Narratives from a Co-Research in Journalism and the Editing Industry

Cristina Morini, Kristin Carls and Emiliana Armano

In the current stage of global capitalist crisis and general precarity, the valorisation process has been increasingly characterized by emotions, creativity, language, and images, both in material production and in labor and human activities, which make up a significant aesthetic and relational content. Today, in all work contexts it is required to know more, to communicate more, and to interact more with the social world outside the workplace. Nonetheless, these requirements are particularly evident for some specific types of work. Journalism and editorial work are usually considered a creative freelance type of work with relevant margins of autonomy concerning the labor process, as well as work contents. Moreover, they are associated with a relatively high social status. How then are processes of precarisation lived in such an exemplary context of knowledge and cognitive labor? How does precarisation affect creative workers’ autonomy and creative capacities, their professional identities and their passion for their job as writers and editors? The aim of our paper is to inquire into the relationship between cognitive labor, creative passion, and precariousness. We want to understand how work attitudes change in a context of daily lived precarisation. Therefore, our analysis is focused on representations of precarity and is based on an empirical qualitative enquiry focused on online texts and vis-à-vis meetings undertaken as a process of co-research (“conricerca”) together with journalists and editorial workers in Milan in 2011 and 2012. Narratives are a central element of this research, both as an object of analysis and an instrument to produce collective knowledge. We mainly used in-depth group discussions focused on daily work experiences and employment biographies to examine workers’ common sense, that is, the constructions of meaning. Such agency potential is the focal point of our analysis: especially workers’ capacities to cope with experiences of precarisation, changing forms of labor control and resulting daily lived conflicts, as well as their capacities to change their working conditions, defend their rights, and realize their own interests.

Theoretical Framework and Hypotheses

Repression, submission to the machine, and a strict governance of subjects’ time was considered indispensable; then creativity and flexibility as despotic norms constitute the center of gravity of cognitive labor within current biocapitalism, as argued by Paolo Virno (2002). Following this shift from factory discipline to biocapitalism, precarious subjectivity is constantly called to enact self-normative, self-realizing, self-organizing capacities that characterize biocapitalism and which can be captured and controlled only by descending to the level of affects and relations that closely belong to the subject; or, in other words, by incorporating affects and relations into the production process itself. The self-normativity at the center here is reached precisely by mobilizing passion within a context of precarity. Such precarity corresponds, by subtraction, to a self-normative iron cage, self-imposed by the precarious subjects upon themselves.

The whole, passionate life of cognitive workers in the cultural industry analyzed in this chapter tends to be subsumed, and this subsumption results in a type of social submission, which cannot be separated from the mode of subjectification and self-governance within a completely open and transparent environment. The immersion of passion within productive processes, such as the here analyzed editorial and journalistic production processes, which require capacities such as writing and knowledge acquired through education and training, translates into a shift from past forms of disciplining by means of hierarchical supervision to current forms of self-control and voluntary self-exploitation (Raunig, 2012). Cognitive labor unfolds itself within an “economy of libido” for which the principle of pleasure plays a crucial role as the mechanism through which the subject internalizes the “liberal” post-Fordist type of governmental power (Foucault, 1985). Referring to the concept of biopolitics, we intend to evoke above all this dispositive of “performance—pleasure” that pervades today’s labor market.

However, the focus of our research is based on the hypothesis that the relational element inherent in cognitive labor (Morini and Fumagalli, 2011; Morini, 2010) also always brings about a surplus (Virno, 2001) of labor capacities, which exceed those functional to the capitalist labor process. Starting out from Marx’s notion of surplus value (the surplus as the sum of labor incorporated in the produced commodity, in relation to the amount of paid labor), the term surplus intends to underline the presence of such a social productivity, of creative capacities, diffused across society, which do not correspond with and may enter into conflict with the requirements of capital accumulation. Following Rossi-Landi, such a surplus also implies a capacity to take a critical stance towards and escape from the social and ideological devices subjects are confronted with in everyday life (Rossi-Landi, 1985).

In recent years, there has been significant discussion about the role of emotions and relational capacities in organizations. Initially, this debate concentrated on the definition of “emotional labor” (Hochschild, 1979/1983/2006; Bolton, Grugulia, Vincent, and Leidner, 2010). It has been argued how organizations try to control and subjugate these subjective capacities according to their interests, and how such attempts of control impact workers. The discussion has regarded the practices by which workers appropriate margins of autonomy and independently manage the emotional aspects of their work, also in contrast to the interests of management (Korczynski, 2003; Bolton and Boyd, 2003). In fact, in a process of “feminization of labor” (Morini 2007; 2010), relational and communicative capacities, historically associated with female ways of being in the private sphere, in today’s biocapitalism are required in the labor process but neither recognized nor paid for by companies (Folbre and Nelson, 2000; Folbre, 2006; Durand, 2004).

