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

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He has published extensively on sociology of culture and cultural policy, and is currently part of a large scale AHRC project assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the cultural sector in the UK. It might mean a show at the Fringe, an internship at a prestigious publishing house, or working for free on their first short film; For those from working class origins, unpaid work is experienced as exploitation, as dead-end opportunities that most often lead nowhere.

Which stories get told is a result of how cultural production is organised’ (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020: 14).Similarly, the highbrow-lowbrow distinction is reinforced in the way nightclubs are grouped together with bars and pubs, in a way that would never happen to opera, theatre and classical music (all distinct categories). In the UK, the press is full of tales of culture in crisis, with redundancies sitting alongside potential organisational and business failures. Vaccinating Britain investigates the relationship between the British public and vaccination policy since 1945.

For some people, “culture” will mean “the sorts of things that were funded by the Arts Council sixty years ago”: literary fiction, classical music, ballet, experimental theatre. At the moment cultural occupations strengthen social inequalities, rather than supporting social justice. The authors use the concept with hesitation, acknowledging that social mobility into creative jobs means ‘mobility’ into low pay and a lack of job security.These include the persistent under-representation of those from working class backgrounds within the cultural workforce, and the dominance of well-educated, high-status middle classes within arts audiences. And is there any reason to suppose that other cultural activities, such as sport, or religion, or broadcast and social media, differ significantly from this picture of structural inequality? It also includes qualitative data in the form of extensive interviews with cultural and creative industry workers. Some of our participants were senior White men from middle-class backgrounds who are working, or who have worked, in senior roles in cultural organisations. But we also want to unpack some of the reasons why this is, rather than stopping once we’ve mapped out the numbers.

The big and diverse world of culture and entertainment brings joy, health, connection and catharsis to billions, but often at the expense of the talented few who labour to produce it. As we recover and rebuild, a ‘business as usual’ cultural sector will struggle to find legitimacy if it reverts back to an exclusive workforce and an exclusive audience. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Orian Brook is an AHRC Creative and Digital Economy Innovation Leadership Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Dave O'Brien is a Chancellor's Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh Mark Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the University of Sheffield -- .The result is as much a manifesto for change as well as a valuable addition to scholarship countering the ‘celebratory discourse’ in relation to the CCIs over the past 25 years. It helped us identify that we wanted to expand into Merseyside, which has been really successful, and now Brighton. If you’re White, you’re not disabled, you’re a man, and you grew up in a household where there was at least one adult working in a well-paid high-status job, culture’s great. Both groups are right, but the first group tends to have its voice heard more often than the second group. Our analysis shows that engagement in many forms of government supported culture are, at best, a minority concern.