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‘Getting in’ or ‘moving on’? On internship experiences and representation in the popular music festival sector
... The Jaguar Foundation report found that an all female team leads to a higher proportion of female acts booked for live events. Unsurprisingly the majority of festival programmers (Scivias, 2024;Swartjes and Berkers, 2023;Swartjes, 2024;Female Pressure, 2024) and venue bookers across Europe are male, possibly explaining the lack of diversity on festival stages. Gadir (2017) was inspired to speak to booking agents in Norway after only 4 out of 47 DJs booked for the 2016 edition of Musikkfest were women. ...
... Even when women do partake in these internships, the environment can often be unwelcoming. Swartjes and Berkers (2023) interviewed festival interns in Rotterdam, the majority of the men interviewed wanted to remain in the sector after their internship, the women did not. ...
As part of Live DMA's Live Style Europe II project, which focuses on observing the live music sector in Europe and prioritizing gender equality, the European network for live music associations have commissioned a literature review on gender disparities within this sector. This review aims to consolidate existing research, offering a comprehensive view of the current landscape. The intention is not to compare the datasets and findings within the literature but to show the prevalence of gender inequality in the live music sector across Europe. The wider issue of gender inequality in the music industry has been well publicised with recent research finding that women working in music face discrimination, harassment, unequal opportunities and a lack of support in an industry characterised by power imbalances (Women and Equalities Committee, 2024). This is certainly not just a European problem but a worldwide one, reflecting a gradual shift in societal attitudes towards women's rights and bodily autonomy. This literature review will explore themes around gender and live
music such as festival line ups, gendered employment in the live sector, sexualised violence in live music spaces and the challenges of establishing an effective methodology for gender data collection. The review concludes by considering some of the solutions implemented to tackle gender inequality in the live music sector.
Music festivals are a ubiquitous aspect of music economies and wider processes of cultural participation and community regeneration. They are now sites for exploring wider issues related to the environment, inequality, diversity and representation. Whereas contemporary literature productively draws on and reworks classical categories such as ritual, excess, and carnivalesque to frame the significance and meaning of music festivals, it has yet to coherently address how civil sphere values such as democracy, solidarity and justice are incorporated into their design and curation. In this article, focusing on the curatorial strategies of festival organisers, we examine the narratives and practices through which music festivals frame wider social issues as part of the event’s ethos. Drawing on interview data with festival organisers located in Britain and Denmark, our analysis indicates how moral and civil values are internalised as an important discourse of festival curation and the practical management of music festivals. A fundamental requirement is that curators produce events that are both economically and culturally sustainable as well as resonating with important social and cultural issues. The major analytical contribution of this article is to identify and address this central tension faced by music festivals around balancing cultural, economic and civil values within their events. Applying the conceptual resources of civil sphere theory, we point to an alternative way of thinking about what constitutes the music festival today.
This article examines how creative industry workers engage with diversity, absent a formal organizational mandate to do so. Through in-depth interviews with independent music industry personnel (N = 50), the article identifies how marquee quotas—racially diverse representation on rosters and festival bills—are used to pursue and implement diversity. Such quotas are justified via four distinct valuations of diversity: aesthetic, economic, reputational and moral. Both people of colour and white participants justify the importance of diversity on moralistic grounds. By contrast, white participants more often justify the value of diversity by making claims about the aesthetic, economic and reputational benefits of marquee quotas. The deployment of these more self-serving valuations has consequences for the extent to which people of colour can feel authentically included. The analysis contributes to critiques of the socio-economic role and consequences of diversity valuations, within the context of a creative industry.
Inclusion and diversity have become paramount within the festival sector and beyond, often focusing on bringing together a diverse group of people within one space. Within leisure studies, there has been a longstanding interest in leisure as spaces where people meet “others.” Nevertheless, previous research found that physical proximity is often not sufficient to enable social mixing. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach combining urban planning and design with cultural sociology and leisure studies, this article addresses how music festival organizers produce spaces of encounter within festival spaces. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 31 organizers of music festivals in Rotterdam. Findings indicate that organizers use their knowledge of spatial design and symbolic boundaries to stimulate or block movement of audience groups, which affects segregation and mixing of audience groups within a festival. Spaces of encounter therefore are consciously designed through symbolic and social boundaries that have spatial consequences.
