https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520904716
Sociology
2020, Vol. 54(4) 727­–744
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0038038520904716
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From Passion to Compassion:
A Caring Inquiry into Creative
Work as Socially Engaged Art
Ana Alacovska
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Abstract
This article considers the analytical potential of a concept of care that foregrounds human
interdependencies, relational ties and the needs of others as the basis for action in analysing work,
such as creative work, which is neither directly nor obviously associated with care provision.
Work in the creative industries has recently become a central concern in sociology. Much of
this scholarship reproduces or extends the idea of creative work as a paradigm of individualized
work in contemporary societies that is characterized by high levels of worker autonomy, passion,
self-expression and self-enterprise. This article challenges such theorizations by calling attention
to the role of caring in creative work, understood both as an ontological phenomenon and as a
relational practice of sustaining and repairing the world. Drawing on a qualitative study of socially
engaged art in South-East Europe, I argue that creative work manifests itself as a labour of care
and compassion.
Keywords
care, caring, compassion, creative industries, creative labour, creative work, cultural work,
individualization, individualized work, passion, socially engaged art, social practice art
Introduction
This article examines the undervalued and under-researched dynamics of care, caring
and compassion in creative work. Sociological interest in creative industries – that is,
those industries that produce and disseminate goods with predominantly symbolic and
aesthetic value such as music, film and video games – has burgeoned over the last two
decades (Banks, 2017; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; McRobbie, 2016a, 2016b).
Creative work has in turn become a central concern in sociology, as evinced by dedicated
Corresponding author:
Ana Alacovska, Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School,
Dalgas Have 15, Porcelaenshaven 18A, Frederiksberg, 2000, Denmark.
Email: aa.msc@cbs.dk
904716SOC0010.1177/0038038520904716SociologyAlacovska
research-article2020
Article
728	 Sociology 54(4)
scholarship featuring prominently in this journal (Friedman et al., 2017; McRobbie,
2016b; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2009; Thompson et al., 2016).
The basic premise of these studies is that creative work is fundamentally individualized
work. Owing to its requirements for ‘passionate work’ (Arvidsson et al., 2010;
McRobbie, 2016a), including self-enterprising work-identities and self-governing subjectivities
(Beech et al., 2016; Lee, 2018; Naudin, 2017), creative work has been widely
defined as self-centred, self-expressive work, undertaken by autonomous ‘subjects-information’
and self-reliant ‘passionate labourers’ (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2009;
Scharff, 2016). This article looks beyond creative work as ‘individualized work’ by
extending current philosophical and sociological discussions of care, caring and compassion
to the study of creative work – a type of work that has been prevalently interpreted
as having a ‘care deficit’ whereby creative workers are seen as displaying a disregard for
moral considerations and relational commitments (Banks, 2006).
Care and caring are of fundamental social importance. Since caring has been long
considered a quintessentially female activity, however, the societal significance and economic
status of care work has consistently been denigrated and devalued as ‘women’s
work’(England, 2005; Thomas, 1993). Scholarship on care has largely been spearheaded
by gender scholars who have painstakingly demonstrated the economic and political
value of care work, defined as labour practices and activities – usually gendered – that
involve human contact and develop the capabilities and well-being of the other (England,
2005; Tronto, 1993). This scholarship typically examines the dynamics of care in the
dual socio-economic domains of: (1) ‘informal unpaid care work’, as carried out in the
‘invisible’ domestic and private sphere by mothers, sisters and daughters (Folbre, 2012);
and (2) ‘formal paid care work’, as undertaken in care occupations by care professionals
such as nurses (Ray, 2013), home aids (Stacey, 2011) and teachers (Noddings, 2010).
More recent scholarship has disentangled the concept of care from the gendered and
binary public–private, formal–informal domains of labour in order to establish the relationality
immanent in care as central to all human action and a fundamental element of
all social and urban organization (Hall and Smith, 2015; Lynch, 2007). This is an invaluable
body of scholarship which posits care as an essential and universal human attribute
that acquires a particularistic force depending on cultural context (Held, 2006; Ray,
2013). Feminist scholarship has subsequently productively mobilized the concept of care
to rethink the moral boundaries of political (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993)
and economic life (Boris and Parrenas, 2010). In spite of these efforts at dissociating care
from narrow occupational gendered ‘care spheres’, however, issues of care and caring
are side-lined in sociological analysis of work, such as creative work, that is neither
directly nor explicitly contingent on care provision.
This article builds on phenomenological conceptualizations of care as the principal
practical and relational ethic of all economic, including occupational practices. The
concept of care is mobilized as an analytical register with which to examine the lived
experiences of creative work as revealed in in-depth interviews with performing artists
engaging, among other things, also in social practice art. These experiences have been
subjected to a caring inquiry that elucidates creative work as a labour of compassion as
opposed to a labour of passion. A phenomenological ‘caring inquiry’ foregrounds the
meanings, relationships and practices of care as an existential, ontological foundation of
Alacovska	 729
human being (Dreyfus, 1991; Heidegger, 1996) and thus also a vital structure (‘carestructure’)
of economic and labour activities (Ray, 2013). ‘Being-in-the-world’
(Da-sein) ‘is essentially care’ (Heidegger, 1996: 180) that presupposes an intrinsic propensity
to ‘act other-wise’ instead of ‘self-wise’ (Lynch, 2007: 555). Caring underlies
all life-sustaining activities that maintain and repair the world as a site of life lived well
together with others (Tronto, 1993). Proceeding from this premise, this article seeks to
elucidate the meaning and practices of care in creative work. A caring inquiry is more
pertinent than ever given the rapid dwindling of public arts subsidies and the proliferation
of non-profit funding schemes promoting socially instrumental artistic values, forcing
creative workers to double as bona fide social care workers (Belfiore, 2018; Bishop,
2012). The article makes three main contributions. First, it introduces the concept of
care as a useful tool in the study of creative labour. Second, it sketches out a caring
inquiry through which creative labour manifests itself as a labour of compassion,
involving a hands-on practical maintenance and repair of ‘a better world’. Third, it elucidates
that artists’ provision of ‘unpaid informal care’, driven by an unobligated, altruistic
affinity to embrace the concerns of the others as fundamental to everyday caring
action, and their ‘paid formal care’, executed under the auspices of funding schemes
that require artists to engage in social work, are not mutually exclusive but complexly
interlocking. The caring inquiry therefore illuminates the incipient politics of care, selfcare
and self-interest in creative work.
