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

Product Information

When someone on Twitter started a debate about our employment conditions, our team leader – very committed to ‘diversity’ – was more concerned with the reputation of the institution than with our financial well-being. They show convincingly that work is precarious (project-based, for low pay or no pay at all), that cultural tastes lead to social closure (reinforcing the ‘somatic norm’), that access to culture in childhood is unevenly distributed (but a key explanation to who ends up pursuing a career in culture) and that childcare is perceived as incompatible with cultural work (which affects women in particular). 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).

They show cultural workers see culture as so valuable that it is worth changing themselves for – this means accepting to work for free, accepting a career in culture is irreconcilable with childcare and accepting there is no boundary between work and life. The final piece of the puzzle was ensuring proximity to a university offering degrees in creative disciplines.This isn’t a criticism of the Arts Council, who are doing their best; it’s impossible to revert long-term patterns in a single strategy document.

It’s easy to blame broader structures for the inequalities in the sector, rather than taking responsibility. Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh.The patterns of inequality aren’t the same in all regions of England, but in many ways that reflects the large fraction of cultural jobs that are in London.