Creative Justice

Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality

Mark Banks

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786601308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Creative Justice examines issues of inequality and injustice in the cultural industries and cultural workplace. It first aims to ‘do justice’ to the kinds of objects and texts produced by artists, musicians, designersand other kinds of symbol-makers – by appreciating them as meaningful goods with objective qualities. It also shows how cultural work itself has objective quality as a rewarding and socially-engaging practice, and not just a means to an economic end. But this book is also about injustice – made evident in the workings of arts education and cultural policy, and through the inequities and degradations of cultural work. In worlds where low pay and wage inequality are endemic, and where access to the best cultural academies, jobs and positions is becoming more strongly determined by social background, what chance do ordinary people have of obtaining their own ‘creative justice’? Aimed at students and scholars across a range of disciplines including Sociology, Media and Communication, Cultural Studies, Critical Management Studies,and Human Geography, Creative Justice examines the evidence for – and proposes some solutions to - the problem of obtaining fairer and more equalitarian systems of arts and cultural work.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Cultural Work and Justice

Social justice, we might say, is about both giving and receiving. To give or do justice is to offer respect and due consideration – to attribute appropriate weighting to specific qualities, and to treat fairly and reasonably in the light of those qualities. To receive justice is to be evaluated equitably and given our due, or to be appraised and administered in accordance with our legitimate rights, entitlements or needs. It is a tautology – but an important and meaningful one – to say we must be treated justly in order for justice to be done. In this book I want to focus on both the giving and the receiving of justice in the contexts of work and education in the cultural industries.1

Initially, the first kind of justice I want to give is to culture itself. This might seem a strange point of departure, but is meant to divert attention towards something I think we are in danger of losing sight of in our determination to relativize value and reify the ‘creative economy2’– a sense of the objective qualities of culture and the aesthetic. At first reading this might appear a reactionary move, a prelude to advocating some return to idealism and veneration for the ‘pure’ work of art – but it’s not meant to be. Instead it’s an effort to connect with a valuable and long-standing (though now somewhat unfashionable) concern with the goods of ‘things in themselves’ – or, to put this in more academic terms, how cultural value might be better understood through a non-relativist sociological aesthetics. Less abstractly, just as Andrew Ross so ably demonstrates in Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (1998), it is an attempt to ‘pay respect’ and do justice to culture, which first involves trying to take it seriously on something like its own terms:

While culture may be viewed as a vehicle for rights or political claims, part of my purpose is to show that justice must also be done to culture itself. Doing justice to culture, for example, includes respect for the rules and law of a genre.3 (Ross, 1998, p. 4)

In Real Love, Ross seeks to combine this sense of justice for cultural forms, with evaluation of the values and claims that culture is invested with, as well as the capacity of culture to help manifest and enact different kinds of social action. While I’m not especially concerned here with particular genres, this full and inclusive respect for cultural industry objects (appraised within their appropriate social context) foreshadows something of my own approach in this book.

Secondly, I want to think about how justice might be given to cultural work4 itself. Again, to clarify, this is not meant to idealise or romanticise labour, or to ignore its deleterious effects, but simply to recognise the standing of cultural work as a specific kind of practice (Keat, 2000; MacIntyre, 1981; Muirhead, 2004). Such an approach focuses explicitly on exploring the plural value(s) of work – the range of qualities or benefits (and disbenefits) we might attribute or obtain through its undertaking. This involves consideration of cultural work as a source of (not just) an economic value, but also a social value, as well as an aesthetic one, underwritten by different kinds of political sensibilities. Doing justice to cultural work therefore means respecting the ‘internal’ goods and qualities of work as a practice – but without discounting the ‘external’ structures and pressures that tend to make such work somewhat less than appealing, and often deeply unfair and unjust.

