‘I was not like them’. On quitting cultural work

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of quitting cultural work. Drawing on biographical interviews conducted with Italian graduates in creative writing, it focuses on aspiring creative workers who dedicated significant time and resources to a creative education, attempted to find employment within the cultural industries, sought to establish a career, but ultimately quit. By investigating less visible areas in cultural work scholarship – quitting, creative education and creative writing schools – and by theorising quitting as an active choice, rather than as an individual failure or defeat, this article explores rarely discussed forms of agency among aspiring cultural workers. It argues that those who quit consciously challenge implicit expectations placed on creative workers, such as working for free, demonstrating unconditional flexibility and embracing self-entrepreneurship in the hope of future job opportunities. Through their acts of refusal, those who quit challenge structural features of work in the creative sector and contribute to reframing the negative connotations surrounding quitting. This study demonstrates that the research on quitting belongs to the scholarship on cultural work: by bringing aspirant creative workers’ biographies to the centre of the discussion, it contributes to a deeper understanding of cultural workers’ lives, agency, choices and values.

Introduction

Research on work in the creative and cultural industries has consistently demonstrated that the resources required to establish a career in this field are unequally distributed across society (Banks, 2017; Brook et al., 2020; O’Brien et al., 2016; O’Connor, 2024). This stands in contrast with the widespread belief, shaped by years of cultural policy originating in the United Kingdom and later adopted globally (O’Connor, 2024), that creative work is inherently desirable and that opportunities to earn a living as a creative professional are equally accessible to all, because they are presumed to be linked to the intrinsic qualities of individuals (McRobbie, 2016).

This article draws on and contributes to research on creative industries and cultural work by focusing on those who left the sector. It discusses the cases of creative writing graduates who pursued a dedicated higher education path, aspired to develop a creative career, and, after multiple unsuccessful attempts, eventually quit.

Their experiences and biographies are situated in Italy, a country whose cultural policies, unlike those of the United Kingdom, have never undergone a transformation comparable to the one initiated by the Labour government from 1997 onwards, which positioned the cultural industries as a core sector for economic development. Historically, Italian cultural policies have been characterised by fragmentation, a lack of a systematic, centralised approach (Bianchini et al., 1996; Santagata, 2009) and a long-standing tendency to identify cultural items primarily as physical assets (Belfiore, 2006). Moreover, the term ‘creative industries’ only began circulating in a pervasive manner from 2014 (Council of Europe/ERICarts, 2016). The focus on Italy contributes to expanding the scholarship on cultural and creative industries by shifting attention to a non-Anglophone country, thus responding to calls for ‘ex-centric’ and ‘de-westernising’ perspectives in creative labour studies (Alacovska and Gill, 2019). While this approach does not directly challenge Western perspectives, it acknowledges the uneven global distribution of creative industries and the resulting emphasis on specific geographies and identities. The case of Italy illustrates how interest in creativity and creative professions exists and develops in a country where public policies have not been specifically targeted at promoting the creative industries.

On quitting: staying and leaving the creative industries

In the last few years, and especially after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the topic of quitting has gained growing prominence in public debate. The term ‘Great Resignation’ ¹ has come to signify a phenomenon whereby workers quit their jobs at an unprecedented rate, one of the consequences of the challenges the pandemic posed to work organisation (Herman, 2021; Strzemien, 2020). While it is still uncertain how quitting trends will develop, ² the rise of quitting practices serves as an example of the changing relationship between workers and their jobs. After decades in which workers’ identities seemed inextricably tied to their occupations, particularly in the creative sector, workers have begun to question the assumption that jobs require full emotional and identity investment (Jaffe, 2021). The phenomenon of pandemic quitting can thus be understood as a symptom of an ‘epochal rupture’ in the relationship between workers and jobs (Coin, 2025).

