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Art and culture are supposed to bring society together. Culture is bad for you challenges the received wisdom that culture is good for us. It does this by demonstrating who makes who and consumes culture are marked by significant inequalities and social divisions.
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. The book shows how unpaid work is endemic to the cultural occupations, excluding those without money and contacts. It explores unequal access to cultural education and demonstrates the importance of culture in childhood. The book looks at gender inequalities, analysing key moments when women leave cultural occupations, while men go on to senior roles. Culture is bad for you also theorises the mechanisms underpinning the long-term and long-standing class crisis in cultural occupations. In doing so it highlights the experiences of working-class origin women of colour as central to how we understand inequality.
Addressing the intersections between social mobility, ethnicity, and gender, the book argues that the creative sector needs to change. At the moment cultural occupations strengthen social inequalities, rather than supporting social justice. It is only then that everyone in society will be able to say that culture is good for you.
spatial hub around which (or near which) new housing and communities can be located. In addition parks can contribute to the urban social-policy agenda more indirectly. From this perspective the focus is on their economic potential to provide spatial hubs for the location of new enterprises in the cultural and creative industries. In this aspect they have the potential to contribute to employment, and thus to urban social-policy goals indirectly by enabling the generation of incomes for employees and also by promoting the social welfare and cultural inclusion associated
of fact, the whole county suffered depopulation that contributed to hollowed villages, rundown traditional houses, the closure of numerous primary schools (Jin & Wang, 2013 ) and the collapse of rural economy and public society, among other problems. These heritage recognitions did prepare for Longtan’s cultural and creative industries-led revitalisation
general study of inequality in society. Thinking about inequality Inequality is now an important subject for academic research. Much of this has been driven by economists and sociologists. 25 That work has tended not to look at cultural and creative industries. Cultural and media studies have done extensive research on the subject. We’re aiming to situate our analysis between these fields. There is extensive, and highly politicised, debate about the nature and extent of inequality. 26 This includes the extent of inequality within countries, as well as between
structural problems. It cautions us to the potential limitations of our critique of inequality in cultural occupations. As we will see, our senior men are well aware of the structural problems. Even with the best intentions of individuals, structural inequalities are replicated and reproduced. As a result, we need to better theorise the relationship between culture and inequality, and think about how to go beyond just raising awareness of the structures underpinning inequality in cultural occupations. Unspeakable inequalities in cultural and creative industries
noted in the introduction that much of the work on cultural and creative industries, and their associated occupations, has been shaped by policy definitions. As with the other parts of our analysis in this book, we are using the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS) influential definition. DCMS’s well-known formation of creative industries covers nine occupational clusters: advertising and marketing; architecture; crafts; design (product, graphic, and fashion design); film, TV, radio, and photography; IT, software, and computer services; publishing; museums
motivated them to become designers. This pattern is echoed in writing stories and in playing an instrument. Groups in cultural and creative industries are by far the most likely to have participated. Fifty-eight per cent of people working in artistic or literary jobs wrote as children, compared with just 38% of people working in higher professional jobs. In turn there are big differences between managerial and professional jobs and other sorts of jobs. The fraction of people in routine jobs who wrote stories as children is half of that of those people in higher
We started the book with a comment from Henna. She was talking about her experiences in the film industry. We’re thinking about Henna again as we close the book. We are going to focus on film and TV to bring together the four themes we’ve discussed in the book. Film and TV also show why looking at occupations is a useful way of understanding inequality in cultural and creative industries. In the late 1960s the BBC broadcast two episodes of its Man Alive documentary series. These episodes looked at the changing patterns and perceptions of social class in
. In these circumstances different regional community interests (using ‘community’ broadly and eclectically) give and gain benefit from different parts of the institution: industry in research and innovation from science and engineering in particular; SMEs from these disciplines and from management, business and law; public policy departments from the social sciences as well as those mentioned above; cultural and creative industries and activities from the arts and humanities as well as from design and IT; socio-educationally disadvantaged communities seeking wider
least a university degree in comparison with only 25.7 per cent in the employed population as a whole. So whether cultural and creative industries are direct or indirect creators of economic development, it is clear that the university sector is creating almost half of their workers. This is certainly reflected in some of the PURE regions. For example in Kent, England, the creative industries are the fastest-growing section, and in an Action Plan generated by the county following our initial visit it was proposed that the sector should be a priority for further