Abstract
This article scrutinises a recent moment of cultural work at Southbank Centre, drawing on empirical research including 32 interviews carried out over a 4-year period. It supports the view that it is important to extend our historical understanding of cultural work and argues that cultural labour and affective economy debates need to be situated in longer institutional contexts. Focusing on what it describes as ‘emotional, embodied, collaborative labour’, it analyses these tropes in relation to both specific histories of Southbank Centre and to broader theories of cultural work and emotional labour. It also argues that by unpacking the changing forms of emotional labour required by cultural workers at Southbank Centre, we can develop our understanding of how and why cultural work evolves within specific contexts. During the period I researched Southbank Centre, the need for individualised, ‘appropriate’ emotional labour, and the ability to facilitate enjoyable visitor experiences was made key for cultural workers, and yet the adept demonstration of these personal attributes is not something which is equally available to all. Through analysis of both academic theory and findings from my research, the article therefore unpacks how collaborative working practices coexist with emotional labour, embodied work and the production of an affective visitor experience as well as being shaped by their cultural–political contexts.
Introduction
This article examines changes and continuities in cultural working practices and attitudes to cultural labour at the multi-arts organisation Southbank Centre, London, drawing on 24 semi-structured interviews with cultural workers between 2014 and 2018, as well as research discussion–interviews with a further eight individuals with relevant knowledge and experience. The article examines and theorises the ways in which Southbank Centre has transformed and produced new forms of emotional labour which impact the lived experiences of cultural workers. It analyses how ‘visitor experience’ has developed at the organisation, including tracing the development of ‘customer service’ initiatives from the 1980s, and more generally, in relation to the global emergence of the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). The article suggests that changing forms of cultural labour have engendered evolutions of emotional labour and, importantly, a more significant need for workers to engage in what Hochschild terms ‘collective emotional labour’, where ‘appropriate’ emotions are co-produced by a team. This involves staff monitoring and supporting each other to perform work within the boundaries of what are deemed the acceptable emotional states to display (Hochschild, 1983: 114–115).
In the article, first cultural work is contextualised and historicised. Following this, Southbank Centre is introduced, its suitability for a case study is explored and the research methodology is outlined. Analysis of the findings from my empirical research follows. I demonstrate how individualised emotional labour, or labour which requires managing one’s own emotions in order to create the ‘right’ kind of outward appearance (Hochschild, 1983) was required in a variety of roles at Southbank Centre. At the same time, collaborative working was also presented as necessary and had complex politics. In large part, this collective working was engendered, and managed, through the Director Jude Kelly’s ‘Festival Methodology’ (2011–2018), which required different departments across the organisation to work closely together, as well as with external cultural workers and the public, to coordinate, produce, manage and deliver on average more than 14 annual festivals and series. These collaborative ways of working represent a different model to individualised, competitive practices often associated with work in the cultural and creative industries, and are themselves part of the distinctive legacy of the institution in municipal history, as I have explored elsewhere (Williams, 2020). The article therefore proposes that when analysing collaborative working and emotional labour, the different historical meanings and power dynamics of the cultural context need to be brought to the forefront.
Contextualising and historicising cultural work
For over two decades now, there has been an expanding academic interest in theory relating to cultural work (Banks, 2007, 2017; Banks et al., 2013, Beck, 2003; Brook et al., 2018; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013; Lloyd, 2006; Oakley and O’Brien, 2016). In many senses, these debates stem from analysis of the cultural and creative industries, including theorisations which attempt to define, contextualise and problematise related rhetoric (e.g. see Banks, 2007; Garnham, 2005; Hartley, 2005; Hesmondhalgh, 2012; Hewison, 2014; McGuigan, 1996; Throsby, 2001), and those which draw on and re-evaluate historical theorisations such as Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous text in 1944.
As part of the academic focus on cultural work there has been a nascent interest in its histories, as well as in its possible futures, now rendered both more urgent and complicated due to the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (Banks, 2020; Banks and O’Connor, 2021; Banks et al., 2013; Brook et al., 2020; Eikhof, 2020). Although some overarching concepts can be suggested to define cultural work, it remains a problematic and contested concept. Much has been written about the notion of cultural work offering unique satisfaction, fulfilment and status (Banks, 2007; Beck, 2003; Sandoval, 2018), but this research often focuses on artistic and creative producers. A useful way of understanding what is meant by cultural work is
[A]n umbrella expression to capture a myriad of working roles, processes and contexts . . . cultural work is rather a category . . . in which different types of labour such as manual, cognitive, emotional and affective are often intensively intertwined. (Hope and Richards, 2015: 121–122)
In this research, I defined ‘cultural workers’ as those involved in the kinds of labour mentioned above, or to put it another way, in the production and circulation of texts and symbolic cultural goods at Southbank Centre. I also used a definition of cultural work which included those who might not be traditionally thought of as creative producers, by interviewing workers from across departments, and not focusing solely on those directly involved in artistic production.
