Editorial Introduction: Creativity, Knowledge and Innovation in Virtual WorkJuliet Webster, Work and Equality Research, LondonWing-Fai Leung, Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, Kings College, London

Corresponding author: Juliet Webster, equality.research@debeauvoir.co.uk

Abstract

The term virtual work covers a vast range of activities, some of which are associated with creativity, innovation and knowledge work. The precise nature of creativity in virtual work deserves close critical scrutiny, and this special issue attempts to shed some light on this issue. In this introduction, we discuss the concepts of creativity and innovation in relation to virtual work. The double-edged nature of much creative virtual work, managerial control, newly emerging gender and race divisions of labour, and the decline of collective labour organisation, are recurrent themes in recent research. We also review the key insights of the papers in this collection, particularly that creativity is a collective, everyday activity subject to profound challenge as employers and clients develop new methods to control creative labour. Methodological innovation may be vital for understanding shifting virtual labour markets, as new occupations, skills and working conditions emerge and older ones disappear.

The Creativity Rhetoric

The content and location of work in the industrialised world have been dramatically transformed, first through the widespread application of information technologies, and more recently, through the Internet and new media. Entirely new types of digital, or virtual work have been created, new value-generating activities have emerged and the geography of employment, underpinned by global divisions of labour, has been recast. New types of unpaid labour connected with the consumption and co-creation of services have emerged, and the boundary between paid and unpaid labour, underpinned by gender divisions of labour, has shifted, affecting both public and private life. All these developments have been captured under the rubric of virtual work, that is to say, labour, whether paid or unpaid, that is carried out using a combination of digital and telecommunications technologies and/or produces content for digital media (Huws, 2012: 3). The term covers a very wide range of tasks, activities and occupations, many of which are in the so-called creative industries or sectors, are concerned with cultural production through established and new media, or are considered to involve some other type of creative or innovatory labour content. This Special Issue of New Technology, Work and Employment critically addresses the presence of creativity, knowledge and innovation within these emerging forms of labour.

Contemporary forms of work, particularly those involving digital technologies, are sometimes supposed to be redolent with the potential for creativity and innovation. In this perception, the deployment of specialist skills and knowledge are central to the performance of digital work. In fact, ever since the formulation of the Information Society concept as far back as the 1970s (Bell, 1973; Webster, 2014), the notion that work is increasingly knowledge-driven has been at the heart of much economic and some sociological analysis of social and technical change.

The idea that the deployment of knowledge plays an increasingly significant role in the performance of work acquired particular force with the deindustrialisation and growth of services within advanced economies from the 1980s onwards, when use of the human musculature was steadily supplanted by a combination of automation and human brainpower. Technology-intensive service growth has been a hallmark of economic development in the advanced capitalist economies during the last quarter of the twentieth century (Miles and Hauknes, 1996), and much of this growth has been in knowledge-intensive business services (Hauknes, 1996; Boden and Miles, 2000). Knowledge, then, is integral to the performance of much professional service work, and often perceived as a distinctive feature of it.

The notion of the Knowledge-Based Economy took hold of both analytical and policy thinking in the 1990s. At the centre of this concept is the production, distribution and use of knowledge through the expansion of knowledge industries and knowledge occupations (Machlup, 1962; Porat and Rubin, 1977; Foray and Lundvall, 1997). Knowledge work, it was argued, would drive improved competitiveness, and would be the lynchpin of economic growth: new goods and services would be underpinned by knowledge; workers would require new skills and occupational expertise; and organisations would have to innovate constantly in order to maintain and improve their economic performance. Firms, sectors, industrial districts, regions and national economies all would need to develop a propensity for learning and innovation in order to maximise economic growth (Storper, 1993). Following this general policy aspiration for an economy based on an implicit amalgam of arts, culture, the knowledge economy and the software industry, the UK Government undertook a mapping exercise of thirteen industries dubbed creative, which became a mobilising slogan for a public policy blueprint in which these industries, underpinned by technological innovation, were the bedrock of economic growth (Garnham, 2005). Little attention, however, was paid to the work and employment conditions within creative industry policy in the UK (Banks, 2010) but this policy agenda was nevertheless rapidly adopted internationally (Schlesinger, 2015).