Care-less-ness in the Creative Industries: Self-Centred,
Individualized and Passionate Labour
In sociology, creative work has frequently served as an expedient case and emblematic
illustration of social developments, labour market changes and shifting work trends in
conditions of ‘advanced modernity’, marked by the rise of individualism and the dissolution
of traditional collectivities such as families, communities and labour unions (Beck,
2002). Sociologists working within the purview of individualization theory (Beck, 2002)
and, later, neo-Foucauldian governmentality theory, have conveniently explained how
‘do-it-yourself biographies’ that posit ‘individualized’ solutions (such as self-branding,
self-enterprise, self-exploitation) to systemic challenges such as diminishing welfare
benefits, employment protection and security operate in the working lives of people in
the creative sector (McRobbie, 2016a). Unsurprisingly, sociological studies typically
define creative work as ‘individualized labour’ (Banks and Milestone, 2011; Lee, 2018);
that is, a type of labour that prototypically embodies the ‘artistic critique’, with its
demands for unique individual talent, passion, autonomy, self-reliance and self-management
(Boltanski and Chiapello, 2006). Accordingly, creative workers are cast as individualized,
autonomous and de-socialized agents. There is virtually no sociological
study of creative industries that does not thematize and hence reproduce the idea of creative
work as ‘passionate labour’ (Arvidsson et al., 2010; McRobbie, 2016a; Umney and
Kretsos, 2015) or ‘a labour of love’ that is in essence ‘an act of self-love’ (Tokumitsu,
2014) performed primarily for personal reward, self-expression and self-realization
(Thompson et al., 2016). The most consistent underlying premise of these studies is that
the production of labour value and economic value in neoliberal creative industries is
730	 Sociology 54(4)
tantamount to the production of subjectivity via the self-branding, self-disciplining and
self-governance of ‘passionate labourers’(Naudin, 2017; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2009;
Scharff, 2016). Sociological studies drawing on neo-Foucauldian governmentality theory
unravel the processes of subjectification whereby creative workers become selfexploitative
‘entrepreneurs of the self’ (Duffy, 2016; Lee, 2018), increasing individual
performance through total quality management of the self, including sustained work on
one’s body, mind and soul through the execution of ‘aesthetic labour’ (Entwistle and
Wissinger, 2006), ‘affective labour’ and ‘emotional labour’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker,
2010).
Critical scholars thus unveil, what Lynch (2010) calls ‘a culture of care-less-ness’,
structurally encoded in neoliberal creative industries. In this view, creative industries do
not care but instead outsource responsibility for failure, upskilling, branding and psychosomatic
health to individual workers, causing self-blame, anxiety and burnout (Ross,
2009). They demand care-free ‘always-on’ workers: ‘Opportunities are not set up for
those who care’ (Smith and Thwaites, 2019: 596). For example, primary care responsibilities
such as childcare and elder care, which sit uneasily with self-enterprise, have
been found to hinder career progression for female creative workers (Smith and Thwaites,
2019) and to ‘ideologically’entrap them in ‘gender-appropriate’uncreative ‘caring roles’
such as communication and admin jobs (Alacovska, 2015; Banks and Milestone, 2011).
Studies of creative work implicitly presuppose an a priori care deficit, thus relinquishing
the analytical potential of the concept of care for the analysis of creative work. As a
result, creative workers have been reductively presented as care-less of the other (community,
neighbourhood, environment) while caring self-centredly either for their art
(intrinsic rewards, the cult of artistic personality, symbolic capital) or for commerce
(individual monetary benefit), or indeed for attaining a self-interested balance between
the two (Aspers, 2006; Bourdieu, 1996; Gerber and Childress, 2017).
Is it really the case, however, that all creative work is so self-centred and care-less?
Sociologists studying creative work have long recognized the need to develop a stronger
critique of the tendencies – engendered by neoliberal exhortations of individualism and
self-reliance – of ‘de-socialization’ and ‘de-politicization’ in creative work (McRobbie,
2002; Umney, 2017). Sharing a normative working hypothesis that ‘the social critique’,
involving considerations of solidarity, equality and security, should not be incompatible
with ‘the artistic critique’, scholars have recently started investigating the communitarian
dimensions of creative work as they occur in collaborative co-working spaces
(Gandini, 2015; Merkel, 2019) and within alternative self-organized spaces of resistance
to individualism, such as artist cooperatives (Sandoval, 2018) and labour rights movements
(Percival and Hesmondhalgh, 2014).
