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

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I think it's very difficult. It's about asking people to be more reflective about various aspects of the conditions in creative organisations such as the work/life balance and so on. There’s this expectation that people who work in the arts do it for love but we all need to pay the rent and eat. There are only certain groups of people who can afford to say it's not about the money. I’d like to see greater recognition of that and an understanding that people still need to be paid even if they love what they're doing

A toxic work culture is a company environment dominated by practices, policies and management styles that perpetuate unhealthy habits and conflicts among team members. It can be harmful to employees, preventing them from being productive and growing professionally. Bad organizational culture can also lead to unhappiness and dissatisfaction that drives employees to look for jobs elsewhere. One of the main problems is that pop culture can promote superficiality. It often emphasizes short-lived trends and entertaining distractions that limit our conversations to superficial topics and keep us from having more profound, more meaningful discussions. This can ultimately affect our ability to build solid and lasting relationships with others. Thinking about production is a bit different. We can start by comparing people working in film & TV with people working in museums, galleries & libraries. At first blush, they look very different; 29% of people working in film & TV are women, while 81% of people working in museums, galleries, and libraries are. So if your goal was to get all sectors to 50:50, you’d have to take a very different approach. Then again, what both sectors have in common is that the workforces get more male as jobs get more senior. So, while they’re different from each other, they’re not as far apart as you might think. On the positive side, pop culture can provide opportunities for self-expression and identification with like-minded people. It can provide a platform to explore one’s interests and passions, interact with like-minded people, and find a sense of belonging. Pop culture can also inspire creativity and imagination and be a source of inspiration for people in various fields, such as art, fashion, and music.In addition, technology has facilitated the spread of false information and misinformation through pop culture content. This can have a detrimental effect on critical thinking and the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. People are likelier to believe false information when presented in a pop culture context.

Social isolation: The constant need for digital connection through social media platforms and online forums could lead some individuals to social withdrawal. As Raymond Williams long ago argued, culture is all around us, and it is ordinary. Brook, O'Brien and Taylor show us that ordinary culture is bad for us. It is bad for us as workers, as consumers, and as a society. This excellent book will be the go-to source on the extraordinary inequality in the creation and consumption of ordinary media for a long time to come.' The Fix: Lead by example and hold everyone accountable. Core values are important to your culture and your success as an organization, so ensure they are upheld by every member of your team. Holding all employees to the same set of standards will foster an open culture based on equality. This will also help promote your core values across all departments so they become ingrained in your culture.Connect with others over shared interests: One of the best aspects of pop culture is its ability to bring people together over shared passions. Use this as an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations about what resonates with you and why – not only will this deepen your understanding of specific topics, but it will help build relationships based on shared values. The Problem: Of course you want every member of your team to feel like they belong in your company culture, but hiring for culture fit is an outdated recruitment strategy that will cost you top talent. When you seek out carbon copies of your current employees, your culture will remain stagnant or start to decline. Like-minded individuals are great at agreeing, but tend to butt heads when it comes to pushing the envelope.

If it’s true, as your research clearly seems to demonstrate, that class-based inequalities in cultural production and consumption mirror wider social and economic inequalities and class divisions, and that generally they reinforce and legitimise those inequalities, what should be done? What kinds of policies on culture should the current government adopt to deliver the promise of ‘levelling up’ the North? N1 - Maggie Cronin is an actress, playwright and director currently undertaking a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast. Recent professional work includes the short film Gravest Hit (2021). She is the author of The Headcount (2021) report into gender breakdown at eight core funded theatre companies in Northern Ireland for Waking the Feminists NI. Then, talk to employees — especially long-term employees — to get a sense of what’s kept them around. Consider conducting an employee engagement survey and carefully analyze the results. Once you know what you need to improve, act on it. The Problem: High turnover is almost always a guaranteed sign of a toxic company culture. Not only will a bad culture drive employees away, it will also deter job seekers from taking your organization seriously; more than 30 percent of workers say they left a job in the first 90 days because “company culture was not as expected” and 20 percent reported switching industries because of a “toxic work environment/culture.” If you’re saying goodbye to employees left and right, they’re probably looking for a less toxic work culture. Pop culture has a major impact on our social relationships, communication, and consumption habits. With increased media exposure, many people have developed a desire to keep up with the latest trends, gadgets, and possessions, often leading to financial stress and dissatisfaction.

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The Fix: To avoid unnecessarily overworking your employees, talk to managers about reassessing workloads. Ensure every individual has enough responsibilities to be challenged and productively contribute to business success without leading to burnout. You may also need to evaluate the entire team’s demands — if every individual is running ragged at work, there may be room to hire another employee to share the workload. For academics, Culture is Bad For You points towards interesting discussions around autonomy, cultural consumption surveys and cultural institutions. For people working in the sector, the first thing to draw attention to is campaigning and activism. There’s organisations operating in and around cultural work that are drawing attention to the inequalities in culture, and doing things about it – I’d particularly highlight Arts Emergency, who both campaign around these issues and work directly with young people from historically marginalised to improve their chances of working in culture. People working in and around culture can support campaigning charities like Arts Emergency as individuals; they can also try to convince their organisations for an institutional commitment. We should recognise that the unusual working patterns of a large number of people in the sector aren’t symptomatic of a stereotypical contract – although the precarity associated with cultural workers goes far beyond them – and defend and extend workers’ rights and conditions through trade unions. This book tells the story of how Henna’s observation that film, and much of the rest of culture, is not a meritocracy. It is not enough to be talented and hard-working to make it. Art and culture are supposed to bring society together. Culture is bad for you challenges the received wisdom that culture is good for us. It does this by demonstrating who makes who and consumes culture are marked by significant inequalities and social divisions.

We demonstrate in the book that there’s an overwhelming belief in the power of culture: culture can change lives. This isn’t a marginal issue that we can deal with once we’ve confronted all the other inequalities and injustices in the world, it’s inextricably linked to them. At the moment, the power of culture is often negative. If we want to transform that, everyone needs to do their part. This emotional connection fuels our passion for reliving those moments in songs, movies, and other cultural artifacts.We will see how the workforce in cultural occupations is deeply unequal, with class, race, and gender constituting crucial axes of inequality. Film and TV occupations are hostile to women; museums, galleries, and libraries are marked by their whiteness. Publishing is ‘posh’. The ‘poshness’ of specific cultural occupations, the absence of those from working class origins, is not a new thing. It is a longstanding problem. One crucial aspect that drives our love of pop culture is the nostalgia effect – as humans, we’re naturally drawn to remember simpler times when life was less complicated. Q. The usual mainstream assumption is that culture is good for you – that it’s enjoyable, keeps you healthy, socially connected, inspiring etc. So ‘Culture is Bad For You’ is an interesting title for a book – can you tell us what you mean, the kind of research you’ve been doing over the last few years, and the core arguments that you’ve developed? The Problem: Employees look to managers for direction. If senior and middle management aren’t abiding by the core values you’ve set forth, employees will follow suit. Even worse, they’ll begin to distrust leadership for exempting managers from the office rules. Authority will be discredited, and a clear divide will form between leadership and the staff.