Inclusion and exclusion in the digital economy: disability and mental health as a live streamer on Twitch.tv

ABSTRACT

In this paper I explore economic and inclusion opportunities for people with disabilities and mental health issues afforded by ‘live streaming’ ? the live broadcast of one’s activities over the internet to a globally dispersed audience. In both 2016 and 2017, the leading live streaming platform Twitch.tv broadcast over 500,000 years of video, which were produced by over two million regular broadcasters (‘streamers’), and consumed by an audience of several hundred million viewers. Streamers can profit, up to and including a full-time living ‘wage’ for those at the highest levels. Numerous successful streamers with chronic health issues have discussed the personal and professional benefits streaming brings them. Utilising data from a research project with 100 interviews, alongside approximately 500 hours of ethnographic observation, this paper examines the experiences of live streaming for broadcasters with disabilities, mental health issues, or physical health issues. Firstly, I explore the positive elements of streaming for these broadcasters, focusing on the many conditions represented in this demographic, and the benefits streaming gives for inclusion and community. Secondly, I consider the negative experiences of these streamers, focused on entanglements of health and technology that make their streaming lives potentially more challenging than their colleagues. Thirdly, I focus on the economic opportunities, and the potential for entrepreneurial activity, the platform affords. I conclude the analysis by exploring how these aspects make live streaming a potentially exemplary emancipatory and entrepreneurial space for these individuals, but not one without challenges.     

Discovering rhetoric: The ecology of enterprise in the Bourgeois Era

Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Dignity deploys Israel Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurial discovery in her explanation of the Industrial Revolution. This essay examines whether Kirzner's theory can bear the analytical load that McCloskey would place on it. I identify two potential incongruities between Kirzner's theory and McCloskey's historical account but find them both unconvincing. Kirzner's entrepreneur is a good fit for McCloskey's story. I argue further that the fit can be strengthened by incorporating further elements of Kirzner's theory, including entrepreneurial alertness.     

英国高校创业教育的发展历程与反思

英国是创业教育先行并较为成功的国家之一。英国的创业教育发端于工业革命与商业文化的兴起,得力于政策推动与基金扶持,成功于创业课程设置以及差异化的专业化创业人才培养模式的构建,具有鲜明的民族特征与时代特色。分析和研究英国创业教育的发展历程和教育现状,对于包括我国在内的大学生创业教育的持续发展,有着广泛的借鉴意义。     

源于文化自觉的城镇化路径——中国城镇化新探索：来自西藏拉萨大北郊的启示

市场经济条件下的城镇化，实质是人口和生产要素的集中过程。新型城镇化不仅仅是线性的“破旧立新”的发展过程，更是多元的“文化创新”的展过程，是文化基因的传承，文化记忆的存留和文化历史的延续。大北郊作为以金属器加工制作为主导的产业集群和生产者集聚的生活社区，其成型、变迁和发展，是基于文化自觉的城镇化的典型个案。     

DIY Entrepreneurship? – Self‐reliance for Women Refugees in Australia

In this paper, we call for a re‐examination of the self‐reliance ideology based on a neoliberal perspective to make policies for refugee women's (self‐)employment and integration. We use a social constructionist perspective to conduct a narrative analysis of data from the lived experience of twelve women refugee entrepreneurs. Three prominent themes emerge from the women’s own narratives of their entrepreneurial journey – self‐reconstruction, social capital, and resilience. Our findings reveal the complexities of self‐reconstruction and socialization as experienced by refugee women entrepreneurs – for whom “push” factors take precedence over “pull” factors with the explicit understanding that the onus is on them to survive with their own resilience. We argue that offering people hope of a new life means offering them meaningful choices, built on forms of economic activity whose sustainability over the long term is evidenced by the positive supports available to make sure economic activity succeeds.     