For women, being underrepresented in high-performance sport coaching is endemic. They also often report a sense of minoritisation, and incidents of discrimination. The purpose of the present study was to understand, using a gendered microaggressions perspective, how sexism manifests for women in elite coaching who report to be the “only” woman in their context, how they respond to such experiences, and how such discrimination is enabled. Through interviews with nine high-performance female head coaches globally, the prevalent type of microaggressions experienced were gendered micro-invalidations. But findings also demonstrate that these women attempted to resist sexism. Nevertheless, being the “only” women restricted their resistance because they could not form collective power that led to transformations in the coaching culture. More action is required to build critical, evenly distributed masses of women across the coaching pathway. Future research must also address the features of organisational contexts that provide fertile grounds for exclusionary cultures.
This article builds on research about gender in music practice, concerned with skewed musical canons, ratios and quotas of gender representation, unfair treatment and power dynamics, and the exclusionary enmeshment with music technologies. The aim is to critically discuss what ‘gender’ is understood to be, how it has been studied and how gendered power has been challenged, in order to suggest new routes for research on gender and music practice. While we count ourselves among the scholars working in the field and critically investigate our own work as well as that of others, the article addresses some additional concerns to those of previous studies by examining how gender is ontologically constructed in these studies, how intersectional approaches can enrich analyses of gender in music practice and how the material dimensions of music practice can be actively addressed. The conclusions outline suggestions for broadening research in gender and music practice.
This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of research. Instead, the sociological investigation of music audiences is divided between two opposed but co‐constructed paradigms that ultimately do not account for how cool emerges as a qualifier and connotation, how it performs as a discourse on music, and to what effect. Using the example of aging music researchers as a departure point, we examine how the cool connotations of music function as a mode of discourse that legitimates particular knowledge, practice, and taste, demarcating insider/outsider status. We explore how music acquires social connotations such as “cool” and whether that alters music researchers' approaches to it. We argue that apart from the disclosure of inclinations, social characteristics, and relationships to the object of research (music scenes, preferences, fandom, and so on), the tradition of reflexive empirical perspectives in music sociology should incorporate further deconstruction of the transformative dimensions in the relations between music and researcher. Music, as a complex and dynamic object, thus, requires sociology to produce accounts that both encompass people's enjoyment and experience as well as its boundary‐defining capacity.
Cultural Studies has drawn attention to the way that cultural and creative industries are marked by significant inequalities. This article explores how these inequalities are maintained, through fieldwork with senior men making decisions in cultural and creative industries. Drawing on 32 interviews with senior men across a range of cultural and creative industry occupations, conducted as part of a larger (N = 237) project, the analysis shows that misrecognition and outright rejection of inequalities are now not the norm. Rather, ‘inequality talk’ and the recognition of structural barriers for marginalised groups is a dominant discourse. However, individual careers are still explained by gentlemanly tropes and the idea of luck, rather than by reference to structural inequalities. The distance between the discourse of career luck and ‘inequality talk’ helps to explain the persistence of exclusions from the workforce for those who are not white, middle class origin, men. This has important implications for inequalities in cultural production and consumption, and in turn for wider social inequality.
Internships are work-based learning experiences, but when they are unpaid and become the standard after formal education, they imply an opportunity cost and could add to the formation of obstacles to the socio-economic mobility that (public) education should seek to attenuate. The present study consists of an evaluation of the intern economy in the French-speaking part of Belgium. Based on data of over 900 available positions in the cultural industry, we examine the demand for internships by organisations and address issues such as substitution and efficacy in the intern economy. We discuss our findings in light of some proposed misconceptions regarding the education-based meritocracy, related to the diminishing role of educational credentials in hiring decisions, the changing role of education in socio-economic mobility, and the overlooked role of employers that prioritise the productive efficiency of their organisations over equal opportunities.