Beyond social critique approaches, recent scholarship has challenged the desocialized
nature of work and postulated a moral economy thesis of creative labour
(Banks, 2006; Lee, 2018; Umney, 2017) that recognizes the capacity of cultural workers
to act in opposition to for-profit individualized market rationality by cherishing noninstrumental
ethical attachments to the autonomy of creative work – its collectively
shared norms of excellence, communities of practice and contributions to human wellbeing
(Banks, 2017; Hesmondhalgh, 2017). Such an understanding of ‘moral work’ enables
these scholars to make an important normative argument for ‘good work’ and
Alacovska	 731
‘creative justice’, whereby workers ‘care about’ changing and bettering society by leveraging
the symbolic, emancipatory, politically progressive value of their artistic products
to enhance people’s lives (Banks, 2017; Hesmondhalgh, 2017). Sociologists have
recently also empirically documented the ethical motivations within specific art worlds,
including considerations of fairness and egalitarianism (Sandoval, 2018; Umney, 2017),
social change (Serafini, 2018) and ‘social enterprise’, encompassing creative workers’
‘commitment to wider community, ecological and social issues’ (McRobbie, 2016a:
118).
Despite these outstanding efforts, the socialized dimension of creative work remains
undertheorized. As a corollary of the predominance of the individualization thesis, sociologists
have focused almost exclusively on studying freelance project-based work
within established, commercial or publicly subsidized cultural institutions. Creative
work in third-sector non-profit artist-run cultural production, wherein considerations of
civic engagement and care for local communities are paramount, has been largely
neglected despite social practice art being a long-standing form of viable creative
employment and socio-political activism (Kershaw, 1992; Mutibwa, 2017). While all art
possesses socially relevant content, social practice art enacts social care in situ via actionoriented
participatory projects (Bishop, 2012). Social practice art happens outside traditional
institutional structures. Referred to as post-studio or post-theatre art, it is antithetical
to the established art world that privileges finalized artistic products, individual authorial
vision and idiosyncratic aesthetic techniques. In social practice art it is community-based
social interaction and a caring orientation to the other that constitutes the (art)work itself.
This is not to say that care relationships obliterate relationships of self-care, including
efforts to accomplish artistic aspirations and economic sustainability. Practising care in
creative work involves a reflexive concern about what type of life and art one practises;
it is care for the other that provides coherent structure to one’s personal and professional
life (Heidegger, 1996).
In order to better understand the practical everyday enactment of caring and compassionate
orientation towards others in creative work and to strengthen the analytical apparatus
for studying its socialized and socially engaged dimensions, I propose a
phenomenological theorization of care and sketch an ensuing caring inquiry. A caring
inquiry reorients the analytical locus from passion (i.e. the individualistic achievement of
an ‘artistic subjectivity’) to compassion (i.e. sympathetic everyday involvement with the
world and interdependence with others). Simultaneously, a caring inquiry allows selfcare
and self-interest to surface as requisite for the sustenance both of long-term community
engagement and sustainable, meaningful careers.
A Promise of a Better World: Care as a Fundamental
Mode of Being-in-the-World
Although the notion of care inundates policy and media discourses, care remains an elusive
and ambivalent theoretical concept in social sciences (Thomas, 1993; Tronto, 1993).
Owing to its legacy and its origin in the studies of care as ‘women’s work’, care has long
been considered merely an empirical category: a ‘common-sense construct reflecting the
concrete [gendered] manifestations of the types of activities society recognizes as
732	 Sociology 54(4)
“looking after people”’), devoid of epistemological validity and status (Thomas, 1993:
665). Such particularistic and gendered treatment overlooks the theoretical potential of
the concept of care in the analysis of work and social relations that are neither situated
‘on the frontlines of care provision’ (Stacey, 2011) nor obviously associated with ‘looking
after people’.
The profound significance of care and caring for social life is nonetheless undisputed
(Noddings, 2010; Tronto, 1993). Care has been recognized as a fundamental existential
and universal mode of human existence. It is therefore through a phenomenological conceptualization
of care that I seek to restore the epistemological currency of the concept
of care in the study of creative work, while transcending the gendered public/private
paid/unpaid dualisms that have hampered the analytical flourishing of the concept.
Care occupies a central place in Heidegger’s (1996) phenomenology of being as one
of the most important structures of our subjective consciousness of being-in-the-world
(Da-sein). Care is the basic structure of the inseparable connectedness of human being
with the world. ‘The being of Da-sein reveals itself as care’, contends Heidegger (1996:
171), and thus all human involvement with the world, including one’s relationship to
oneself, happens by means of an understanding of being as care.
An a priori ‘sense of care’ structures all past, present and future involvement in and
with the world. For Heidegger, care has a threefold temporal structure: of already-in,
being-thrown-in-the-world that existed beforehand (past); of being-amidst, encountering
things and others (present); and of being-ahead-of-itself, projecting an authentic self
(future). As such, care is a mode of ontological being that is factual – that is, possesses
facticity – and that ‘makes itself an issue’ (Dreyfus, 1991: 238), disclosing itself in
moods, projections, coping strategies, psychological processes and orientation towards
other entities in the world, and thus makes manifest the basic structure of care as a mode
of ‘being-together-with-one-another’. The temporal structure of care therefore does not
imply ‘a priority of practical over theoretical behaviour’, since care is already always
imbued with the ‘caring attitudes’ and ‘positions’ of Da-sein in the past, the present and
the future (Heidegger, 1996: 180). Care thus ontically reveals itself as ‘a human behaviour’that
is ‘full of care’and which is ‘guided by a dedication to something’, manifesting
itself as ‘care-fulness’, ‘dedication’ and ‘anxious effort’ oriented towards the achievement
of good for the other and for the authentic self (1996: 184–186).