With a few signal exceptions (see, for example, Reich, 1991) one of the major deficiencies of this intellectual and policy framework was that it treated knowledge and innovatory capacity as primarily residing in economies, regions and organisations. It skirted over the role of human labour in acquiring, applying or augmenting knowledge. It completely ignored the working conditions of that human labour. In so doing, it left unanswered a series of questions about the social processes involved in the emergence and performance of this knowledge work. For example, where in society was knowledge development to take place? What was the role of individual creativity, how was it acquired, and how did it actually serve competitiveness and employability objectives, or those of reducing disadvantage and increasing social cohesion? Also overlooked were the social processes by which different forms of knowledge are distributed or appropriated by different social classes and social groups, and by which some forms of knowledge come to acquire the label of knowledge or social capital, while others do not.

What all discussions of the learning organisation (and organisational learning) do is relegate the actual living beings that work in them to the status of cogs, subordinate to the more important organisational life In the process the notion of individual learning is lost, save in the sense that it can serve the organisation (Grugulis, 1999: 6).

In the so-called creative economy, the view of human capital even if nebulously defined - as central to the conduct of work remains axiomatic. Creative digital labour is often associated with such attributes as entrepreneurialism and innovative capacity, and those who work in creative jobs have been controversially described as occupying a qualitatively different position class position from other types of worker by virtue of the informal working arrangements, autonomy and flexibility involved in many of these jobs (Florida, 2002). The notion of a creative economy staffed by a new type of self-directed, entrepreneurial, productive individual is both politically persuasive and conceptually optimistic.

This idea of creative labour may have considerable rhetorical appeal and political persuasiveness, but there is a down side to it, in the neo-liberal employment relations in which freelance labour supplants secure employment, yet workers are nevertheless on demand and responsible for delivering increasingly high quality, original and imaginative work. The concept of cognitive capitalism, for example, highlights the requirement for, and use of, cognitive capacities by the labour force within the paradigm of present day capitalist accumulation (Vercellone, 2006; Fumagalli, 2007). It draws on Marxs idea of the general intellect (Marx, 1993), and notes capitals increasing dependence on ideas and creative talent, as well as emotions, sentiments and relational work, for value creation. As Morini (2007) observes, however, this form of labour also requires infinite adaptability and flexibility (all constituent elements of work which she points out are well-known to women). Capital may be dependent on creative talent, but this does not abolish exploitation (Ross, 2013).

Critiques of the concept of creativity in virtual work

Many people have provided a strong corrective to the romanticisation of the creative labour concept, and their work shows that the role and significance of creative labour in the contemporary landscape of virtual work deserves critical re-evaluation. Analytically, a fundamental challenge is that the term creativity covers an extremely diverse set of phenomena, and a wide range of occupations, employment conditions, knowledges, skills, and work processes (Holts, 2013; Webster, 2014; Webster and Randle, 2016). Furthermore, not all activity carried out under the rubric of creative labour is actually creative; some parts are more mundane and routine (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). By the same token, most work, whether formally creative or not, involves some creativity, if only in the sense of the planning necessary to its conduct (McKinlay and Smith, 2009).

Notwithstanding these analytical complexities, there is now considerable agreement about some of the dominant employment dynamics of virtual work, including its creative elements. The autonomy of creativity comes at a price: precarious work, in the form of temporary contracts, crowdsourcing and multiple other forms of fragile employment, is now widespread even among those whose occupations involve high-level cognitive input. Whole groups of digital, creative and knowledge workers - from graphic designers and web programmers (Pitts, 2016) to academics (Murgia 2016) and automotive engineers (Silberman 2016) - are increasingly vulnerable to knife-edge insecurity of employment, coupled with expectations of high intensity effort in which they must increasingly hold down several projects at once in order to survive. New entrants to the creative labour market are likewise drawn into a do-it-yourself economy, where [they] fashion their own livelihoods by piecing together disparate lumps of work and income (Ross, 2013: 30; see also Webster and Randle, 2016). In this economy of self-employment, short-term contracts, and individualised working arrangements, there is a marked absence of labour rights and policies, including democratic procedures, equal opportunities policies, and anti-discrimination policies (McRobbie, 2016).

