Introduction

Although both cultural work and creative hubs have been objects of intense policy valorisation over the last twenty years or more, relatively little research has been carried out into the psychosocial consequences of creative work, although this is an area of increasing attention. Writers within cultural studies such as McRobbie (2016), Gill (2002) and Ross (2004) have pointed to the ‘dark side’ or toxic conditions of cultural work for some creative workers—showing how the ‘glamour’ of individualised labour and the promise of self-realisation too often masks the reality of precarity, exploitation and the erosion of a semblance of work-life ‘balance’. But following this formative work, detailed empirical investigations into the psychosocial affective nature of these experiences have been thin on the ground, particularly as such issues become more pressing in the context of ‘austerity’ and the intensification of new modes of freelance creative labour in the ‘gig’ economy.

This chapter aims to address this gap through an interrogation of the lived reality of working in creative hubs for a group of young workers in who have recently entered the British cultural industries labour market from higher education (HE). The research investigates the psychosocial experiences and consequences of cultural work for young people who have recently entered the cultural and creative industries under the political economic context of austerity. It investigates the ways in which working in hubs offers certain forms of value, including social and economic capital; as well as the specific affective and emotional pressures that hub working may generate. In so doing, it explores the ‘unspeakable’ feelings of shame, failure and anxiety amongst ‘cultural workers in the making’ (Ashton 2013) and considers the significance of the prevalence of such feelings and experiences within the creative industries.

Hubs and Cultural Work

In a recent report, the British Council defines a creative hub as ‘a place, either physical or virtual, which brings creative people together. It is a convenor, providing space and support for networking, business development and community engagement within the creative, cultural and tech sectors’. The authors stress the importance of understanding creative hubs as spaces for ‘work, participation and consumption’ (Dovey et al. 2016, p. 7) and argue that we need to see them as distinct from creative clusters or quarters, where the definition is largely based on agglomeration and co-location of similar businesses. Creative hubs are often localised but are part of an ‘urban cultural system’ that includes linked networks and non-physical space. They are diverse and are slippery to define, but include variants such as studio space, centres, networks, clusters and online platforms. Such places would include Fusebox in Brighton, Birmingham Open Media, Site in Sheffield and many others. They can be publicly funded and subsidised spaces, although increasingly they are commercially run (ibid.).

To understand the psychosocial consequences for (some) creative workers located in creative hubs, it is important to recognise the discursive environment within which they find themselves, at the feted nexus of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Conventz et al. 2016). This is a discursive space where negative affective experiences caused by creative work are often ‘unspeakable’ (Gill 2014) and tend to be seen by creative workers as individualised failings rather than located as structural features of precarious work. Creative hubs (along with associated spatial concepts such as creative clusters, quarters and districts), for example, have been actively encouraged through economic and cultural policy and are often described in language that posits hubs as not only being the recipe for dynamic economic growth, but also as spaces of tolerance, diversity, innovation and self-realisation.

For those interested in working in a creative hub, the marketing rhetoric is celebratory. For example, the co-working hub Mindspace in Shoreditch promotes itself in the following fashion:

We believe business is not just about work, it’s also about inspiration. We create a stimulating atmosphere for your team to release their imagination. We scour local flea markets for one-off artefacts, handpick vintage furniture, commission local artists, build towering bookcases, and paint the walls with thought-provoking messages. We create an environment that lets your clients think outside the box and reach new heights. When you get your Mindspace with us in London, you also get space with us in Munich, San Francisco, Berlin, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, Warsaw and others. Free. Yes, Free. (HubbleHQ 2018)

Of note here is the appeal to authenticity (‘local flea markets’), imagination and a rejection of the mundane discourse of business as just ‘work’, stressing the ‘inspiration’ that comes from being part of a local hub, but one with global connections. And such a boutique environment is not cheap—a hot desk space at Mindspace costs from £300 a month at the time of writing in June 2018, with similar provision at the global workspace provider WeWork costing £500. Higher up the value chain, a private office at Huckletree in Clerkenwell costs £20,000 a month (ibid.).