In the following, we will apply these hypotheses to cognitive labor in journalism and editing (Morini, 2012). Besides other specific professional qualifications, the work of journalists and editors also requires relational capacities such as empathy, emotional intelligence, and affective and communicative resources. It is thus a good example to inquire into how these relational and emotional elements—the feelings for one’s work—are affected by precarization (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2008; 2011). Let us also assume that journalism and publishing labor, as a significant segment of the broader knowledge labor, should be considered as socialized, placed, and networked inside the dynamics of the Web. Without highlighting what the key dispositifs are that govern the network, we would like to point out what Terranova writes about the coercive power of the network and the limited but possible areas of counter-use of the network itself: “The digital automation is expressed in nodes made by electronic and nervous connectivity so that users themselves become quasi-automatic connections within a continuous flow of information” (Terranova, 2014, 2). However, it is just the limited margins of a potential common use of the network which we are interested in: with the aim to investigate how the space for self-organization of subjectivity can be and becomes an instrument of agency and expression of experiences against the precarious condition.

This level of analysis seems relevant since mass individual communication involves a creative audience (Fuchs, 2009) and “communication networks are networks of fundamental tools of power making in society” (Castells, 2009, 544). In this, we are particularly interested in analyzing the subjective dimension of precarization: its relational, emotional, and existential aspects that regard the way in which workers give meaning to their working and social lives and position themselves in society.

We would like to stress that we focus our analysis on workers’ subjective representations of experiences of precarization (Bourdieu, 1998). We are more interested in understanding precarity as a manifold and intersubjective construction of meaning. Therefore, we have chosen to inquire workers’ multiple representations of insecurity from a subject-oriented approach (Murgia and Armano, 2013), that is, from the point of view of the subject (Butler, 2004), and to assume this partiality as heuristically important. This is the backdrop from which our interest in comparing representations linked to different work contexts, as those of journalists and editorial workers, stems (Morini, Carls, and Armano, 2014).

Referring to a polysemic notion of precarity (Bresson, 2007), we understand it as “an expression of a new mode of domination, based on the institution of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity that aims at forcing workers to submit to and accept exploitation” (Bourdieu 1998, 97). As stressed in sociological debates, such insecurity does not only regard the future prospects of a given employment relation but, crucially, also touches upon social relations (Barbier, 2002) and social vulnerability (Cingolani, 1986; 2005; Boumaza and Pierru, 2007). While we refer to such a polysemic understanding of precarity, we also want to underline that with regard to social constructions, precarity is to be understood as a perception of increasing risks, personal destabilization, and the fragilizing of social relations (Castel, 1995; Bourdieu, 1998). As the “factory of the neoliberal subject,” precarity means that responsibilities are transferred upon social actors and that systemic insecurity is attributed to individual choices (Dardot and Laval, 2014, 414–65). According to Corsani (2014), this notion of precarity can be further specified: “What is at stake is to make everybody become a ‘self-entrepreneur’ who assumes, on his own, all economic and social risks of his activity, an individual struggling against all others in order to obtain an employment position, investing all his daily life time in frenetic rhythms, day and night, in the ‘production of himself’ in order to win the war for a ‘merited’ (direct or indirect) income.”

Methodological Choices

Our empirical research aims at analyzing representations, practices, and resulting agency potential of journalists and editorial workers in the face of precarization. The methodological choice was to adopt several techniques of data collection, able to investigate various aspects of individual and collective history. Through the creation of focus groups, it was possible to access the main stories in the dynamics of journalism and publishing labor. At the same time, the collection and analysis of the mailing lists of the Network of Precarious Editors (Re.Re.Pre) on its website showed us the issues that were more discussed and the intensity of trade and development phases in response to specific events. Therefore, including the analysis of the material on the Re.Re.Pre website, what has been adopted can be defined as a cyber-ethnographic approach, which equates the offline empirical material with the online (Teli et al., 2007).

