In analyses of the cultural, media and creative industries, considerable attention has been paid to the negative, unethical or amoral aspects of the labour process – the exploitation of ‘precarious’ workers, the self-exploitation that results from internalizing mechanisms of control, and the damaging aspects of inequality and individuation at work.

While it remains vital to theorise these aspects, a number of scholars have sought to offer contrasting accounts that point to the diverse array of moral and ethical practices evident in cultural/creative labour, with workers appearing to routinely invest their work with social and non-instrumental values, ethics and politics – however ‘commercialised’, ‘networked’ and ‘immaterial’ their workplaces may appear to be. Such scholars draw their energies from accounts of the cultural or moral aspects of economic life (Sayer), the limits of market thinking in the cultural sphere (O’Neill, Keat), autonomist and post-Marxist approaches (Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri) and varied attempts to move beyond the ethical impasse of post-structuralist critique.

Yet whether it is possible to identify any substantively ‘moral’, ‘ethical’ or critical features of this sector remains contentious. This conference therefore asks: what are the moral or ethical dimensions of creative work? What are the political outcomes of efforts to infuse creative labour with ethical intent or content? How might an ethical politics of creative labour be theorized and organized? Or, given the propensity of capital to absorb or exploit normative critique, should the prospect of ‘ethical’ cultural work be regarded as illusory and damaging?