Reluctant entrepreneurs: musicians and entrepreneurship in the ‘new’ music industry

Changing labour conditions in the creative industries – with celebrations of autonomy and entrepreneurialism intertwined with increasing job insecurity, portfolio careers and short‐term, project‐based contracts – are often interpreted as heralding changes to employment relations more broadly. The position of musicians’ labour in relation to these changes is unclear, however, given that these kinds of conditions have defined musicians’ working practices over much longer periods of time (though they may have intensified due to well‐documented changes to the music industry brought about by digitization and disintermediation). Musicians may thus be something of a barometer of current trends, as implied in the way that the musically derived label ‘gig economy’ is being used to describe the spread of precarious working conditions to broader sections of the population. This article, drawing on original qualitative research that investigated the working practices of musicians, explores one specific aspect of these conditions: whether musicians are self‐consciously entrepreneurial towards their work and audience. We found that, while the musicians in our study are routinely involved in activities that could be construed as entrepreneurial, generally they were reluctant to label themselves as entrepreneurs. In part this reflected understandings of entrepreneurialism as driven by profit‐seeking but it also reflected awareness that being a popular musician has always involved business and commercial dimensions. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of entrepreneurship developed by Joseph Schumpeter we highlight how the figure of the entrepreneur and the artist/musician share much in common and reflect various aspects of romantic individualism. Despite this, there are also some notable differences and we conclude that framing musicians’ labour as entrepreneurial misrepresents their activities through an overemphasis on the economic dimensions of their work at the expense of the cultural.     

To profit or not to profit: Women entrepreneurs in India

Entrepreneurial activity attracts certain kinds of individuals, whether it is to promote a social cause in the nonprofit sector or profit in the for‐profit sector. This article looks at the behavior of women entrepreneurs in India in both the for‐profit and nonprofit sectors to test for potential differences and similarities. We chose two groups of entrepreneurial women who founded and led relatively similar‐size organizations in the same city and who provided services primarily to women and children. Our findings show that while all nonprofit entrepreneurs receive a high payoff from promoting social causes, there is no single unifying payoff for for‐profit entrepreneurs. Family background and support, however, play an important role for both sets of entrepreneurs. We find that experience in the sector, social class, caste, and education in?uence entrepreneurial behavior and that this in?uence differs by sector.     

‘Zealotry or Nostalgic Regret’?1 Women Leaders in Technical and Further Education in Australia: Agents of Change,Entrepreneurial Educators or Corporate Citizens?

Education has been restructured in many Western post‐industrial nation states during the 1990s. The Australian Technical and Further Education sector (TAFE) has been particularly susceptible to discourses of responsiveness to the market and the new entrepreneuralism. This article explores how women have been repositioned in contradictory and ambiguous ways as the new entrepreneurial middle managers by existing and emergent discourses that circulated in and through TAFE organizations. In turn, it points to how discourses of change management and client responsiveness took on particular readings within specific institutional and professional cultures of the eight Technical and Further Education institutions (TAFEs). At the same time, the restructuring that arose from the corporatization of TAFE, in a highly gendered process, through the twin strategies of marketization and the new managerialism produced new possibilities for individual women educators who moved up into middle management. Yet these individual women were positioned within highly masculinist ‘neo‐corporate bureaucratic cultures’ that co‐opted their passion for the capacity of education to make a difference and incorporated these new entrepeneurial work identities.     

Le travail entrepreneurial, ou l'entrepreneur schumpetérien performé

Creating a firm requires the completion of specific tasks of gathering, and combining of the resources needed for production and sales. The head of the project does not do all this alone; he receives help from advisers, experts and managerial tools. This study of the collective entrepreneurial work accomplished by jobless persons who set up a business casts doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption of a visionary entrepreneur, who, all alone, creatively designs a “new combination” of resources. Although a new firm does not spontaneously spring out of an individual's intuition, the framework wherein it gradually takes shape tends to make it a novel combination that is coherent in terms of production, sales and accounting. In this framework, full responsibility can be attributed to the project head. The entrepreneur is not, therefore, Schumpeterian; he becomes so.     