We also refer to the notion of netnography, according to the definition coined by sociologist and marketer Robert Kozinets, a neologism that identifies a qualitative research method of ethnography matrix and allows users to take a series of assessments from the interactions that can develop through the network, shedding light on a number of important insights (Kozinets, 2010). Netnography, which was created to monitor the cultures of online consumption, can be used for sociological purposes, helping to define the contours of new and alternative social worlds that are mobilized just by the use of the Internet. It allows us to understand the communication flows within their socio-cultural context, together with the use of the more traditional focus groups. Therefore, it promotes participative observation, which is particularly useful to note the political significance of the Re.Re.Pre experience. This approach is consistent with the ideas of Castells regarding the centrality of information and the ability to imagine forms of the social web (Castells, 1996) that are propaedeutical to the rise of new organizational forms. Its ambition lies in the in-depth analysis of daily work practices, meaning constructions, and cultures in a relevant segment of cognitive labor rather than in the production of representative outcomes.

As regards methodology, a narrative approach (Riessman, 1993) has been chosen as a way to render visible workers’ diverse practices in the face of daily lived conflicts and contradictions. Through the analysis of narratives, we want to grasp the meaning constructions that workers develop to make sense of their work experiences. These meaning constructions can be analyzed relying on direct explanations and opinions given within a narrative, but also by considering the positioning of single events in the overall storyline. From an analytical perspective, we are not so much interested in analyzing narratives as such but in understanding how the worldviews that guide everyday practices are constructed. In this attempt, we refer to a mix of various methodological instruments, ranging from narrative analysis of interviews (Riessman, 1993) to critical discourse analysis of co-research (Alquati, 1993) and cyber-ethnography (Teli et al., 2007).

From a co-research approach, narratives are considered as an instrument to create collective knowledge about participants’ own social working and living conditions. More precisely, the aim of such a co-research process is to create a collective space in which the narration of individual experiences can facilitate a critical reflection about collective positions and coping practices, in front of conflicts experienced in everyday work realities. Crucially, this entails reflecting upon the contradictions within one’s own common sense as well as the potentials and limits of one’s own agency. What is at stake is the production of a practical collective knowledge that is useful in daily conflicts to increase workers’ capacities to influence and change their working conditions. Given this co-research approach, the empirical investigation has been organized in the form of group discussions rather than as a top-down process of interviewing. These group discussions have been concentrated on daily lived conflicts within the labor process.

In addition to the analysis of the main results that emerged from the focus groups through the path of co-research, in the following pages, we present a cyber-ethnographic analysis of mailing lists and online communications on the Web, especially with reference to the possibility of the implementation of collective action.

Access to the Research Field and Construction of the Sample

An important part of the research was carried out through face-to-face meetings with focus groups, located in Milan, starting in June 2011 and going on throughout 2012. Given the fact that our empirical inquiry took the form of a co-research, it was based on group discussions instead of traditional interviewing. For this reason, active participation of the involved workers as well as sound trust relations have been crucial right from the beginning. Subsequently, three research encounters were organized outside the workplace, in a favorable environment: two for a first focus group and one for a second. Each of the group discussions lasted for about five hours. Cristina Morini and Kristin Carls conducted these discussions, guiding them towards the chosen topics, while their realization remained a collective process.

Two different groups of editorial workers are part of this co-research. The first focus group is composed of six professional journalists who work or have worked until recently for different monthly and weekly journals of one of the biggest Italian publishing houses in Milan. The one journalist in this group who, at the time of the co-research, did not work for that publishing house anymore has moved to the press office of a TV channel. Four of these journalists are on open-ended employment contracts. These are three women and one man above 40 years of age. The other two journalists are younger women (both 28 years of age) that work on temporary project contracts or on temporary internships.

The second group comprises five editorial workers, four women and one man, who work for three different book publishing houses in Milan (non-fiction and school books). They are between 30 and 40 years old. As project and pseudo self-employed workers with only one contractor, they can all be considered to be in a precarious employment position.

Table 1. Composition of the first focus group with six journalists
–May 2011

Name	Age	Gender	Professional Role	Publishing house	Contract
Luca	48	M	chief editor, journalist	weekly magazine	permanent
Marta	46	F	head of editorial department, journalist	weekly magazine	permanent
Giulia	55	F	head of editorial department, journalist	monthly magazine	permanent
Laura	49	F	head of editorial department, journalist	monthly magazine	temporary job
Roberta	28	F	editorial staff, journalist	monthly magazine	project contract
Simona	28	F	press office staff	Television	internship, temporary job

Table 2. Composition of the second focus group with five editorial workers
–June 2011

Name	Age	Gender	Professional Role	Publishing house	Contract
Barbara	40	F	editorial staff	school book editor	Free lance + pseudo selfemployment
Stefania	30	F	editorial staff	book editor, non-fiction	Free lance + pseudo selfemployment
Daniela	32	F	editorial staff	book editor, non-fiction	pseudo self-employment
Mario	35	M	editorial staff	book editor, non-fiction	pseudo self-employment
Chiara	38	F	editorial staff	book editor, non-fiction	Temporary job

Particularly, these two groups bring together a number of participants motivated to share and narrate their experiences in a collective process, thanks to longstanding mutual knowledge and confidence. For privacy reasons, all names used in the following section have been changed.