Apart from the power they derive from these workers lack of basic labour rights and relative lack of collectivism, how do employers and managers exercise control over their daily effort? The foregoing discussion suggests that by displacing the risk of employment onto freelancers and self-employed workers, and by simultaneously intensifying work in a manner reminiscent of traditional Taylorism, employers benefit from several interrelated processes for securing the effort of creative labour forces. As the paper by Schoerpf and his colleagues in this issue shows, online ratings systems clearly help to elicit this effort, and increasingly punitive performance management systems are commonplace in knowledge work (see also Megoran, 2016). Of course, some creative workers enjoy a relatively privileged labour market situation, job security and decent pay. Yet even those who do not do so display a conscientious and passionate commitment to their work. The pleasure involved in creativity partly explains this passion (McRobbie, 2016). The working conditions are another part of the explanation. Contractual precariousness means that work must be taken when it can, so that bulimic working frantic periods of activity followed by periods of idleness is rampant in fields such as new media freelancing (Gill, 2002; Pratt, 2002), as is pay inequality. At the same time, there is a cultural ethic of professionalism based on phenomenal levels of self-exploitation, particularly in project working; in software development, for example, long working hours and lack of sleep are commonplace (Plantenga and Remery, 2001; Valenduc et al, 2004; Pitts, 2016).

Do knowledge and creative workers express resistance, and if so, how? What types of collective occupational communities can emerge in these fractured labour forces and what prospect is there for collective organisation? There are signs that cognitive and creative workers are organising despite the individualised conditions of their labour, to counter their increasing exploitation-though-atomisation (de Peuter and Cohen, 2015; Periera, 2016; Megoran, 2016; Wirsig, 2016). For instance, the Charter of Knowledge Workers Rights, created in Italy in 2009 to campaign for a guaranteed and secure fixed income during spells of unemployment as well as during working periods (Fumagalli, 2015), is one of a small but growing number of so-called Alt-Labor initiatives. These are relatively new forms of labour organisation: unions of freelancers, web platforms for interns and support networks for other workers whose livelihoods do not turn on conventional employment at all (Pradal, 2015). They raise the broader analytical question: what types of collectivism, trade unionism and collective bargaining are emerging in the virtual labour-scape and how different are they from traditional forms of labour organising?

Analytical challenges in understanding creativity and knowledge in the context of virtual work

This Special Issue draws principally on the research findings and insights developed and consolidated under the auspices of the EU COST Action on the Dynamics of Virtual Work that ran from 2012 to 2016. The aim of the Action was to develop a clear conceptual framework within which such work could be studied, to develop an understanding of how new forms of virtual work emerge, to investigate the newly-emerging skills and occupational identities associated with this work, and also to explore the shifting boundaries between paid and unpaid work and between work and play. The papers in this Special Issue critically analyse different types of creativity in varied instances of virtual work. The papers by Pink et al and Stoerpf et al are the result of empirical research conducted under the auspices of the COST Action; a strong thread running throughout the papers is the examination of the evolving relationship between creativity, knowledge, innovation and virtual work. As the above discussion suggests, the case of virtual work raises a series of compelling questions about the nature and exercise of creativity, some of which are addressed in the papers presented here, and others of which still need to be addressed if we are fully to understand this relationship as it affects the performance of work of all kinds in contemporary capitalism.

One of the most basic questions raised by research into virtual work is that of the precise knowledge content of its specific forms. What, in this context, is creative labour? Virtual work, as we have noted, is enormously diverse, and we do not expect to see the same potential for individual or collective creativity, or the same knowledge requirements, in, say, isolated routine clickwork activities like image tagging or text transcription as we might in more complex work such as software engineering or web content production (Bergvall-Kreborn and Howcroft, 2014; Webster 2016), or indeed in dispersed design and engineering teams (Chamakiotis et and Panteli, this issue). However, pinning down a definition of creative work is both conceptually and empirically complex, as the papers in this Special Issue illustrate, since creativity emerges from these papers as highly contextual. Creativity is clearly not the sole province of the so-called creative industries or creative professions. Nevertheless, it is probably much more characteristic of certain sectors and occupations than others, and we still have only a patchy sense of where and in what circumstances it is exercised. How are creativity and knowledge deployed in digital work in different sectors and occupations, and indeed, at different moments? What, empirically, is the creative or knowledge content of particular forms of virtual work and how has this changed with the progressive digitisation of almost all types of work?

A clearer understanding of the class, gender and global dynamics of creativity and knowledge possession and deployment is also sorely needed. We know, for instance, that the creative industries, particularly publishing, film and television, are dominated by workers with professional middle class backgrounds and excellent social capital, as well as, increasingly, the economic resources to support them through unpaid internships (Randle, Forson and Calveley, 2015; OBrien et al, 2016). Nevertheless, the relationship between employers and even the most privileged of knowledge workers is characterised by a profound imbalance of power and one which is arguably becoming increasingly asymmetrical as work is progressively dominated by precarious forms of employment, including free labour (Gill, 2002; Ross, 2013; Terranova, 2013).

