Creative work for humble professions: micro-entrepreneurs innovating the food and beverage sector in Italy

Recently, the successful Creative Industries imaginary allowed an expansion of the professions in which to ‘Be Creative’ is an imperative (McRobbie, 2016). This is also happening in traditionally labor-intensive professions, far from the high-tech industries (Ocejo, 2017), deeply transforming the identities and experiences of these ‘new’ professionals from the precedent ones. The proposed research analyzes this trend through an ethnography of micro-entrepreneurs in food and beverage businesses in Milan, with a focus on two fields: ‘creative bartenders’ from upscaling neighborhoods and gourmet food truckers. Three main results are discussed. First, unlike the previous ones, new professionals are generally middle-class individuals with high cultural capital that choose these professions as the easiest entry-point to creative industries, in a stagnant and precarious labor market. Thus, we advance a summary of their nature as hybrid workers, sharing traits with both traditional and creative sectors but with distinctive features. Secondly, we propose three ideal types of professionals, suggesting that the cultural and creative component of labor becomes fundamental to define their identity of dealers and assemblers of authentic taste and experiences, in opposition to traditional ones. Lastly, we analyze the tactics enacted to sustain the high levels of stress and economic precariousness, proposing that they operate a ‘passionate sacrifice’: besides a separation of the identity value of work from its monetary value (Arvidsson, Malossi, Naro 2010) they accept to sacrifice economic profits in the name of passion and distinctiveness.