Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries

Product Information

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content? Dr Brook’s work attracted impact accelerator backing for Arts Emergency’s Youth Collective of young creatives in their early 20s aiming to work in CCIs. The third core argument is that negative aspects of cultural work that seem ubiquitous – for example, periods of working for free and navigating a freelance lifestyle – are in fact experienced very differently by different people, where they can be seen as freeing and exciting for people who are better-resourced and fit the “somatic norm” of a White middle-class man, but crushing inevitabilities for people with less money to fall back on and those who don’t fit that stereotype. The book combines the first large-scale study of social mobility into cultural and creative jobs, hundreds of interviews with creative workers, and a detailed analysis of secondary datasets. This tension could be explored further in relation to precarity: perhaps employers have successfully adapted by presenting autonomy and precarity as a trade-off, not only in cultural occupations any more, but also in other sectors.

It’s important to recognise that there are people who are in both groups, and that there’s plenty of other equally valid approaches to defining culture. A cornerstone of Arts Emergency’s work has been encouraging young people to access creative and humanities education.We should recognise that the unusual working patterns of a large number of people in the sector aren’t symptomatic of a stereotypical contract – although the precarity associated with cultural workers goes far beyond them – and defend and extend workers’ rights and conditions through trade unions. These differences in childhood cultural engagement set up lifelong divergences in the chances of different demographic groups making it into cultural occupations. Given the dimunition of structural support for education in the arts or in government assistance to those without the economic capital to survive the establishing period in a cultural career, we now have a sector dominated by the well-heeled middle class.

The colour of a scarf, the accent of a conversation, can unite people or divide them, and the smallest detail can play its part in signalling who are allies and who are enemies, as much for elites as for citizens in a democracy. We use cookies for different reasons, including measuring your visits to our sites and remembering your preferences.The fact that they may be saying no to unpaid work doesn’t mean they’re not committed or passionate or talented. In Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Manchester University Press, 2020), authors Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor cut through a Gordian Knot of interconnected and complex factors that create and maintain multiple inequalities within the UK Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs). What we found was that the proportions change a lot over time because the social class profile of the broader society changes over time. Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine. The modern backstory to culture leaves us with some mightily unsatisfactory arrangements that need addressing, though it is difficult to say from this read what we ought to be doing about it.