There are clear gendered and racial consequences of the increasing individualisation of virtual and creative labour (Freeman, 2000; Grain, Poster and Cherry, 2016). The working arrangements which once characterised feminised and migrant labour in general interrupted employment, precariousness of earning power - are now becoming normalised across the labour force. Traditional secure forms of employment are being displaced by impermanent, short-term forms of self-employment, unprotected by labour rights and welfare provision; with this weakening of social protection, traditional forms of social support, dependant on traditional gender roles, resume significance (Adkins, 1999; McRobbie, 2016). Affective labour has a further significance in the context of virtual work: the performance of emotion and investment of passion, indeed whole areas of personal resources, are increasingly harnessed in the sphere of paid labour for the production of value (Webster and Randle, 2016), and creative labour epitomises this state of affairs (McRobbie, 2016). Although none of the papers in this Special Issue directly address the gender dimensions of creativity or innovation in virtual work, these are gaps in our knowledge that are worthy of thorough investigation.

Creativity and innovation as social and political processes

The aim of this Special Issue is to subject the concepts of creativity, knowledge and innovation in virtual work to critical scrutiny. In their different ways, the papers presented here help to advance this critique through their uses of these concepts. Pink, Lingard and Harley argue that creativity should be treated, not so much as an outcome or objective of individual human behaviour, but as an improvisation process that is, as they put it, integral to human activity. In other words, creativity is part of the daily endeavour of working, and perhaps more routinely practised than tends to be recognised, particularly in policy debates concerned with boosting the economic performance of the cultural industries or the scientific/technical sector. As they note, work practices, by definition, reflect the realities people have to deal with in new and unpredictable situations. This is a similar point to that made by McKinlay and Smith (2009), who argue that most forms of even routine work include some elements of creativity, so that creativity may be interspersed with run-of-the-mill tasks. The boundary between apparently creative labour and other forms of labour may be more difficult to discern than is often supposed. Only the most detailed of ethnographic labour process research is likely to reveal the performative engagements with the materials that surround us (Hallam and Ingold, 2007: 3, quoted in Pink, Lingard and Harley) in each empirical situation, and this is precisely the objective of Pink, Lingard and Harleys paper here.

Treating creativity as an everyday human process of knowing and problem-solving also reminds us that it is not just an attribute of individuals, but is, just as importantly, a collective activity. This point is particularly powerfully demonstrated in the paper by Chamakiotis and Panteli on the creative process in virtual product development teams. Creativity in this kind of context hinges on individual motivation, conceptual skills and problem solving abilities, but also on leadership skills, facilitation skills, team diversity, and organisational cultures and arrangements that enable cooperative joint effort. Here, then, creativity is constantly present, but can take many forms, from ideas for novel products, to ideas presentation to problem solution, most of which rely on collaboration between team members.

This is both empowering and egalitarian: it moves us away from thinking in terms of creatives or geniuses labouring away alone and having lightbulb moments of inspiration, and restores attention to the potential of every person to innovate or, in Pinks account, improvise - in order to problem-solve at work. In turn, this improves recognition of the value, which is so often overlooked, of these knowing activities, including those that are undocumented because they are informal, or physically embodied and performed, rather than conceptualised. As well as being a more democratic concept of innovation, this is also more gender-equal one: the stereotype of the lone innovator has historically been a male figure, so that women innovators, like women scientists and women technologists, have been all too invisible (Hearn and Husu, 2011).

Stoerpf, Flecker, Schnauer and Eichmanns paper on the control of crowdsourced creative labour similarly calls for a process perspective in understanding the ways in which workers acquaint themselves with the workings of the online platform, but their paper subjects the concept of creativity to an additional type of critique. They question whether the term creative labour is applicable to this form of virtual work at all, given the circumstances in which it is carried out. Their paper reflects a now widespread interest in the phenomenon of crowdworking, though their focus is on the terms on which creative labour, specifically, is managed and controlled via online crowdsourcing platforms. Their definition of creative labour is somewhat different from that Pink, Lingard and Harleys; taken from the work of Banks and Hesmondhalgh (2009), it relates to the products rather than the process of the labour original and distinctive commodities that are primarily aesthetic and/or symbolic-expressive. Their research investigated the work of such creatives as graphic designers, illustrators, and voice over artists. In these occupations, they see several areas of fundamental tension between creativity and the control of crowdsourced labour through online platforms. Modularised and standardised work packages militate against the exercise of creativity in any substantial sense. Furthermore, there is constant pressure on workers to undercut the competition in order to secure a contract, and having underbid by shaving time budgets, they find themselves under such pressure that they no longer have the luxury of the time needed to explore possibilities and solutions in the ways that these types of creative work demand. Some online platforms set very short windows within which workers may accept and then carry out their jobs, to the extent of monitoring availability and response times, so that the workers themselves lose any control over incoming contracts, the pace at which they can deliver them and the price they can command for the work. In these circumstances, and in order to make something like a decent living, they tend to juggle multiple contracts and deadlines simultaneously (the phenomenon so aptly labelled bulimic working by Pratt (2002)), and this too, is inimical to originality and inspiration. Finally, online ratings systems act as powerful controls on creative labourers, whose reputations, and therefore capacity for securing future work, can stand or fall by the client ratings they are awarded. Stoerpf and his colleagues paper shows how creative workers negotiate their ways through these forms of technical or bureaucratic control, sometimes suffering payment defaults, and sometimes voluntarily adding in extra work for free in order to honour their own professionalism, to boost their prestige and future employability, or simply to indulge their passion for the work (McRobbie, 2016).