The academic workplace is often described as a place of merit and equal opportunities. However, research shows a leaky pipeline where the share of women and people of color decreases in the higher echelons of academia. Explanations are often structural referring to the access barriers women are confronted with such as hiring and recruitment. This research investigates what goes wrong in the early phases of a female academic's career. From an intersectional perspective, I study the experiences with everyday sexism and racism of PhD and post‐doctoral researchers across disciplines. After conducting 50 in‐depth interviews four processes are discovered: smokescreen of equality, everyday cloning, patronization, and paternalism.
This open access book discusses Rotterdam as clear example of a superdiverse city that is only reluctantly coming to terms with this new reality. Rotterdam, as is true for many post-industrial cities, has seen a considerable backlash against migration and diversity: the populist party Leefbaar Rotterdam of the late Pim Fortuyn is already for many years the largest party in the city. At the same time Rotterdam has become a majority minority city where the people of Dutch descent have become a numerical minority themselves. The book explores how Rotterdam is coming to terms with superdiversity, by an analysis of its migration history of the city, the composition of the migrant population and the Dutch working class population, local politics and by a comparison with Amsterdam and other cities. As such it contributes to a better understanding not just of how and why super-diverse cities emerge but also how and why the reaction to a super-diverse reality can be so different.
By focusing on different aspects of superdiversity, coming from different angles and various disciplinary backgrounds, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in migration, policy sciences, urban studies and urban sociology, as well as policymakers and the broader public.
Our quest in this book was to unravel how the city of Rotterdam comes to terms with its superdiverse character. It speaks to the rapidly evolving literature on superdiversity by taking as the central case study a city that may be representative of a much broader range of cities in Europe (and beyond) that seem reluctant in coming to terms with superdiversity, and that are not ranked as global cities. The example of Rotterdam reveals the spectrum of contradictions and paradoxes that come along with this uncomfortable relationship with superdiversity. Rotterdam is both a city of inclusion, the first with a mayor of Moroccan descent, and a city of exclusion, with political discourses in the City Council that are exclusionary and sometimes outright discriminatory. The core question to be addressed in this concluding chapter is why in some cities, like Rotterdam, the transformation into a superdiverse city is more problematic and accompanied by political upheaval, while in other cities it seems to be a more smooth process. The term superdiversity is merely describing a certain reality that characterizes Rotterdam and is not used as a normative term. With this book, we want to contribute to the growing literature that is trying to explain under which conditions a superdiverse city or neighbourhood is perceived by its inhabitants as an overall positive configuration and under which conditions people perceive it as being a more negative phenomenon and it leads to a more negative discourse.
This article addresses the extent and ways in which gender inequality in the newspaper coverage of arts and culture has changed in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, 1955-2005. Through a quantitative content analysis, we mapped all articles that appeared in two elite newspapers in each country in four sample years 1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005 (n = 15,379). First, despite increasing women’s employment in arts and culture and a quantitative feminization of journalism, elite newspaper coverage of women in arts and culture has hardly changed, making up about 20-25 percent consistently over the last fifty years. Second, our results show surprisingly few cross-national differences in the amount of the newspaper coverage devoted to women in arts and culture. Third, although women are underrepresented in the coverage of all artistic genres, there is some evidence of horizontal sex segregation – particularly in architecture (stereotypical masculine) and modern dance and fashion (stereotypical feminine) – as well as vertical sex segregation – in that attention to women has increased in “highbrow” genres that have declined in status. Finally, as the status of an actor type increases from laymen to artistic directors, the proportion of women decreases in newspaper attention to arts and culture.
What is it like to work in the media? Are media jobs more ‘creative’ than those in other sectors? To answer these questions, this book explores the creative industries, using a combination of original research and a synthesis of existing studies.
Through its close analysis of key issues - such as tensions between commerce and creativity, the conditions and experiences of workers, alienation, autonomy, self-realisation, emotional and affective labour, self-exploitation, and how possible it might be to produce ‘good work’ - Creative Labour makes a major contribution to our understanding of the media, of work, and of social and cultural change. In addition, the book undertakes an extensive exploration of the creative industries, spanning numerous sectors including television, music and journalism.
This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of life in the creative industries in the 21st century. It is a major piece of research and a valuable study aid for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including business and management studies, sociology of work, sociology of culture, and media and communications.
