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

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Despite this critical note, they use the concept to debunk the idea there was ever a golden age for people from a working-class background gaining access to the arts. One of the organisations Dr Brook worked most closely with is Arts Emergency, an award-winning mentoring charity and long-term support network that works with young creatives. This extract was taken from the introduction of ‘Culture is Bad For You: Inequality in the cultural and creative industries’ , published by Manchester University Press – you can purchase it here.

It was only published at last year, and it is a good contribution to public debate, not just academic discussion. Should we be aiming to protest the unequal situation of working-class people, seek representation on strategic bodies like Compacts? What kinds of policies on culture should the current government adopt to deliver the promise of ‘levelling up’ the North?Ongoing class, race and gender inequalities make a myth of the idea of meritocracy – that with hard work and talent it is possible to succeed, regardless of your background. That would also reflect the central injustice Brook, O’Brien and Taylor address: if culture is actually good for you, it should be distributed evenly across the population. Culture is bad for you also theorises the mechanisms underpinning the long-term and long-standing class crisis in cultural occupations. Wenn du das Abo nicht fortsetzen möchtest, kannst du es vor Ende des Testzeitraums jederzeit kündigen.

It helped us identify that we wanted to expand into Merseyside, which has been really successful, and now Brighton. 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.

Like the rest of our participants we’ve given her a pseudonym, so she could be honest and open in the interview.

I think there is that understanding from within the organisational level but, what I was hearing, is that it’s still very much seen as a completely normal and desirable thing by the universities because of the need to get real world experience. We use cookies for different reasons, including measuring your visits to our sites and remembering your preferences. It’s important to recognise that there are people who are in both groups, and that there’s plenty of other equally valid approaches to defining culture.In terms of how other activities differ from this picture of structural inequalities, I’d point to work by people like Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman, who’ve investigated how the fractions of people from different backgrounds vary across industries. 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.