The investigation of quitting is not a direction that the media and creative industries scholarship has systematically pursued, particularly in relation to those who leave while still transitioning from education to work. The scarcity of studies on quitting might be related to the limited relevance of this topic among researchers and in public discourse, a lack of incentives or specific challenges in identifying those who quit. In contrast, the article’s focus on quitting, despite not directly engaging with post-pandemic quitting, as it discusses data collected in 2018, contributes to broadening the understanding of the inequalities shaping the cultural sector and how aspiring workers respond to them. It provides an additional understanding of ‘the labouring lives of people working in the cultural and creative industries’ (Banks et al., 2013: 1), which has historically been a core interest of this scholarship.

Over more than 20 years of existence, research on cultural work has typically focused on those who remain in the sector despite its challenges. It has examined its structural organisation and features (Banks et al., 2013; Conor, 2014; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010), particularly its precariousness (Alacovska, 2018; Banks, 2019; McRobbie, 2016; Ross, 2009); creative workers’ subjectivities (Bandinelli, 2019, 2024; Oakley, 2013; Scharff, 2016); and the impact of inequalities on the chances of entering the industry (Banks, 2017; Brook et al., 2020; Scharff, 2018). Thanks to these studies, we know that creative jobs require workers to be flexible, mobilise specific technologies of the self to survive and develop a career (Conor, 2010) and embody a type of self that blends ‘bohemianism and entrepreneurialism’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 14). It involves accepting low-paid or unpaid jobs, or juggling multiple occupations at once, which is particularly challenging for women and vulnerable minorities (Conor, 2014; McRobbie, 2016). A musician described her precarious professional life as ‘Difficult, fickle, tumultuous’ and yet ‘the best job in the world’ (Scharff, 2018: 162), highlighting a tension which makes enduring the industry’s challenges worthwhile.

The concept of the Passion Trap (Murgia and Poggio, 2012) refers to the mechanism that pushes workers to accept precarious and exploitative conditions in exchange for a deep emotional connection to their careers. Workers seek ‘a job where they can live their own passion, use the skills they acquired through their education and develop their professional profile’, but often face ‘insecurity, lack of guarantees’ (Murgia and Poggio, 2012: 10, translation is mine).

Research on those who leave creative occupations has focused on specific sectors, such as the United Kingdom’s film and television industries, highlighting the gendered dimension of this phenomenon (Percival, 2020). It has also challenged the widespread narrative of a shortage of aspirants for the UK’s film and television industries, revealing a trend of workers abandoning the sector, rather than a lack of entrants (Wallis and Van Raalte, 2022). A study on Hong Kong creative workers identified precariousness, ageing and disillusionment, with both creativity and the original hope of contributing to social change, as the key reasons for quitting a creative career (Wong and Chow, 2020).

Although these studies explore different facets of quitting, they do not address the phenomenon of creative graduates quitting while still attempting to establish their careers.

Genealogies of quitting: perspectives from Labour Process Theory and Italian Autonomist Marxism

Work refusal and quitting have been conceptualised in broader theoretical contexts, beyond the scholarship on creative industries, by strands of Marxist theory, where they appear as forms of resistance within the wider struggle between capital and labour. Labour Process Theory (LPT) (Braverman, 1974; Edwards and Scullion, 1982) focuses on the relations of production in industrial capitalism and the power dynamics between workers and employers. It assumes that capital requires workers’ consent to labour, as the extent of labour power that employers purchase from workers is indeterminate and cannot be fully specified in advance (Smith, 2006). Within this framework, the concept of labour mobility power refers to the capacity of workers to withhold their consent to work through voluntary turnover and quitting (Edwards and Scullion, 1982; Smith, 2006). Research on quitting among migrant workers employed in hospitality and temporary jobs has theorised their decisions as examples of labour mobility power. Challenging the assumption that migrant workers are willing to accept any job due to economic necessity or precarious legal status, research demonstrates that they make strategic decisions about which jobs to keep and when to leave in pursuit of better alternatives, particularly when they feel little connection to their roles. Consequently, quitting becomes a way to reclaim agency and an exercise of labour mobility power (Alberti, 2014).

The creative graduates at the centre of this study did not quit a job per se; rather, they stopped engaging in a series of behaviours that would have kept them within the pool of aspirants. However, like migrant workers, they were relatively powerless when they quit, yet they chose to withdraw from a system that failed to reflect their values and expectations, an act that also signals a form of resistance.