The social composition of the workforce of the UK film and television industries does not reflect the diversity of the population and the industries have been described as white, male and middle class. While the lack of specific demographic representation in employment (for example gender or ethnicity) has been highlighted by both industry and academic commentators, its broader social composition has rarely been addressed by research. This article draws on the work of Bourdieu, particularly the concepts of field, habitus and capitals, to explore perceptions of the barriers to entry into these industries and the way in which individuals negotiate these by drawing on the various capitals to which they have access.
There is growing interest in how festivals can help to build strong and cohesive communities, particularly whether they can reach a broad swathe of the population or operate as enclaves. This article explores ways in which festival organizers may contribute to social inclusion goals through a qualitative phenomenological study of music festivals. Findings suggest that these festival organizers may contribute to social inclusion across four areas of society—consumption, production, political engagement, and social interaction or communitas—through factors such as providing opportunities for local participation, learning new skills, and access to education about social justice. However, it appears that these festival organizers tended to direct their social inclusion efforts toward portable communities, focusing on attendees but failing to reach out to local residents. This limits their ability to embrace the local community in its broadest sense, and calls into question their likelihood of achieving inclusivity outcomes.
This article focuses on a major host of unpaid intern labor-the music industry-to examine how internships function as a challenging, intermediary step for individuals attempting to launch careers. Based on interviews and participant observation, the author finds that ambiguity plays an important role in producing and maintaining the intern economy. The author uses the term provisional labor to describe the temporary, conditional, and ambiguous standing of interns, as they simultaneously build their employability and provide inexpensive labor. The case study reveals why aspirants encounter varying opportunities in their internships, which may differ from their respective hopes, expectations, and career aspirations. © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
The games industry has seen a burst of new interest in the prospect of unionization. The efforts of organizations like Game Workers Unite have attracted much favorable coverage in the enthusiast and trade industry press, increasing awareness amongst videogame audiences of the difficult working conditions facing professional game developers. However, often missing from these discussions is an articulation of what unionization would look like for the significant number of game developers working in precarious conditions in small, often informal teams. The fragmented nature of contemporary gamework presents challenges in aggregating worker power similar to those found in other fields of creative or precarious work and entrepreneurial careers, where contingent work is typically organized around piecemeal, project–based funding arrangements. In this paper we draw from empirical research with Australian game developers to identify a number of barriers to unionization posed by small-scale game production. We also identify how within these same circumstances, novel and alternative forms of solidarity and collective action are beginning to emerge. The article ultimately argues that any successful attempt to unionize videogame workers will need to both account for, and take advantage of, the complex situation of small-scale videogame production in local contexts.
Women from working-class backgrounds face a multiplicative earnings penalty in Britain's elite occupations. In this paper, I explore one driver of this “double disadvantage”; a strong gender divide in who discusses and displays a working-class identity in the workplace. Drawing on data from the 2019 UK Civil Service People Survey (n = 300,788) and 104 interviews with civil servants, I find that men from working-class backgrounds are more likely (than women) to identify as coming from a working-class background, to talk openly about their background, and to feel comfortable displaying embodied markers of their origin. For some men such “origin talk” can even confer advantage, allowing them to resist dominant behavioral codes or “brand” themselves as senior leaders with a unique perspective. In contrast, women from working-class backgrounds overwhelmingly choose to conceal their backgrounds at work, presuming that such disclosures will only leave them vulnerable to negative judgment. Such suppression often leaves a significant emotional imprint, with many women reporting a lingering sense of shame and inferiority. It can also have implications for their careers; feeling unable to inhabit one's “authentic self” at work often elicits a sense of withdrawal and self-elimination from the stakes of career progression.