The interconnected and relational significance of the totality of ‘care-ful involvement’
(Alacovska and Bissonnette, 2019) with the world thus presupposes an analytic of everydayness
that concentrates on the everyday practices in which care ontically discloses itself
as ‘taking care of’. If Da-sein is dedicated to Others then the everyday world discloses
itself as a communitarian, convivial and compassionate place filled with everyday careful
action. Care-ful dedication to others is what Nussbaum (1996: 28) defines as ‘compassion’
– ‘a basic social emotion’ that is ‘the central bridge between the individual and the
community’. For Nussbaum, compassion is not reducible to a mood, affect or sentiment,
nor to an arrogant kind of benevolence (see Berlant, 2004 for an analysis questioning ‘the
ethics of privilege’ and ‘the logic of dependency and vulnerability’ denoted in compassion),
but is rather a certain form of moral capacity and judgement as to what constitutes
‘the well-being of others’ (Nussbaum, 1996: 28). In this sense, compassion prompts ‘caring
action’ whereby the resources employed to meet the needs of the other are not means
Alacovska	 733
of privilege but of existential self-orientation towards ‘being-together-in-the-world’
(Heidegger, 1996). According to Tronto (1993: 105), ‘caring seems to involve taking the
concerns and the needs of the other as the basis for action’. Entangled in a totality of relational
involvements (Heidegger, 1996), ‘the self’ possesses moral bonds with others-inthe-world
that compel it ‘to act “other wise” rather than “self wise”’ (Lynch, 2007: 555).
Proponents of feminist care philosophy have consistently argued that care is not only
a cognitive disposition (as in compassionate ‘caring about’) but a hands-on practice of
acting ‘other-wise’ (as in ‘caring for’ and ‘taking care of’ something/someone) (Held,
2006; Tronto, 1993). Care has thus been defined as a set of activities ‘that includes everything
that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it
as well as possible’ (Tronto, 1993: 103). Care thus reveals itself when a practice is intentionally
aimed at maintaining, continuing and repairing the world and the relations to
others that arise from being-‘an authentic self’-in-the-world.
If acting other-wise is the ontological ‘care-structure’ of human being, then autonomous,
passionate and individualistic activities (which are typically imputed as characteristic
of creative/artistic work) do not constitute care. On this basis, even feminist care
philosophers have contended that ‘to create a work of art is not care’ (Tronto, 1993:
104) and that artists are careless, self-sufficient agents. The assertion that creative work
is ‘non-care’ is fallacious, however, since it ignores the fact that caring is an ontological
mode of being that already always imbues everyday practices, including art-making
practices (Heidegger, 1996). Art has always been ‘inextricably bound to the promise of
a better world’ (Bishop, 2006). It always implies fostering, if only symbolically or
affectively, social relations, social change and civic engagement (Rancière, 2013),
prompting the rhetorical question: ‘What artist isn’t socially engaged?’ (Bishop, 2012:
2, emphasis in original). Social practice art, moreover, has long represented a distinct
art form that is explicitly predicated on relationships of care and is aimed at ‘repairing
broken communities’ and mending the world at large. Socially engaged artists ‘care
about and/or care for the communities they are working with’ (Shaughnessy, 2012: xiv;
see also Brodzinski, 2010).
In the following caring inquiry of creative work, I mobilize a phenomenological
understanding of care as ontically revealing itself in the everyday hands-on practices of
acting other-wise and striving to maintain, repair and ratify ‘a better world’ while also
preserving ‘an authentic self’. A focus on caring practice must thus get to grips with all
the contradictions, confrontations and ambiguities of care and self-care.
Caring Inquiry: Exploring the Meaning of Care in Creative
Work
I became aware of the importance of care in creative work in the framework of a project
investigating the subjective experiences of work in post-socialist creative industries in
South-East Europe. For this project I conducted, with the help of local assistants, 83 indepth
interviews with performing artists – 40 musicians (of whom 18 were women) and
43 theatre actors (of whom 22 were women) – in a variety of urban areas in North
Macedonia and Albania. The artists were recruited via a regional artists-run non-profit
organization, with subsequent snowball sampling. Interviews lasted from 1 to 2.5 hours
734	 Sociology 54(4)
and were conducted face-to-face in local languages by the author and three younger
assistants. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thorough anonymization
has been undertaken to preserve the privacy of the study’s participants.
The analysis abided by the principles of abductive analysis (Timmermans and Tavory,
2012). Abductive analysis refers to the inferential process through which ‘surprising’ or
‘anomalous empirical findings’ are explored against the background of established sociological
theories. In order to generate novel theoretical insights, ‘surprising empirical
evidence’ that defies extant theoretical models is subsequently ‘cased’ in alternative
novel theoretical frameworks (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012: 169).
Following these abductive procedures, I first coded the data for experiences of work
individualization and precarity, since these are central tenets in existing creative work
theories. The experiences of post-socialist creative workers largely fitted into the extant
model; that is, work was experienced as individualized and precarious, with a plethora of
psychosomatic sicknesses, such as burnout, anxiety and stress.
