This inquiry into the significance of individual and collective experiencing in late-modern capitalism is dedicated to my graduate school teachers at the University of Washington, who each with their extraordinary expertise have inspired me to explore their respective paths and who keep resonating in my thought and research processes as I am going my own path: Gary G. Hamilton, Howard S. Becker, and the late Herbert L. Costner.
The research for this book benefitted from grants and institutional support by the Economic and Social Research Council (res 000-22-1056), British Academy (sg-41938), the University of Cambridge, the University of Exeter, and Singapore Management University (06-C208-smu-021). It started with Iain A. Lang as co-investigator on the esrc-grant project and would have been less tactile and fun without him. I thank the diligent and enthusiastic research assistants who, between 2005 and 2011, helped with data collection, interview transcriptions, and survey data compilations. These are Jean Harrington, Amy Singer (Research Fellow), Simon Clode, Anthony Creaton, and Maren Klotz at Exeter University; and Edward Lim Junhao, Eleina Ailmchandani, Eileen Lee Yi Hui, Alvin Witirto, Shu Ting Wee, and Zen Goh Wan Chen at smu. Legal scholar Katharina Möser will be remembered for bringing my attention to the legal aspects of volunteer recruiting on our visit to the Australian field sites. My former colleague, the late philosopher John N. Williams will be remembered for his fine translation of the English-German comparative law paper I wrote with Katharina. I thank Christian Boulanger for commenting on Chapter 9; Steven Vallas for commenting on early research outputs pertaining to the sociology of work, and William N. (Bill) Kaghan and Wai-Keung Chung for commenting on Chapter 4.
For co-writing conference papers in the early stages and interdisciplinary dialogue on some of the major ideas that made it into this book, I thank the Cambridge economist Alan Shipman, who also read closely the full manuscript. Partial results were presented at various university conferences and academic workshops in Berlin, Chicago, Grenoble, Hong Kong, London, Lund, Montreal, New York, Seattle, Singapore, and Venice. For their contributions to these various conference papers, I thank Katharina Möser, Shu Ting Wee, Miodrag (Misha) Petrovic, and Iain Lang. I also thank Skadi Loist, now at Film University of Babelsberg, who since 2008 kept drawing me into the circles of the enthusiastic media scholars’ community whose works are ‘on stage’ in Chapter 1.
I enjoyed the productive atmosphere emanating from working with brill, thanking Masja Horn for putting my manuscript under swiftly review, the anonymous reviewers for their enthusiastic support of the project, and Christa Stevens for her extremely efficient coordination at every stage. Having foraged research libraries for festival ephemera and literature over the course of many years, I will not forget the wonderful support by staff in libraries and collections, especially Ruth Pagell, former chief of staff at smu’s Li Kashing Library in Singapore, but many more, such as at the Berlin State Library at Unter den Linden where I had my own desk for a year, the Hong Kong Film Archive, ucla Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles, and the inter-library loan section office at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
Key informant dialogue on ‘the industry’ provided for some of the major ‘turning points’ in research strategy, allowing for the multi-perspectival approach of this book: I thank Jonathan Handel in Los Angeles, Gabrielle Kelly in New York and Singapore for sharing their insider views; Peter Tsi in Hong Kong for opening my eyes to the business models circulating in festivals; Alfred Cervantes in Houston for helping me understand film policy; and Kathryn Lenton for getting me through the maze of Sundance. I am grateful to my graduate-school peer Julie (Beth) Jackson for examining excruciatingly my statistical model results and sharing interpretations and draft-readings that lead to a robust first draft of what later became Chapter 6. The same goes for Singapore fellow sociologist Nicholas (Nick) Harrigan, who helped interconnecting the data correctly while also vetting my first conference-paper output. At smu, I also benefited from having productive talks with my peers at the School of Social Sciences, such as Brian Mooney, Ivy Lau, Sandy Lim, Kirpal Singh, Clara Portela, Wai Keung Cheung, Eduard Jordaan, Luan Shenghua as well as the smu geographer Kam Tin Seong. Finally, I must acknowledge the influence of Hans-Peter Müller at Humboldt University of Berlin on some of the theoretical explorations in this work, as his passion for European sociological theory was contagious.
Turning to friends and family, I want to express special gratitude to Frank Hoche whose persisting interest in precarious cultural work and current social politics engendered many exciting discussions; Benedikt von Ammon for all
Art is collective action. So is science. In this spirit, I am deeply grateful to Mohammed Hegazi in Kuala Lumpur for holding me accountable to my daily writing progress on the final stretch; and to Ayşe Lenz in Berlin for reminding me of the fine difference between endurance and persistence.