Social inequalities in the creative economy over time and place: connecting workforce, programming and consumption

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The creative economy is often celebrated for its contribution to the economy, in the form of job creation, the night-time economy, cultural tourism, and intellectual property. It contributes to policy and practice in terms of urban regeneration, education, and soft power diplomacy, as well as quality of life and life satisfaction. It is feted as being a driver for social mobility, and for the progressiveness and belief in meritocracy of the workforce. However, research has also revealed the significant exclusions from this picture: the creative workforce demonstrates substantial inequalities in terms of social class origin, gender and ethnicity. Moreover, existing research has demonstrated the low chances people from working class origins have of entering the creative economy workforce did not change significantly between 1981 and 2011, despite huge changes in the social structure of English society. Cultural consumption too is strongly stratified according to social class and ethnic group. The lack of representativeness amongst those that that create and commission of culture is the subject of sustained debate in public, policy and industry circles. There are also important inequalities in the geographical distribution of cultural investments.This research builds on recent AHRC-funded projects to explore each of these dimensions of exclusions from the creative economy in turn, in three linked work packages: - Work package one will explore the relationship of audience members from Black and Minority (BAME) ethnic groups to the programming of cultural institutions, how they feel that their culture is represented by these institutions, and how this relates to their cultural lives overall. I will analyse how this interacts with their own social class and education, traditional predictors of cultural participation. - Work package two will explore how cultural consumption is contextualised by the places that people live in, by analysing the cultural participation of those that relocate: how does moving to an area with more or fewer cultural services, or other measures of cultural intensity, affect the cultural lives that people report? How does this relate to the factors that we know affect whether people being report being culturally engaged, such as education and being taken as a child? Previous research found that those with lower probability of attending a venue are more negatively affected by a lack of local opportunities to do so. - Work package three will develop a more nuanced understanding of how social mobility into creative employment varies geographically, comparing Scotland to England and those raised outside London to those who grew up in the capital. In addition I will look for explanations of the high rates of people leaving the creative workforce, to better understand the barriers to maintaining a career in the creative economy. This fellowship builds on successful previous work with The Audience Agency, a creative sector support organisation that is at the centre of research into the relationships between audiences and venues. It partners with a new independent research organisation, the Centre for Towns, which offers academic research and analysis in support of the viability and prosperity of towns across the UK. Each partner organisation will contribute to the research design stage (focusing on work packages 1 and 2, respectively), will offer advice on protocols and operationalisation, access to data that they have developed, and a platform for dissemination and impact through inclusion of the research in at least one event, and will publish a public-facing report which summarises the research findings. The Audience Agency will in addition offer advice on and access to networks for recruiting participating venues for the audience research.