The conclusion draws together the overall themes of the book, looking at individual experiences of inequality, the problem of shared experiences that obscure structural inequalities, and the long-term and long-standing nature of inequalities. The conclusion defends the book’s project of making inequalities visible in order to tailor appropriate solutions. Making inequality visible suggests the need to develop appropriate theories of inequality and culture. The book concludes by thinking through what strong and weak theories of culture and inequality might look like, and what solutions they might suggest to the problems we have made visible in our analysis. Ultimately the conclusion restates the value of culture, and the need to challenge inequality so that everyone can experience the way that culture is good for you.
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.
Cultural occupations have long-standing problems associated with a lack of social mobility. This chapter explains how those problems are experienced by cultural workers. In doing so it shows some of the mechanisms by which exclusions operate. The chapter introduces academic critiques of the idea of social mobility, linking them to the way particular individuals and communities are given value in cultural occupations. The chapter outlines the idea of embodied cultural resources, or capitals, along with the ‘norm’ of the White, middle-class male, in cultural occupations. This somatic norm helps to explain the negative experiences of cultural workers who are not White, middle-class origin men. The chapter highlights the experiences of socially mobile women of colour, a group who are most likely to face marginalisation and discrimination. In doing so the chapter shows the powerful underlying mechanisms preventing change in cultural occupations.
We usually think of culture as a good thing. Arts organisations and governments tell us that culture has a range of benefits for individuals and for societies. This is in addition to the value of culture for its own sake. However, culture is closely related to a range of social inequalities. There are inequalities in the workforce for cultural occupations. There are inequalities in the audiences for arts and culture. Culture also plays an important role in relation to how social inequality reproduces itself. This chapter introduces the book, its core argument and themes, and structure. It shows the importance of studying cultural occupations, as a framework for understanding culture and inequality. It also highlights the relationship between the workforce and the audience, demonstrating the consequences of the barriers to diverse and equal representation that is central to the analysis in the rest of the chapters.
There are many ways that culture is good for individuals and for society. It has positive effects on health, on education, on places, and on communities. Culture has value in and of itself, irrespective of its impact on social or economic issues. The good culture can do is a key reason for cultural workers’ commitment to cultural occupations, as well as central to much government and organisational policy. This chapter looks at the ways culture is good for us, drawing on recent policy and research documents. The chapter complements the analysis of policy and research with interview data from cultural workers. By making the case that culture is good for you, the chapter introduces the problem of inequality that is the subject of the rest of the book. Inequalities in production and in consumption mean that, sadly, culture is only good for narrow and closed sections of society.
Money matters. Chapter 6 analyses the role of economic resources, economic capital, in access to cultural jobs. It focuses on experiences of unpaid work. Unpaid work seems to be endemic to cultural occupations, both as a route to getting in and getting on. Part of the reason cultural workers are willing to put up with low and no pay for their labour are the joys and pleasures that come from cultural work. At the same time, the chapter shows how what seems to be a shared experience of cultural work is important to keeping low and no pay a type of norm for cultural occupations. In fact, the shared experience is stratified by age and by class. Class and age reveal very different experiences of unpaid work. Older creative workers were much more likely to have the creative freedom described by their younger, middle-class origin, colleagues. Middle-class origin younger people experienced positive aspects of unpaid work. For those with the right sorts of resources associated with middle-class origins, it gave them creative freedom, as well as routes into high-profile work. For those without such resources it was often just exploitation.
Media and policy discussions sometimes make it seem as if there was a golden age for social mobility into cultural occupations. This chapter interrogates that idea. It shows how social mobility has been a long-standing problem for cultural occupations. First the chapter discusses the key theories of social mobility, differentiating the academic and policy uses of the term. It then uses the ONS-LS dataset to track social mobility into cultural occupations over time. In the early 1980s someone from a middle-class origin had about four times the odds of entering a cultural job, as compared with working-class origin people. These chances were almost the same in the early 2010s. The static rates of social mobility into cultural jobs suggests three things. First, that cultural occupations share some social mobility issues that are common in other elite professions. Second, that rather than things getting worse in recent years cultural occupations have perhaps always been exclusive and exclusionary. Third, there is a clear need to understand the mechanisms driving this long-standing problem.
Senior men are in positions of power and can change the cultural sector. Much of the academic literature worried that they would not recognise inequality and would therefore be slow to act. This chapter demonstrates how senior men now understand inequality in cultural occupations, and are able to give nuanced analysis of gender, class, and racial inequalities. They are skilled at ‘inequality talk’. However, this understanding of inequality may not produce change. This is because senior men’s understanding of their own career successes do not take inequalities into account. Moreover, by embracing structural accounts of gender, class, and racial inequality in cultual occupations, senior men play down their ability, as individuals, to challenge and change systemic problems. Just as with the rest of the book’s analysis, shared experiences hide the impact of inequality, in this case the positive benefit for those who fit the somatic norm of cultural occupations.
Inequalities in cultural production and cultural consumption begin very early in an individual’s life. This chapter analyses survey and interview data to understand how access to culture in childhood might influence getting in and getting on in cultural occupations later in life. The chapter introduces the concept of cultural capital, the cultural resources that help some people feel at home in cultural, and other professional, occupations. The interview data illustrates a theme that runs throughout the rest of the chapters. What seems to be a set of experiences shared by all cultural workers actually hides significant differences. The differences in childhood experience of, and access to, culture reflect social inequalities. In particular social class is crucial in determining who gets access to cultural resources. These include music, drama, poetry, and dance, along with books and libraries. Differing levels of cultural capital, in the context of our unequal education system, mean that the absence of a level playing field for cultural occupations begins very early in life.
Cultural audiences are marked by significant inequalities. Almost every artform, aside from film, is attended by only a minority of the population. We see significant differences in levels of attendance and participation by class, gender, and race, with geography, age, and disability also influential in shaping the minority who are heavily engaged in formal culture. In contrast, everyday culture is much more popular. This division is part of how the very idea of culture is marked by inequality. Hierarchies and what ‘counts’ as culture for the purposes of surveys reflect long-standing struggles over what is, and what is not, given legitimacy. Hierarchy and inequality are clear in the intersectional analysis offered by the chapter. This show that even within the minority of the population who are highly engaged in culture, cultural occupations stand out. Our artistic, literary, media, and performance workers are by far the most committed to culture. This, again, reflects a distance between cultural occupations and the rest of society. Finally, the chapter shows how these inequalities are present irrespective of the type of data, whether ticketing or survey, used for the analysis.