The literature on market-mediated work, such as professional gig-work in the cultural industries, have shown how this type of work infuses what Fleming (2017) calls a ‘radical responsibilization’ on the part of the individuals doing this work. This entails that cultural gig workers are subjectivized and responsibilized into entrepreneurial agents, whose moral duty it is to constantly work on and increase their economic value in the job-market at the same time as they bear the economic risks related to work. As a solution to this, the idea of work cooperatives (coops) has been put forward as a way in which such responsibilization could be minimized, as the foundational idea here is that the responsibility and risks of for example economic loss or work shortage are shared. However, whether work cooperatives are indeed a solution to the problem of responsibilization and how this may play out remains unclear.

This study contributes to the literature on work cooperatives in the gig economy by illustrating the complex and entangled ways in which work cooperative members in the cultural industries become responsible not only for their own careers and work opportunities, but also for the cooperative as such. Many people want to work in the cultural industries, as work here offers the promise of autonomy, self-realization and the possibility to do what you love and are passionate about for a living, as well as enabling a by many desired identity. Additionally, as cultural and creative production is most often conducted by freelancers with protean careers, cultural work also promises a working life of independence and freedom. However, the other side of the coin of cultural work is that workers in these industries often face challenging economic conditions, as much of the studies of cultural labour shows.

This literature has identified some consistent findings: Cultural industries work tends to be project-based and irregular, with short-term contracts and minimal job security. Freelance or self-employment is common, career prospects are uncertain, earnings are frequently low and unequally distributed over time, and access to insurance, health, and pension benefits is limited. Cultural workers tend to be younger and more likely to hold secondary or multiple jobs. Additionally, women, ethnic minorities, and other underrepresented groups often encounter disadvantages in these types of work. Overall, the cultural industries experience an excess of labor, with many individuals working for free or for subsistence wages. (Banks and Hesmodhalgh, 2009, Towse 1992, Bourdieu1998, McRobbie 1998, 2002, Ursell 2000, Blair 2003, Ross 2003, Willis and Dex 2003, Terranova 2004, Neff etal. 2005, Banks 2007, Gill 2007, Hesmondhalgh 2007, Morini 2007).

Hence, studies of professional gig-work inthe cultural industries show how in such work, risk are transferred from the employer to the working individual where she has to bear the economic risks of work shortage; manage her career, skill development, pension and social protection coverage; constantly work on securing future work; and work on her “employability” in order to access new projects and assignments (Hesmondhalg and Baker, 2011; Halpin & Smith, 2017). Due to the rather economically precarious 3 nature of professional gig-work in the cultural industries, researchers and activists are becoming interested in how one may organize work in this industry to reduce economic precarity and make this work more sustainable.

A number of scholars are suggesting that worker owned cooperatives could be a possible solution to the problems of precarity and bad working conditions in gig work in general (Schor, 2020; Rothstein,2023). As a founding principle of workers’ cooperatives is the shared responsibility for work, to organize professional gig-work in cooperative ways may also reduce the increasing responsibilization and atomization of work. However, whether this is actually the case or not, and how cooperativism interact with, and possibly counter act, the responsibilization of work is a question that needs to be investigated. This study aims to shed light on this.

The paper is based on an in-depth qualitative study consisting mainly of interviews, but also of observations and document analysis of policy texts on cultural and creative industries work, as well as material onthe studied cooperatives and their operations (promotion material, yearly reports etc). All in all, we conducted 45 number of interviews, out of which 35 were with cultural workers and the rest with actors in the institutional field.We finish the paper by discussing how responsibilization plays out for cultural professionals in worker cooperatives in the cultural industries.