Findings of the Co-Research Among Journalists

The central conflict in everyday work experienced by those journalists in our group with open-ended employment contracts is the loss of margins of autonomy and creativity within the work process. The issues of autonomy, creativity, and passion for one’s work are central in this group’s discussion, though they are above all associated with past experiences, former patterns of work organization, and relations.

The journalists tell us about a change in work organization that has produced more hierarchies and direct control in their everyday work. According to their analysis, this transformation is aimed at increasing management’s power of blackmailing and disciplining in front of a professional category that, until recently, used to be rather independent and autonomous. A central narrative, in this respect, revolves around the experience of professional devaluation resulting from management’s growing disinterest in the contents and quality of journalistic work. Instead, work processes are more and more unilaterally formatted and standardized according to market aims and imperative marketing rules.

One participant, Marta (department head, open-ended contract), explains:

The difference between today and some years ago is that, if I have to cover a story, let’s say ‘children in jail,’ once I could choose by myself which stories to collect, which people to talk to, and which experts to eventually interview. Today… I am in a situation where I can actually choose very little by myself. That is, I’m told who I have to talk to… There is too little delegation of responsibilities and also a lack of confidence in our work now. For sure, under these conditions, you feel even more restricted in your creativity… You are not recognized as a specialist anymore. I’m just treated as an instrument. They put me in front of some topics that are good to sell, and I simply have to write about them, even if I don’t know anything about these issues.

Another participant, Giulia (department head, open-ended contract), adds:

I refuse this fact that today magazines are called ‘products.’ I don’t like this, but it’s very common and accepted by now. When I think of pure production, I think about something schematic, following pre-established rhythms, something linked to efficiency, precise measurable performances and outcomes; all aspects which are by now relevant also in my profession.

These stories show how precarization touches upon this rather well-established category of professional journalists with open-ended contracts, medium-high positions in the firm hierarchy, and consolidated professional experience. Precarization here passes through the deterioration of working quality and a consequent “fragilization” (Sennett 1999) of professional identities—be it with respect to the contents and the sense of the work, or with respect to the margins of autonomy and self-determination in the labor process. Castel has described a similar “precarization of stable workers” as a process in which the progressive degradation of rights and social relations, and an increasing insecurity of working conditions, causes a constant sense of threat and weakening of one’s future working position (Castel, 1995/2004; 2009).

The discussion within our group of journalists shows how such a precarization regards not only the degree of employment protection and labor rights but also the qualitative aspects of the labor process (Morini, 2012). In other words, it becomes evident how precarization directly involves knowledge workers’ subjectivity as it touches upon their emotional relation with their work, its contents, and meaning. Journalists’ work is described as the work of “proletarian knowledge workers” (Bologna 2011) rather than that of professionals. In this, shrinking margins of autonomy, increased direct control, and marketization go hand in hand with a reduction of the creativity that is required or possible to express in the labor process. Creativity thus gets redefined and repositioned as a capacity to efficiently recompose given resources according to given objectives and time frames.

Marta (department head, open-ended contract) reflects:

The creative element? In everyday work, maybe, if it’s not really creativity, maybe it’s something similar… or maybe it’s all just a fairytale… But giving a personal autonomous contribution could also simply mean that you have had the time to pick up the telephone to get first-hand information on news because, however, you do have a vantage point of observation. The reporters outside send you their various signals, but it’s you who puts them all together. You are like a power station for up-to-date information, and you have to organize that information in some way… You could do much more things, you could be much more creative, but you don’t have time. And that’s why, in the end, you just give the writing jobs to external collaborators, all those things that would be nicer to do, just because you are obliged to stay in the office to do other stuff.

The most frequent reaction to these transformations in the labor process, shown by all the participants with a longer work experience, is a strong sense of disillusion, resulting in emotional distancing and disengagement from work. There are not really any attempts to reappropriate the lost margins of autonomy because the described changes are perceived as an irreversible change not only in the work organization but also in power relations. Participants share the impression that more autonomous contributions and greater investment of creativity would be rejected and disliked by management.

Luca (chief editor, open-ended contract) explains:

In my position, the mechanism that sets in is one of filtering and rejecting ideas. It is risky to try to bring in ideas from outside, from the bottom, and to formulate them as proposals to the top, to the core of the magazine… They could accuse you of not doing your job, of not filtering sufficiently.

