may indicate a
profound shift in which our frameworks and categories of analysis (such as
the traditional labour theory of value) that worked well in the context of an
industrial media economy are less helpful than before (Banks and Humphreys,
2008). Even after taking into account that ideas of immaterial labour, affec-
tive labour, free labour and precarious labour have been reworked through
an engagement with the work of theorists such as Maurizo Lazzarato and
Hardt and Negri, one has to question to what extent such reworkings give
us precise tools to come to grips with the ongoing transformations in post-
industrial and network capitalism.1 As Mark Poster (2006) suggests, neo-
Marxist production-based models of the economy may in the end simply and
comfortably return the critique of capital to the labour process although that
process is now expanded and redefined.
Part of the problem in all of this is perhaps the critical imperative itself.
These critical approaches often position consumer participants as in some
sense unaware that their participation is a productive practice from which
economic value is extracted. If the participants express their pleasure or
enjoyment in these exchanges this is then cited as just further evidence of
 Banks & Deuze ● Co-creative labour 425

their seduction in which the affective works to perhaps even more effectively
entangle consumers in these webs of corporate servitude (Jarrett, 2008;
Scholz, 2008). In their analysis of the videogames industry, Stephen Kline,
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter (2003) argue that celebratory
accounts of the democratization of producer–user relationships too conve-
niently overlook the complexities and contradictions surrounding the inter-
ests of corporations and consumers. In their analysis the gamers are ‘at best,
only very partially aware’ (Kline et al., 2003: 19) of these manipulative com-
mercial and promotional dynamics. They add that, ‘Indeed, one of the main
objectives of the games industry is to make sure that the player does not
reflect on these forces’ (Kline et al., 2003: 19). Their central argument is that
any empowering democratizing or participatory potential is ‘shaped, con-
tained, controlled, and channelled within the long-standing logic of a com-
mercial marketplace dedicated to the profit-maximizing sale of cultural and
technological commodities’ (Kline et al., 2003: 21). In all of this, the critic
seems to be guaranteed a position above the fray and blessed with an ability
that is denied to the participants themselves, of seeing through the charade
and identifying the ‘real’ nature of the unfolding relations. Even the far more
nuanced account by Andrew Ross in No Collar (2003) uses this rhetoric of
blindness – most explicitly in the books’ subtitle referring to a ‘hidden cost’:
hidden to all but the critical scholarly observer. The implication would seem
to be that the account of the critical ethnographer reveals or discloses these
costs that would otherwise remain undiscovered. The critical imperative can
work to reduce the actors to informants who need to be disciplined and
taught what they really are and what the contexts really are in which they
are situated. At the crux of this kind of analysis is a traditional understand-
ing of the academic as uncovering what is going on – lifting the veil from the
eyes of otherwise hapless participants. Such critical stances and posturing
often tell us very little about the material complexities, tensions and oppor-
tunities of these co-creative practices. The rhetoric of opposition and resis-
tance can all too often ignore that it is precisely through these commercial
networks that both consumers and media professionals explore the possibil-
ities for participatory empowerment and emancipation (Hartley, 2009b).
It must be clear that co-creative relationships in the global cultural econ-
omy of the media industries are a significant object of investigation, and
that one needs to be aware of both the promises and pitfalls of deploying
perspectival frameworks that are grounded in more or less traditional the-
ories of value, markets, and labour. As guest editors of this special issue we
neither claim to represent a synthesis to such narrowly conceived and prob-
lematic oppositions between political economy critical analysis and neo-
liberal or neo-classical equilibrium economics. Nor do we want to reduce
the critical eye of the academic to one that functions solely to reify the priv-
ileged position of the observer over the observed. We do advocate, however,
an approach to producer–consumer collaboration in the creative industries
that maps the various iterations of such co-creative practices with an open
426 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5)

eye to what these activities in fact bring to the people involved. We also
need to be attentive to the capacities and competencies of the participants,
both professional and non-professional, commercial and non-commercial,
to negotiate and navigate the possibilities of these emerging co-creative rela-
tionships for mutual benefit. One direct consequence of such a perspective is
the realization that what tends to drive media professionals in their work –
peer review, reputation metrics, and a manufactured authenticity (Nixon,
2006) – may not necessarily differ all that much from what fans, prosumers,
produsers, or Pro-Ams claim their motivations are.2 This suggests that the
categories of capitalism (such as value-added, monetary gain, market size
and audience) perhaps are not the most useful concepts when trying to put
the phenomena under investigation in this special issue in a meaningful con-
text. Co-creative media production practice is perhaps a disruptive agent of
change that sits uncomfortably with our current understandings and theo-
ries of work and labour.
Bruno Latour (2005) reminds us that in situations of controversy ‘where
innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the
range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates … ’ then we must not,
limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known
types. You have to grant them back the ability to make up their own theo-
ries of what the social is made of. Your task is no longer to impose some
order, to limit the range of acceptable entities, to teach actors what they are,
or to add some reflexivity to their blind practice. (Latour, 2005: 11–12)
A common theme and concern across the articles of this special issue is how
the actors themselves, both professional and non-professional, navigate and
define these relationships that we are describing as co-creativity. Consumer
co-creators and media professionals are often competent and canny partic-
ipants navigating the tensions between the costs, risks and rewards of their
participation (Banks and Humphreys, 2008). As Latour (2005: 16) pro-
poses, we should deploy controversies about what constitutes these social
relations by refusing to restrict in advance the categories and materials that
the actors themselves use. In this way we may have a chance at discovering
the unexpected actors and resources that emerge on their own terms. We
therefore agree with Gill and Pratt’s (2008: 18–20) recent provocation that
when considering questions of creative work and labour we need to pay
more attention to the meanings that cultural workers give to these activities
themselves. We would extend this to the meanings co-creative consumers
also give to these activities, and suggest that we perhaps also need to con-
sider how these activities and their meanings can be understood parallel to
(or beyond) categories such as work and labour. Our aim with this special
issue on co-creative labour is to approach these categories and identities of
labour and work as a site of controversy about what they are made of. We aim
to keep the controversies open and not rush to settle them. It is our purpose
with this special issue to follow and examine the diverse and contradictory
 Banks & Deuze ● Co-creative labour 427