In order to analyse the ‘lived experiences’ of these cultural workers, three concepts are important to examining practices and discourses: emotional, immaterial and affective labour, which I will define here. Emotional labour is primarily defined using Hochschild’s theory, as a commodified working practice which ‘requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ and which involves ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ (Hochschild, 1983: 7). Immaterial labour is defined as labour from which the outcome is, at least for the most part, a non-material service, product or communication (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hope and Richards, 2015; Lazzarato, 1996). It may involve tasks or activities which have not previously been recognised as ‘work’, for example, defining and influencing trends in consumption and taste, and even producing ideologies (Lazzarato, 1996). Affective labour is that in which the worker intends to create ‘affect’ for the customer, that is, work which has a cognitive, physiological or emotive impact, or a mixture of one of more of these (Dowling, 2007, 2012; Dowling et al., 2007). These forms of labour are all important terms to further understand collaborative cultural work and visitor experience. Importantly, they can be mobilised by different historical and cultural–political regimes, and the varied historical practices at London’s Southbank Centre are a good example of this. Next, I provide further details about the case study for this research.
Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre is a multi-arts organisation on the River Thames in London’s Southbank and is of immense cultural significance as the largest multi-arts centre in Europe. It comprises different sites over 11 acres: the Royal Festival Hall which includes a 2700-capacity auditorium, The Clore Ballroom, Archive Studio, National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre Shop, Riverside Terrace Cafe, Central Bar and Skylon restaurant; the Hayward Gallery; the Queen Elizabeth Hall; and the Purcell Room. Its mission as stated on its website at the time of writing is to: ‘Champion greatness: We seek out great artists and give them the space to create their best work; Take the lead: We make sure we’re at the forefront of the arts – provoking and inspiring culture, not just following it; Open up the arts: Not everyone will love everything, but we make sure there’s something for everyone’ through producing, showcasing and facilitating ‘festivals & series, art & exhibitions, classical music, gigs, literature & poetry, performance & dance, talks & debates, comedy, families, access events and courses & workshops’. 1 It is a fascinating case study through which to explore and extend debates around cultural labour for several reasons.
First, Southbank Centre has a complex cultural history and contemporary cultural workers are expected to be well-versed in its heritage. For example, this includes The Festival of Britain in 1951, which took place on what is now the Southbank Centre site, and was an attempt to celebrate and galvanise culture and offer a showcase for the arts, design and sciences. It incorporated the picturesque, and a focus on pleasure and imagination, as well as the future through display of innovative design, technology, art and popular culture (Atkinson, 2012; Conekin, 2003; Mulgan and Worpole, 1986). Alongside this, the organisation has been greatly influenced by the legacy of radical policies and arts funding under the GLC, from 1981 to 1986, and specifically the launch of the Open Foyer Policy in 1983, although this legacy is not highly visible in discourses of cultural workers for the organisation nor officially promoted (Williams, 2020). Apart from its temporary closure due to the COVID-19 crisis in early 2020, Southbank Centre continues to offer sizable public space that visitors don’t have to pay to access. Jude Kelly’s leadership as Artistic Director of Southbank Centre (2005–2018) and her explicit promotion and mobilisation of the ‘festival methodology’ (2011–2018) has also profoundly shaped the organisation. On average, in recent years it has employed up to around 600 employees, although many staff were furloughed and there were mass redundancies during COVID-19 lockdowns. This led to the #SouthbankSOS campaign and open letter and responses from Southbank Centre and the campaign, 2 as well as a number of articles. There are ongoing debates about the impact upon diversity of workers for the organisation, the ramifications of its restructure and reopening, and questions about how and whether it can continue to offer similar access to such a diverse range of art forms and public space. 3 Therefore a nuanced understanding of its histories and a recent moment of collaborative working practices is particularly valuable. Bearing this context in mind, I next describe the methods used in my empirical research.