Despite this somewhat gloomy assessment of the autonomy left to creatives when working online via a crowdsourcing platform, there are some areas of creative work that cannot be controlled by hegemonic means by clients or their online intermediaries. They cannot prescribe the way in which the work should be done, nor can they observe the processes by which the worker did it, since the process is essentially conceptual and cognitive, not amenable to codification and thereby to external control. Nor can they anticipate the result of the creative endeavour. In fact, Pink and her colleagues highlight the empowerment that can be gained by workers using digital devices to creatively share knowledge in order to improve their safety at work. Chamakiotis and Pantelis assessment of shared creativity is similarly optimistic, though they also point to the ways in which digital working can inhibit creativity by over-formalising communication dynamics. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental asymmetry of power and control between virtual labour and employers (or clients); the design of online platforms and particularly the functioning of online reputation systems capture and buttress this asymmetry, though clearly the potential for control over labour is moderated in other settings where their relative autonomy is useful (Burawoy, 1979).

All of these papers remind us in different ways that digital labour is not conceptually or empirically separate from physical labour, or from work in the material economy. In practice, these forms of corporal and virtual labour are interlinked and often mutually interdependent. Pink, Lingard and Harley refer to digital materiality, by which they mean that [t]he digital, the material and design are not specific and separate things, but are rather more porous elements of processes of research, design and intervention (Pink, Ardevol and Lanzeni, 2016, quoted in Pink, Lingard and Harley). In the case of manual work, this concept describes the ways in which workers are able to conduct their everyday work activities, communicate with colleagues and access information on construction sites has both material and digital elements. At another level of analysis, and as Chamakiotis and Panteli illustrate, forms of virtual work both support and require the material economy; underlying the panoply of activities in virtual work is a solid material economy composed of the value chain functions of extraction, manufacturing, transport, logistics and so on (Huws, 2013). Virtual labour is inextricably linked with these physical activities.

Methodological tools

Much virtual work is spatially dispersed, locally and globally (Webster and Randle, 2016). Analysis of dispersed creative work, or creativity in global value chains requires methodological tools which can appropriately identify, map and evaluate their dynamics. Here the papers in this Special Issue raise a methodological question mark. Stoerpf and his colleagues, for instance, introduce a novel method in their assessment of the control of online creatives by conducting participant observations of their online clients. Chamakiotis and Panteli also make extensive use of observational methods in the context of a case study, and it seems that particularly close contact with creative workers is needed if the detailed nature and exercise of creativity is to be effectively appreciated in the research process.

In order to analyse the processual, collective and tacit nature of digital creativity, Pink, Lingard and Hartleys research draws on visual ethnography and uses digital video, both as the subject of the research and as the method of undertaking it. Their concern is to understand the ways in which research subjects construction workers in this case - are situated in, experience and shape their particular everyday environments. Video offers a powerful means of observing and recording these processes, as an online platform for safety management is developed and workers use and further develop it through continuous improvisation based on their embodied knowledge and experience. The process of innovation-in-implementation, whereby users (re)configure technologies in order to reflect local contingencies, has previously been analysed in relation to the development and implementation of manufacturing technologies (Fleck, 1993). However, in order to discern the unvoiced knowledges and requirements that workers bring to their engagement with workplace technologies, a visually eloquent method is needed. For Pink, Lingard and Harley, the association of video with ways of knowing, and empathetic embodied understanding and learning not necessarily expressed in spoken words was particularly relevant. Yet their paper raises the familiar issue of how this knowledge is to be valorised; it is significant that the knowledge only becomes visible, and therefore valued, once it has been inscribed within a digital resource.