ways in which these social categories of work and labour are used and evoked
by the participants themselves as they seek to negotiate and coordinate these
co-creative relations.
In ‘Amateur experts: International fan labour in Swedish independent
music’, Nancy Baym and Robert Burnett argue that we need to move beyond
thinking of consumer co-creation as either inherently liberatory or exploita-
tive, and to develop ‘better understandings of … the logics that motivate and
sustain it, and its personal, social, cultural and economic consequences’. They
demonstrate how this might be done in a particular context through a case
study of the interactions between music fans and various players in the
Swedish independent music industry. Baym and Burnett foreground how the
fans understand and negotiate the various tensions and contradictions
between the costs, rewards and risks of their co-creative practice.
Hector Postigo continues his earlier work analysing the case of America
Online volunteers (AOL) in ‘America Online volunteers: Lessons from an
early co-production community’ to critically examine debates about immate-
rial and free labour. He considers the various factors that contributed to the
success of the co-productive relationship and develops the concept of ‘pas-
sionate labour’ to describe the structural conditions of co-creative work.
In ‘Working for the text: Fan labour and the New Organization’, Ryan
Milner analyses how gamers perceive and understand their co-creative con-
tribution to the process of game development through a discourse analysis of
material from the official Fallout 3 forum. He argues that fans readily
acknowledge that this labour is uncompensated, but regard their loyalties as
resting with the text rather than with the game development company. He
proposes that the concept of the New Organization – harnessing the power
and connectivity of self-motivated knowledge workers providing immaterial
labour – provides a fresh understanding of co-creative labour.
In ‘The mediation is the message: Italian regionalization of US TV series as
co-creational work’, Luca Barra offers a study of the role of co-creational
labour in adapting and translating media products for Italian consumers. He
carefully describes the co-creative production routines that contribute to this
process of ‘Italianization’ and how they mediate the meanings of the texts.
Barra argues that this co-creational practice produces a new text through the
professional practices of the traditional dubbing system and grassroots fan-
subbing communities.
Mervi Pantti and Piet Bakker describe how professional journalists in the
Netherlands are negotiating and responding to the increasing co-creative phe-
nomenon of citizens participating in the provision of media content. In
‘Misfortunes, memories and sunsets: Non-professional images in Dutch news
media’, they unpack the implications of non-professionals increasingly sup-
plying news media organizations with photo and video materials. They care-
fully examine how professional journalists assess the value of amateur
content, and they also address the journalists’ understanding of the impacts
that these co-creative practices may have on professional journalistic practice.
428 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5)

In her article, ‘All for love: The Corn fandom, prosumers, and the Chinese
way of creating a super star’, Ling Yang explores the way fans of the Mainland
China artist Li Yuchun, winner of the 2005 season of the immensely popular
reality television show Super Girl, reflect on and give meaning to their so-
called ‘Corn’ fandom as both supporting a female singer’s aspirations to become
a superstar without being dependent on the favors of a male-dominated
corporate culture industry, as well as contributing to the commercial success
of that very same industry. Yang even explores how the fans at some point
discuss the option of forming corporation themsevles, thereby challenging
the control of the major players in the entertainment industry – while at the
same time reproducing the same power structures of that industry.
These articles (and the many more that were submitted for review and
inclusion in our special issue) offer an inspiring and exciting look at par-
ticipatory media cultures around the world in a wide variety of media. All
of the authors successfully refuse to be sucked in by either critical detach-
ment or fan-like embrace, or by either development or dependency theo-
ries of co-creation. Instead, this special issue stirs the pot of controversies
around co-creative practices, which may lead to more nuanced, rich, and
fun work in the currently exploding field of study in media, cultural, and
creative industries.

Notes

1 See the recent issue of Theory, Culture and Society 2008 25(7–8) for a series
of articles that discuss and analyse the ideas of precarious labour and imma-
terial labour in the context of cultural work. Rosalind Gill’s and Andy
Pratt’s introductory article, ‘In the Social Factory?: Immaterial Labour,
Precariousness and Cultural Work’, provides a helpful overview of recent
debates surrounding these ideas.
2 http://deuze.blogspot.com/2007/10/fandom-and-media-work.html

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● JOHN BANKS is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre of

Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University
of Technology, Australia. His research focuses on emerging co-creative
relations and user-led innovation in the creative industries, with a
particular interest in videogames. His background includes working in
the videogames industry as an online community manager. He has
published widely on research grounded in these areas. Address: Centre
of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Z1 Level 5,
Queensland University of Technology, Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove, QLD
4059, Australia. [email: [email protected]] ●
 Banks & Deuze ● Co-creative labour 431

● MARK DEUZE holds a joint appointment at Indiana University’s

Department of Telecommunications in Bloomington, USA, and as
Professor of Journalism and New Media at Leiden University, The
Netherlands. Weblog: http://deuze.blogspot.com.
Address: 1229 East 7th St, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA.
[email: [email protected]] ●