Karen Hands

This paper examines the perceptions of increased emotional labour among staff at a regional university in Queensland, Australia, during the transition to home-based work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The study utilises a multi-method approach to survey academic, professional, and technical staff and identifies job type, gender and significant predictors of emotional labour. Quantitative analysis indicates that women and academic staff experienced higher emotional labour than their professional and technical counterparts. The thematic analysis highlights organisational resilience expectations, emotional support roles, and institutional communication as key factors influencing emotional labour. The findings emphasise the need for structural reforms and support systems in the higher education culture to assist women in navigating the gendered challenges of remote work, work-from-home, and digital transformations. The paper discusses these results in the context of neo-liberal discourses and the concept of ‘personal resilience’ for individual workers.

The Australian creative economy is a growing labour market, employing 5.9% of the national workforce and increasing at a faster rate than aggregate national employment (McCutcheon and Cunningham 2022). Despite robust employment metrics, creative work remains complex shaped by external economic forces and its own internal structures (Luckman and Andrew 2020). Economic rationalism and technological change have seen workers fluctuate between unpredictable periods of creative work, non-creative work, and unemployment (Comunion and England 2020). Despite irregular employment, McRobbie notes that creative workers persist in their practice and maintain their creative identity (2016).

Creatives are drawn through passion to “work with heart” (Suchy 1999), but this innate driver can be problematic. Passion is linked to resilience, emotional intelligence, ambition and a strong sense of purpose (Bridgstock 2005), yet it is not enough to sustain a creative career in a volatile economic environment. This tension complicates career sustainability for those drawn to creative work. Not surprisingly, job precarity drives many to leave the sector, especially when facing major life decisions such as home ownership, having children, or retirement planning (McRobbie 2016). This compromises both individual career longevity and the retention of an experienced workforce vital to commercial and public cultural production. This is represented through what I refer to as the ‘Thunderstruck Paradox’.

This research considers creative workers in three post-youth stages drawn from Zacher and Froidevaux’s life course model (2021): ‘early adulthood’, ‘middle adulthood’ and ‘late adulthood’. It asks how individuals who identify as creative workers have navigated, withstood, or surrendered to the precarious and protean career model dominant in the creative labour market. Informed by primary survey data (A252797), the research offers insight into creative careers by highlighting how systemic precarity restricts inclusion, fair work, and career longevity—ultimately limiting rich cultural production. It contributes to a society that values creatives' rights to long-term, fair and meaningful work (SDG8).

Passion is a quality associated with creative practitioners. In the arts and creative industries, it is considered a desirable attribute and recognised as a predictor of resilience and emotional intelligence (Suchy, 1999), ambition (Richardson, Jogulu & Rentschler, 2017), and a strong sense of purpose (Bridgstock, 2005). In the context of these claims, passion can be conceptualised as an emotional resource essential for a sustained career in the arts and creative industries, alongside technical skills and theoretical knowledge. But can the kind of “harmonious passion” (Vallerand et al, 2003) that leads to rewarding engagement with creative practice be taught? 

This paper outlines the design, implementation and student learning outcomes from experimenting with integrating ‘passion’ as a learning object throughout a tertiary creative industries course. The qualitative research methods utilised in this study included observation, reflection, and textual analysis of written material.

The findings suggest that by positioning passion as an emotional resource alongside recognised theories such as ‘flow state’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) and Noller’s theory of creativity (Parnes, Noller & Biondi, 1977), and frameworks such as design thinking and radical creativity, harmonious passion can be identified and fostered as a learning object. As an emotion it is deeply individual, but this study demonstrates that students can recognise their passion as having legitimacy and utility beyond the driver or motivation that initially drew them to creative practice.

This exploratory qualitative research utilizes historical policy and analyzes documents and primary interviews to explore the dynamics between policy-introduced structures and the artistic director’s tenure in the Australian subsidized theater sector. The research probes the effect of tenure length on the sector and examines decision-making about career mobility and the role of the individual passion of the artistic director. Short-term or project-based work dominates employment opportunities in this sector, yet the full-time artistic director position presents an anomaly to typical work patterns and career pathways. Incumbents of this role have forged a career in this precarious environment to attain an elite artistic leadership position that forms part of a dual leadership model. This research offers insight into how arts policies shape artistic careers, specifically the career pathways of artistic directors, which may contribute to a deeper understanding of the role, the development of future arts policies, and supported artistic leadership pathways.   

This research examines three political moments in the Australian theatre sector as turning points in contemporary understanding of the sector’s financial foundations. Socio-cultural and economic conditions leading to the establishment of The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1954, the instigation of the Industries Assistance Commission Inquiry in 1976, and the commissioning of the Major Performing Arts Inquiry in 1999, and their impact on the theatre sector, are reviewed in this paper. These political moments took place against changing economic policies in Australia. By reviewing the economic transition from Keynesian 'welfare' to economic rationalism, the interventionalist nature of these policy moments and their effect on the artistic vibrancy of the sector is understood. This paper reveals a tension between the sector’s Keynesian foundations, which underpinned the Trust's intentions to establish a financially sustainable sector, and the now dominant economic rationalist model which restricts the performing arts’ capacity to flourish. Through analysing secondary documents and scholarly discussion, this research reconsiders the legacy of the Trust as a key policy landmark. It proposes that The Trust succeeded in delivering artistic outcomes, but failed in its financial objective to establish a sustainable sector. The role of the Trust is often misconstrued in scholarly and professional discussions about the necessity of arts funding, and by reconceptualising these political moments as interventions of policy, a new perspective of the foundation of Australian arts funding can be appreciated.