To cope with constant frustration, the older journalists try to limit their involvement and efforts put into daily work. Instead, they try to realize their professional passion outside of wage work, for example, by publishing their own books or other texts on their own account. Emotions, desires, and passion associated with the act of writing, producing texts, and transmitting ideas thus remain a central element for the self-representations and the sense of self-realization of these journalists. But they are not collocated and realized within the workplace anymore.

Laura (department head, open-ended contract) describes these escape strategies:

However, many people, according to me, in this period have tried to escape from certain mechanisms. The diaspora that has emerged is also a consequence of this internalized conflict: the desire to turn this into a sort of infidelity. So you decide to go away from that place, and you retreat somewhere else… This has become a way of saying: ‘No, I don’t want to be part of these mechanisms, I don’t want to stay in this dimension.’ But I also need some money, some income; so I try to find a different position.

These strategies of escape, however, do not completely manage to remove the sense of alienation that stems from the loss of professional identity, autonomy, and creativity (Corsani 2012). Taking a real distance from one’s work remains difficult given the necessary personal involvement in the production of texts and the continuous sense of frustration of one’s desires of self-realization in everyday work. The strongly lived passion for the work of writing is thus described as strongly problematic and ambiguous. Marta (department head, open-ended contract) adds:

On the one hand, it is a crucial resource to beat off the experience of alienation; on the other hand, this same passion is the basis of a powerful mechanism of self-control and disciplining… In the sense that I am absolutely a kamikaze of passion… Even if I’m told to write something about blue celery, I will still have fun with it, maybe even if this story is pushed for marketing aims, because I’ll always find something interesting even in such a story.

An additional downside is that the attempts of withdrawal from work and the refuge searched for in personal self-realization outside work contribute to the individualization of daily work and labor relations. These coping practices cause a loss of collective capacities in the workplace, as under such conditions of emotional distancing and individualized withdrawal, it becomes more difficult to recognize any collective positions and to struggle together for shared interests and labor rights.

Laura (department head, open-ended contract) reflects:

Years ago, there was still more participation. The dramatic thing is, it’s not a coincidence that today we find ourselves discussing more about the individual, subjective issue of passion and emotions: you are more lonely in this situation today… Before, more or less, we were a group, even though with few resources. There was also a conflict at stake with the trade union, which somehow we still recognized. Because if we did get so angry with the union, that meant that we still attributed it some role.

Another participant adds:

Frankly speaking, today I do feel more alienated, more distanced from the trade union than from my journalistic type of work. For sure, this whole situation worries me.

Turning to the younger journalists in our group who are on precarious employment contracts, disillusion regarding the qualitative aspects of work appears less pronounced. In contrast, the central problem for these colleagues is the experience of continuous employment precariousness. Such precariousness translates into a strong vulnerability towards management’s strategies of blackmailing and subjects workers to forced availability (Marazzi 1994). Precariousness is experienced here above all as an existential insecurity due to an unstable employment position and the lack of effective labor and social rights. It regards one’s whole life (Salecl 2010), affecting social relations as well as individual capacities to project oneself into the future. Confronted with this situation of existential precariousness, lacking margins of autonomy and creativity in the work process appear as secondary issues.

Roberta (journalist, project contract) explains:

No, the fact that there is not much space here for autonomy and creativity is no big deal. In the sense that I try to create myself some space to express my creativity elsewhere. And, however, this magazine offers other possibilities to me: the pleasure to do the research type of work that is required here, as I feel disposed for that and I also have the impression to learn something… However, this kind of reasoning that we have engaged in now in our discussion, for me, in this moment, only represents a subsequent level, it’s really quite far away for me now… in the sense that I’m much too worried about how to manage to pay the rent for my apartment, to ask myself whether this work gratifies me or not.

The discussion shows how even only limited possibilities of self-realization within the work process are used to smooth over the highly negative experience of precariousness. Despite their strongly negative experience of employment precariousness, these young journalists manage to get some motivational reward from their work. Together with their hope for a better future, such identitarian counterbalancing makes it easier to accept the given precarious conditions. In other words, also in this case, the emotional aspects of passion and meaning attributed to one’s work are central elements of workers’ daily coping practices. At the same time, however, workers have to face the ambiguous character of these practices that make them resist precariousness (in the sense of enduring it) but not against it, and in which their expectations and desires of self-realization and recognition are at best partially met.

