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

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There really is an arts emergency, the reality of the class crisis is shocking, but this book shows how we can do something right now to change things. This isn't the whole story (and the book flags up the exceptions), but the data is well collected and presents a difficult to defend tale about the making of national identity by the select few. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Saving courses allow you to compare them, it also allows you to create a permanent list of 'favourites' that will always be there when you visit our site. Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh.

It is experienced differently according to social class: for those from middle class origins, with the most economic, social, and cultural resources, unpaid work is an investment in their career. We use cookies for different reasons, including measuring your visits to our sites and remembering your preferences. This is at its worst when arts workers decide their job is to transform communities rather than build on the culture made around them, the imposition of a creative vision trumping grassroots placemaking. The modern backstory to culture leaves us with some mightily unsatisfactory arrangements that need addressing, though it is difficult to say from this read what we ought to be doing about it.note = "Maggie Cronin is an actress, playwright and director currently undertaking a PhD at Queen{\textquoteright}s University Belfast. We often hear claims that there was a “golden age” in cultural work, and that the situation’s got worse more recently, particularly with reference to social class: we show that this is entirely due to changes in the labour market, and that cultural work has always been unequal. This means that the overall effect can be that when people from less privileged backgrounds attend these sorts of activities, they can feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. It is the first book to examine British vaccination policy across the post-war period and covers a range of vaccines, providing valuable context and insight for those interested in historical or present-day public health policy debates.

It is hard to be sure if investment in developing a new artist, a new musician, a new play, or a new novel, will pay off. 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. Projects in development include an ambitious plan to reinterview a hundred people working in CCIs from the Panic!Culture is bad for you is a sweeping, empirical investigation of what it takes to "make it" as a British culture producer, but also of the forces that "break it": unequal access for people with fewer resources. We will see how the workforce in cultural occupations is deeply unequal, with class, race, and gender constituting crucial axes of inequality.

Culture is sometimes narrated as a place where anyone can make it and thrive; we show that it’s much easier for some people than it is for others. Our social mobility work looked back, from people born in the 1950s to people born in the 1980s, early 90s, and for each decade, looked at what proportion of people from different social class backgrounds got into creative jobs. While the inequalities that characterise both workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised.AB - 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). 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. However, the relation between autonomy and capitalist cultural production deserves more attention across social backgrounds. Culture is bad for you also theorises the mechanisms underpinning the long-term and long-standing class crisis in cultural occupations.

Culture is Bad for You is a welcome and necessary addition to the literature on cultural production and consumption. Culture is Bad For You: by Orian Brook, Dave O'Brien, and Mark Taylor, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020, 384 pp. 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. The echo chamber of cultural politics looks at its worst when the most motivated consumers of culture also turn out to be its producers. This talk introduces themes from the book, Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries.Arts Emergency is a network working with young people and hooking up those from less privileged backgrounds who wanted to get into arts or creative jobs with mentors. A lot of the kinds of policy interventions that would be most effective in confronting inequalities in the cultural sector are broader than the sector itself. If students are still expected to go out and do unpaid work, there’s some joining up there that needs to be done. 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.