Dream Job or Ordinary Work: Understandings of Creativity and Work in Creative Industries

This paper examines how early career workers in Irish Creative Industries perceive creativity in relation to their work experiences. Based on a survey of twenty workers in media, digital, marketing, and social media roles, the findings show workers did not claim creative identities nor see their jobs as creative. Instead they associate creative workplaces with constraints, and with quite “ordinary” and hard work. Nonetheless, they operationalized an idea of creativity and listed creative fulfilment and recognition as rewards for their work. This finding is significant because it departs from accounts of the attraction of creative work as intrinsically tied to questions of identity and rather points to an ideology of the creative as a key attractor for current new entrants, who privilege an ideal notion of creative work even despite their own material experiences that contradict that ideal.