Roberta (journalist, project contract) continues:

The positive aspect of this work that makes you go on and accept these conditions is that it contributes to creating your sense of identity. You feel like a thinking being, you do a job that requires and engages your competences… For sure, we are not in a comfortable position. We are not only precarious but also young. This means that we always have to keep our head down, we never talk back, because we still have to learn. Under these conditions, it gets difficult to express any passion for your work… In the sense that I’m really still young, I don’t have a family yet, so I could give a lot because I still have enthusiasm, time, desire. I still have the desire to do things.

In regards to the hope for a better future, it is not so much based on any concrete career prospects, and neither is it based on any strong and positive professional identity linked to the collective imaginary of creative work or to the social status as a journalist. Rather, this hope seems to be based on the above-mentioned learning possibilities offered in the current work positions, as these could, at least potentially, allow for personal and professional growth in the future. Moreover, this hope is linked by the young journalists to their own capacities to seize such opportunities of professional growth: the capacity to learn and produce but also to respond positively to management’s continuous requirements of flexibility and availability, to submit oneself and to sustain blackmailing in order to obtain, finally, the aspired recognition.

Simona (press office staff, internship/fixed term) states:

The only thing that makes you go on is this sentence that you repeat to yourself constantly: ‘Maybe, if I don’t give up now, maybe one day I will succeed and really be part of this editorial department or this workplace.’… And then you live with this hope that once you have a stable contract, you will be less vulnerable to blackmailing and you will be able to say ‘no’ more easily, you will have to endure less and be less available.

Such a hope in the future, based on the belief in own professional capacities and the readiness for emotional involvement in one’s job, can be read as a coping practice that helps to resist highly negative contractual conditions. It is a way to claim the value and meaning of one’s work performances as well as to express the experienced injustice that stems from lacking recognition. But this meaning construction can also be built upon by the counterpart to increase exploitation, given workers’ emotional and identitarian attachment to work and their readiness to accept forced availability in order to obtain possible future rewards.

These young precarious journalists are conscious of the “passion trap” (Murgia and Poggio, 2012), a mechanism of forced availability and forced acceptance of given conditions within an always less participatory and more hierarchical work organization. But this situation is experienced as a “normal” uneasiness that does not give rise to any claims for larger margins of autonomy and creativity, which are central for their older colleagues. That is, precariousness here clearly functions as a disciplinary device to enforce acceptance of less qualifying tasks, worse working and employment conditions, and increased forced availability.

Roberta (journalist, project contract) adds:

Often, I feel like an anomaly, like a problem for everyone, because I’m neither an independent professional worker nor in the position of an internship that can be justified as such anymore. I’m somebody that everyone tries not to see. And that’s not all, I also feel completely ignored by the shop stewards, as if I didn’t exist; sometimes I even feel a certain hostility.

Findings of the Co-Research Among Precarious Editorial Workers in Book Publishing

For the second group composed of precarious editorial workers in various book publishing houses, the biggest everyday problem is employment precariousness, linked to their employment positions as project and self-employed workers. Like the older professional journalists on a permanent contract, however, they equally strongly complain about lacking autonomy and quality of work. They experience this lack as heavily contrasting with the high level of responsibility demanded in the work process, which they consider as not adequately recognized.

Barbara (editorial staff, self-employed project worker) explains:

We are paid little; you have enormous responsibilities but with a ridiculous employment contract. You publish the books practically alone, managing all the suppliers and everything… But, at the end, the only thing that matters is to have the book out. What is in it does not matter to anyone… You publish bullshit; you publish school books in which you really can’t put something of yourself. But, anyway, you put something of yourself in your books. When I flip through them, I see that it’s been me who has done them.

As this quote demonstrates, the experience of lacking recognition comprises two aspects: On the one side, there is the contrast between precarious employment conditions and required responsibilities that translates into lacking economic, material recognition and thus missing existential security. On the other side, the deterioration and limited attention given to the quality of one’s work is lived as lacking recognition of professional performances.

Daniela (editorial staff, self-employed) adds:

This is also precariousness, the fact of not having a desk or a company mail… It’s just annoying, but maybe it would make you feel a bit more like you’re participating, involved… There are quite a lot of issues that are kind of humiliating in terms of gratification. The absurd thing is that they expect you to be there in the office, and I can’t guarantee my presence because I don’t know where to sit and work.

This strong experience of missing recognition makes individual coping by means of identitarian compensation difficult. It is not that the precarious editorial workers in this group would not identify with their work, but once they have fully acknowledged the extent to which their expectations, desires, and needs are in fact constantly disregarded, their passion for editorial work is no longer enough to assure motivation and daily endurance of precarious work and employment conditions. Like the older journalists on open-ended contracts, they develop practices of emotional distancing and try to limit their availability and investment in their work. But due to their precarious employment positions that make them highly vulnerable to blackmailing, such withdrawal from work is much more difficult and limited as compared to the journalists on open-ended contracts.