However, once I narrowed the focus on the subjective meaning level of action
and intentionality (Aspers, 2006: 166), surprising and ‘seemingly unimportant
things’ became visible – things connected to everyday and mundane relational acts
of living together with others (Back, 2015) that are obscured by an analytical lens
tinted by theories of individualization. What underpinned the experiences of work
for post-socialist creative workers was attention to and orientation towards others
in the community, involving care, compassion and mutual aid. The prevalence of
these instances in the data-set contradicted the dominant critical sociological
approaches that see creative workers as victims of a neoliberal ‘creativity dispositif’
that instils ‘voluntary’ acceptance of precarity, pain and inequality in return for selfexpressive,
individualized work (McRobbie, 2016a; Scharff, 2016; Umney and
Kretsos, 2015).
Post-socialist creative work remained until recently under-researched in sociological
studies of creative labour that develop theoretical insights on the basis of empirical
evidence generated chiefly from a handful of western creative hubs and neoliberal
creative industries (McRobbie, 2016a, 2016b; Scharff, 2016). The post-socialist creative
industry context may itself have enabled relationships of care to surface more
forcefully than in a neoliberal context. Social practice art has flourished in post-socialism
as ‘a privileged vehicle of utopian experimentation’ following the receding of the
socialist project from the political imaginary (Bishop, 2012: 4). Philanthropic foreign
funding schemes supporting the rebuilding of civil society from the ashes of socialism
compensated for state deregulation and privatization of the art world with resulting
dwindling arts subsidies and vanishing public art spaces (Galliera, 2017). Deeply
socialized and informal creative labour practices, often sustained in third-sector institutions
and grey economies, proliferate in post-socialist creative industries as a ‘survival’
and ‘hopeful’ response to constant financial, social and economic distress
(Alacovska, 2018a, 2018b; Ozimek, 2019).
Additionally, ‘an element of chance’ may have facilitated our observation of ‘unanticipated,
anomalous’ data ‘inconsistent with prevailing theory’ (Merton, 1968 [1957]:
157), namely the importance of care in individualized work-worlds. The performing arts
have always been at the forefront of socially engaged practices, ‘since participatory
Alacovska	 735
engagement tends to be expressed most forcefully in the live encounter between embodied
actors in particular contexts’ (Bishop, 2012: 3). By its very nature, such an ‘accidental
context’ yielded a ‘fortuitous by-product’; that is, ‘the serendipitous’ surfacing of the
importance of care and acting other-wise in creative work (Merton, 1968 [1957]: 162).
In line with abductive analysis, a new set of theoretical constructs, namely the concept of
care, was mobilized to theorize this ‘accidental observation’, a process in which we
adhered to the principles of ‘a caring inquiry’ (Ray, 2013).
A caring inquiry focuses on the meaning of caring for creative workers by acknowledging
the primacy of their compassionate mode of being which takes the other as the
basis of action in the effort to maintain, repair and enact a more liveable world. By bringing
to reflective awareness caring as experienced in creative work, the caring inquiry
directed the analyst’s attentiveness to moments in which creative workers ‘ontically’
(Heidegger, 1996) acted other-wise instead of self-wise (Alacovska and Bissonnette,
2019; Lynch, 2007; Ray, 2013).
Acting Other-Wise in Creative Work
Creative work appeared from my study to be emphatically ‘other-centred’ (Lynch,
2007), involving considerations of mutuality, responsibility and commitment to maintaining
and repairing the world in which a person is ‘thrown’ (Heidegger, 1996; Tronto,
1993). According to Lynch (2007: 559), other-centred work ‘is directed in the first
instance by the good of the other rather than the good of the self’. In the interviews I
conducted, the practical politics of everyday caring was indeed evident in day-to-day
concerns and interactions dominated by compassion and assiduous attention to the
needs and well-being of others, social repair and infrastructural maintenance and mutuality,
as well as fully fledged social care work.
Socially Engaged Artists: Caring as Social Repair and Community Activism
Such attentiveness to the other involves context-specific knowledge and personal awareness
of local adversities, hardships and despair as the basis for caring actions. In a postsocialist
context, marred by a lack of being cared for by governments, institutions or
political systems (Primorac, 2007), it is affective community and neighbourhood ties that
compel actors to take care of and for each other; that is, to act ‘other-wise’. Various forms
of social practice art emanated from such caring relationships, most notably socially
engaged community-based art geared towards strengthening mutuality and solidarity.
Sasha, a 33-year-old pop musician is regularly involved in what he himself calls
‘activist musical endeavours’ to mitigate the ‘dreadful living conditions’ of ‘bereaved
neighbours’:
No one seems to care about us, the ordinary people. If they [government] don’t care then we
have to care about each other. It’s that simple. [. . .] Last month for example we released a
single and all the proceeds gathered are earmarked already for a family with four small kids that
live in a house with literally no windows. We are collectively redoing the house. It’s dreadful
what these people have to endure. We’re now halfway to gathering the amount we need. We all
help – the radio stations, the clubs.
736	 Sociology 54(4)
For all of the participants in the study, as in the case of Sasha, noticing the needs of others
was always unforced and unobligated. Indeed, the ‘unobligated character’of care arising
from the interdependencies of humans as relational and affective beings (Heidegger,
1996; Lynch, 2007; Tronto, 1993) has recently been noted in studies of everyday kindness
(Brownlie and Anderson, 2017). As an unobligated care labour, creative work
cements relations of everyday mutuality and solidarity. However, performing voluntary
care for the other also presupposes self-care. Such care labour, for example, reflected the
kind of ‘authentic self’ (Heidegger, 1996) that Sasha wanted to be as a music professional;
that is, caring, compassionate and kind.