Quitting and job refusal practices also belong to the theoretical and practical repertoire of the Italian Autonomist Marxism or Operaismo. Since the early 1960s, Operaismo emphasised the primacy of the working-class’s struggles and its agency over the structure of capital, eventually theorising the suppression of labour by the working class (Negri, 2005; Tronti 2013 [1971]). In the second half of the 1970s, this theoretical position developed into a social movement (Autonomia) which actively engaged in acts of work refusal, absenteeism and wildcat strikes, operating outside the bounds of trade unions and the Italian Communist Party. The Autonomia movement understood work refusal as a means of attacking the capitalist organisation of labour and of developing a new revolutionary subject (Monteith, 2025). The harsh response from capital and state institutions ultimately resulted in the dismantling of the movement by the end of the decade (Grispigni, 2006). However, the theoretical legacy of Operaismo partially resurfaced at the dawn of the 21st century, particularly in conjunction with the investigation of immaterial labour (Lazzarato, 1996; Wright, 2002).

Although the participants in this study did not belong to a social movement or explicitly articulate a class consciousness, the analysis will show that their decision to quit challenges the way capital, to use Marxist terminology, organises the market they must navigate to be recognised as potential creative professionals. Their quitting can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to reclaim agency against structures they don’t have the power to change.

The need to reclaim agency echoes motivations cited by scholars who have left academia, a sector increasingly affected by quitting and, like the creative industries, characterised by a strong link between identity and professional role. Over the past decade, particularly in the United States, numerous academics have left the field, citing overwhelming workloads and precarious working conditions as the main reasons behind their decision. Francesca Coin (2017), employing a Marxist perspective, argues that this wave of quitting derives from the neoliberal transformation of higher education into a market-driven enterprise. As a result, academics are burdened with administrative tasks and pressured to secure funding, rather than being valued for research and teaching (Spicer, 2017). In this context, quitting becomes both a ‘sign of weakness before the invasive demands of market competition’ (Coin, 2017: 707) and an act of resistance, an ‘attempt to interrupt the neoliberal discourse and its self-positing structures. A spontaneous act of disobedience. A political decision aimed at creating a space for self-crafting’ (Coin, 2017: 707).

Participants in this study resemble academics in their strong identification with their desired occupation. Similarly, their decision to quit suggests an effort to reclaim a space of resistance, autonomy and self-definition, and to preserve the original nature of their passion for literature and writing.

The making of cultural workers: research on creative education and creative writing degrees

A range of studies have examined the education of aspiring creatives, recognising the need to interrogate whether this educational path, particularly media and humanities degrees, ‘may reproduce problematic aspects of various industry work practices, values, and identities’ (Ashton and Noonan, 2013: 1). Research has found that aspiring creative students face unequal opportunities to access art and creative education due to the way criteria for excellence and talent are constructed at the admission level (Banks, 2017). It has also highlighted the risks of creative degrees creating unrealistic expectations for students, giving ‘young people, especially young women, the feel of being middle class and aspirational’ (McRobbie, 2016: 10), without providing protection against the downsides of self-entrepreneurship and the precariousness embedded in creative professions. Scholars have studied the multifaceted lives and careers of creative graduates (Bridgstock et al., 2015), looked at how art college graduates negotiate and validate their identities (Taylor and Littleton, 2013) and highlighted the influence of networks and social capital in shaping careers (Lee, 2013).

Internships and work placements are recognised as an essential intermediate stage in career development as they hold pedagogical relevance (Berger et al., 2013), inform students’ expectations about work (Ashton, 2013; Noonan, 2013) and are spaces where aspirants’ identities begin to shape (Taylor and Littleton, 2013). However, internships also present structural issues, such as barriers to entry and inadequate financial rewards (Oakley and O’Brien, 2016). In addition, graduates often consider internships unsuitable for their skill level, as revealed by a study on media graduates’ reluctance to accept the entry-level role of runner in the TV industry (Ashton, 2014).

