Doing work. Atypical employment in the film and in the automobile industry in comparison

Current analyses of labour market transformations focus on two groups: creative and precarious workers. While the first group is typically seen as particularly good at coping with flexibility requirements, the latter appear to lag behind in their ability to compensate for uncertain employment prospects. This paper compares the perceptions and accounts of work experience and employment prospects for low qualified precarious workers and project workers in the film industry. The comparison shows that both groups are far more similar to each other regarding the structural aspects of their jobs and with respect to their interpretations of their work situation than expected. In both cases, the "setting" of the industry and the production process, and a specific view of the qualifications required-under the structural conditions of the labour market segment-are key for interpretations of the work situation. On the basis of these findings, the study suggests that the prevailing foci on labour-market and labour-supply structures could usefully be complemented with the perspective of "doing work" for the analysis of "good" and "bad" work.