Thirdly, I want to consider how different institutions – such as art schools, universities, firms and organisations – distribute their resources and favours in more or less fair or equal ways. More specifically, I am concerned with distributive justice5 in terms of who receives the most prestigious cultural education, the highest pay and the best (or indeed any) kind of cultural industry job. Critical social science, workers’ organisations and journalists have begun to draw attention to patterns of discrimination and disadvantage here, mainly couched in terms of class, gender and ethnicity, as well as age and disability. I will review some of this evidence, firstly in relation to arts and cultural education, secondly in terms of employment opportunities and thirdly in respect of pay and income. In doing so, I consistently adopt the view that a more even distribution of positions and rewards in the cultural industries is defensible on grounds of economic opportunity (everyone who wishes to should have a fair chance to enter, participate in and earn a living from cultural work), on cultural grounds (in cultural work, people should have similar opportunities to obtain recognition, and to express themselves and their interests, within certain limits6) and in terms of enhancing the democratic polity (a pluralist, multivocal society that permits cultural dialogue between different democratically inclined parties and interests is better than one that does not). These are some of the foundations on which arguments for creative justice might be built.

Such an approach assumes the prerequisite of accepting equality and equity as social goods and inequality and inequity as social bads. I take equality in this case to mean that people are able to be treated as dignified beings of equivalent human worth who have the right to seek education and employment on an equal basis with others7. Additionally, thereafter, I suggest that any differences in the way positions and rewards are socially distributed should be equitable – that is, the result of a fair and just process8, one whose outcomes are sufficient to minimise or offset undue disparities in opportunities, incomes or social statuses. While equality and equity are not the only possible principles for justice, they are foundationally important in the cultural industries, where primary concerns lay with (a) economic resourcing, (b) cultural expression and recognition and (c) political participation. It might be argued that if the economic resources that circulate in the cultural industries are unequally (or inequitably) distributed9, then opportunities to make a living in cultural work are unlikely to extend to the fullest range of the population. Unfair privileges and the hoarding of wealth undermine the capacities of the less privileged to participate and contribute as social equals. Similarly, if only certain persons or social groups are recognised as legitimate cultural workers, then other populations who might wish to make contributions may not be afforded equal opportunities to do so. This not only has consequences for the particular populations involved, but creates a broader democratic deficit, since the range of voices and perspectives that circulate in the cultural arena is diminished. Thus, in economic, cultural and political terms, a limiting of wealth, access and opportunity leads to an underdevelopment of individual (and social) potential. This is to the detriment of society as judged from an equalitarian and equitable perspective.

A TIME FOR JUSTICE?

Why should we be concerned with issues of ‘creative justice’ at this particular moment? I think there are at least three compelling reasons:

•Firstly, in social science, there is an apparent ‘crisis’ of cultural value – partly evidenced in efforts to challenge the idea that cultural objects (and the cultural work that manifests them) might contain their own objective value. Certainly, in sociology especially, claims that cultural objects might contain their own ‘intrinsic’ value have come to be regarded as partial, elitist or otherwise politically suspect – and much less significant than theorising either the social origins of value judgement, or the (non-aesthetic) economic or social benefits that culture might usefully provide. As I will argue, while I have many sympathies with this approach (not least because it can expose injustices and inequalities), it has its own limitations, in terms of being (a) sociologically reductive and (b) having a tendency to overlook both objective value and the social necessity of normative judgement10. In terms of work, as the commercial imperative has become more central to the cultural (or ‘creative’) industries, so other kinds of values or motivations to work have come to be regarded as less significant (in commercial and policy terms) and much less vital (in political or sociological terms). Culture, therefore, (whether located in ‘object’ or ‘work’) has not only become routinely (and reductively) cast as an instrument of power, but increasingly decoupled from its potential to offer meaningful, non-commercial experiences, including progressive elements of social or political critique. Both of these developments fail to do justice to the full potential (and actuality) of culture (and cultural work), in my view.