When considering creative writing degrees and similar educational paths, such as screenwriting courses, it is worth examining specific features related to creative writing education. Creative writing as an academic discipline is among the most recent additions to the humanities curriculum (Wandor, 2008), occupying a position between vocational training and literary studies (McGurl, 2009). Despite being part of university course offerings, especially in English-speaking countries (Harbach, 2014; Myers, 2006; Wandor, 2008), creative writing programmes and equivalent diplomas aimed at aspiring screenwriters (Ashton and Conor, 2016) have a controversial reputation. This perception is influenced by the popular belief that writing cannot be taught, as writing talent is viewed as an innate quality that an aspiring author either possesses or does not. This opinion, closely linked to the Romantic myth of the artist as a genius, has not been substantially altered by more than 50 years of creative writing courses (Ghidotti, 2020). The claim that writing degrees do not necessarily teach individuals how to write is supported by a study of creative writing graduates in the United States, who later became writers, teachers, or publishing professionals. The findings indicate that graduates who became authors did not feel that the programme significantly changed or improved their writing skills. However, participants acknowledged that it offered the opportunity to fully commit to their craft, establish networks with other aspiring authors and develop ‘the softer skills of the professional identity’ (Childress and Gerber, 2015: 6).

Despite addressing critical issues related to creative education and the transition from education to work, existing studies do not specifically engage with the phenomenon of graduates quitting while attempting to establish a career. If completing a creative degree constitutes a ‘commitment to pursuing a creative career and an associated identity as a professional in a creative field’ (Taylor and Littleton, 2012: 47), research in the area should also address the consequences of the collapse of that original commitment.

Methodological approach to studying quitting among Holden School graduates

The rest of this article draws on the analysis of two interviews from a corpus of 47, which I conducted in 2018 for my doctoral project on aspiring cultural workers within the context of the contemporary neoliberal economy, where ‘creativity’ is considered a resource readily available to everyone. Through in-depth qualitative interviews, the research examined aspirations, motivations and the transitions between education and work among graduates of the Holden School, an Italian creative writing programme. ³

The Holden School was established in 1994 in Turin, Italy, by best-selling author Alessandro Baricco as a school of ‘narrative techniques’. Initially, it offered a 2-year course in creative writing and storytelling. Since then, the School has undergone several structural changes and now defines itself as a school of Contemporary Humanities, offering full-time 2- and 3-year programmes, as well as short courses for adults over 30 (Scuola Holden, 2025c). The main transformation occurred in 2014, when the School relocated to a new building, allowing the number of students to grow from around 30 to approximately 130 (Scuola Holden, 2025a). A second major change took place in 2019 with the launch of Academy, whose diploma was, for the first time, recognised as legally equivalent to a university undergraduate degree (Scuola Holden, 2025b). Tuition amounts to € 10,000 per year, significantly higher than the average cost of university degrees in Italy, ⁴ and admission requires passing an entrance test.

Throughout its existence, the School has offered various forms of support to graduates during the post-diploma phase. Initially, it arranged internships on an almost-individual basis; later, it began sharing job offers and placement opportunities via Next Step, an internal newsletter. Following the 2014 expansion, it launched Opening Doors, a 2-day event during which students present their final projects to professionals in the cultural sector, with the hope of securing internships, employment, or book deals.

The Holden School became the case study for three intersecting factors: the absence of creative writing degrees in Italian universities, which has made the School a unique institution within Italian higher education and comparable to creative writing programmes worldwide; its success, which demonstrates the appeal of creativity even in a country whose policies have not been characterised by structural investment in the creative industries; and my own positionality. As a 2012 Holden School graduate, I had firsthand knowledge of the institution and unique access to fellow graduates. Although this research is deeply connected to my personal experience, it is not an autoethnography. Instead, I consider myself an insider researcher (Hodkinson, 2005), meaning I share certain characteristics with the researched group and possess an extended ‘cultural competence’ (Hodkinson, 2005: 138) that predates the research. My positionality proved valuable in the recruitment phase, as it enabled me to access an initial group of graduates, and during the interviews and analysis, when I could draw on my extensive knowledge of the institution.

