The informal nature of creative work is routinely acknowledged in the studies of creative labour. However, informality of creative work has been so far treated dualistically: firstly, as the informal governance of creative labour markets and secondly, as the ever-increasing informalization of creative workplaces. In contrast, this article argues for the importance of focusing on informal labour practices as infused in relational contexts so as to understand how creative workers uphold career sustainability and cope daily with contingent, insecure and underpaid work. Drawing on the relational work perspective from economic sociology, I contend that creative workers’ informal labour practices and economic activities are constituted by the meanings and quality workers attach to interpersonal relations. The more socially and spatially intimate and closer the interpersonal relationship, the less the economic benefit. The more socially and spatially distant the relationship, the greater the pecuniary motivation. The article maps relational work dynamics in: (1) informal paid labour practices, comprising work under-the-radar of state authorities, such as cash-in-hand work including online crowd-work, tips-based work, and paid favours and (2) informal unpaid labour practices, practices happening in webs of reciprocity that are not directly compensated with money, such as barter, favour-swapping and voluntary work.

This article explores the relationship between future-oriented temporality and precarity in creative work. Existing sociological studies implicitly assume an unproblematic causal link between creative workers’ future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation. This article problematizes this link and offers a more nuanced reassessment of creative work’s futurity by arguing for the analytical potential of the notion of hope in gaining a better understanding of creative workers’ hopeful – affective, practical and moral – responses to conditions of protracted precarity. Building on theories of hope, the article conceptualizes hope both as an existential affective stance and an active moral practice oriented towards the present – an orientation that enables workers to keep going in spite of economic hardship and job uncertainty. From ‘an atypical case’ study of creative work in South-East Europe, hope emerges empirically as the central quotidian practice of coping with precarity. Three practices of hope are discussed: (1) hope as therapeutic practice; (2) hope as informal labour practice; and (3) hope as socially engaged arts practice. In so doing, the article explores the possibilities of practising ‘a hopeful sociology’ of creative work.

Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan 'creative hubs' and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernising project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an 'ex-centric perspective' on creative work. An ex-centric perspective does not merely aim at multiplying non-West empirical case studies. Rather, it aims at destabilizing, decentring and provincializing the taken-for-grantedness of some entrenched notions in creative labour studies such as informality and precarity. An ex-centric perspective, we contend, offers a potential challenge to many of the claims about creative work that have taken on the status of general truths and universal principles in spite of them being generated from limited empirical evidence gleaned from research sites situated almost exclusively in the creative hubs of Euro-America.

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.

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