Dr Orian Brook: Culture, Social reproduction and Inequality: Culture is Bad for You?
Culture is meant to be good for us, according to policy-makers and cultural organisations, whether at the individual level, through self-actualisation, to educational benefits in childhood, community cohesion, place-making, regeneration and job creation. The creative economy is also celebrated for its openness to diversity of background and experience: research (McAndrew et al 2017) finds that cultural workers are significantly more progressive, left wing and pro-welfare than average, even in comparison to other jobs with similar education profiles, such as teachers. However, analysis of the Labour Force Survey (O’Brien et al 2017) shows that employment in creative jobs is marked by significant exclusions according to gender, ethnic group and social class origin, and analysis of the ONS Longitudinal Study finds that these exclusions are long-standing. Cultural participation is highly socially stratified, from opera to cinema, and the social construction of cultural tastes, especially the role of cultural capital, is long recognised in reinforcing social class structures.
This work in progress talk reviews the evidence on social exclusions from cultural work and participation, and uses new empirical evidence from a mixed methods project, involving 2,500 survey responses and 235 semi-structured interviews with creative workers. Analysis of the survey and interviews uncovers the beliefs of cultural workers in what it takes to get in and get on in cultural work, the intersectional experiences of socially mobile creative workers, working for free, and the impact of motherhood on creative careers, to explore the tension between the sector’s progressive attitudes and its lack of social diversity. It will explore how it is that the overt expressions of concern about these exclusions fail to translate to more equitable access to cultural production and commissioning, and the significance of this given the role of culture in telling stories about society to itself.