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

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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. For women of colour who are socially mobile, the experience of cultural occupations and cultural institutions is of an often hostile environment.

Book Review Culture is bad for you: inequality in the cultural and creative industries by Orian Brook, Dave O´Brien, Mark Taylor, Manchester University Press, 2020, 384 pp. If students are still expected to go out and do unpaid work, there’s some joining up there that needs to be done.Then again, what both sectors have in common is that the workforces get more male as jobs get more senior. What should ACE, local authorities and other bodies charged with managing and funding cultural experiences do to tackle the problem? British parents came to accept vaccination as a safe, effective and cost-efficient preventative measure. although I knew about pretty much everything this book discussed, I'd never read something that went this much into detail when it comes to inequalities in the industry.

The result is as much a manifesto for change as well as a valuable addition to scholarship countering the {\textquoteleft}celebratory discourse{\textquoteright} in relation to the CCIs over the past 25 years. Yet while identity is the dimension in which public life is conducted, it is inherently paradoxical: on the one hand people cultivate their identity by association with a group, or religion, or nation, whilst on the other hand they distinguish themselves from their associates within those groups by presenting an intensified or purer form of the qualities which otherwise unite them. If you are authenticated and think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.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). 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. The fact that they may be saying no to unpaid work doesn’t mean they’re not committed or passionate or talented. 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. There’s a very interesting and persuasive argument for this that Kevin Osborne’s recently written, that I’d recommend people read.

The colour of a scarf, the accent of a conversation, can unite people or divide them, and the smallest detail can play its part in signalling who are allies and who are enemies, as much for elites as for citizens in a democracy. Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries, and the 2020 book – Culture is Bad for You. I know that there has been a bit of a sea change within the sector in terms of understanding that unpaid internships are problematic. Given the dimunition of structural support for education in the arts or in government assistance to those without the economic capital to survive the establishing period in a cultural career, we now have a sector dominated by the well-heeled middle class. After a century in which an assumption was held across the ideological spectrum from left to right and from Marxists to economic individualists that the rational pursuit of material gain underlay social and political activity, the fundamental importance of the cultivation and preservation of identity is re-emerging across the whole spectrum of politics in which Britain is one example only.

Which stories get told is a result of how cultural production is organised’ (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020: 14). There’s also more younger people than older people, which is the reverse of the pattern that we see for a lot of activities). Film and TV occupations are hostile to women; museums, galleries, and libraries are marked by their whiteness. They explore how jobs in the arts and how the consumption of culture are affected by economic, racial and gender inequalities, shaping the cultural world we all live in.