Projects

Care in the TV industry: the Currency of Gratitude 

Care in the TV industry: the Currency of Gratitude project is an investigation into the potential for gratitude to entrench inequalities in the television production industry. The project uses interview-based case studies to articulate how gratitude is a felt experience of working in TV and influences career trajectories. It considers the context of the recent “turn to care” of the television industry and the atomised, freelance, short-term project-to-project nature of much television work.

The project finds that employees, largely, value security, connection and longevity of employment (although this is often undermined by a sense of “what might be” occurring on projects elsewhere). Longevity itself is problematic in its potential to be preventative of diversity as freelancers become embedded in companies and the culture within specific organisations has the potential to become self-perpetuating. This self-perpetuation can occur despite the freelance context – a finding which speaks to the lack of uniformity within the industry, itself a reason it is often so difficult to navigate, particularly for newcomers and / or those outside the norms of the self-perpetuating culture. The project concludes with recommendations to induce more uniformity within the industry, which can be used in turn to induce cultural shifts with the potential to increase the security of employees and open the industry up to newcomers in a sustained way.

The project was undertaken by Dr Rowan Aust and the report can be found here: Care in the TV industry: the Currency of Gratitude Report