Young adults and the tuning of the entrepreneurial mindset in neoliberal capitalism

Enhancing the entrepreneurial spirit of young people is a means by which their employability and future potential as well as economic growth, the core goal of national policies, are incubated. Consequently, individuals performing entrepreneurial mindset are seen to possess the most future potential. We sketch the contours of this mindset and develop the idea of ‘tuning’ the entrepreneurial mindset with other discursive elements, or ‘ingredients’, available in society in order to make the overarching idea of entrepreneurialism more manageable, bearable, and even enjoyable at the individual level. The ingredients with which the mindset is tuned are non-depressiveness, happiness, and gratefulness. This tuning of the mindset is itself necessary and difficult mental work, even though it is invisible. Our analysis is based on 40 interviews with 18–30-year-old women and men from Tampere, Finland.     

New Public Management et professions dans l’État : au-delà des oppositions, quelles recompositions ?

More and more reforms in public administrations are being conducted that are based on the principles and instruments of “new public management”. They have set off protest and collective actions by several professional groups in various sectors (health, education, justice, social work, research…), whence questions about the future of professional groups in public services, in particular about their autonomy, which these reforms threaten. The opposition between this new public management and certain professional groups, is not the final explanation to draw from an analysis of this situation. Should these changes be seen as the decline of professional groups and of their autonomy, as a mutation of professional models, an overhaul of professionalism, etc.? These questions, which current events in France and Europe have raised, are a matter for ongoing sociological thought. They are approached empirically, from the field, using varied scales of analysis and research. Forms of tension between this new public management and professional groups are explored.     

Entrepreneurial NPOs in Russia: Rationalizing the Mission

Nonprofit organizations in Russia are introducing for-profit activities as a means of gaining autonomy from external donors, and as instruments of strategic planning and sustainable development. This study focuses on organizations that work with welfare provision and explores how they reconcile entrepreneurial activities with their social mission. More specifically, we interrogate how two institutional logics, business and nonprofit, are defined and reconciled in organizational identities, structures and hierarchies. Socially oriented nonprofits define their mission through service to beneficiaries, through personal and professional dedication to beneficiaries’ well-being, and through making an impact on public policies and the society at large. They mimic a business approach in strategic planning and meticulous reporting, but subordinate profit-seeking to social mission by integrating entrepreneurial activities into already existing organizational structures, or by separating them into independent entities.     

Dimensions of Precariousness in an Emerging Sector of Self‐Employment: A Study of Self‐Employed Nurses

Changing economic ideologies and a new emphasis on entrepreneurial opportunities have led to a rise in self‐employment in Canada, especially among women. Although some people benefit from self‐employment, it is considered to be a precarious form of employment. Despite a growing body of literature on gender and self‐employment, there is more to learn about its precarious nature across industries and types of entrepreneurs. This ethnographic study examines the experiences of self‐employed nurses in order to better understand self‐employment in professional caring work. In some ways, these nurses' experiences fit with what is known about female self‐employment but this specific sector highlights how precariousness can take different forms across different areas of work. In particular, this study reveals new insights about the complexity and ambiguity of precariousness.     

Coordination Tasks and Negotiation Modes of Linked Lives in Entrepreneurial Families

The overlap of business and family roles, and how they are linked in entrepreneurial families, requires intergenerational negotiation. Biographical case reconstruction analysis of 32 narrative interviews of 12 German entrepreneurial families explores what coordination tasks need to be resolved and how family members negotiate their interlocking lives. The article finds that entrepreneurial families actively coordinate positions, life phases, and material transfers by means of a pedagogy of succession, life course evidence analysis, and entrepreneurial narratives. The article presents two innovations. First, it demonstrates how these families experience and cope with their linked lives under flexible working conditions and in multigenerational families. Second, it argues that research on linked lives should shift from focusing on outcomes to understanding emergence and operations, and it advances the use of the biographical case reconstruction method for this endeavor.     

Decision‐Making in Paediatric Rehabilitation: Exploring Professionals' and Children's Views on Decision‐Making Involvement

The article explores the distinction that professionals make between difficult and less difficult decisions in paediatric rehabilitation interventions. This distinction is explored by looking at the involvement of two children in decisions regarding paediatric rehabilitation interventions. The article argues for a clinical practice where children's experiences are extensively used to improve practice and to accommodate the child's right to participate in medical decisions concerning their own body and life. The different ways the children and the professional describe their experiences provide an avenue for a discussion on how medical reasoning can curtail children's involvement in decisions.     