Meanwhile, creative work, as anyone who has researched the valorisation of the creative industries since the 1990s will know, is positioned as a space for self-realisation, diversity, autonomy and freedom, particularly amongst policy-makers, business consultants and a range of regional, national and international agencies. As such, it also has many advocates, such as the once ubiquitous Richard Florida (2002), with his off the shelf prescription for municipalities seeking to attract the ‘creative class’, alongside any number of national, regional and local economic development plans, often drafted by consultants operating internationally, who are key intermediaries in the transmission of ‘fast’ creative industries policy (Peck 2005; Prince 2012). Cultural policy has been central to such a discursive environment. New Labour’s creative industries mapping studies of the late 1990s set the mood music for the contemporaneous celebration of creativity (DCMS 1998), and a raft of cultural policies aimed at developing the ‘creative industries’, the ‘creative economy’ and the ‘digital economy’ have also been closely linked to regional spatial policies seeking to develop flagging post-industrial urban economies into citadels of the ‘new economy’, predicated on knowledge, creativity and attracting footloose capital investment and the ‘creative class’ (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2015). Indeed, if much creative industries boosterism and hype has been fairly devoid of actual policy (Oakley 2004), the more ‘concrete’ economic spatial politics of urban regeneration and ‘clustering’ has meant that the development of, or investment in, creative hubs, clusters and quarters has operated as the clearest area of actual policy in this area. In the UK, for example, this took its form in the investment of significant funds from regional development agencies (RDAs) into ‘creative clusters’ and forms of agglomeration, alongside matched funding from EU structural funds (Lee et al. 2014; Evans 2009). While much of this money dried up following the financial crash of 2008, the desire for ‘clusters’ and hubs is still dominant in city regions across the UK.

In such a context, it is very difficult for creative workers to find expression and give voice to the negative experiences that research shows often ensue because of the precarious, individualised and affective dynamics of cultural work. Ros Gill has written about the ‘unspeakable’ nature of negative affective experiences of labour (2014), preventing workers from developing a language of reflective critique. In a context where one is required to invest one’s affective being, time and emotional labour into creative work, experiences such as failure, rejection, anxiety and burnout are difficult to articulate (Lee 2017). Where such experiences are narrated by cultural workers, they tend to be located as individual failings, rather than systemic features of structural inequalities within neoliberal labour markets. This connects to neoliberalism’s injunction for individuals to fashion the self to meet the demands of the contemporary workplace (Scharff 2016).

In the analysis that follows, I seek to unpack these affective experiences and reflect on the relationship between creative work, affect and creative hubs. What role do creative hubs play as locations where ‘unspeakable’ and toxic creative work might play out? Do creative hubs offer resources for resilience against the structural affects and effects of precarious labour? Or do they serve as spaces for entrenching modes of social inequality based around class, gender, race and age?

The Sample

The study is based on a sample of 12 young adults aged 24–30. All respondents are graduates from arts, humanities and social sciences undergraduate degree courses in England, who left university between 2010 and 2012. The interviews were conducted between July and September 2016, and a snowball sampling approach was used, making use of the business networking website LinkedIn. As a small-scale qualitative study, the sample is not statistically aligned with national demographics but includes a fairly even mix of men and women and two respondents from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds (BAME) (see Table 4.1). Social origin was also analysed as a variable.Footnote 1 Table 4.1 below sets out the sample (with names and key details anonymised) and provides detail on the geography of their labour activity at the time of interview. All respondents could be defined as working in various forms of ‘creative hubs’ across urban centres within the UK.Footnote 2 Given the slipperiness of the term, this ranges from work in gentrifying post-industrial urban spaces in cities including Leeds, Manchester and London, to co-working arrangements as freelancers working in the corporate hipsterism of WeWork and other similar workspace ‘hubs’ across the UK.

Table 4.1 Respondents details
Full size table

Taking a psychosocial approach to exploring their work experiences, semi-structured interviews were carried out, and the material was coded using NVivo. The analysis presented below is based on an exploration of narratives around failure, shame, anxiety and compulsory sociality that emerged from the data.

The (Psychosocial) Benefits of Working in Creative Hubs

Clearly for some interviewees, hub working had various positive attributes. While these were largely connected to the economic benefits of agglomeration for individuals, such as finding work, interviewees also discussed the social benefits which accrue from collaboration, co-working and connectivity inherent to creative labour, with hubs offering spaces for solidarity, community and support. As such creative hub working allows for the consideration of the often contradictory and complex nature of creative work—which is simultaneously highly individualised and highly socialised. In the right circumstances, it is possible that creative hubs might also the possibilities of alternatives to, and opposition to, the current dominant individualised precarious pathways for creative work.