To recruit participants, I followed the principle of theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) and adopted a broad inclusion criterion: the sole requirement was being a Holden School graduate, which allowed me to access individuals from various cohorts. Most interviews were conducted remotely via Skype (one was conducted in person) and followed a consistent structure. Participants were asked to discuss the pre-School phase, their period at the School and what happened after graduation. For the analysis, I transcribed the interviews and manually coded the data using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Thematic analysis is a method for analysing qualitative data that is not bound to a specific theoretical framework. Through the stages of familiarisation, code generation and theme development, it enables researchers to generate patterns in their data (Braun and Clarke, 2019). While my positionality facilitated the familiarisation process and the analysis, I made a conscious effort to avoid imposing my prior knowledge and experiences onto participants’ narratives.

Biographies of quitting

The investigation of quitting was not part of the original research design; rather, I generated it inductively from the analysis of interviews focused on the post-diploma phase. Participants frequently recalled feeling anxious and scared when leaving the School’s protective environment. Two of them described a gradual process of abandoning their original aspiration of working in the cultural sector, and their accounts contrasted with the narratives of adaptability and resilience commonly found in studies of creative workers’ subjectivities. Understanding the quitting trajectories of these two participants, appearing here under the pseudonyms Elena and Anna, ⁵ required a close examination of their biographies and a careful consideration of how their experiences unfolded over time, as quitting did not occur all at once. Therefore, I employed in-depth biographical analysis and adopted a life story perspective (Gubrium and Holstein, 2012), aiming to ‘elicit not only what happened, but also how people experienced events, and how they make sense of them’ (Erel, 2007: 3).

Although biographical approaches for studying creative workers’ lives have been challenged, as they order ‘events in a fashion that is more akin to the rhythms of industrial society than those of post-Fordism’ (Adkins, 2013: 149), they remain widely employed in research on creative workers’ subjectivities (Bandinelli, 2019, 2024; McRobbie et al., 2022). While I acknowledge that working lives in the post-Fordist era have lost their linearity, biographical analysis remains a powerful heuristic tool for exploring individuals’ subjective experiences and their engagement with broader societal changes and structures.

Anna: ‘I was not like them’: expectations, boredom and attachment to true talent

Anna was 23 years old and had a BA in the Humanities when she started at the Holden School. Confident in her talent and having received praise for her writing all her life (a common occurrence among participants), she wanted to become a writer. At the time of the interview, about 5 years after her diploma, she had not published anything and was launching a small landscape design business. Her decision to quit was not immediate or final; rather, it occurred gradually.

Anna’s experience in publishing began during her first year, when one of her teachers, also an editor for a major publisher, recruited students to work as readers on a casual basis for his employer. Readers are among the least prestigious figures in publishing, tasked with reviewing manuscripts and compiling evaluation sheets for senior editors. When Anna accepted the job, she hoped it could serve as a starting point for her career. She worked as a reader during her time at the School and for a year after graduation. Contrary to her expectations, her role was limited to evaluating manuscripts, without contributing to the editing. Over time, she became frustrated by the poor quality of the texts, reflecting a common response of entrants who often find the responsibilities assigned to them below their skill level (Ashton, 2014). The monotony of her tasks affected her mood, her passion for writing and even her self-esteem. When she was asked to train a colleague and saw their career surpass hers, her disappointment peaked:

The [senior] editor asked me to train the new editor for the Adventure and Fantasy Series. He wanted me to explain to this Two-Surname ⁶ Lady how I filled the evaluation sheets. Well, fuck! My surname is not [Two-Surname Lady], and after three years of this shitty job, I am required to explain it to someone who does not know how to do the job but is already an editor! And I got really upset. ⁷

Anna took on the reader role assuming every job in culture would entail creativity and autonomy. She trusted the School as the intermediary that could help transform her aspirations into a career. However, both the School and the editor failed her by not preparing her for the realities of the industry. She eventually quit the role after accepting a full-time, fixed-term administrative position at a design firm. She delayed a few book evaluations and explained that she had ‘lost touch’ with the editor, who had since moved to another publisher. Anna did not present the editor’s move as the main reason for quitting, nor as a direct consequence of her working arrangement. However, the fact that she quit when the editor, her only point of contact with the publisher, moved to another company highlights how precarious, disposable and dependent on personal connections her position was.

