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. But occasional crises showed that faith in the system was tied to contemporary concerns about the medical profession, the power of the state and attitudes to individual vaccines. 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.

We suspect that this is likely to follow from new digital business models, driven and controlled by the marginalised themselves. Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh. Which stories get told is a result of how cultural production is organised’ (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020: 14). The book looks at gender inequalities, analysing key moments when women leave cultural occupations, while men go on to senior roles. Another effect can be that the activities whose audiences are largely from less privileged backgrounds are less well-supported financially, with programmes more likely to be cut.During the pandemic many wondered why government institutions, funding bodies and even cultural workers were more concerned with keeping cultural institutions ‘alive’ than making sure all precarious, self-employed cultural workers would be guaranteed an income. Mike Quille interviews Mark Taylor, co-author of Culture is Bad For You, by Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor, published by Manchester University Press. 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. They show cultural workers see culture as so valuable that it is worth changing themselves for – this means accepting to work for free, accepting a career in culture is irreconcilable with childcare and accepting there is no boundary between work and life. 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.

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.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. For example, I was having a conversation with somebody who’s doing a study on unpaid internships in arts degrees. 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. 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. It is written in very clear manner, and they take the trouble to explain very basic concepts of cultural sociology.