The Economic Benefits of Hubs

As Dovey et al. show, ‘creative hubs can produce a wide range of impacts including start-up ventures, jobs, new products and services, future investment (public and commercial), talent development, regional talent retention, informal education and engagement, training, urban regeneration, research and development, new networks, innovative models of organisation, quality of life enhancements and resilience’ (2016, p. 5). For many of the interviewees, hubs offered economic advantages. Finding work and business opportunities was the key impact, with ten out of twelve interviewees mentioning this. For example, Richard talked about how the proximity of digital agencies in the hub he worked in (including a digital network which he was part of) provided numerous ‘catching up’ possibilities which led to an enhanced knowledge of what contract were coming up and what the contracting companies were looking for:

Being based at [x] has totally transformed how I find jobs. As a freelance I rely on a fairly small group of people who employ me regularly to do social media marketing work. I can pick stuff up on the internet and on spec but it tends to be pretty low quality low paid. Working here has meant I’ve doubled the number of people I get work from in less than a year. I mean, I’m still quite new to the industry, but it’s so much better than sitting at home waiting for something to fall into your lap.

Hubs were also spaces for attracting business investment funding for a smaller number of individuals. Declan described the highly organised series of business development events which were hosted where he worked, often funded by the city council and various regional agencies. Connections to the local universities were important, and investors from across the region would come to such events to investigate possible investment opportunities:

I found that there were a lot of events put on where you could meet people looking to make money by investing in a new start-up. So, for me, I was just freelancing doing coding and stuff, and decided to go along to a networking thing. I met this guy who worked for Innovate UK, and was encouraged to put in a bid for start-up funding, which amazingly was successful. It really gave me a big boost at that very early stage.

Social Benefits

Beyond the financial, creative hubs provided clear social benefits for some creative workers. Hub working, most significantly, offered the benefits of collaboration and sociality. For these young workers, the opportunities to meet friends and connect with people through work (and after work) were a key attraction of a creative hub. The development of new networks was critical to this, as hubs provide opportunities to network, make and embed relationships and develop regional opportunities which interviewees saw as offering an enhancement of their quality of life.

For some interviewees, being connected to a creative hub provided a bulwark against the isolating effects of precarious and nomadic freelance work, which is becoming increasingly dominant in the cultural industries, particularly for early career workers (Gandini 2015). In a platform economy, hubs can serve as a social glue, creating a ‘stickiness’ to a specific place, and also offering connections and modes of cultural and social capital. As Naudin has argued, this mode of networking serves an extremely important function, particularly outside of London where networks are smaller, more supportive and less instrumental (2015, pp. 134–137). For example, Tom (26) reflected on the atomised nature of freelance ‘spec’ work, and how being part of a co-working space, on a ‘hot desk’ arrangement, had provided him with much needed company, networks and social support:

I’ve always struggled a bit with depression and that, I’m a bit prone to that. Yeah, so working alone all the time probably wasn’t the best idea! My friend suggested that I try out a hot desk contract at [x], and it’s been really good for me. There’s stuff on at lunchtime, like walks, workouts etc., and free coffee is always good for chatting to people. I think it’s helped a lot and I feel much less alone in what I do now. It’s good to know that there are other people out there doing the same thing.

Creative Hubs and Affective Pressures

Despite the positive attributes of hub working identified above, the research pointed to the distinct and intense psychosocial pressures of hub working for some individuals. This section briefly investigates several key areas where hub working had a significant impact on their affective experiences of creative work. These include experiences and narratives of failure and shame; the impact of ‘compulsory sociality’ in hubs; the lack of space for dissent, critique or mental illbeing in a context where enthusiasm, ‘confidence’ and well-being are celebrated above all else.

Narratives of Failure and Shame

In a culture focused on performativity and ‘resilience’, finding a space to consider experiences and feelings of failure and shame through work is increasingly difficult.Footnote 3 However, failure is not only routine, but structurally embedded into the nature of creative work, functioning as it does on a ‘hits’ based reputation economy, where the majority of products entering the market will ‘fail’ at a purely financial level. Where discourses of failure are able to circulate, they are overwhelmingly presented in a positive light, as a necessary prerequisite on the ‘heroic’ route to success:

“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”—Coco Chanel

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”—Paulo Coelho

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”—Denis Waitley

In reality, failure within the competitive individualised context of cultural work is often experienced in a far more complex subjective fashion, and one’s ability to withstand the pressures of failure (or to be ‘resilient’), are dependent on structural factors such as class, gender and cultural capital.Footnote 4

