1. Value relation as regulation: a
case study of billable hours in
the creative industries
Frederick Harry Pitts
Dept. of Social & Policy Sciences
University of Bath
2. My PhD Research
• Looks at issues around value and
measure in the creative industries.
• Case study of billable hours in graphic
design and advertising.
• Qualitative approach to quantitative
process.
• Interviews with employees in UK and the
Netherlands.
3. Research Conundrum
• Creative labour characterised as immaterial,
ephemeral, heterogeneous.
• What problems does this pose for measure,
valuation, commensuration?
• Law of value- capitalist exchange depends
upon comparability, commensurability,
equivalence. This regulates everything in
capitalist society.
• Billable hours a mode of this regulation.
4. Theoretical Foundations
• 'Value-form' approaches to Marx's theory of
value. Unorthodox, critical, radical.
• Key thinkers Heinrich, Bonefeld, Bellofiore.
Adorno an important influence.
• Emphasis on unfolding abstract process of
'social validation' rather than substantialist
understanding of value as the product of
specific concrete labour.
• Value theory a critical theory of society
rather than hamfisted economic account.
5. Theoretical Foundations cont'd
• This process of 'social validation' culminates in
commodity exchange
• But steps must be taken within production to
help the exchange abstraction cohere.
• Differences must be smoothed out, things
rendered commensurate, a realm of pure
quantity established.
• Creative labour harder to do this with.
Billable hours an attempt to do so.
6. Billable Hours
• Process of contracting and accounting
whereby different hours of labour valued
differently and billed to clients on this basis.
• Overcomes concrete heterogeneity &
overflowing temporality of creative labour
with abstract quantitative framework.
• Law of value manifests by bringing all in
relation with all else. Number assists in this.
Regulation by the market.
7. Regulation by the market
• Client-agency relationship brings creative
logics into line with business outcomes.
• Need to make understandable, and,
importantly, commensurable.
• Intensified by a) increasingly integral role
taken by creative industries in capitalist
economy and b) prevailing market
uncertainty, on top of uncertainty typical of
'unknowable' creative products.
8. Rationalising & articulating
• Billable hours take a dual role of
• a) rationalising the eccentric practices of
creative labour, to render them
measurable internally, and
• b) articulating these practices to other
businesses in private and public sector
(also in conformity with cultures of
openness and accountability etc.)
9. Tensions and struggles
• Billable hours as a mode of the regulation
by the law of value entail certain tensions
and struggles over the character of creative
practice.
• First is that of the employer to enforce
measure, quantification, commemoration.
• Second is that of individual & collective
creatives, whose principles tend to conflict
with those of capitalist exchange.
10. Hiding and forgetting
• The smooth quantitative surface of billable
hours can conceal practices of both
exploitation and insubordination.
• The whole process depends upon the ability
to forget what is unbillable,
incommensurable, unassimilable.
• What is recorded need not have
happened, from perspective of both
employee and employer. Timesheets
always lie!
11. Remembrance and breaches
• The abstraction from reality that is needed to
construct the regulatory framework of billable
hours becomes clear in the 'breaches' where
the system breaks down.
• The threat posed to the reproduction of
this mode of regulation derives from
memory, from remembrance- the capacity
to recall that which is elided, excluded and
abstracted from- desires, emotions, play,
slacking, power relations, utopia.
