A faultline of mental and physical ill-health runs through the creative industries. Mark Deuze argues in this timely, important book that this is a structural characteristic, as evidenced by a diverse range of surveys and reports documenting the experiences of media workers. This is an area of scholarship that Deuze has contributed extensively to over the past two decades, for example, with Media Work (Deuze, 2007) and the edited volume Making Media (Deuze & Prenger, 2019). Well-Being and Creative Careers is a compelling read, propelled by a sense of mission on the author’s part. He makes clear his personal investment in the topic as a musician, journalist, and professor whose students represent the next generation of media workers and for whose future prospects he cares.
The opening chapters establish the context, motivation, and main conceptual definitions at stake in the book. “Well-being”, in Deuze’s formulation, is both individual and social; it encompasses feeling good, functioning well, and living up to one’s potential, as well as a sense of belonging within a community (pp. 69–70). When people undertake “creative careers”, their well-being is subjected to a fundamental tension inherent in their professional environment: On the one hand, creative careers are more of a “calling” (p. 72) than a straightforward paid job, linking closely to an identity as a “creative” of some kind. On the other hand, this type of work carries pressures and risks including precarious employment and “atypical” working patterns, conditions, and relationships. Therefore, Deuze regards well-being “in terms of social, political, and economic structures that determine how people can live, work, and play” (p. 77). This, in turn, defines the paradox of creative work being a source of joy, identity, and “enchantment”, while at the same time containing material risks to health, well-being, and even life. More broadly, the problem that Deuze engages with here is not exclusive to the media and creative industries, namely, a wider shift to precarity, atypical work, and casualised employment (p. 152).
The fourth chapter, “Mapping the Crisis”, serves as the book’s central repository of evidence, tallying up an impressive number of surveys and reports on well-being across six categories of media work (advertising, music, film and TV, games, social media entertainment, and journalism). Here, Deuze establishes the scale and consistency of the links between the “material aspects” and “affective dimensions” of these key areas and the well-being of the workers within them. In this chapter, as in the book at large, there is an element of repetition in different instances of job-related ill-health that serves to illustrate the consistency across the national and professional context of the fundamental challenge laid out in the book’s title. That consistency also invites the reader to add examples of their own to Deuze’s corpus. Thinking about the Nordic context, for example, the core argument fits a range of reports and surveys that have similarly documented well-being challenges faced by artists and creative workers: Precarious employment and income anxiety feature prominently, as well as the risks of unclear professional boundaries, including bullying and sexual harassment on the job, as exemplified by the report Stregen i Sandet published with a coalition of Danish associations of creative professionals (see, e.g., Kleppe & Askvik, 2023; Ruusuvirta et al., 2023; Telese, 2025; Stregen i Sandet, 2025).
Deuze points out that the creativity, buzz, and “aspirational labour” of media work often come at the expense of professionalism. The chapter “Doing What you Love as a Blessing and a Curse” expands upon a key theme of the book, the “calling” to work in a creative field and the love of the work, set against the material realities of the professions built around that work. Thus, a key theme of the book is what it takes to become and remain a creative professional. A defining characteristic of professionalism is that it draws a boundary between role and individual. This boundary, as Deuze illustrates, is often vague in the creative industries, where personal creativity and talent also serve as professional qualifications. The result is a persistent blurring of distinctions between the personal and the professional when people work on short-term projects without clear organisational rules or guidelines. Thus, management skills and leadership crop up repeatedly as areas of practice in need of more care and respect for the people being managed. Media work, in Deuze’s analysis, is characterised by a lack of principled management that takes seriously its duty of care towards the creative professionals within its remit (pp. 48, 71).
This fits a larger pattern in creative labour and media work: The risk of what may feel like a “labour of love” tends to fall disproportionately on the workers themselves, including risks to health and well-being, yet this ethic “draws and keeps people engaged and coming back with the industry’s uneven and capricious ways of managing work” (pp. 114–115). Deuze invokes Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” to name this dynamic, with an eye on the practicalities of how this actually happens. Infused with the potential of creativity, those ways of working persist because they rest upon a belief system: “In short, the cruel optimism inherent in media work reminds us that people do not have a creative career – it is a promise of one” (p. 222).
That promise always comes with the many caveats of an uncertain future. Deuze’s book represents a timely intervention in those larger questions of what is in store for the fundamental concepts of “career”, “talent”, and “creativity” at this historical juncture. Well-being and Creative Careers opens up a range of interesting questions about the meaning of creative work in the age of “content”, and about the possible structural incentives for improved business practices across media and creative industries. The closing chapter, “Finding Joy at Work”, represents not so much a conclusion as an ambitious programme of further scholarship and policy in this area. For example, Deuze draws on Ana Alacovska’s “hopeful sociology of creative work” (Alacovska, 2019) to argue that a more sustainable approach to creative careers is possible, based on an “ethics of care and dignity at work” (p. 235). The challenge Deuze leaves his readers to consider is what it would take to make this the new default setting for media work and beyond.