Failure was widely internalised, individualised and experienced as aberrant from what was perceived to be the norm. It often led to feelings of pain and depression, where one’s self-identity was disrupted. For example, Jack, a 25-year-old software developer, described the humiliation and emotional pain of losing his job at a software agency in 2014:

So far, I guess failure for me has meant not being asked to work on the really interesting projects. I also lost my job at a software agency a couple of years, and that was really tough. We were all on sort of rolling contracts – so they just didn’t renew my contract at the end of the month. Didn’t tell me why. So I found it humiliating and although I asked why, I was made to feel that I should have just slunk off with my tail between my legs. Not bother them about it. That was the culture. Tough. I think it’s worse in London because there is such competition for these jobs they can treat you like shit.

Author: How did it affect you?

I guess… I sort of got down afterwards. I found it hard to sleep. I kept thinking about it, you know about losing my job, and felt really shitty about myself.

Despite being a source of psychic pain, depression and anxiety, for many of the respondents talk of failure was a taboo topic—either within their social circles, or as something that one would consider as a possibility. Jay, a graphic designer, noted ‘It’s [failure’s] not something that people talk about out and about. My friends all work in creative jobs but don’t really talk about failure. They’ll talk about how tough the industry can be, how the pay is low, living in London hard. But not failure’. The ‘unspeakability’ of the hidden injuries of creative work is particularly evident in Jake’s narrative, showing the difficulty of speaking of failure and other ‘toxic’ experiences within the ‘cool’ and celebratory environments of creative work (Gill 2014).

Katy (24), an advertising executive in London, also talked about a culture where she worked where ‘failure’ or fear of failure is not something that can be discussed:

The company I work in, you just can’t talk about failure. Everything has to be ‘cool’, and everyone is supposed to be ‘up’ all the time. It’s pretty oppressive really. That culture is pretty much driven by the managing director, who loves to promote himself at any opportunity as the ultimate self-made entrepreneur.

Failure, in these narratives, can only be discussed as part of a heroic tale of successful transformation, rather than as something that can have more damaging psychic consequences.

Compulsory Sociality

For Jack, working in a co-working hub in London, the highly socialised environment was a significant factor in his experience of cultural work and his affective response to it. The expectation of ‘compulsory sociality’ (Gill and Pratt 2008) well documented in creative work impacted upon him negatively because of his personal circumstances which left him unable to ‘fit in’:

OK, so it was kind of expected that you’d go out for beers after work – sometimes two or three times a week. [The company] was pretty much all guys, and being based in East London there were loads of places that they liked to go. Also, it was expected that we’d hang out with clients and other business contacts too. The thing for me was that I suffer from anxiety and find that kind of thing really difficult. Also, I’m on meds for anxiety which means I can’t really drink. So I found myself making excuses all the time. After a while they stopped asking me, and that’s when working there became really uncomfortable. I was pretty much left out of stuff, and in a small company like that it’s pretty impossible. I could see the writing was on the wall for a while…

This speaks to the negative side of the highly socialised cultures of creative work and shows that expectations of socialising are deeply embedded in the network cultures of creative hubs. While enjoyable, and of course a source of entrepreneurial networking and support for many creative workers (Naudin 2015) it also shows the difficulties experiences for those who do not fit in, either through choice, or for individual reasons such as health. In such cultures where ‘presence’ is an expectation, there is a deep lack of transparency involved for those who don’t or can’t make themselves available outside of contracted hours, creating new modes of performative inequality.

For example, Eleanor (27), who comes from a working-class background, suffered powerful feelings of shame in relation to her experiences of working as a copywriter for a London-based advertising agency based in a creative hub. She described the intense workload pressure, coupled with the need to be seen to socialise after work in the bars and clubs near to the agency where she worked:

I suppose I enjoyed it to start with – as soon as I started there I found myself going out nearly every night with people from work. A lot of drinking, clubbing, drugs too… haha a bit of an ad agency cliché I guess! But the work was so pressured, I was working on some big client briefs and pitches and sometimes you’d be working until 10pm, then going out til 3am, then back in the office early doors – it was crazy. I started to suffer from really bad anxiety and depression, panic attacks, you name it, and in the end I had to go to the doctor about it. He signed me off work there and then for a week and put me on antidepressants. I couldn’t get out of bed, I had to move home to my parents’ house. I lost the job after a few months – I was on a probation contract anyway, so they didn’t have to keep me on while I got better.

