• ISBN13: 9780367673758
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: Communication, Mass Media and Journalism
• Publisher: T&F
• Publisher Imprint: Routledge
• Publication Date: November 12, 2025
• Pages: 432
• Original Price: GBP 34.99
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 530 grams

This book is a first of its kind critical inter-disciplinary introduction to the economic, political, cultural, and technological dimensions of work in the rapidly growing digital media and entertainment industries (DMEI). Tanner Mirrlees presents a comprehensive guide to understanding the key contexts, theories, methods, debates and struggles surrounding work in the DMEI. Packed with current examples and accessible research findings, the book highlights the changing conditions and experiences of work in the DMEI. It surveys the DMEI’s key sectors and occupations, and considers the complex intersections between labour and social power relations of class, gender, and race, as well as tensions between creativity and commerce, freedom and control, meritocracy and hierarchy, and precarity and equity, diversity, and inclusivity. Chapters also explore how work in the DMEI is being reshaped by capitalism and corporations, government and policies, management, globalization, platforms, A.I., and worker collectives such as unions and cooperatives. This book is a critical introduction to this growing area of research, teaching, learning, life, labour, and organizing, with an eye to understanding work in the DMEI and changing it, for the better. Offering a broad overview of the field, this textbook is an indispensable resource for instructors, undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.

Tanner Mirrlees is the current Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University, where he has been teaching the Work in the Creative and Tech Industries course for over a decade. He is the author of numerous publications including Global Entertainment Media (2013), Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Cultural Industry (2016), and EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age (2019).