From leisure to labour: towards a typology of the motivations, structures and experiences of work‐related blogging

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Jane Parry,Brian J. Hracs
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12179

314 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 35:3

ISSN 1468-005X

From leisure to labour: towards a typology of

the motivations, structures and experiences

of work-related blogging

Jane Parry and Brian J. Hracs

Beyond a purely social activity, mode of leisure or form of es-

cape, blogging is an increasingly important form of labour that

is becoming central to many jobs, occupations and forms of

self-employment. Yet, the labour dynamics of blogging remain

poorly understood and articulated. To address this gap, this pa-

per presents a novel typology of work-related blogging based

on the integration of existing knowledge, an in-depth qualita-

tive analysis of 10 blogs and 1,304 blog posts and a ‘total social

organisation of labour’ framework. It contributes to the sociol-

ogy of work by unpacking and nuancing our collective under-

standing of the relationships between blogging, labour market

mobility and labour market trends such as the fragmentation

of work, the heightened signicance of unpaid labour and new

forms of resistance and solidarity in the digital age.

Keywords: blogging, digitised work, motivations, occupations

and unpaid labour, TSOL, mobility.

Introduction

Personalised online writing has been a part of the internet since 1994, and the term

‘weblog’ was coined in 1997 (webdesignerdepot, 2011). However, Web 2.0 and the

shift towards connectivity facilitated the proliferation of blogs in their current form,

underpinned by blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger (webdesignerde-

pot, 2011). Although the styles and aims of blogs continue to evolve, they are com-

monly understood as regularly updated websites featuring text, images and video

content produced by individuals in an informal style (Fullwood et al., 2015). As of au-

tumn 2020, there are over 500 million blogs out of 1.7 billion total websites in the world

(or 29.4 percent) (Hostingtribunal, 2020). Collectively, bloggers are said to produce 2

million posts daily and one in three bloggers monetise their online activities

(Hostingtribunal, 2020). Despite the parallel growth and examination of social media

platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (Duffy and Hund, 2015), it is

clear that blogs represent an important arena in their own right and scholars in a vari-

ety of elds, including sociology, geography, cultural studies and media studies have

paid increasing attention to the format and practice of blogging (Dean, 2010; Rettberg,

2014; Gandini, 2016).

The relevant existing literature highlights a range of motivations for blogging

(Huang et al., 2007; Fullwood et al., 2015), which also shape blogs’ style, content and

interactivity (Joosse and Hracs, 2015). Based on interviews with bloggers, Nardi et al.

JaneParry, Department of Organisational Behaviour and HRM, Southampton Business School, Univer-

sity of Southampton, UK.

Brian J. Hracs, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton, UK.

A typology of work-related blogging 315

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

(2004) present motives such as self-improvement, life-documenting, commenting,

expressing feelings, using blogs as a globally and providing a community forum.

Subsequent studies have added information seeking and sharing, self-presentation,

entertaining others and connecting with like-minded individuals (Huang et al., 2007;

Chung and Kim, 2008; Sepp et al., 2011). Blogging has also been conceptualised as a

form of escapism with immersion in online communities offering a retreat from the

real world, boredom, responsibilities and problems, while providing an opportunity

to try out new ideas and identities (Sepp et al., 2011). Although blogging is often per-

ceived as public communication, describing environments and experiences for exter-

nal audiences, many bloggers write about their feelings and thoughts as though to an

internal audience (Nardon et al., 2015).

This literature provides a useful foundation from which to explore the motivations

and outcomes of blogging, but as Sepp et al. (2011) argue, more empirical studies and

conceptual work are needed to better understand the structures, complexities and in-

terconnections of blogs. This paper integrates existing knowledge with an in-depth

qualitative analysis of 10 blogs, 1,304 blog posts and a ‘total social organisation of la-

bour’ (TSOL) framework to develop a novel typology for understanding a signicant

subset of blogging activity: work-related blogging. While the literature has predomi-

nantly conceptualised blogging as a social activity, mode of leisure or escape, shifting

the focus to blogging in connection to work enables us to understand a rather different

conguration. In this context we are able to observe a more purposeful manifestation

of efforts, involving a range of skills and tasks such as writing, advertising and mone-

tisation that are performed in physical and virtual spaces around the clock (Hracs and

Leslie, 2014).

Blogging is an international phenomenon which is becoming central to many jobs,

occupations and forms of self-employment within the creative industries and broader

economy and represents an emerging form of global labour (Duffy and Wissinger,

2017). Yet, the ‘work’ associated with blogging, which might include creating content

for a range of platforms while building and maintaining an audience, remains poorly

understood. A closer, and more critical, examination of the labour dynamics of blog-

ging makes an important contribution to the sociology of work. Our primary aim is to

explore the motivations, experiences, and structures behind work-related blogging.

We also attempt to link this form of work to wider developments in contemporary la-

bour markets including the fragmentation of work and new forms of resistance and

solidarity in the digital age. Indeed, the diversity and dynamism of work-related blog-

ging neatly illustrates some of the contested and uid boundaries around labour cate-

gories, practices and mobilities, as blogging activities cover both paid and unpaid

work, and range from self-employment to contracted labour.

Notably, the work-related blogging that we explore is conceptually distinctive from

‘workblogging’, which forms just one part of our typology (5A). Workbloggers are

structurally discrete, being located within rms, and blogging about their working

lives, often in a specically oppositional format (Richards, 2008; Richards and Kosmala,

2013; Pedersen et al., 2014). As we highlight, work-related blogging is broader. It con-

tains blogging set in different work and non-work domains initiated by individuals

which creates content that often goes beyond their daily paid working lives. This dif-

fusiveness, and our aim to capture the blurred labour boundaries around blogging, has

been highly inuential in the ‘total social organisation of labour’ (TSOL) conceptual

framework (Glucksmann, 1995) that we adopt and discuss below.

The typology that we develop and populate in this paper offers a structured frame-

work for understanding how blogging-related labour, including motivations, practices

and outcomes, uctuate not only over time, but from blog post to blog post. We un-

pack and map the relationship between paid and unpaid work in bloggers’ occupa-

tional negotiations. Using the rich empirical detail from our qualitative analysis

facilitates a nuanced interrogation of constraints, opportunities, relationships and con-

icts within this evolving eld of digitally driven labour. We assert that new working

practices like blogging offer a compelling focus of study in understanding negotiations

of a recongured labour market, enabling work-related solidarities to be formulated at