She works as a freelance copywriter now, and finds it suits her much better. But her difficulties with anxiety still exist:

I think that [anxiety] was there just waiting to come out, I don’t know – who knows. But I’ve definitely not been the same since, I still get really stressed and anxious. I’ve got social anxiety in certain situations. I am still taking medication. I feel really ashamed about it if I’m honest – I’m still in touch with people from the agency who have done really well and I think ‘what’s wrong with me, why didn’t I make it like them?’. But then, well, life’s too short to worry about that kind of stuff I guess.

Interrogating her ‘breakdown’ in more detail, it became clear that social class and field competition involving tastes and middle-class dispositions were important factors. Feeling the strong need to ‘fit in’, and internal shame for not finding this easy, Eleanor described how she coped by reliance on alcohol and drugs too when they were available:

‘I was drinking a lot when going out – I think I wanted to fit in and I was nervous because they all seemed so confident. I was hanging out with a young crowd at the agency, they knew other friends from university working at other agencies, and it was all really cliquey. I wasn’t posh like them, didn’t’ have their natural confidence in the bars and restaurants. They all seemed to have gone to better universities, and came from posh places. The girls were so bloody trendy! Always wearing the latest stuff, going to the coolest bars, clubs, members bars… I guess I didn’t really fit in with them, so drink and drugs was my way of coping with it. For a while at least.’

As her problems worsened, so too did her anxiety and shame about failing to fit in—or least her perception that she was failing to fit, echoing Walkerdine’s (2011) analysis of working-class girls’ experiences of HE, suffering from the intense pressure to ‘make it’ within middle-class milieus. This led Eleanor to make to multiple ‘retreats’ from the specific field of cultural production which she was in, which in combination ultimately led to her leaving it altogether for a time. One form of retreat was through alcohol and substance abuse, another was a retreat from what she perceived to be her authentic self (rooted in her working-class origins) in order to ‘fit in’. Ultimately, her final retreat was from the job itself.

Enthusiasm and the Disavowal of Critique

The final area of analysis examines relates to the difficulties faced by cultural workers who deviate in some way from the enthusiastic, positive script which is expected within the psychosocial landscape of the creative hub. This reflects the way that work has been transformed by the creative economy imaginary ‘into something closer to a life of enthusiasm and enjoyment’ (McRobbie 2002, p. 521), and this research into hub working would suggest that little or no discursive space is available for young cultural workers who do not embrace such a discourse. Being awkward or vocalising affective experiences which do not fit with the dominant culture of enthusiasm, youth, health and well-being expected in creative hubs quickly left some individuals on the margins.

For example, several respondents talked about the difficulties of vocalising any kind of critique of the precarious work culture inherent to much labour undertaken in the creative hub context. Here, insecurity was to be embraced and the ability to ‘surf’ the flux of uncertainty was a marker of ability, confidence and success, further consolidating the ‘cult of confidence’ that permeates the hub labour market. For example, Declan noted how he had been castigated by his peer group for expressing his anxiety about the precarious nature of much of his employment: ‘they basically told me ‘don’t be such a wuss, man up’… it wasn’t something that was cool to talk about. It was weird actually, but I understand the logic of it you know it’s not as if it’s going to make any difference to moan about it and we all need to boost each other’s confidence. Yeah, I was definitely the wet blanket that day’.

Also, several interviewees noted the personal consequences not only of experiencing psychological difficulties such as anxiety and depression in hubs, but of being perceived to be suffering. Hubs may offer supportive spaces for those fully immersed in the ‘creative economy’ script, but for those marginalised by anxiety or depression such as Jack or Eleanor, hubs were unamenable spaces which individuals quickly spiralled out of. Indeed, the creative hub emerges from the research as a fairly homogenous space, with a climate intolerant of perceived weakness, difference and opposition. Negative experiences were certainly not vocalised, or even entertained by some. For example, for Amy (25), from an upper-class background, the very notion of failure was alien, and to her seemed a strange thing to be talking about:

It’s so funny to like be asked about failure. I mean… I just don’t think like that. Erm… I guess I’m just an optimistic person! Things seem to have gone pretty well for me so far… I’m getting promoted, really like the people I’m working with and we all have great fun you know.