Very few organisations, even local firms, are insulated from global economic activity or the social and cultural consequences of widespread global migration programs such as international education. Nonetheless, established recruitment processes remain stubbornly local, privileging candidates who conform to the criterion of ‘people like us’ to produce a ‘good fit’ in relation to the existing workforce. In a three-year study investigating the employment outcomes of international students graduating from Australian universities in nursing, engineering and accounting, we interviewed potential employers (multinational, medium and small) regarding their recruitment practices. We found employers considered the credential indicated technical competence while the apparently objective criteria like visa eligibility and English language ability (linguistic capital) often filtered out many international student candidates. Additionally, in the context of rising credentialism, employers additionally looked for dispositions of employability or 21st century ‘soft skills’ considered to be transferrable from education into work. But the final form of distinction between applicants was based on whether the applicant would ‘fit in’ to the organisational culture and existing teams. Despite employers agreeing with management discourses extolling the benefits of workforce diversity with regard to gender, cultural and linguistic capitals, recruitment practices saw unconscious bias exercised against international graduates, thus reproducing monocultural rather than inclusive organisations.
Studies of race and media are dominated by textual approaches that explore the politics of representation. But there is little understanding of how and why representations of race in the media take the shape that they do. How, one might ask, is race created by cultural industries?
In this important new book, Anamik Saha encourages readers to focus on the production of representations of racial and ethnic minorities in film, television, music and the arts. His interdisciplinary approach combines critical media studies and media industries research with postcolonial studies and critical race perspectives to reveal how political economic forces and legacies of empire shape industrial cultural production and, in turn, media discourses around race.
Race and the Cultural Industries is required reading for students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in why historical representations of 'the Other' persist in the media and how they are to be challenged.
A key insight from studies of gender segregation is that the allocation of different groups to different positions in the labour market is strongly related to ascribed status. Shared gendered cultural beliefs generally portray men as more competent and of a higher status than women, and position some workers as more suited than others to perform different types of work and tasks. Yet, although much work has been done on status and gender segregation, this research tends to overlook the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. This study contributes to the literature by examining how skills and competence are valued in traditionally gender- segregated professions that have seen an increased influx of immigrants and ethnic minorities. Drawing on 66 qualitative interviews with Norwegian students, the study analyses, first, how gender, racial, and ethnic stereotyping of tasks and competencies affect the students’ aspirations in transition from education to work, and second, how the intersection between race, ethnicity, and gender plays out quite differently in different professions. Theoretically, I develop the concept of ‘professional self-socialisation’, which points to the process whereby individuals adapt and redefine their aspirations to the gendered, ethnic, and racial hierarchy of suitability within their profession.
This article considers how college resources (academic abilities, social engagement, and career skills) affect the likelihood of a successful post-graduation job search. Using survey data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (N = 16,659 alumni who graduated between 1976 and 2015), we find that arts graduates are increasingly likely to be lost in transition. Over recent decades, the likelihood of experiencing a prolonged job search after graduation or initial employment in an unrelated field has increased. Yet, we find that higher levels of social engagement and career skills, but not academic abilities gained through traditional instruction, are predictive of labor market success. Female and non-White alumni report lower levels of college resources, longer initial job searches, and are more likely to find work in an unrelated field. Furthermore, gender moderates the relationship between career skills and job search length such that career skill development is associated with stronger gains for men than for women.
This chapter explores the role of networks and associations for cultural workers within the creative economy, and then considers the implications of research findings in this area for the practices and curriculum of higher education institutions (HEIs), and their relationship to creative sectors. Networks and networking can be seen as crucial practices for finding work, sustaining a career and progressing within the often freelance and insecure labour markets of the cultural industries. Yet, who is best placed to undertake networking successfully? Research in this area raises important concerns about the network culture that has developed within cultural labour markets (Oakley, 2006; Ashton, 2011; Lee, 2011; Allen et al., 2012). On the surface the reliance upon networks as a means of recruitment and finding work appears to offer a relatively frictionless and non-hierarchical method of facilitating labour market processes in this area. Unburdened by the administrative demands of formal job recruitment, managers are able to rely on word-of-mouth and informal associations to recruit in highly freelance, contract-based labour markets. However, on closer inspection, they actually act as mechanisms of exclusion, favouring individuals with high levels of cultural and social capital.
