Provocatively titled, carefully argued, and accessibly written, Culture is bad for you demolishes our cherished myths about culture. The vaunted cultural industries are not open or egalitarian. Culture has never been meritocratic, neither today nor in some mythical golden age. Culture excludes, pop culture as much as posh culture. An enlightening read for all producers and consumers of culture - that is: all of us.' T1 - Book review: Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries by Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor, Manchester University Press (2020) 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. While pop culture can bring us together, it’s essential to be aware of its potential adverse effects. By finding a balance between enjoying the pop culture and having meaningful conversations, we can build strong relationships and improve our communication skills. Consumerism And Materialism In Pop Culture

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? Limit passive consumption: It’s easy to fall into the trap of endlessly scrolling through social media feeds or watching videos on autoplay without truly engaging with the material. By setting boundaries around how much time you spend passively consuming content (and replacing some of that time with more active pursuits), you’ll create space for genuine reflection and growth. 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. Culture Is Bad for You is clearly intended as a contribution to public debate, not just academic discussion. The authors write in clear and concise sentences (the table of contents is testament to that) and take you by the hand. In an incredibly helpful introduction, they make sure the reader is acquainted with the basic concepts of cultural sociology. In Chapter 4 on consumption (titled ‘Who Consumes Culture?’), the authors admit that the data and analysis do not fundamentally challenge existing academic research on the topic, but for the non-academic reader the book busts some of the most persistent social myths in public debate. On one level, toxic work culture is institutional-centric; the company’s policies and procedures are designed with itself, not its workforce, in mind. Negative workplace culture also often means outdated work policies — for example, a requirement to work from the office — that are mistakenly thought to squeeze the most productivity from an employee, or an offering of benefits and perks that are easy on the company budget, but tough on employees’ lives.The Take Part-survey used in Culture Is Bad for You makes clear the need for better surveys to measure cultural consumption. Since defining culture is closely related to inequalities, as academics we should not reproduce these distinctions like the survey does. Cultural hierarchies are made through space: cultural consumption at a venue is ‘attendance’, cultural consumption at home is ‘leisure’. Especially in a pandemic, we should attribute more value to how culture is lived informally at home and on the streets. Similarly, the highbrow-lowbrow distinction is reinforced in the way nightclubs are grouped together with bars and pubs, in a way that would never happen to opera, theatre and classical music (all distinct categories). Dave O’Brienis Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh. He has published extensively on sociology of culture and cultural policy, and is currently part of a large scale AHRC project assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the cultural sector in the UK. 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.

The patterns of inequality aren’t the same in all regions of England, but in many ways that reflects the large fraction of cultural jobs that are in London. We find that you’re much more likely to end up working in a cultural job if you grew up in London, and that’s after we take into account the strong associations with parental social class, education, ethnic group, and gender.

Dr Brook co-authored both the initial report, Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries, and the 2020 book – Culture is Bad for You.

For Dr Brook, work to redress the balance is ongoing. Projects in development include an ambitious plan to reinterview a hundred people working in CCIs from the Panic! project and see how their situation and perceptions have changed in the intervening years. Eventually, she hopes to see the research make a lasting and positive difference to the sector. 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. Culture is bad for you. This book does more than it says on the tin.'The Fix: Build out your employer branding strategy. While you can’t control the public’s perception of your company, you can help shape the story. Of course, it’s important to build an accurate employer brand, which can only be done if you first create an exciting workplace culture. 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. 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. Arts Emergency worked in London but aspired to expand its operations geographically. Dr Brook used data on schools in areas of social deprivation, with a high proportion of pupils claiming free school meals, mapping this against concentrations of people working in creative and cultural industries who could be approached to become mentors. The final piece of the puzzle was ensuring proximity to a university offering degrees in creative disciplines. A cornerstone of Arts Emergency’s work has been encouraging young people to access creative and humanities education.

The UK film industry is not a meritocracy at all. It doesn’t matter if you’re intelligent or well-qualified or any of those things. What matters is who you know and who you’ve worked with. 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. Of course. That’s just the reality of it.”The expectation of unpaid labour is now endemic to the cultural sector. It is experienced differently according to social class: for those from middle class origins, with the most economic, social, and cultural resources, unpaid work is an investment in their career. It might mean a show at the Fringe, an internship at a prestigious publishing house, or working for free on their first short film; For those from working class origins, unpaid work is experienced as exploitation, as dead-end opportunities that most often lead nowhere.