This qualitative case study of travel journalism in the USA explores how freelancers produce on speculation because publications do not contractually guarantee pay or advanced resources for travel. Freelance travel journalists therefore experience their work as an investment into an uncertain return in an undefined future. This article shows how such speculation manifests itself as a new productive process and relations of organisational externalisation in lean capitalism. Examining the changing obligations between freelancers and publications without assignment-contracts, this study argues that speculation presents the obfuscation of production. It externalises the risks of production onto the freelancer; reduces organisational control over production; and changes occupational norms and practices.
AbbottA (1983) Professional ethics. American Journal of Sociology88(5): 855–885.
2.
AlexanderJBreeseELuengoM (2016) The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press.
3.
BarleySKundaG (2006) Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
4.
BeckertJ (2009) The social order of markets. Theory and Society38(3): 245–269.
5.
BensonRHallinD (2007) How states, markets and globalization shape the news. European Journal of Communication22(1): 27–48.
6.
BlaunerR (1964) Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
7.
BlokkerP (2011) Pragmatic sociology: theoretical evolvement and empirical application. European Journal of Social Theory14(3): 251–261.
8.
BoltanskiLChiapelloE (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.
9.
BoltanskiLThévenotL (1999) The sociology of critical capacity. European Journal of Social Theory2(3): 359–377.
10.
BoltanskiLThévenotL (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
11.
BoneJ (2006) ‘The longest day’: ‘flexible’ contracts, performance-related pay and risk shifting in the UK direct selling sector. Work, Employment and Society20(1): 109–127.
12.
BravermanH (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.
13.
BroschakJDavis-BlakeABlockE (2008) Nonstandard, not substandard: the relationship among work arrangements, work attitudes, and job performance. Work and Occupations35(1): 3–43.
14.
BurawoyM (1982) Manufacturing Consent. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
15.
CharmazK (2006) Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
16.
CohenN (2016) Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age. Montreal, QC, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
17.
CoombeR (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
18.
DamarinA (2006) Rethinking occupational structure: the case of web site production Work. Work and Occupations33(4): 429–463.
19.
Davis-BlakeABroschakJ (2009) Outsourcing and the changing nature of work. Annual Review of Sociology35(1): 321–340.
20.
DexSWillisJPatersonRSheppardE (2000) Freelance workers and contract uncertainty: the effects of contractual changes in the television industry. Work, Employment and Society14(2): 283–305.
21.
DiMaggioP (2003) The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
22.
DuneierMCarterO (1999) Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
23.
DurkheimÉ ([1893] 1997) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.
24.
EigenZ (2012) Empirical studies of contract. Annual Review of Law and Social Science8(1): 291–306.
25.
FiskC (2003) Authors at work: the origins of the work-for-hire doctrine. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities15: 1–70.
26.
FligsteinN (2002) The Architecture of Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
27.
FraserJGoldM (2001) ‘Portfolio workers’: autonomy and control amongst freelance translators. Work, Employment and Society15(4): 679–697.
28.
FridmanDLuscombeA (2017) Gift-giving, disreputable exchange, and the management of donations in a police department. Social Forces96(2): 507–528.
29.
GouldnerA (1955) Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. London: Routledge.
30.
GranovetterM (1973) The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology78(6): 1360–1380.
31.
HochschildA (2012) The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times. New York: Metropolitan Books.
32.
HoqueKKirkpatrickI (2003) Non-standard employment in the management and professional workforce: training, consultation and gender implications. Work, Employment and Society17(4): 667–689.
KallebergA (2000) Nonstandard employment relations: part-time, temporary and contract work. Annual Review of Sociology26: 341–365.
35.
KallebergA (2003) Flexible firms and labor market segmentation: effects of workplace restructuring on jobs and workers. Work and Occupations30(2): 154–175.
36.
KallebergA (2009) Precarious work, insecure workers: employment relations in transition. American Sociological Review74(1): 1–22.
37.