Instead of trying to escape to alternative, individualized forms of self-realization outside of work, these precarious editorial workers have started to organize collectively. They have formed a network of precarious editorial workers (Re.Re.Pre) that comprises colleagues from various publishing houses. In one of the workplaces under observation in this co-research, an assembly of precarious workers has been created. Workers’ narratives, however, clearly show how difficult such attempts of collective organizing are, due to the high workforce fragmentation into various different employment categories that produces relevant interest differences and increases invisibility of each category.

Daniela (editorial staff, self-employed) states:

There is a huge generational gap between the way I react to a situation that is an injustice and their way of reacting, in a more passive way… I feel this as a really strong difference: At our workplace, there are some people that already work there as project workers for at least 10–15 years, and they could very well sue the publishing house [for illegal pseudo self-employment]. But they don’t do it… I don’t know why they don’t do it. Maybe due to mental laziness? Maybe because they are accustomed to this situation?… However, there are also some younger colleagues, people of our age, in their 30s, who never get involved in our activities because they are too lazy or because they are afraid to lose what they have.

Particularly the position as project and self-employed workers makes it rather difficult to develop collective conflict strategies, given the highly individualized working conditions, the equally individualized practices of negotiating contracts and pay, as well as the various individual coping practices of reducing and balancing experienced conflicts. Moreover, old conflict strategies, such as strike action or daily forms of performance reduction and slowdown of work processes, are not very practical for these (pseudo) self-employed workers. Any such practices of abstention, avoidance, and refusal to work do not harm the firm but rather fall back on workers themselves as they are considered to be self-responsible for accomplishing their work tasks within a given deadline, without any (officially) fixed working hours.

Network Experiences of Creative Labor: The Case of the Re.Re.Pre Network^[2]

The analysis of the focus group with the middle-aged publishing workers in book editing points out the big gap and the huge contrast between their fragile bargaining condition as freelance workers and the great responsibility attributed to them in the everyday work process. It is a subjective situation characterized by a lack of recognition of responsibilities and capabilities, which does not only lead to bad economic employment conditions and to lacking access to workers’ rights but also to the humiliation experienced in feeling “invisible.”

This experience produced feelings of impatience from which the precarious editors felt that they could not escape individually. In fact, there were no individual strategies of identity compensation among this group of workers because, in this case, the passion for work, unlike for the young journalists, was not sufficient to endure the experience of frustration.

Instead, in the face of these feelings of humiliation, impatience, and being made invisible, some editorial workers started to act collectively by putting into place a network called the Network of Precarious Editors (Re.Re.Pre). In the first instance, this network functioned above all as a tool to share experiences and feelings, opinions and ideas, by using interaction via e-mail and a website (Rerepre.org).

The Re.Re.Pre website, since its establishment in 2008, works as a network of self-organized publishing workers. The Re.Re.Pre has been a space for spontaneous and cooperative communication with each other. It serves as a tool to build up interaction, using online as well as face-to-face offline relations. The main issue behind this relation-building is to promote better working conditions and to build collective agency in a situation of precariousness in which the traditional forms of organizing would not be effective.

In recent years, the Re.Re.Pre had as its main reference point national movements against precarity, such as the network of Saint Precario and the respective website Precaria.org. But, at the same time, it tried to speak with traditional trade unions (especially with some components of the CGIL). At the moment, the network Re.Re.Pre is structured around three local nodes located in the Italian cities Milan, Bologna, and Rome, in which the publishing activities are particularly concentrated. A strong component is maintained in Milan, the city that can be considered the heart of the Italian publishing industry.

The live-stories published by the precarious editors on the Rerepre.org website reveal how much uncertainty is subjectively perceived as the uncertainty of workers. Online storytelling becomes a powerful resource to avoid the invisibility of individualization. And it is just online that the language and the word give body to the thought and empower it (Foucault 1985), to “make society” in the interactions of speech, which converts the individual experience into a collective experience (Bruner 1991).

