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

Product Information

What does this mean, and what is the relationship between inequalities in the cultural sector and inequalities in wider society? We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Culture Is Bad for You posits that absolute mobility has gone down, but also that the labour market has changed: there are less ‘traditional’ working class jobs now than there were in the 1960s, which means that relative mobility has remained the same. 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 -- . An important read and resource or everyone working in the creative sector, particularly those working on access and equality.

At the moment cultural occupations strengthen social inequalities, rather than supporting social justice. It’s also massively to do with being a woman of colour… They would much rather hire the white dude, and they feel more comfortable with the white dude, than the bolshy brown woman who seems to have done things that they don’t feel comfortable with. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Of course, this isn’t deterministic: we’re not saying that every single working-class person walking into an opera house will feel uncomfortable and won’t come back. The echo chamber of cultural politics looks at its worst when the most motivated consumers of culture also turn out to be its producers. The perception of social inequality in creative work was that it must have got worse, as there used to be more people from working-class backgrounds in creative jobs, so they must now be being excluded.

Vaccinating Britain investigates the relationship between the British public and vaccination policy since 1945.In an incredibly helpful introduction, they make sure the reader is acquainted with the basic concepts of cultural sociology. So identity simultaneously generates equality and inequality, between identification by association, and identity by exclusion and differentiation; it is both the engine of public life, and the cause of its confusion and conflict. Based on quantitative surveys as well as qualitative interviews with workers in creative occupations in the UK, the book shows social inequalities (in terms of class, gender and race) are reflected in production, which is still defined by the ‘somatic norm’ of white middle-class men. The proportion in the population has reduced, due to the loss of manufacturing work and an expansion in office work, which means that they have become an even smaller minority. Cultural hierarchies are made through space: cultural consumption at a venue is ‘attendance’, cultural consumption at home is ‘leisure’.

But what is missing is the potential for a cultural experience to be profound and authentic, to speak to more than the converted, a struggle the ACE has been battling with since its conception.So culture can be bad for you if you’re working in the cultural industries and you don’t fit that stereotype of a middle-class, White, male person. Report was produced in collaboration with Create London, Arts Emergency and the Barbican but involved more than 100 CCI organisations in the UK.