Two interesting cases of unpaid creative work have recently come to my attention. CBS News reports that Steven Pruit has contributed three million edits to Wikipedia, all unpaid since he is not their employee. Around the same time, I read that 19 year-old Rachel McMahon has created hundreds of quizzes for BuzzFeed, also unpaid and largely unrecognized (intelligencer, 1 January 2019). For me, these cases highlight a puzzling contradiction about creative work and paid employment.
My first question was how these people manage to support themselves. Pruit is reported to have a day job and McMahon is still a teenager and presumably supported by public investment in education and her parents. My next thought was that surely millions of people also want to be creative, are inspired by voluntary action and can contribute enormously to society. So why is work currently organized in the form known to sociologists as the Weberian formal organization?
Today’s businesses want their employees to be enthusiastic; they search for this when they interview job candidates. Employers know they need the creativity and passion of those they hire. For their part, young people now talk about ‘their dream job,’ which means work they also want work that is interesting and pays enough. But the business firm coerces its employees, for example by bribing them with pay incentives and threatening them with dismissal. These produce internal distortions and inflexibility. For example, people hang on to their money and then cannot move to the work that most attracts them. Individual firms become less creative and society as a whole cannot use all its available talent. Beyond this, a large part of the population isn’t in the paid labour force at all.
Thinking about the future, how can society escape the limitations of the business organization? Can we do better than the ‘labour contract’ as a way of mobilizing people? Could people use other ways to express their creativity and aggregate their ability to cooperate? We sociologists should be able to imagine better ways to organize people’s work. Any solution seems to me to require the separation of livelihood income from the locations where people express their creativity. This is what both Pruit and McMahon do, by different means. Both sides of this problem need rethinking. Perhaps informal and transient associations can be more effective than formal organizations. And income sufficient for a decent living could come other than from wages – we need to think about micro-payments, ownership and taxation as possible sources of economic livelihood. The first society that can free creativity from subsistence will surely benefit everyone.