This entry-level casual role shaped Anna’s expectations of work, aligning with studies on the meanings and organisational dynamics of internships (Ashton, 2013; Noonan, 2013). However, in her case, it played a paradoxical role: while the job introduced her to industry, it also exposed the negative aspects of publishing and ultimately led her to quit.

The second step in Anna’s quitting involved abandoning the aspiration of becoming a writer. She was among the few participants who explicitly stated that she went to the School with the goal of writing a novel. At the time of our interview, she was no longer writing. The undoing of her authorial ambitions began when she was not selected for the Third Year – an informal tutoring programme offered by the School to two or three of its most promising graduates, providing continued mentorship, access to facilities and networking opportunities. Anna was not offered the Third Year which left her feeling rejected and underappreciated:

Lorenza was awarded the Third Year. . . Gaia, Francesco [the other two students who were awarded] deserved it. . .then Lorenza, my brain exploded. I didn’t understand why they chose her. I felt that the School, that world. . . they didn’t understand me at all.

According to Anna, Lorenza was awarded the Third Year because she cultivated a strong relationship with the staff, something the School valued more than what Anna saw as genuine writing skills and authentic commitment to literature. Anna felt betrayed, believing that the School had broken its promise to recognise and support students’ talent. Anna did not form these assumptions on her own. Between 2002 and 2010, the School’s website promised:

The master’s degree will help pupils to shape their talent towards a real project, but before that, it will help them to get to know and develop their own talent, to nurture it through the apprehension of the narrative techniques and the dialogue with teachers and peers. (Scuola Holden, 2002)

In Anna’s view, the talent recognised and promoted by the School was not literary, but rather social, specifically, networking skills, which she did not wish to engage with or learn. Although she remained in Turin after graduation, Anna refused to participate in the School’s activities and deliberately distanced herself from other graduates. She viewed writing as a solitary commitment: she wanted her work to speak for her, not her social relationships. She rejected the social dimension of writing, considering talent and networking to be mutually exclusive. She commented,

I wanted to learn how to write, and I had the feeling that my classmates were not that interested. (. . .) However, their lack of interest in the writing per se helped me to define myself. I distanced myself from that world and attitude, and it was my choice (. . .) because I realised that it was not my world or my style.

When compared with the uses of the creative writing diploma outlined in Childress and Gerber’s (2015) study, Anna’s experience did not reflect the typical process of community building or the acquisition of ‘softer skills’, such as ‘learning the lingo to talk about writing’ (p. 6), which participants identified as benefits of writing degrees.

Anna did not stop writing immediately after she graduated. Despite her scepticism towards publishing professionals, she submitted her work to editors she had met through the School but received no positive feedback. In retrospect, she believed the rejections were justified, as her writing lacked what she defined as ‘motivation’. She explained,

Getting older, I realised that, before one can write, one must live. You cannot say, ‘I am good at writing, so I want to be a writer’. The issue of what you want to write, what your message to the world is, which world you are creating, is crucial because if you do not have anything to write it is better not to write at all.

Anna’s decision to quit lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the informal sociality and networking – that combination of ‘bohemianism and entrepreneurialism’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 14) which research has consistently identified as central to cultural work. She refused to perform the kind of subjectivity that was implicitly expected of her. If, as Maurizio Lazzarato (2009) wrote, ‘to be employable one must behave oneself and have a lifestyle which is in harmony with the market’ (p. 127), then Anna’s quitting occurred in a space where she did not align herself with the demands and values of the market that she needed to engage with to be recognised as a potential author.

Elena: ‘Writers should be hermits’: a ‘sacred profession’ and a less sacred reality

Elena was also 23 years old when she started at the School and held a BA in Philosophy. While Anna had always wanted to write a novel, Elena developed a sudden interest in the School after seeing its charismatic founder, Alessandro Baricco, on a TV show. She recalled,

[The School] seemed an incredible place to be (. . .) I wasn’t sure what to do after graduation, so I attempted the admission test (. . .) and I was shocked by it. I didn’t think I had made it. (. . .) I was so excited about the place, about all these cool people from all over Italy, they were all so interesting, it was so exciting to be part of it.