Methodology
To draw on Janet Newman’s (2012) ethnography of female activists in senior positions in organisations, which uses a similar methodology, my empirical research did not intend to provide a linear history and neither is it a complete story. Instead, it aimed to present a new perspective, or a story from a novel angle about collaborative emotional labour. The methodological approaches used in the research were an amalgamation of cultural discourse analysis, which takes inspiration from Foucauldian approaches, combined with a selective use of cultural ethnography, and underpinned by an in-depth literature review and analysis of primary written and online resources produced by the organisation. One of the purposes of this research – in a similar vein to Beverley Skeggs’ ethnographic work with working-class female care workers in a town in the North-West of the United Kingdom – was in order to understand what it means to be a cultural worker and the processes by which cultural workers produce themselves (Skeggs, 1999: 216–217).
In order to ‘access’ and analyse this lived experience the most appropriate fieldwork approach was to conduct semi-structured interviews, and this is the data I draw on for the purposes of this article. During my fieldwork, I conducted 24 interviews and a further 8 interview–discussions with academics, specialists and freelance cultural workers who had expertise on Southbank Centre, the Festival of Britain or other relevant topics. The difference between these two research methods is that the interviews were held with current or previous workers for the organisation. They were semi-structured and similar questions were asked each time. However, the research discussions were held with individuals who did not necessarily fall into the categories mentioned above, so, for example, those who may have done freelance work for the organisation, or worked in a consultancy capacity. They were less structured and helped form and develop theorisations for the research project, although they are not extensively drawn upon for specific quotations. The argument presented in this article centres around the interview method and the thematic analysis used in my research.
The fieldwork was mostly carried out at Southbank Centre itself and was participative, using a snowballing sampling method. It is now commonly accepted that all research is a dynamic engagement with a cultural, social situation and therefore requires reflexivity by the researcher and an awareness that the research process is in itself a type of interference in the environment (Seale, 1998), as well as understanding that research always has political ramifications (Warren and Karner, 2005: 25), and that there is a danger of it being carried out in the interests of specific people or groups only (Skeggs, 2001). In this context, I, as the researcher, had a specific perspective: and one which was at times that of a participant since during the research process I drew on my experiences of being a cultural worker for an international arts organisation, which helped shape and form the structure and content of the interviews. As with all academic research, it is important that a rigorous ethical framework for research is utilised. Ethical guidelines underpinning this research project were in line with relevant policies and codes of practice.
Most of the participants interviewed for this research were current workers for the organisation, or had worked there within the past 10–15 years. However, I also spoke to individuals who had worked for the organisation in the early 1990s, one who worked for Southbank Centre from the early 1970s until the early 2010s, and another worker who had been employed by the organisation for 30 years. During the selection of research participants, I deliberately stretched the definition of ‘cultural worker’ and decided to not only interview creative producers for the organisation: I interviewed individual workers from departments including Visitor Experience, Marketing, Education and Participation/Festivals Team, Development, HR, Facilities, Technical and Commercial Events. This ranged from past and current members of the Senior Leadership Team (those working at ‘Director’ level, who report directly to the Chief Executive or Artistic Director of Southbank Centre) to Visitor Service Hosts. I also spoke to a number of past and current ‘Heads’ of teams – the layer of staff below Directors in the organisation, as well as those with job titles including Manager and Officer, for example.
My research involved ongoing reflection on my engagement with research participants and throughout there was a drive to make processes collaborative and ‘sociable’. Shamser and Back overturn the idea of ‘finding a quiet place’ to do research as part of the process of ‘the mere transposition of talk to text data’, lamenting the fact that this makes research ‘unsociable’ (Shamser and Back, 2014: 1). They argue that, for the purposes of their research, it was important to conduct interviews in sociable, public spaces, to provide comfort for participants, ease of dialogue and the feeling of collaboration rather than interrogation. During the course of my research, interviews were held in a variety of different informal, accessible public spaces at Southbank Centre and other locations. This approach yielded rich results and fascinating data which I draw upon selectively for the purposes of this article. Let us now move onto the analysis of these data and what it shows us about the evolutions of emotional labour at Southbank Centre, starting with the Royal Festival Hall in the 1950s.
From volunteer ushers to visitor experience hosts: Southbank Centre’s prioritisation of the visitor in the context of the ‘experience economy’
In the early decades of its existence, the Royal Festival Hall functioned as a classical music concert hall. Guests would visit for a concert and then leave and foyers were only open before the concerts. In effect, it was a site of elite patronage and there was little in the way of ‘customer service’. As one interviewee who had been working for the organisation for over 25 years in a variety of roles, including in technical and artistic planning, put it:
In the old days it was a volunteer role for mainly older, retired people, who did it as a sort of hobby. And although they were very good, there’s a whole different approach now.