An excerpt titled “Accreditation Direct to CV. The Man and the Yogurt” illustrates this:

There is the stable employee; I would like to say a few words on the subject, but it is so rare to speak about him that to talk of him or Superman is the same thing, so I’ll avoid it. Then there’s the temporary employee; he, like yogurt, has a shelf life, but its preservation is longer and is usually around a year or, luckily, a little more. The employee is sort of a wild card in the publishing industry, whether he/she works at home or in the office does not make that much difference; he/she often works like a slave, and when you come to see him/her in the refrigerator, you can always throw him/her away. The internship worker is a valuable commodity, it is a crucible of ideals, sourced direct route from the university dairy… Finally, then there’s me… The others, despite their complaints about their precarity, at least they have a job and a hated miserable salary. But I am much more fortunate than them; I do not have to stain myself with money. For me, the right phrase is ‘direct accredit to CV.’ What is this? You work for free, and if you ask them what is it that we gain, the answer is always the same: your collaboration with us can boost your CV.

Another fragment, titled “Things from the Last Century,” highlights workers’ frustration:

Privileges—now they call them so—those rights that were the result of decades of union struggles that seemed to be acquired for all workers, cancelled in a flurry of laws and sneakiness in recent years: illness, parental leave, vacations, bonuses, retirement, salary increases due to inflation… stuff from the last century!

In January 2008, the network’s activities evolved from sharing individual indignation to attempting to act collectively. A collectively signed message circulated online:

A call to all precarious workers of the publishing-editing industries: Precarity and exploitation. A condition that today most editorial workers know because they live it in their own skin. Our class, in addition to suffering the consequences of a set of institutional arrangements that are, to put it mildly, insane, is virtually invisible: it seems that no one knows we exist, no one cares about our situation. We too, guilty, are reduced to silence, bowing more and more our heads for few pennies and embracing the logic of competition that underlies the triumphal economic model. The signers firmly believe that the time has come to say: that’s ENOUGH: stop the permanent precarity, stop the denigration of our professionalism, stop individual negotiation of piecework contracts that imprison us at the desks (at home or, worse, at the office) and that allow us to hardly survive, stop dumping behaviors against our colleagues. Stop, above all, our submissive silence. Today more than ever, we feel the time has come to take care of our lives, our common destiny towards the road of self-organization. We have in mind a network, our network, which serves to valorize us, defend us, support us. A web of experiences and proposals, which seek to vindicate fairer labor conditions, to oppose those who so far have just tried to squeeze us… We want to know how and who would be willing to spend some of his/her own time and remaining energy on this project, because the network is made of nodes, and the more nodes there are, the narrower the links are between them. We ask you, therefore, to spread this appeal as much as possible and to demonstrate the will to commit to saying no! to this situation… We will let you know if we will be enough to start. Then what? The network is horizontal in nature and is built with the contribution of everyone: we will therefore activate a mailing list where ideas and witnesses can circulate and where we agree to hold a constituent assembly… We will write the rest together.

This appeal marked a shift from individual expression to collective action. In April 2008, fifty workers convened in Milan for a constituent assembly, founding the core of Re.Re.Pre. The network expanded through informal channels, leveraging digital tools for communication and organization. Over time, Re.Re.Pre engaged in public campaigns, collaborations with unions like the CGIL, and participation in broader movements such as the Mayday protests.

However, challenges persisted. Despite initial momentum, internal fragmentation and fear of retaliation weakened collective efforts. As one activist noted:

First, there is hesitation, there are steps back: no one wants to tell his/her story to journalists, no one feels like pressing charges indirectly on the publisher. Some start to be afraid, and immediately the group disintegrates. Worse, some began to study exit strategies at the individual level… Others decide to propose a bargaining table, where to look for a compromise: the claims are watered down, the company procrastinates because it knows that the hourglass runs in its favor… Soon, the front falls apart.

Conclusion

Our analysis of knowledge and cognitive labor in journalism and book publishing, based on a narrative co-research process and cyber-ethnography, has revolved around the link between changing forms of work, precariousness, and the commodification of emotional experiences and creative capacities. Within our co-research group, precariousness is experienced in various different forms that, well beyond the employment contract, are linked to the labor process and control. Precarization results from forced availability, blackmailing, intensification of workloads, existential insecurities, and the weakening of professional identities.

Management’s strategies to exploit workers’ passion and emotional investment remain unstable, as daily frustration and alienation can catalyze resistance. The Re.Re.Pre network exemplifies both the potential and limitations of collective organizing in cognitive labor sectors. While digital tools enable visibility and solidarity, they cannot fully overcome systemic issues like workforce fragmentation, individualized coping strategies, and the internalization of neoliberal ideologies.

Ultimately, the co-research process highlights the centrality of subjectivity in precarious labor. Workers’ narratives reveal how emotions, passions, and identitarian attachments shape coping practices and agency potential. The challenge lies in transforming individualized disillusion into collective struggles for recognition, rights, and dignified work in the era of creative capitalism.

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