She described herself as a passionate reader who considered writing as a ‘sacred profession’, embracing the Romantic trope of the writer as a creative genius. However, during her time at the School, she discovered that her assumptions about the nature of writers were far removed from reality. She explained,

I expected grown-ups to be better than kids, to be mature. Among the grown-ups, writers were supposed to be the most mature. Instead, writers revealed themselves to be a bunch of immature and envious kids.

Despite the disillusionment caused by the exposure to ‘real’ writers through the School, Elena did not immediately abandon her aspiration to work in publishing. After graduation, she secured a low-paid internship (250 euros per month) at the press office of a major publisher, through the School’s placement mailing list.

The toxic and hostile workplace she encountered dismantled Elena’s belief that working in the cultural sector meant entering a welcoming, nurturing world driven by a love of literature:

When an author came into the office, people acted nice and supportive. Then when [they] left, [my colleagues] would start gossiping behind their back. I just felt bad for that poor author, who didn’t know that everybody hated them. The same occurred among my colleagues. Whenever someone left the open-space office, the gossiping would begin. It did not feel right, and I felt uncomfortable. I felt like a little slave. I updated the website, collected the mail, served coffees, I lived with the anxiety that my colleagues were always gossiping behind my back.

Like Anna, Elena had vague and optimistic expectations about cultural work, did not anticipate being assigned repetitive, non-creative tasks and the School did not adequately prepare her.

The internship ended early when the company stopped funding her role. As compensation, she was offered a position as a bookshop assistant at a flagship store in central Milan. Her colleagues saw it as a downgrade; some even commented that the new role suited her better. These remarks reflect a hierarchy of values in which retail jobs are considered less prestigious than office roles, due to the assumption that they lack intellectual and creative elements. Yet Elena’s office tasks had been no less repetitive, nor more intellectually fulfilling or creative, than her retail responsibilities.

Elena thrived in her new position; she appreciated doing ‘something related to books but without the awkwardness of knowing what was going on behind the scenes’. She moved to Milan and got along well with her colleagues. However, the job was a fixed-term contract limited to 2 years under Italian law (Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, 2015). When the contract expired and her position was not made permanent, Elena moved back to her hometown to live with her mother. At the time of the interview, Elena was working at a job agency supporting youth and migrant workers.

Elena’s experience highlights structural issues with internships, such as low pay, precarious conditions and tasks below interns’ skill levels. As in Anna’s case, the internship served a paradoxical function: rather than helping her shape her identity as a creative, it contributed to her decision to quit.

Elena’s choice might seem as a casual shift in priorities, driven by poor working conditions and the company’s decision not to renew her contract. However, the intentionality behind her move becomes clearer when compared to the case of Francesca, another Holden School graduate.

Like Elena, she was disappointed by writers:

I used to look at writers: ‘Oh writers’, that magic world I thought existed. Nowadays (. . .) I’ve become so incredibly cynical toward that world. Writers look crazy to me. I spend my time acting almost like their therapist, trying to control their madness, their chaos, their bouts of frenzy and paranoia.

But Francesca did not quit. She endured low-paid internships in publishing while working as a waitress, and eventually secured a full-time, permanent position as a fiction editor at a major publisher. Francesca’s case helps frame Elena’s decision as intentional, rather than the result of circumstances beyond her control. Elena stopped pursuing a career in publishing because the industry stripped away the positive values she had originally associated with literature. She was motivated by a disinterested passion for literature, a disposition that clashed with the organisational culture of the publishing environment she encountered. She wished to see literature as something pure and separate from everyday life. Ultimately, her refusal to adapt to the realities of the publishing industry led her to quit.