‘The old days’ was the mid-century moment of a strong welfare state, and as such the use of their free labour by the organisation was less exploitative than we would understand unpaid labour to be today. Cultural production at Southbank Centre has vastly diversified recently with the development of new events and a wider programme of arts available to the public. The Southbank itself has transformed from a site primarily focused on manufacturing during the 19th century to a place renowned for its service and entertainment-based economy. This parallels a wider transition in the Global North to service-based economies (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Ross, 2008) and increased levels of employment therein (Lloyd, 2006). Imbricated with these developments was the development of ‘customer services standards’ and codes of practice in cultural organisations, most visibly from the 1980s, in tandem with the shift to emphasising the primacy of the market and neoliberalism (Banks, 2007; Hochschild, 1983; Lloyd, 2006), as well as transformations in arts policy (Garnham, 2005).
At Southbank Centre the move away from volunteer staff towards ‘professionalised’ customer service staff, who were able to respond to the differing consumption needs of diverse audiences, was codified as necessary for the organisation’s success. A cultural worker who worked in a senior role in the Education department at Southbank Centre in the early 1990s talked about how expectations for front of house roles changed:
Re-educating the ushers was a massive task . . . They were doing it because they loved classical music and the history and heritage of the Festival Hall. Things like Meltdown or . . . any gig where the audience would come in and not sit on their bottoms on seats and want to bring in beer and be dressed in quite different clothes and have a whole different attitude and want to go out to the loo and back in again, all those things just were mind-blowing . . . And also, they didn’t like the music so the treat was to sit in a concert hall and listen to the concert having seen people in and out of their seats before and during. Then they had to sit and listen to music that they didn’t particularly enjoy and deal with people who weren’t like them so a lot of them were finding that really difficult.
The organisation began to prioritise the needs and wants of its paying customers in a more deliberate way; to manage the conduct of employees accordingly through ‘re-educating’ them in the norms of customer service. During interviews between 2014 and 2018, a focus on the importance of ‘customer service’ was overt in the discourses of current employees. For example, a senior member of staff in the Visitor Experience team talked to me about what they look for when recruiting:
We talk a lot about how we think we offer a world class service here. A lot of what we talk about in our job advertising, in our job descriptions and also in our interviews is to do with the warm welcome that people are going to offer, and customer service skills. [We try] to find people that are going to be great with visitors, who are really warm and who are going to be really welcoming to people when they come in the door.
This quote indicates how rhetoric around ‘pleasing the consumer’ became embedded at the organisation and the transition to the explicit language of consumer capitalism through overt manipulation of the visitor experience.
A later transformation from the development of customer service practices was moving towards ‘experience’ rather than ‘service’. As Pine and Gilmore (1999) presented in their much-quoted business text from the late 1990s, The Experience Economy, ‘an experience’ is the chief unit of value marketed to the consumer, and products and services are increasingly promoted in terms of experiential or lifestyle advantages. In interviews with cultural workers at Southbank Centre, I found they were well-versed in the importance of ‘the visitor experience‘. For example, one member of the Events team talked about the ways in which the visitor experience is seen as key:
The artistic team kind of curate the experience that they want the visitors to have, so . . . the visitor experience and how they’re going to feel when they’re onsite is quite crucial to everything we do really.
This cultural worker positions it as being central to the work of the organisation. Another cultural worker, a Visitor Experience Host, recalled the renaming of the front of house department:
It changed to Visitor Experience . . . that name change also signified a shift in the importance of the department, that we’re not just providing the ticket sales . . . but also providing this kind of huge warm festival welcome . . . Our visitors don’t just come here to watch performances, they come here to grab a coffee or for a meeting or to work or to study. It’s about the experience for everyone.
The experience economy discursively reconfigured the relationship between staff and visitors. The drive for ‘a huge warm festival welcome’ suggests a semantic elision between the privileged customer and low-status server, flattening the discursive distinctions between them. There was an awareness in the discourses of cultural workers that the experience is collaboratively produced by numerous individuals and multifaceted influences, together. In these narratives, it is apparent that the corporate language of the experience economy coexisted with strong residues of earlier social democratic politics at Southbank Centre, palpable in the democratic ‘open foyer policy’: of how a welcome continued to be extended to non-paying customers who wished to engage with ‘the experience’ of the Royal Festival Hall. This enmeshing of a democratic heritage and neoliberalism demonstrates an important phase in the evolution of emotional labour. From this we can begin to understand more about current emotional, embodied, collaborative working practices.