Viktor, a 28-year-old rap musician, was acutely aware that practising care through
creative work was a form of ‘self-care’that afforded the formation of a personally valued
professional identity:
This is who I am as an artist! Most of my work is actually pro bono work. In this part of the
world you cannot simply be a star – big and above all the others. [. . .] I play humanitarian
concerts, lend my name to spread info about donations, get dirty and wet on the battleground as
well. Now, for example, we’re collecting winter clothing, boots, jackets and hats to help out the
Roma community. People freeze to death and no one seems to care. [. . .] Some friends of mine
who are Roma hip-hop musicians initiated this and I immediately jumped in to help out. We
played hip-hop and opened a gathering station in the city square where everybody could donate
what is spare and do some rapping in the rain.
Socially engaged artists like Sasha and Viktor have taken a highly visible role in community
activism and protest against social injustice. While never dismissing the selfbranding
value of caring work, our informants emphasized social engagement as a
defining element of their artistic practice. Hall and Smith (2015) argue that it is the
grounded and down-to-earth pragmatism of mutual help, upkeep and maintenance within
communities rather than grand utopian self-fulfilment aspirations that drives the determination
to work towards the creation of a better world. This is what Viktor referred to
as ‘get[ting] dirty and wet on the ground’. This type of hands-on caring engagement was
common among our participants. A caring and compassionate relationship to others is an
act of ‘social repair’ in which creative workers reach out to those in the community for
whom things have broken down in an effort to re-distribute opportunities for leading a
‘dignified life’ (Hall and Smith, 2015; Nussbaum, 1996). Caring offered generative possibilities
of socially engaged art practices that our participants valued highly both aesthetically
and ethically.
Infrastructural Maintenance, Solidarity and Mutuality: Caring as
Resistance to Individualism
Most of the informants see their orientation towards others in the community/locality/
neighbourhood as a political act of resistance to the injunctions of individualized entrepreneurial
subjectivities in creative industries. Faced with a lack of well-developed local
creative industry infrastructure, ever-diminishing public art subsidies and undercapitalized
art markets (Galliera, 2017), many participants value acting together in solidarity
Alacovska	 737
rather than competitively and individualistically so as to build strong local communities
and webs of mutual aid. The relationships of care developed by the study participants
also led to more vibrant and convivial local artistic scenes in which a central concern was
that of mending broken industrial infrastructures and repairing fragmented occupational
communities ripped apart by decades of underfunding.
Many participants frequently contested the purely economic and individualistic
rationalities of creative work, articulating instead the primacy of nurturing and
repairing relational infrastructures as compensation for an institutional and governmental
‘lack of care’ – or ‘care-less-ness’ (Lynch, 2010). Caring relationships ‘ontically
disclosed’ themselves in a range of occupational caring practices (Heidegger,
1996). These practices included voluntary mentoring and career counselling for
early stage practitioners (e.g. more established performing artists giving free-ofcharge
tutorials for future students), informal collegial support (e.g. more established
artists performing together with younger artists, exchanging favours, sharing
rehearsal space or lending expensive equipment) and upholding the vitality of local
performing scenes (e.g. by charitable involvement in the organization of local drama
and music festivals). All these examples are practical instances in which action was
primarily motivated by the provision of care and compassion within occupational
communities. Indeed, the local music and theatre scenes seem to have been held
together precisely by such apparently minor but actually immensely significant caring
acts of repair geared towards ‘fixing broken industrial infrastructures and music
scenes’ (Vasil, 46, jazz musician):
It’s a weird sense of responsibility for the younger generation that keeps me going. The
industrial infrastructure is collapsing. Local festivals are disappearing and the music scene is
faltering. In a way everything is broken and we have to fix it now together. You know, from the
bottom–up. This is where my voluntary engagement with the festival makes a lot more sense
[. . .] There’s no other way to inspire and educate a new generation of good musicians. If we
don’t act now we risk the complete extinction of local music scenes. (Vasil, 46, jazz musician)
Relationships of care do not exist completely outside of economic and institutional circuits,
however. As basic forms of creative work in the region, caring and compassion are
also institutionalized and formally organized in civil society arts organizations.
Social Practice Art: Creative Labour as Social Care Work
Artists’ self-organization in non-governmental civil society arts institutions has been on
the rise in South-East Europe of late (Barada et al., 2016), while arts activities across
Europe are increasingly being supported by funding from non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and philanthropic charities that pursue a pro-active social/political agenda
(Bishop, 2012; McRobbie, 2016a; Serafini, 2018). Within non-profit civil society organizations,
creative work is explicitly and purposefully framed and practised as fully fledged
social care work oriented towards disenfranchised, vulnerable and marginalized groups
andthuspractisedassociallyengaged‘appliedperformance’(Bishop,2012;Shaughnessy,
2012). Here, creative work was increasingly executed under a non-profit umbrella within
738	 Sociology 54(4)
primary institutions of care such as hospitals and nursing homes, though also in prisons
and brothels:
It’s easy to give up around here. It’s crucial that we cultural workers make a positive mark
now that the healthcare system is failing us all and unemployment is at the highest level
ever, with poverty rates through the ceiling. It’s high time to act with honesty, commitment
and devotion. [. . .] My work is mostly in hospitals. I work with disabled children using
drama as a method of self-exploration and coping with life circumstances. It is harrowing
work. I am often heartbroken to witness these little people’s suffering. But this type of
theatre work gives me purpose and a sense of accomplishment. (Nada, 33, professional
theatre actor)
The creative workers we interviewed cared for the communities they worked with.
