Culture is Bad For You: by Orian Brook, Dave O'Brien, and Mark Taylor, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020, 384 pp.

While the inequalities that characterise both workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised. It was then that I wish I owned some copies of Culture Is Bad for You to distribute in the office the next day. Your book also suggests that the inequalities are ‘intersectional’, involving social class, gender and ethnic background.Sadly, as Culture is bad for you demonstrates, what counts as ‘risky’ in the cultural sector is, very wrongly, associated with women, ethnic minorities, and those from working class origins. The perception of social inequality in creative work was that it must have got worse, as there used to be more people from working-class backgrounds in creative jobs, so they must now be being excluded. Business as usual, to give a few examples of inequalities that the book makes clear, excluded women of colour; it had no room for women with caring responsibilities; its audiences were disproportionately those from the affluent middle class; and it failed to fully reflect, and adequately represent, society.

And is there any reason to suppose that other cultural activities, such as sport, or religion, or broadcast and social media, differ significantly from this picture of structural inequality? These differences in childhood cultural engagement set up lifelong divergences in the chances of different demographic groups making it into cultural occupations. Its impact influenced culture change not only at the three collaborating partners but across the sector, including at leading cultural institutions such as the British Film Institute and the Young Vic Theatre. 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.The activities which skew most heavily towards people in the most privileged positions also tend to be the ones which are heavily subsidised by organisations like the Arts Council. Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine. my favourite chapter and the most novel academic contribution – shows that while senior white men acknowledge inequalities in society and in cultural occupations, they do not connect structural conditions to their own lives.

Human identity is neither rigidly determined nor unpredictable and spontaneous, but between those two extremes is the forum on which the public life of humanity is generated. It’s for this reason that I don’t think it’ll be possible to transform inequalities in the cultural sector by addressing the cultural sector alone.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. Culture is bad for you is a sobering, enraging picture of the creative industries and the inequalities at their heart. So culture can be bad for you if you’re working in the cultural industries and you don’t fit that stereotype of a middle-class, White, male person. There has been a big shrinkage in people from working class backgrounds in creative jobs but the chances of someone from a working-class background getting a creative job have not changed. His PhD-thesis investigates how music genres shape socio-spatial inequalities in nightclub production in Amsterdam.