There is little evidence of what would now be termed ‘emotional labour’ nor of organised managerial control over the emotions of workers in the early decades of the Royal Festival Hall. As the cultural worker quoted earlier who worked for Southbank Centre in the early 1990s put it:
They [Volunteer Ushers] were doing it because they loved classical music and the history and heritage of the Festival Hall.
These volunteer cultural workers showed emotional involvement in their enthusiasm and love for the organisation, but there is little evidence of a similar degree, and extent, of emotional labour being required in the past compared to recent years.
Cultural workers at the organisation, until about the mid-1980s, in other words, were not expected to embody the ethos and values of the organisation. The same interviewee described the move towards a focus on catering for the needs of a more diverse group of consumers:
[There were] really different cultural expectations . . . just making sure that we had any diversity in the ushers, and what they wore, getting them into T shirts, just everything about it. They were in a sort of blue crimplene suit as far as I can remember, you can imagine Guy Garvey’s Meltdown and a bunch of 70 year old very sweet older ladies in their crimplene suits saying ‘Please can you sit down, sir’. You wouldn’t dream that that would be a possibility now but that’s where we started.
This indicates the move towards the deliberate management of public facing staff. As music programming and audiences developed and diversified, there was a drive to employ different kinds of workers in order to reflect this change. Moreover, as Joanne Entwistle argues, since dress and fashion are an essential way through which the body communicates social and cultural meanings (Entwistle, 2000), the drive to ‘get staff into T-shirts’ can be understood as a clear effort by Southbank Centre to not only reflect the changing and more diverse nature of their audiences, but also to construct and visually present ideologies around ‘all being welcome’ through the casualisation of clothing. I now move on to how these evolutions are visible in organisational discourse from recruitment practices onwards.
‘Happy, smiley, open body language’: the evolution of recent recruitment processes and new forms of emotional labour needed for cultural workers
My research found that there were explicit efforts by the organisation to manage the emotional outputs of employees (Hochschild, 1983) by communicating which emotions are seen as conducive to the workplace, and which are not. The senior member of the Visitor Experience team quoted earlier shared further details of recruitment processes:
What we want is them to be really kind of happy, smiley, open body language. Those are the key things we look for before anything. Because we want people who can really engage with visitors, because it’s about the experience from when they arrive in the building.
It is clear from this quote that the ability to provide emotional labour for the organisation was key. The need for consumers to be greeted in certain ways was constructed as vital, and a high capacity for effective emotional labour was required. Hochschild describes the preselection of flight attendants as being an opportunity for candidates to demonstrate that they understand ‘the rules of the game’ (Hochschild, 1983: 95). Or to put it another way, an ability to understand what is emotionally, cognitively and physically required in a situation is a part of the job.
Alongside this, many cultural workers I interviewed talked very positively about the recruitment process. This was constructed in discourses of staff as being a measure which perhaps encourages ‘meritocratic’ recruitment. Another member of the Visitor Experience team told me that
When we recruit for hosts we don’t take application forms anymore. We do open days . . . a tour of the site by an existing host and then they have a 10 minute speed interview with one of the managers . . . the focus of that is really to find people people.
However, despite this attempt to provide more open access to work, there still remained a need for candidates – and workers as we shall see later – to be able to undertake emotional labour through performative body language, for example, smiles and eye contact, and appropriate demeanour.
In terms of this production of an ‘appropriate self’ for the workplace, recent debates on women in the workplace and feminised labour are useful. For Gill and Orgad, confidence and resilience are continually cited as the personality traits needed by women to achieve success in the workplace. Placing the emphasis on the individual to ‘internalise both the responsibility for the problem and the programme required to resolve it’ in order to ‘work on herself to overcome her problems’ rather than look to any social and cultural influences upon the problem (Gill and Orgad, 2016: 334) is a key feature of the neoliberal workplace. The idea that everyone has an equal chance of ‘making it’ to the top of the ladder is a meritocratic myth (Littler, 2017). I argue that the need for confidence and resilience was key to the recruitment process at Southbank Centre but that the adept demonstration of these personal attributes is not something which is equally available to all. A focus on the idea that talent and effort alone can enable upward mobility ignores the important influences of family wealth and status, for example (Littler, 2017: 7). The ability to present a confident front in the workplace and to display the ‘right’ emotions, or conceal those not appropriate (Hochschild, 1983) may also be based on further myriad factors including socioeconomic status, age, caring responsibilities, background and upbringing, educational opportunity, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, mental health, physical health, being able bodied or disabled, gender, gender reassignment, sex, sexuality, religion or belief, race, class or a combination of any of these factors. These recruitment processes may favour those skilled in successfully producing themselves during the ‘game’ of recruitment as confident, emotionally literate, self-fashioned individuals.