KallebergA (2013) Good Jobs, Bad Jobs. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
38.
KuipersG (2015) How national institutions mediate the global screen: translation, institutional interdependencies, and the production of national difference in four European countries. American Sociological Review80(5): 985–1013.
39.
LamontMSwidlerA (2014) Methodological pluralism and the possibilities and limits of interviewing. Qualitative Sociology37(2): 153–171.
40.
LeungM (2014) Dilettante or renaissance person? How the order of job experiences affects hiring in an external labor market. American Sociological Review79(1): 136–158.
41.
MacaulayS (1963) Non-contractual relations in business: a preliminary study. American Sociological Review28(1): 55–67.
42.
McChesneyRPickardV (2011) Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights. New York: The New Press.
43.
MarxK ([1867] 1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin Books.
44.
MearsA (2015) Working for free in the VIP: relational work and the production of consent. American Sociological Review80(6): 1099–1122.
45.
NeffG (2012) Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge: MIT Press.
46.
OcchiutoN (2017) Investing in independent contract work: the significance of schedule control for taxi drivers. Work and Occupations44(3): 268–295.
47.
OcejoR (2017) Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
48.
OsnowitzDHensonK (2016) Leveraging limits for contract professionals: boundary work and control of working time. Work and Occupations43(3): 326–360.
49.
Pew Research Center (2013) The state of the news media 2013. Available at: http://stateofthemedia.org (accessed 30 July 2018).
PolanyiK ([1944] 2001) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
52.
PolivkaANardoneT (1989) On the definition of ‘contingent work’. Monthly Labor Review112(12): 9–16.
53.
RilesA (2011) Collateral Knowledge – Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
54.
RosenblatAStarkL (2016) Algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of Uber’s drivers. International Journal of Communication10: 3758–3784.
55.
RosenkranzT (2016) Becoming entrepreneurial: crisis, ethics and marketization in the field of travel journalism. Poetics54(1): 54–65.
56.
RossmanG (2014) Obfuscatory relational work and disreputable exchange. Sociological Theory32(1): 43–63.
57.
SchudsonM (2001) The objectivity norm in American journalism. Journalism2(2): 149–170.
58.
ScottW (2004) Reflections on a half-century of organizational sociology. Annual Review of Sociology30(1): 1–21.
59.
SelznickP (1969) Law, Society, and Industrial Justice. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
60.
SimpsonR (1985) Social control of occupations and work. Annual Review of Sociology11(1): 415–436.
61.
SmithV (2001) Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
62.
StoreyJSalamanGPlatmanK (2005) Living with enterprise in an enterprise economy: freelance and contract workers in the media. Human Relations58(8): 1033–1054.
63.
SuchmanM (2003) The contract as social artefact. Law and Society Review37(1): 91–142.
64.
TavoryIEliasophN (2013) Coordinating futures: toward a theory of anticipation. American Journal of Sociology118(4): 908–942.
65.
UzziB (1997) Social structure and competition in interfirm networks: the paradox of embeddedness. Administrative Science Quarterly42(1): 35–67.
66.
VallasSChristinA (2018) Work and identity in an era of precarious employment: how workers respond to ‘personal branding’ discourse. Work and Occupations45(1): 3–37.
67.
VallasSPrenerC (2012) Dualism, job polarization, and the social construction of precarious work. Work and Occupations39(4): 331–353.
68.
VenkateshS (2006) Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
69.
Wagner-PacificiR (1994) Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia Versus MOVE. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
70.
WeaverDBeamRBrownleeJVoakesPWilhoidG (2007) The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge.
71.
ZhouXLiQZhaoWCaiH (2003) Embeddedness and contractual relationships in China’s transitional economy. American Sociological Review68(1): 75–102.
72.
ZukinSPapadantonakisM (2017) Hackathons as co-optation ritual: socializing workers and institutionalizing innovation in the ‘new’ economy. In: KallebergAVallasS (eds) Precarious Work, vol. 31. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 157–181.