The whole fluidity of the virtual labour market, in creative sectors particularly, is likely to challenge the research methods which are commonly deployed in the study of permanent, geographically anchored, forms of labour. In a fast changing virtual labour market, with constantly shifting forms of employment and the entry of whole areas of unpaid labour into the process of value creation, multiple newly developing occupations, and plenty of disappearing ones, are in evidence. The research issues raised by virtual work call for a triangulation of methods, from ethnography and case studies to big data, and for insights from across the disciplinary boundaries of, for example, sociology, management, political economy, media and communication studies, gender studies and organisation studies. Tracking the emergence of new occupations and the disappearance of old ones, as well as analysing the working conditions, skills requirements and social dynamics of the new model workers (Ross 2009) will require its own creativity and innovation.

Reflections and Perspectives

We set out to develop our understanding of the creative or knowledge content of particular forms of virtual work through this Special Issue. This is not a simple undertaking. As we noted at the beginning of this editorial, the term virtual work covers a very diverse range of phenomena, as do the terms creativity and innovation, and the assumed relationship between them is rarely empirically tested. The papers in this special issue alone demonstrate that there are hugely varied types of virtual work, from crowdsourcing to virtual teams to digital health and safety management. There is, additionally, a vast and rapidly expanding body of research addressing the diverse dimensions of the digital economy and its related phenomena, the sharing economy, cognitive capitalism, the creative industries, digital labour, and so on, and all of which may or may not involve some degree of creativity and innovation.

Nevertheless, what emerges from this special issue and much other research is that the creative aspect of virtual work is often highly contested terrain. Crowdsourcing platforms increasingly important sources of creative labour - are designed in ways which circumscribe the room for manoeuvre by crowdsourced graphic designers and other artistic and media workers, though there are some areas where, to date, requesters cannot entirely control the creative process. As online platforms are progressively used to source highly skilled knowledge work, for example, in professions such as aerospace and automotive engineering (Silberman, 2016), it is possible that this control may be extended into new and hitherto unaffected occupational areas.

It remains to be seen whether and to what extent the virtual design teams still employed within organisations are likely to be displaced by freelance online workers. There are signs that this is already beginning to happen, and it raises the question of what precisely are the limits to the fragmentation of creative and knowledge work, and in what areas of work may creativity be retained - or even newly exercised in online environments of different types. Two of our papers (on health and safety training and virtual design teams) offer more optimistic assessments of the potential for virtual work to support creative activity; in both cases creativity appears as a social process rather than an individual attribute or a momentary phenomenon. It also emerges through negotiation between workers, and these two papers demonstrate that responsive management cultures within employing organisations are vital in ensuring that creativity is encouraged and supported.

The opportunities for these workers to collectively problem solve in the course of their work must surely have an impact on their occupational identities and their sense of joint purpose an issue which merits further investigation. What emerges very strongly, though, from the accounts of crowdsourced creative labour in this issue as well as from other research on this topic, is the profound sense of occupational isolation and lack of collective bargaining power that freelance creatives often experience. The new types of labour organising which have arisen in response to the working conditions of creatives show how sorely needed are collective initiatives to challenge the strong supremacy of the online hirers (McKercher and Mosco, 2010; De Peuter and Cohen, 2014). This may also have huge implications for the position and strategies of trade unions in organising and protecting virtual workers, an issue which also warrants more research. This special issue is only the beginning of a discussion of creative virtual work as a social and political project. It is both about individual working lives and the struggles that represent the collective experience of labour. The effects of ethnicity, gender, age, nationality and class on these emerging occupational identities remain salient issues that will require further investigation.

There are also more far-reaching questions about the future of creativity in virtual work to be considered in research to come. Ultimately, perhaps we should be looking further ahead to the development of the very newest technologies which are widely predicted to displace knowledge workers altogether. Large-scale automation predicated on machine learning, rapid developments in robotics and exponential growth in computing power and big data seem poised to transform the range of tasks that machines can fulfil, with profound consequences for every area of the labour market, including knowledge work and creative labour (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014). Will human creativity always be superior to machine labour? Will the human capacity for flexibility and affect help to retain the attractiveness of living labour? Or, perhaps, will human creative labour simply be more economical to retain by virtue of its low cost compared to knowing machines (Srnicek and Williams, 2015)? It is likely that what we recognise as virtual work today is only the beginning of a much more profoundly automated future. The question is whether this will reinforce or reverse the dynamics of virtual creative labour today.

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