Moving on from the selection process, it is evident that cultural workers at Southbank Centre in the late 2010s needed to draw on a wide repertoire of emotions in order to produce themselves at work. For example, when asked about why she chose to work for the organisation, a worker from the Marketing team who had recently joined the organisation when I spoke to her in 2016 was very positive:
It’s also very refreshing that it’s so un-stuffy, so very open and welcoming and you can just be yourself . . . everyone’s very happy.
In addition, a cultural worker in the Education team talked about being inspired by a range of different aspects of the role:
It’s quite a happy site to work on because everywhere you go you might be able to encounter some kind of art and I think that colleagues do feel that because we do work with quite inspiring people both internally and externally we’re working with lots of artists and young people, so I hope that does come across in our team.
Emotional labour had become calibrated through particular feelings like openness, authenticity, happiness, fun, excitement, inspiration and love. Hochschild theorises that ‘[s]eeming to “love the job” becomes part of the job; and actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers helps the workers in this effort’ (Hochschild, 1983: 6). In the discourses of employees I interviewed, there was an overt theme of the need to ‘love your work’ in order to be successful. A worker in Events who was also relatively new to the organisation said
I think everyone that works here falls in love with what this place is. You do get tired of it, . . . But I think everyone does fall in love with it a little bit . . . I mean, people who don’t fall in love with this place don’t stay very long.
This indicates their understanding that there was little space for less positive emotions such as tiredness, or being fed up with work. Interestingly, this cultural worker posited emotional labour as an individual choice. Marisol Sandoval has critiqued the rhetoric of ‘do what you love’ or the idea that it is possible to ‘follow your passion’ and find work that you enjoy so much it will cease to feel like labour or exploitation (Sandoval, 2018: 114). For Sandoval, in a similar vein to other cultural theorists (Berlant, 2011), this is ultimately ‘a trap’, however, since it positions the responsibility for happiness at work within the individual worker, and therefore negates any efforts to disrupt or challenge hierarchies and systems of control in order to improve conditions for workers globally (Sandoval, 2018: 115–116). In addition, such intense, emotional work has impacts. In an empirical study on the bodily states required during cultural work and the impacts upon physical and mental health, Hope and Richards found that cultural workers claim the most exhausting task of all is the emotional labour required (Hope and Richards, 2015: 130). In the following section of this article, I look at the ways in which cultural work was embodied at this organisation and the uses and effects of performative work.
‘Different hats and voices’: performative, embodied cultural work today
As mentioned earlier, I argue that an embodiment of the ethos of Southbank Centre was required by workers when I conducted my research there. This embodied connection (or lack of) to different kinds of work is explored by various studies. For example, Lyon and Back’s cultural ethnography of fishmongers in Deptford explores the ‘sensuous quality of labour as an embodied practice’ and observations around the performative qualities of work (Lyon and Back, 2012: 1). In Dowling’s autoethnographic analysis of the waitress as an affective worker, she argues that the staff were expected to embody core organisational values (Dowling, 2007). When talking about the role of Visitor Experience Host, a senior member of the staff highlighted the physical requirements:
I think when people are on duty, 95% of the time needs to be spent out and about, talking to visitors and particularly on those big festival weekends as well.
This suggests that this role was constructed by the organisation as an active one in which individuals need to be physically, cognitively and emotionally present.
As discussed above, the energy required is similar to that of a performance in which certain emotions and moods are hidden and the desirable ones are brought to the surface. Pine and Gilmore (1999) present the model of work as theatre as key to understanding the Experience Economy, and assert that employees perform the task of working both to colleagues and to customers. A member of the Festivals team at Southbank Centre shared their experience of this:
One day I might be working with hundreds of school children who, this might be their first visit here and they’re doing something really exciting. So for example in Imagine which is our children’s festival we had a big event called Battle of the Bands where we had I think it was 10 school groups battling it out for a trophy . . . so there’s great stuff like that . . . another week I’ve been working with older people and forming partnerships in Lambeth and Southwark and South London. So I think that’s the funniest thing it’s about how varied this is and how many different hats and voices you have to talk in to lots of different people.
This quote illuminates a nuanced understanding of work-as-performance, in choosing to adapt communication styles for both colleagues and visitors.