Quitting: a conscious decision

This article opened by discussing research on cultural work, which revealed that, despite the optimistic discourse surrounding creativity and the democratisation of creative careers at the turn of the millennium (Florida, 2002), access to such careers remains deeply unequal. Opportunities to pursue creative professions are unevenly distributed across society (O’Brien et al., 2016), access to creative education is stratified (Banks, 2017) and holding a creative degree offers little protection against the precariousness of the sector (McRobbie, 2016). Research has also shown that sustaining a creative career requires individuals to embody flexibility and continuously adapt (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Scharff, 2018) and that, while internships may provide entry points into the sector, they are structurally problematic (Ashton, 2014; Oakley and O’Brien, 2016).

The cases of Elena and Anna are in line with the findings of the research on internships, as they were tasked with repetitive and non-creative tasks, that felt below their skills, were poorly paid and offered no career progression. Like their Hong Kong creative counterparts (Wong and Chow, 2020), they became disillusioned with creative work and were affected by its precariousness, further confirming the globally widespread nature of these labour market dynamics. When considering research on those who quit their jobs, Anna and Elena resembled migrants who left their jobs despite holding limited power over their employers (Alberti, 2014).

They shared with those who quit academia a deep attachment to their (desired) professional identity (Coin, 2017) and experienced disillusionment when they found themselves performing repetitive, mundane and non-creative tasks, with almost no career opportunities, alongside low pay and job insecurity.

Another Holden School graduate who participated in the study remarked that his peers should have known that ‘one cannot really make a living by working in culture, especially in Italy’, adding that ‘if someone holds such expectations, they are either too naive or delusional’. While it is true that Anna and Elena held idealised expectations about cultural work, their assumptions did not depend on their subjective fallacies; rather, they stemmed from the portrayal of creative professions over the past three decades as desirable and fulfilling. It is also important to consider the prestige assigned to literature in Italian culture, where it is often equated with culture itself (Forgacs and Lumley, 1996), as well as the way the Holden School promoted itself.

At the beginning of the School, and without direct experience of cultural work, Anna and Elena associated positive meanings and attributed high moral qualities to it. They were not unreasonably naive; lacking prior connections, they trusted that the School would teach them how to shape their aspirations and talents into creative identities. The erosion of this trust led them to quit. This is not the case of someone failing and telling the story of a glorified exit. Rather, by quitting, Anna and Elena separated their identities from their work and escaped the Passion Trap cycle of self-exploitation (Murgia and Poggio, 2012). From this perspective, their decision to quit is more radical than it might initially appear. Through their refusal, they challenge the prestige associated with cultural work by exposing its everyday reality, structural issues and implicit demands. Ultimately, by quitting, they reclaimed the agency, albeit limited, available to aspiring creative workers.

This article has argued that research on quitting belongs within the scholarship on cultural work. The focus aspiring creative workers’ biographies not only confirms the precariousness and uncertainty of creative lives and careers but also reveals that aspirants’ strong attachment to values and principles can persist beyond, and even at the expense of, their own potential careers. This perspective deepens our understanding of cultural work by expanding it to include the partial yet meaningful forms of agency and resistance that aspiring cultural workers exercise in response to structural constraints. Finally, the cases of Elena and Anna offer valuable insights for creative education providers, as they demonstrate the need to rethink internships as an entry point into creative work and to equip students with a critical understanding of what to expect from work in the cultural sector, including acknowledging and addressing its widespread structural issues, before they transition from education to the job market.

The future of quitting

In this study, quitting emerged as a definitive exit point that irreversibly shaped participants’ biographies, as it signalled the collapse of the expectation that a creative education serves as a gateway to creative employment. Yet, as an analytical concept, quitting holds broader potential than the binary opposition of ‘in’ and ‘out’. Within the context of post-Fordist capitalism, where the expectation of lifelong employment has been replaced by short-term, project-based work, reshaping traditional transitions between youth and adulthood (Cuzzocrea and Magaraggia, 2013), quitting may be understood as a challenging but potentially transient and reversible condition.

Future research should therefore explore the blurred boundaries of quitting and its potential for reversibility, in order to develop a more dynamic understanding of this concept and of the role quitting plays in the professional trajectories and lives of creative workers.