Career patterns in the artistic labour market: multiple job holding and informal professional networks

Artistic labour market shows peculiar features: they are paradigmatic of a project by project organization; there are no formal prerequisites giving access to artistic professions and no institutionalised career paths. Through in-depth interviews, we reconstruct the ideal-typical career pattern in three Italian arts sectors: theatre, dance and cinema. Besides these characteristics, we discovered that: I) artistic labour markets are strongly structured through informal social regulation mechanisms; II) the career patterns are still not individualised, but there is significant uniformity. High uncertainty and formal instability have to be dealt with, both by employers and employees. Thus, for the demand side, it is convenient to rely on established professional networks to recruit personnel. For the supply side, instead, two strategies for dealing with the discontinuity of employment and income emerge: multiple job holding, through the portfolio career pattern, and informal stability achieved by the extensive use of informal professional networks. These latter take on specific configurations within each sector.