This is first of conceptual chapters of the book, presenting the basic ideas connected with the festivals their genesis, development and their diversity. The chapter presents definitions of the festival taken from various sciences, including anthropology, sociology and geography. The perception of festivals in contemporary science and the key characteristics distinguishing them from other events, such as business or sports events, are presented. The chapter also includes the description of the advent of festivals. In antiquity, festivals were an emanation of the culture and religion of primitive tribes. Later, they developed and became more diversified as a result of cultural advancements, among other things. This chapter covers the issues of the historical development of festivals due to an increase in the amount of free time and average income, as well as the emergence of so-called experience societies in the twentieth century. This part of the book includes the description of the main factors of festival development. Strong focus is given to the issues shaping the popularity of festivals in the twentieth century and creating so-called festival boom. Presentation of the basic types of festivals is also one of the main aims of this chapter. This chapter also characterises their typologies based among others on attitude to religion, seasonality, form of organising and financing the event, structure of festival visitors, theme, etc.
The last 30 years or so have seen a rapid evolution in the relationship between higher education (HE) and the cultural industries. While HE has always been vital to the production of fine artists, designers and musicians, among others, the links between HE and the cultural workplace have often been as much social as vocational. As Frith and Horne (1987) pointed out and many studies have testified since, the experience of going away to college, full student grants, and the chance for a period of cultural and personal experimentation, were all more significant in terms of producing cultural workers than the provision of particular courses at universities. As late as 2000 or so, the role of universities as incubators of the cultural industries could be seen primarily as a by-product of their teaching, an aspect of their role in the incubation of certain aspects of youth culture, rather than the implementation of public policy.
Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched.
The article considers inequality and cultural value from two points of view: how cultural value is consumed and how it is produced. The paper argues that these two activities are absolutely essential to understanding the relationship between culture and social inequality, but that the two activities have traditionally been considered separately in both academic research and public policy, despite the importance of culture to British and thus international policy agendas. The article uses the example of higher education in the UK to think through the relationship between cultural consumption and production. In doing, so the article maps out a productive possibility for a new research agenda, by sketching where and how research might link cultural consumption and production to better understand inequality.
This research note evaluates the benefits and pitfalls of unpaid work as an entry route into employment in the creative industries and investigates the consequences of this practice for those who already work in the sector. Based on a qualitative study of perspectives of stakeholders in unpaid work, this article argues that the social capital thesis, often used as a rationale for unpaid work, inadequately explains the practice of unpaid work experience, primarily because it does not take cognisance of the consequences of this practice for other people working in the sector. The study also highlights methodological issues that need to be considered in the future. As well as the importance of a plurality of stakeholder perspectives, the study emphasizes the need to consider the perspectives of those who are excluded from unpaid work and those who are potentially displaced by it.
This paper challenges the prevailing conventional wisdom in the UK that the government is the sole architect of the education and training (E&T) system and that qualifications are the magic bullet for securing employment in the creative and cultural sector. It also argues that if policy‐makers are serious about wanting to diversify the occupational profile of the creative and cultural sector to reflect both the multicultural composition of the UK’s population and the rising demand for broader creative and cultural products and services, then it is necessary to develop a less qualification‐driven and more multifaceted approach to facilitating access and supporting learning and development in that sector. The paper maintains that this presupposes a shift from the current credentialist strategy to develop ‘creative apprenticeships’ towards a strategy that supports people to ‘be apprenticed’ in a variety of ways in the creative and cultural sector.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a more comprehensive understanding of why social inequalities and discrimination remain in the creative industries.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper synthesizes existing academic and industry research and data, with a particular focus on the creative media industries.
Findings
The paper reveals that existing understanding of the lack of diversity in the creative industries’ workforce is conceptually limited. Better understanding is enabled through an approach centred on the creative industries’ model of production. This approach explains why disadvantage and discrimination are systemic, not transitory.
Practical implications
The findings suggest that current policy assumptions about the creative industries are misguided and need to be reconsidered. The findings also indicate how future research of the creative industries ought to be framed.
Originality/value
The paper provides a novel synthesis of existing research and data to explain how the creative industries’ model of production translates into particular features of work and employment, which then translate into social inequalities that entrench discrimination based on sex, race and class.