There are a number of studies demonstrating the ways in which work-as-performance is valued by organisations (e.g. see Lloyd, 2006). Although working for Southbank Centre does not require the overt, sexualised, transactional performance that Lloyd writes about, the need for ‘hip social codes’ (Lloyd, 2006: 181) translates into the need for an understanding of and love for the arts. As a senior member of the Visitor Experience team put it
We want people to work here who love Southbank Centre, who love art. It’s about knowing what the art is and talking to visitors about that and interpreting the art.
As can be seen above there was a call for cognitive engagement with art, alongside bodily performance and adaptability. This requires a certain amount of social and cultural capital. For Dowling the waitress performs and embodies various roles, including attempts to create affect in the body of the customer. This requires a close reading of body language and being able to anticipate desires (Dowling, 2012). Similarly, a cultural worker who had been at the organisation for about 5 years when I met them reflected on the challenges of the ‘performance’ of managing spaces at Southbank Centre:
It’s having foresight to see the different users of the space at a certain time . . . it’s really quite difficult . . . managing expectations for all those different people, and keeping switching yourself around mentally as [to] how you deal with people.
It can be seen here that there are various challenges associated with the maintenance of appropriate emotional labour, which is inherently performative (Hochschild, 1983). It also shows something of how this performance is undertaken, both by individuals, and collectively, as workers collaborate to produce experience at Southbank Centre. To draw on Goffman (1959), any social interaction is understood as involving mutual influence, and colleagues in a workplace operate as a team ‘who cooperate in staging a single routine’ (p. 85). The willingness to engage in the ‘staging of this single routine’ is an important influence upon the evolution of cultural working practices at Southbank Centre.
‘Real cohesion and closeness between staff’: manifestations of collaborative emotional work
During my research at Southbank Centre, I continually observed collaborative work, in multiple ways, being framed as necessary and fundamental to the institution. In part, the promotion of collaborative work as essential at Southbank Centre was the result of management techniques (Frost, 2016). A cultural worker talked to me about the recent working practices under the ‘Festival Methodology’, inaugurated by Jude Kelly in 2011:
We create cross-disciplinary teams . . . it might involve media, writers, academics, the business sector. From that comes a broad agenda, then all the teams coalesce around that particular concept and how it’s delivered.
This demonstrates how there was a commitment to collaborative working practices at different levels, stemming from management decisions. It was evident that many cultural workers aimed to collaborate to produce an atmosphere which visitors and audiences wanted to consume. One cultural worker in a creative production role talked about collaborative ways of working being necessitated by the pace of change:
It’s such a collaborative organisation, all these constituent parts are so interlinked and . . . it can’t actually be done by email or phone call because everything is just changing all the time . . . people are constantly talking to each other . . . it’s probably one of the most collaborative environments that I’ve ever been in.
Many employees at Southbank Centre demonstrated an awareness of the complexities of staffing at the organisation and the interconnectedness of different job roles. For example, the member of the Education team quoted earlier reflected that
I work very closely with teams that people on the outside might not necessarily think are really important . . . So a team we work closely with is production for example . . . so for it all to work, there has to be real cohesion and closeness between [staff] otherwise it just won’t work.
Here the cultural worker was emphasising the need for different strands of the organisation to work collaboratively in order to achieve a shared outcome.
At Southbank Centre, a key feature of cultural work involved co-producing emotions as a team. Hochschild theorises ‘collective emotional labour’ as workers supporting each other to maintain appropriate emotional states when working (Hochschild, 1983: 114–115). I argue, though, that the collaborative work of affective visitor experience at Southbank Centre involved far more than a ‘monitoring’ of others’ emotions. It involved ongoing collaboration, in order to actively produce emotions in colleagues and audiences. For example, a Visitor Service Host reflected on how they think they make visitors feel welcome at the organisation:
I mean I think, for me it’s being constantly aware of the needs of everyone, so always almost looking for lost people. I think being a point of information always. I think being incredibly flexible, that’s actually the main way I would make this place welcoming.
The same cultural worker then went on to share how they felt this was achieved in their team:
And I feel really strongly . . . I’ve said it, actually, to my boss, loads of times . . . I always just feel like I’m quite good at constructing kind of mutual support with people and for me, anyway, what I’m trying to say I guess like the community of this place is what I love about working here as well, it’s just nice to work here because there’s just so many great people that work here and I mean they’re really interesting.
