{"title":"We got you covered: Contextualizing industry insurance practices and the response to Covid-19.","authors":"Derek Johnson","doi":"10.1177/13678779211067262","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In response to Covid-19, media industries have increasingly relied upon insurance to manage risks to health and productivity loss surrounding creative labor. Analysis of contemporary trade journals reveals how the pandemic prompted new urgency around the question of who could get coverage, both by health plans protecting individual workers and cast insurance policies protecting employers. While Covid-19 risks are global in nature, the lack of universal health care exacerbated precarity in US media industries especially, where these two insurance practices overlap: medical coverage depends on the ability to work, which can depend on whether employers can insure their investment in that creative labor. Thus, struggles over insurance must be contextualized within historical discourses that made insurability legible within professional media work cultures. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how corporate media cultures calculate loss and mortality, marking some, but not all, as worthy of status, investment, or protection.","PeriodicalId":47307,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"25 3-4","pages":"369-383"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8901443/pdf/10.1177_13678779211067262.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Cultural Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779211067262","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"CULTURAL STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In response to Covid-19, media industries have increasingly relied upon insurance to manage risks to health and productivity loss surrounding creative labor. Analysis of contemporary trade journals reveals how the pandemic prompted new urgency around the question of who could get coverage, both by health plans protecting individual workers and cast insurance policies protecting employers. While Covid-19 risks are global in nature, the lack of universal health care exacerbated precarity in US media industries especially, where these two insurance practices overlap: medical coverage depends on the ability to work, which can depend on whether employers can insure their investment in that creative labor. Thus, struggles over insurance must be contextualized within historical discourses that made insurability legible within professional media work cultures. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how corporate media cultures calculate loss and mortality, marking some, but not all, as worthy of status, investment, or protection.
期刊介绍:
International Journal of Cultural Studies is committed to rethinking cultural practices, processes, texts and infrastructures beyond traditional national frameworks and regional biases. The journal publishes theoretical, empirical and historical analyses that interrogate what culture means, and what culture does, across global and local scales of power and action, diverse technologies and forms of mediation, and multiple dimensions of performance, experience and identity. Dedicated to theoretical and methodological innovation in cultural research, the journal is multidisciplinary in outlook, publishing relevant contributions that integrate approaches from the social sciences, humanities, information sciences and more. International Journal of Cultural Studies publishes original research articles. The journal gives preference to papers that extend existing theory or generate new theory through interpretive engagement with empirical cases. Papers based on single country case-studies should clearly indicate and develop the broader relevance of their analyses for an international readership. The journal does not publish close readings of single texts; but it does consider critical, contextualised readings that similarly indicate and develop the broader relevance of their analyses to the field. International Journal of Cultural Studies regularly publishes special issues on urgent questions in the field as well as on specific regions, industries and practices.