Even if they found their political, economic and structural circumstances hopeless and
miserable, they were committed to carving out hopeful spaces (Alacovska, 2018a; Hall
and Smith, 2015) of social justice, human well-being, healing and emancipation. Many
creative workers saw not-for-profit caring as the raison d’etre of their professional work,
as testified in the following account by Valentin:
I do mostly prison performances. It’s NGO work. It’s very psychologically taxing, sometimes
even dangerous, and it pays peanuts. But it’s work I love doing. [. . .] This means co-creating,
screenwriting and staging with inmates. Theatrical performance is basically used where it is
difficult to talk. At the moment I’m working with men incarcerated for having committed
sexual violence. It’s a sort of rehabilitation work. In the dehumanizing and hopeless conditions
behind the bars, musical performances humanize, makes people reimagine humanity and get
to grips with their past. This is really what theatre essentially is and has to be. (Valentin, 42,
performing artist)
The ‘applied performers’ cared for the participants in their participatory projects and act
with ‘conscience, integrity and commitment’within their communities (Shaughnessy, 2012:
xvi). This is not to say, however, that the character of care work is not commodifiable.
Practising creative work as fully fledged ‘paid care’ within non-profit organizations
was one of the most desirable forms of stable employment among the interviewed participants
(Barada et al., 2016; Bishop, 2012). In the absence of robustly funded cultural
institutions and vigorous art markets, social care-driven philanthropic funding schemes
represented the last refuge for workers intent on persevering as creative professionals
(Galliera, 2017). Although socially engaged art reinvigorates both social care and artistic
employment (Rutten et al., 2017), the costs of engaging in social practice art were
immense for the creative workers who often found it excruciating to balance care work
with self-care.
Balancing Care and Self-Care
Managing relationships of care was onerous. Caring relationships often did not cease
with the termination of contractual arrangements: many informants reported cherishing
‘intimate’ attachments with the people they cared for long after projects had ended,
Alacovska	 739
visiting them in hospitals and prisons and providing further compassionate care at the
expense of their own mental and physical health.
Maria, a 34-year-old actress doing palliative care performances in an elderly home,
confessed the following:
I tend to forget myself. It is overwhelming to be in touch with dying people every day. I forget
to listen to my own body. Have I eaten? Have I slept long enough? I have no tools to do mental
hygiene. At school they taught us how to develop unique artistic vision, not to care for people.
I have no tools to cope with all this suffering. I tend to over-attach and have difficulties letting
go of the people. I keep coming back to the hospice.
The physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by a compassionate bearing of
the suffering of others, prolonged exposure to pain and the realization that those being
cared for may never recover caused compassion fatigue (Nussbaum, 1996). Untrained
to dabble as social workers, creative workers found it difficult to disengage from the
caring relationships and practise self-care. Self-care, however, does not refer to selfindulgence
or the mindless positivity of self-help but to occupational self-preservation
and professional integrity in the face of suffering. As a valued form of formal paid
employment, creative-work-cum-care-work often involves a struggle to balance one’s
commitments to others with concerns for self-care and career self-interests (England,
2005; Lynch, 2007, 2010).
Although the performance of care work was frequently described as ‘taxing’, ‘heartrending’
and ‘emotionally draining’, the majority of informants emphasized that caring
was ‘the essence’ of their creative work, ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ they have committed
themselves to lives as creative workers in spite of widespread work’s precarity. Many
participants projected a sense of ‘self-care’, that is a current and future professional
‘authentic self’, by expounding care-for-the-other as their fundamental ‘being-in-theworld’.
Using Heidegger’s (1996) terminology and phenomenological sequencing, we
can detect care manifesting itself as the principle reason for self-care, understood as the
fundamental being-in-the-world of a creative worker. For example, by applying a phenomenological
reduction one can syncretize Valentin’s account with the following ‘forthe-sake-of-which’
ontological grounding (adapted from Wheeler, 2011): an artist using
art (‘with-which’) in a local prison (‘in-which’) in order to produce an applied theatre
play (‘in-order-to’) aimed at helping others, that is, male prisoners (‘towards-which’), for
the sake of being a care-ful that is, ipso facto, a professional theatre actor.
Conclusion: The Politics of Care in Creative Work
Creative workers have typically been positioned as ideal workers in ‘the age of individualism’(Beck,
2002): self-expressive, self-enterprising and self-reliant. This article, in contrast,
has examined creative work as ‘other-centred work’ – a veritable form of care work
wherein creative workers do not act ‘self-wise’but ‘other-wise’. Considerations of mutual
help, solidarity, human well-being and social engagement foreground creative work as
‘other-centred’ work (see also Alacovska and Bissonnette, 2019). Contributing to emerging
studies of the socialized nature of creative work (Banks, 2017; Sandoval, 2018), this
740	 Sociology 54(4)
article has argued that ‘unobligated’ relationships and practices of care and compassion,
grounded in everyday pragmatism of ‘being-with-Others’in the world (Heidegger, 1996),
underpin creative work. Such care work rekindles hope in the possibility of the existence
of ‘a better world’. It repairs, maintains and preserves the social fabric of faltering and
struggling creative industries by enhancing mutuality and relationality both within professional
communities and surrounding neighbourhoods. It mitigates the ‘care-less-ness’ of
welfare institutions and redresses the decline of local artistic scenes.
The observed centrality of practical and relational care in creative work is not a new
phenomenon, albeit the predominance of the individualization thesis has long obscured
its importance for sociological analysis. To say that care, understood as the effort of
maintaining, upholding and repairing a better world, is central to creative work is tautologous.