This demonstrates the ways in which this worker articulates the parallel importance of being responsive to both needs of visitors to the organisation and providing a supportive ‘community’ for colleagues. In her book Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, Lynne Segal reflects on the social and public nature of feelings and emotions, arguing that, ‘for anything we call happiness to endure and be cherished it needs to be recognised and shared with others, always hovering somewhere between the strictly personal and the potentially public’ (Segal, 2017: xi). Similarly, a dualism could be perceived in cultural workers at Southbank Centre during my research. At the same time as needing to be effective at individualised emotional labour, they were also required to closely read other workers and endeavour to promote a collectively welcoming and engaging experience for each other and for visitors.
However, the idea of collaborative working can be used for both democratic ends and that of private profit. Here, to return to collaborative creative work specifically, Marisol Sandoval’s work is useful. Sandoval critiques the ‘do what you love’ rhetoric for its focus on the idea that enjoyment of work can be attained by an individual alone within a neoliberal work context (Sandoval, 2018: 120) and as a comparison investigates cultural and artistic cooperatives and their collaborative creative working practices. She suggests that they can potentially act as a form of resistance to the competitive individualisation rife in cultural work, and work generally, and provide a space in which needing support and being tuned into hierarchical inequalities can be expressed (Sandoval, 2018). Although a very different working environment from a small cultural cooperative, during my research at Southbank Centre, a large public arts institution in London, I encountered similar ideologies to this. For example,
I think in Commercial, because we make up 15 percent of funding . . . for us, it’s like we’re doing it for the greater good. We’re going through all of this for the greater good . . . and everybody loves it for a different reason.
As Sandoval puts it, ‘Work as productive activity, as creative engagement with the world around us making use of human skills and capacities, can indeed be a genuine source of enjoyment and accomplishment’ (Sandoval, 2018: 114), and even more so when it is done collaboratively with both colleagues and audiences.
Conclusion: the cultural–political context of evolutions of cultural work at Southbank Centre
As this analysis has shown, cultural work at Southbank Centre has evolved in parallel with socio-political developments and these ‘moments’ of cultural working practices continue to impact the organisation today. An analysis of the discourses of cultural workers at Southbank Centre in recent years, and their lived, cognitive, emotional and bodily involvement with the collaborative work of affective visitor experience, mapped onto longer-standing discourses and histories of cultural work has demonstrated that individualised ‘appropriate’ emotional labour was required and collaborative work was used as a management tool, which in a climate of neoliberal austerity, privileges the privileged. However, alongside this these practices often resulted in progressive programming and initiatives, as well as genuine collaborative joy for cultural workers. There was an activation of the social democratic heritage of the organisation, as a worker in Visitor Experience expressed in an interview:
We’re open to everyone and we don’t turn anyone away. We’re really welcoming . . . that’s really kind of the ethos of South Bank Centre, and I think it’s one of the reasons why a lot of people have worked here a long time, because I think we believe in what South Bank Centre is trying to achieve
In addition, a commitment to providing innovative, engaging, uplifting artistic experiences which were accessible to all, as well as opportunities for debate and discussion of important social issues, was evident.
I argue that cultural work by its very nature is complex and needs to be understood in terms of its specificity and power dynamics. As mentioned previously, this ability to perform both individualised emotional labour, and collaborative affective labour as a team is something that is not available to all, and is therefore exclusive. Further research into diversity at the organisation would be useful to understand how this impacts the workforce. This could investigate intersectional, protected characteristics; age; disability; gender reassignment; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; and sexual orientation. Furthermore, it would be useful to consider how, for example, socioeconomic status, caring responsibilities, background and upbringing, educational opportunity, class and the opportunity to develop social and cultural capital, impact the ways in which cultural workers are (or are not) skilled in successfully producing themselves at work as confident, emotionally literate, self-fashioned individuals.
It became evident from my interviews with a range of cultural workers for Southbank Centre that, at least for many of these workers, there appeared to be a genuine commitment to the organisation, and to the layers of history which are constructed and reconstructed in the present in order to collaborate to produce affective experience for visitors. The willingness by many staff to combine and move fluidly between the two ways of working outlined above, and to constantly evaluate and judge what is required of them at any given time was, I argue, intertwined with this deep connection to the organisation and its complex heritage. Southbank Centre might do well to reflect further on its own histories and attempt to understand the range of factors which have contributed to the significant ‘moment’ of emotional, embodied affective visitor experience collaboratively produced by cultural workers in recent years. An understanding of the complex power dynamics of collaborative work, and its historical contexts, can be an important tool for understanding cultural work at cultural institutions and more generally its significance and impact in society.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