In recent years, there has been a rapid rise in “atypical”, precarious forms of employment in all European Union states, and the political significance of the issue of “employment in the cultural sector” has increased noticeably. There are several reasons for this. One is the change from a post-industrial economy to a cultural economy and a forced process of economisation of societal welfare-state fields such as health, education and culture. The “marketisation” of culture and the “culturalisation” of the market means that on the one hand “high” culture is becoming increasingly commercial and, on the other, cultural content is increasingly shaping commodity production. These processes run concurrently and are part of a general trend in post-modern society.
The article follows the thesis of a recently published EU study on job potential in the cultural sector [MKW Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH / Österreichische Kulturdokumentation. Internationales Archiv für Kulturanalysen et al., (2001). Exploitation and development of the job potential in the cultural sector in the age of digitalisation (Brussels: European Commission DG Employment and Social Affairs) (summary: http://www.kulturdokumentation.org/eversion/rec_proj/potential.html)] which identifies a new type of employer and/or employee—the “entrepreneurial individual” or “entrepreneurial cultural worker”—who no longer fits into previously typical patterns of full-time professions of the European welfare state system.
The former “cultural worker” has been transitioning into a “cultural entrepreneur” or—as others put it—into a “sole service supplier in the professional cultural field”. According to the historian Heinz Bude's argument, western European societies find themselves in a process of “transformation into flexible, digital capitalism, away from the Keynesian welfare state to a Schumpeterian performance state and a ‘variable geometry of individual incentives’”. What is developing here is the guiding concept of the “entrepreneurial individual”, i.e. individuals who do not follow prescribed standards but who (have to) try out their own combinations and assert themselves on the market and in society. In this context, the creative cultural sector is of broader interest for new labour market concepts and strategies. In addition to the general change, new technology is leading to the emergence of new job profiles in the creative cultural sector so that the image of artists and creators is changing fundamentally. The new creative workforce is meant to be young, multiskilled, flexible, psychologically resilient, independent, single and unattached to a particular location. The article stresses the argument that these new realities of work and labour have to be recognised more extensively in up-to-date labour market strategies and cultural policy concepts. Western societies have to learn to cope better with these new general working and living conditions which affect a continuously increasing number of cultural workers/entrepreneurs—people who have to make their living from micro-entrepreneurialism. The article argues that cultural and employment policies should find innovative ways to accommodate the ambivalent efforts and needs of cultural workers/entrepreneurs (without capital). In conclusion, it will point out that the knowledge-based society has also given birth to historically new forms of employment not yet represented in the traditional canon of the political representation system (political parties, interest groups, etc.). Cultural policy-makers should take this into account in thinking about adequate social security schemes for their clientele, and labour policy-makers should be more aware of the major employment potential of the cultural sector on the one hand and, on the other, of the often precarious working and living conditions currently prevailing in it.
Classification of Popular Music Festivals: A Typology of Festivals and an Inquiry into Their Role in the Construction of Music Genres
- Ivan Paleo
- Nachoem M Orosa
- Wijnberg
- Paleo Ivan Orosa
Paleo, Ivan Orosa, and Nachoem M Wijnberg. 2006. "Classification of Popular Music Festivals: A Typology of Festivals and
an Inquiry into Their Role in the Construction of Music Genres." International Journal of Arts Management 8 (2): 50-61.
Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place
- Nirmal Puwar
- Puwar Nirmal
Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. London: Berg Publishers.
Creative Graduate Pathways within and Beyond the Creative Industries
- Ruth Bridgstock
- Ben Goldsmith
- Jess Rodgers
- Greg Hearn
Bridgstock, Ruth, Ben Goldsmith, Jess Rodgers, and Greg Hearn. 2015. "Creative Graduate Pathways within and Beyond
the Creative Industries." Journal of Education & Work 28 (4): 333-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2014997682.
Keychange -Working Towards Gender Balance in the Music Industry
- Britt Swartjes
- Nidhi Joshi
- Pauwke Berkers
Swartjes, Britt, Nidhi Joshi, and Pauwke Berkers. 2023. "Keychange -Working Towards Gender Balance in the Music
Industry." https://www.keychange.eu/s/Keychange-Pledge-2018-2022-Research-Report-Erasmus-University-of-Rotterdamdocx.pdf.