Care for a better, more just, fairer and freer world has always imbued art, not
least in an abstract and symbolic way. Since the counter-cultural movements of the late
1960s, many artistic formations operating outside established cultural institutions but
within local communities have adopted radical and collective alternative modes of production,
including radical theatre, protest music, zine publishing and agit prop, performing
practical, concrete and situational care-for-the-other. These artistic formations are
explicitly predicated on effectuating social change, providing ‘welfare’ and ‘socio-political
impact’in communities (Kershaw, 1992). Cultural studies scholars have long argued
that art has always been an inextricable part of social movements, with artists practising
care by levelling radical critique at dominant ideologies while prominently endorsing
pro-social causes in anti-war, anti-abortion and anti-racism movements (Eyerman, 2002).
International development scholars have extensively documented the rise in ‘celebrity
humanitarianism’, involving ‘the caring activities’of film and music celebrities in ‘global
helping’ as a response to the ‘distant suffering of others’ (Richey, 2015: 4). In contrast to
glamorized and PR-driven global celebrity caring, theatre performance scholars have
emphasized the direct involvement of professional artists with proximal local communities
in socially engaged projects and social practice art (Bishop, 2006, 2012).
Despite care being intrinsic to creative work, ‘caring’ has remained, paradoxically,
largely inchoate in studies of ‘individualized’ creative work. The everyday propensity to
care, although constitutive of social life, remains often in the domain of the taken-forgranted
and unarticulated. The phenomenological caring inquiry, advocated here, is useful
for the sociological study of creative work, as it urges us to bring the everydayness
and taken-for-grantedness of care to the forefront of the analysis in order to critically
reassess and articulate the link between the existential affinity to provide care for the
other and the pragmatic, instrumental engagement in care work for the attainment, for
example, of career advancement or employment status.
There is an urgent need for a caring inquiry of creative work. When care, understood
as a basic mode of being-in-the-world and self-care, understood as a self-centred engagement
in work executed under the auspices of philanthropic and public funding schemes
that require artists to engage in formal social care work, are complexly interlocking, then
the political consequences for creative work are equally complicated. The last two decades
have witnessed an intensification of efforts on the part of both social and cultural
policy-makers to capitalize on the fundamental caring nature of art. Cultural policy
scholars have long recognized that ‘cultural policies are social policies by other means’
Alacovska	 741
(Oakley, 2006: 256). Recent UK and European creative industry policies, for example,
cast creative workers as de facto social workers, compelling them to demonstrate the
instrumental value of artistic work in tackling social inclusion, crime prevention and
poverty alleviation (Belfiore, 2018; Harvie, 2013). Simultaneously, social care scholars
alert attention to the grave consequences arising from the rapprochement between social
care and art as artists are called upon to ‘cheaply’ fill the void left by social workers
retreating from public spaces of social change and emancipation (Rutten et al., 2017). In
conditions of economic austerity, dwindling public arts subsidies, fierce labour competition
exacerbated by rapid digitization and the proliferation of non-profit funding schemes,
the field of social care has become a highly attractive employment option for artists
(Bishop, 2012; Harvie, 2013; Shaughnessy, 2012). Creative work is increasingly being
conflated with care work, while at the same time care is becoming commodified and
onerous.
When government policies explicitly capitalize on the caring dispositions and practices
of creative workers, care work becomes yet another excuse for further trimming of
public arts subsides (Harvie, 2013). The prevalence of intrinsic and unobligated caring
motives among creative workers – as their ‘existential’ artistic mode of ‘being-in-theworld’(Heidegger,
1996) – can easily become self-victimizing factors that annihilate the
necessity of ‘self-care’. Creative workers can be turned in this way into ‘prisoners of
love’– a condition which, as scholars of social care work argue leads to downgraded pay
and exacerbates exploitation (England, 2005; Thomas, 1993). Care work ‘may in fact
involve a net loss to them financially, socially or emotionally’(Lynch, 2007: 559). Given
that care is their basic mode of being, creative workers will be reluctant to withdraw care
in spite of abusive work relations and declining pay. The lack of training in managing
relationships of care and self-care in creative work may further exacerbate occupational
anxiety, stress and burnout.
Sociological understanding of the complexities of care in creative work thus requires
attentiveness to the concrete, local and particular hands-on ‘care-giving’ practices of
meeting the needs of others through in situ artistic work, as well as to practices of selfcare
involving activities of professional self-preservation and occupational self-identity.
The consideration of care in creative work should recalibrate the ways in which handson
caring work has been feminized and degraded as ‘dirty’ and ‘poorly rewarded’
despite its immense social salience (England, 2005). Since caring provides the basic
structure of a professional self-identity and represents an increasingly popular form of
artistic employment, moreover, considerations of self-care, including coping with the
suffering of others, vicarious trauma and emotional exhaustion, should become central
to the analysis of creative work. Taking the politics of care and self-care into account
when theorizing creative work will require research designs unambiguously focused on
care and compassion.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article: the data upon which this article is based have been generated within a
research project funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, grant number
MK_211.
742	 Sociology 54(4)
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Ana Alacovska is Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. Her
research interests revolve around the sociology of cultural work and the studies of creative/media
industries. Her research has been supported by generous external research grants such as the
Danish Research Council for Independent Research (2014–2018), the Swiss Agency for
Development and Cooperation (2014–2016), Horizon 2020 (2020–2024) and a Sapere Aude grant
(2020–2024). Alacovska’s work has appeared in high-ranking academic journals such as Media,
Culture & Society, Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, Organization, The Sociological
Review and others.
Date submitted January 2019
Date accepted December 2019