La carrière des artistes et les transformations de la production musicale. Relations de travail et relation au travail dans le monde des musiques rap et électroniques

The interaction between the artistic and managerial poles of the world formed by the persons specialized in rap and electronic music in France is described as well as musicians' occupational culture. The aesthetic and organizational characteristics of these musical genres are shown to influence the division of labour in recording and production. Owing to the combination of artistic and managerial activities typical of these musicians, occupational networks are fluid. This blurring of roles is especially visible in the recording labels used from home studios. Technical changes in the “tools” for this work have led these artists to become professionally involved in management and advertising. Cultural motivations also explain this involvement: the critical stance adopted by the “cultures” of rap, electro, techno, etc., tends to make obsolete the image of the artist as a creator who avoids the engineering aspects of the commercial distribution of his recordings. In contrast, rap and electronic musicians' careers develop through participation in many and various projects, which nurtures their artistic production, improves the quality of their groups and enhances their reputations. Accepting more short-term professional engagements supposedly increases their control over their career profiles. However these musicians voice concerns, in particular, about bonds between the individual and the groups whom they cross (and who cross them) — concerns that can be extended to other types de workers caught up in an occupational world organized “by project”.     

Occupational Claims to Professionalism: The Case of Paralegals

This article, based on fifty‐one in‐depth interviews with paralegals working in private law firms, bridges the gap between sociologists' understanding of professions and professionalization and workers' subjective meaning of professional and professionalism. For paralegals to be professional, they must be both competent and capable of maintaining the proper demeanor, which includes their thoughts, behaviors, appearances, and emotions. Ironically, paralegals claim the title professional, or make claims to professionalism, to make themselves feel better about the unprofessional manner in which they are treated by attorneys; however, their assumptions about the meaning of professionalism undercut the likelihood that they will ever make collective demands for the professional treatment they seek.     

Nonprofit association CEOs how their context shapes what,how, and why they learn

This qualitative study explored the learning experiences of twelve national nonprofit membership association CEOs using a phenomenological research design. While the professional context of an organization's chief executive is considered unique from other executive positions, the impact of this context on what and how CEOs learned was unclear. The findings describe association CEO learning as being affected in significant ways by the politically charged context in which the nonprofit association CEO operates with his or her board of directors. Power imbalances with staff and the board make learning through traditional organizational dialogue a less useful learning process for the CEOs. Furthermore, the feelings of isolation and vulnerability that are generated from the nonprofit association CEO context often cause CEOs to use private reflection and dialogue with their spouse as primary learning mechanisms. The study concludes that the association CEO context uniquely and profoundly shapes what, how, and why CEOs learn. Perhaps lacking the financial security of lucrative severance payments, which are often specified in employment contracts of for‐profit CEOs, the nonprofit association CEO will often temper his or her actions to avoid personal vulnerability with a politically charged board of directors.     

From starving artist to entrepreneur. Justificatory pluralism in visual artists' grant proposals

Inspired by French pragmatism and using Bourdieu's notion of “refraction” as an indication of a field's autonomy, we explore in-depth what kinds of justifications visual artists deploy to legitimate their requests for government money. Based on 494 government grant proposals from visual artists between 1965 and 2015 in Belgium, we find six such justifications. The reputational, esthetic, and romantic justifications are grounded in autonomous criteria of worth, such as artistic CVs, the work of art itself, and a compulsive desire to make art. Since the 90s, social, academic, and entrepreneurial justifications bring in heteronomous criteria, or refractions of field-external values. Artistic practices become increasingly legitimized through engagement with social/political issues, academic methods and terminology, and an entrepreneurial spirit. We empirically show how the refraction of governmental logics is multi-faceted, yet always related to or combined with artistic concerns, which we interpret as characteristic for the artistic field's persisting autonomy in the face of heteronomous pressures.