However, those from less affluent social backgrounds on the other hand were certainly not oblivious to how class (and race) played a key role in how the cultural industries operated. For example, Tina (24) a black woman from a NS-SEC Group 2 background elaborated on her experiences:

Failure – not something you want to talk about is it really? But yeah…. I’ve found this industry can be tough. I wouldn’t see it as failure as such, but I don’t think I’ve achieved what I set out to in the timeframe I wanted to. That’s been tough for me personally – I often feel depressed about it. I work really hard, so not sure what I’m doing wrong really. Sometimes I think my face doesn’t fit in this place [work], as most of my colleagues are white, and pretty much posh. Some are really up themselves too – y’know arrogant? I find that tough – they seem to be progressing much quickly than me up the greasy pole.. They all seem oblivious to rejection and ‘failure’ – must have some kind of confidence drummed into them at public school.

She felt that you had to be prepared to be rejected to find work in film as it is so competitive, but also that once you are in employment you must push yourself and be ‘driven’ as there are so many other people out there who want your job. This suggests a relational component to hub working, where ‘success’ is based on evaluating yourself reflexively against others’ performances, and certainly not through vocalising criticisms or negative experiences.

Conclusion

This chapter has investigated some of the inherent psychosocial factors of cultural work in creative hubs, providing an exploration of the lived realities of such work. Hubs are to some extent unavoidable spaces for contemporary cultural workers, as they are increasingly dominant features of the workspace environment in urban environments. Even when they are not physical spaces, they often play a role in the virtual networks that creative workers inhabit and form (Dovey et al. 2016). Understanding the dynamics of work in creative hubs is therefore a pressing and significant research task.

Creative hubs offer several distinct advantages—both economic and social. The ability to find work, network are important economic benefits. At a psychosocial level, hubs are also spaces for socialising, providing connections and a bulwark against the isolation and atomisation which characterises freelance creative work (Long and Naudin, this volume; Gandini 2015). However, hub working comes with significant affective pressures, reflecting an intensification of previously noted dynamics of cultural work. Most notably they are spaces where negative psychological experiences are not allowed to be given voice easily. Therefore, commonplace experiences of failure, shame and anxiety are hidden from view, and when they are raised or observed impact negatively on those giving voice to them. Moreover, the competitive individualised culture of hub working means that there is a relational aspect to perceptions of success or failure, where ‘success’ is based on evaluating yourself reflexively against others’ performances, and certainly not through vocalising criticisms or negative experiences. Therefore, although researchers have written about the possibilities for collective mobilisation through the specific types of socialities fostered by creative work (de Peuter and Cohen 2015; McRobbie 2002), this research indicates the difficulties for creative workers in vocalising dissent in such discursive environments, let alone organising more equitable conditions.

In the meritocratic reality of contemporary society, a new shift towards ‘grit’ and a moral focus on character precludes discussions of weakness, failure or mental health issues. In the UK, for example, there has been a noted increase in mental health illnesses over recent years, with an estimated 1 in 4 people suffering from a mental health problem and almost a quarter of a million children and young people receiving help from NHS mental health services for problems such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders (Mental Health Foundation 2016). Neoliberalism’s competitive atomised culture, coupled to the relational pressures exerted by social media and other forms of communication, appears to be leading to what some have described as an ‘epidemic’ of loneliness, anxiety and depression in late modern societies around the world (Monbiot 2016). The lack of spaces to share routine experiences of affective distress through creative labour is highly problematic. In creative work, long a frontline for the promotional discourses of meritocracy (Allen 2013), such disavowals are evident in this research, and yet also belie the lived reality for these young cultural workers.

The chapter also explores how social origin appears to have an impact on psychosocial experiences of hub working. Although a small sample, a link can be made between social class, confidence and ‘resilience’ in the face of the performative competitiveness expected within creative work. In this sense, narratives such as Eleanor’s provide an insight into the psychosocial dynamics which help determine the social inequalities increasingly observed within the creative industries. Yet, if creative hubs provide spaces for many of the negative features of individualised cultural work to intensify (precarity, affective damage, compulsory sociality, (self) exploitation and inequality) they also offer opportunities for a resocialisation of labour through a normative orientation towards collaboration, mutual exchange, diversity and community (Merkel 2015).This suggests how the ongoing transformation of labour as a result of social, economic and technological change not only accentuates the potentially toxic psychosocial impacts of cultural work, but also offers possibilities for alternative models based on ethical as well as market values.