•Secondly, we need to challenge some of the more extravagant claims being made about the economic value and social benefits of the so-called ‘creative economy’. While governments have tended to present evidence of rapid and expansive growth in cultural and creative education, jobs, incomes and revenue, with benefits presumed for all, research from critical social science, public policy and the third sector has offered a quite different perspective. Indeed, beneath the official statistics and the eye-catching headlines, such research has revealed a more complex and troubled picture – one where, for the majority, the best kinds of creative education remain elusive and good jobs in culture are becoming harder to obtain. Additionally, in low-status and entry-level work, wages seem to be rapidly depreciating or disappearing, opportunities for promotion diminishing and conditions of work becoming more oppressive and unmanageable, especially when compared with the conditions enjoyed by some of the more established industry elites.

•Thirdly, we should be concerned because it’s no longer sufficient to say that working lives in the cultural industries are unknown to us. The last decade or so has seen a huge turn towards studies of cultural and creative labour in the social sciences (and beyond11) – and its well known that the allegedly universal benefits of the creative economy are proving elusive for the majority and tending mainly to accrue to the privileged few. The empirical case demonstrating problems of (say) exploitation, discrimination and misrecognition is now more firmly established, informing calls for reform that have become more vocal and more pressing. Thus, while new empirical work remains vital, scholars have begun to pose questions that seek to move us beyond the particularities of specific cases and speak more generally to the formation of normative principles for action. These questions include: What kinds of values or actions might underpin a fairer or more just cultural work? What kinds of better working lives do we want to imagine or help create? This book aims to suggest (at least some) tentative answers to these vital enquiries.

Such questions are not necessarily new of course, but they do seem to have become more resonant for practitioners and academics alike, and scholars have approached them from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. However, I think it is sociology, media and cultural studies that have offered the most sustained and fruitful engagement with such questions, and it is mainly within their parameters that I frame the intellectual concerns of this book. Throughout, I will draw variously on three (quite loosely defined) perspectives that I think best interrogate the questions and dilemmas suggested by the idea of creative justice:

•The first is a ‘critical’ or ‘critical theory’ approach, which I use in a deliberately broad sense, seeking to incorporate a diverse group of scholars working in various strands of sociology, political economy, feminism and media and cultural studies. This includes research on cultural work by recognised experts such as Andrew Ross, Angela McRobbie and David Hesmondhalgh, work on artistic labour by Janet Wolff, but also culturally literate research with a slightly different (and more philosophical) focus such as that undertaken by Nancy Fraser, Russell Keat, Alasdair MacIntyre and Andrew Sayer. All this research shares the virtue of being especially eloquent on issues of economic and cultural injustice. Mostly, it tends to be quite openly normative12 and much concerned with prospects and potentials for the reform of (cultural) work and the structural or institutional conditions that shape it.

•The second approach is more specifically informed by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. This is less explicitly work-focused, tending instead to concentrate on the ways in which value is socially defined in the ‘field of cultural production’, as well as the ways in which education (and work) are based on systems of cultural misrecognition that help reproduce established patterns of inequality (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). It also focuses on how cultural producers compete with one another to secure various capitals that can aid in the securing of social prestige and status (e.g. see Kirschbaum, 2007; Faulkner et al, 2008; Pinheiro and Dowd, 2009). While this approach is similarly ‘critical’, it tends to be less explicitly normative and much less concerned with making statements about justice or social reform per se than the first kind of approach, though such statements are not entirely absent from it (e.g. see Bourdieu, 1998).

•Finally (and featuring much less prominently in the book) is a ‘pragmatist’ perspective that tends to favour emphasising the more specific and contingent aspects of cultural valuation and organisation and the ways in which these might be exposed through deep(er) forms of empirical inquiry. Research in this vein tends to align with critical anthropology, actor-network theory or the new ‘sociology of critique’ (e.g. see Hennion, 2007; Stark, 2009; Fox, 2015; Entwistle and Slater, 2014) and is often marked by an agnostic (or occasionally hostile) attitude towards normative social science. I also make reference to others, such as Georgina Born (2010), who has attempted to assemble a more integrative (‘pos...