Which stories get told is a result of how cultural production is organised’ (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020: 14).

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. 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.The key point here is that the organisation of work makes a sustainable career in culture extremely difficult, but disproportionally so for those people from working-class backgrounds, people of colour and women. 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.

The book analyses the connection between culture and social inequality, presenting the first large-scale study of social mobility into cultural and creative jobs, hundreds of interviews with cultural worker, and new analysis of secondary datasets to show how who works, and who engages, in culture is deeply unequal. 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. The third core argument is that negative aspects of cultural work that seem ubiquitous – for example, periods of working for free and navigating a freelance lifestyle – are in fact experienced very differently by different people, where they can be seen as freeing and exciting for people who are better-resourced and fit the “somatic norm” of a White middle-class man, but crushing inevitabilities for people with less money to fall back on and those who don’t fit that stereotype. note = "Maggie Cronin is an actress, playwright and director currently undertaking a PhD at Queen{\textquoteright}s University Belfast.Some of the people who’d had the most negative experiences working in culture were women of colour from working-class backgrounds. Should we be aiming to protest the unequal situation of working-class people, seek representation on strategic bodies like Compacts?

Orian Brook is an AHRC Creative and Digital Economy Innovation Leadership Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Dave O'Brien is a Chancellor's Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh Mark Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the University of Sheffield -- . If you've ever felt on shaky ground describing your experience of inequality in the arts, if you've ever wondered if it's really true that some people are excluded from participation in cultural production and representation, if you'd like something to wave in the face of naysayers who think the cream always rises to the top, this is it.

What should ACE, local authorities and other bodies charged with managing and funding cultural experiences do to tackle the problem? Dave O’Brien is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh. 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). This book tells the story of how Henna’s observation that film, and much of the rest of culture, is not a meritocracy. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).