This book comprises current, original, empirical studies of career-making in theatre, music, film, TV, visual arts, fashion design, and architecture from Asia, Europe, and North America. This format facilitates comparative analysis of central features of career-making within as well as across both specific industries and national contexts. The studies empirically and theoretically analyze issues such as career management, temporality, location, recognition processes, competition, uncertainty, gender, chance-arbitrariness, education-to-work transition, mediators, the 'individualization' of careers, and collaboration partnerships. The book is at the forefront and intersection of contemporary career research and research on work in creative industries / the cultural economy, intertwining both subjective and objective approaches to and dimensions of career.
The book moves beyond the dichotomies that have characterized recent career theory and work on creative industries in terms of 'boundarylessness-boundedness' and 'good and bad work' to examine the factors that facilitate and restrict horizontal and vertical mobility, sometimes simultaneously and paradoxically, and the trade-offs involved, and the simultaneous positive and negative dimensions of given phenomena. The chapters also analyze the operation and significance of various formal and informal recognition processes from the macro state level down to minute interpersonal interaction that are central to career-making in creative industries.