Turning Gig-Work into Familiar Matters - Exploring Cooperatives of Artists Navigating a Labor Market of Cultural Gig

Research describes how self-realization and individual creativity motivate performing artists to put up with working conditions recognized by anxiety, isolation, and/or insecure levels of pay. In many cases, doing so requires that they figure out how to navigate a precarious work life as gig-workers, relying on insecure job opportunities, fluctuating incomes and unpaid work without sickness benefits or pensions. By making it possible to support each other and share the burden for finding an income, cooperatives have recently been suggested to minimize the negative consequences of this type of precarious gig-work and enhance opportunities to tame drawbacks of an individualistic and highly competitive work life. By introducing modes of domestication as a concept, this article, investigate how performing artists dependent on gigs, organize themselves in cooperatives to facilitate social support, tackle insecurity and embed gig-work in their everyday life. The study draws on 37 semi-structured interviews with artists mostly engaged in orchestrated performances in music, acting and dancing. Interviews have also been done with representatives for unions and different interest organizations. In addition, policy documents have been analyzed. The analysis identifies three co-existing modes of domestication, central to how performing artists turn a self-realising, insecure and individualistic work life into a familiar part of their everyday life. In the first mode of domestication cooperatives constitute a resource enabling the individual artists to address an insecure labour market, whereas the two following modes of domestication rather direct their attention to the joint organization of the cooperatives. Tension between the different modes of domestication are discussed in the study.