Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will bring communities together. Culture will improve your education. This is the message from governments and arts organisations across the country; however, this book explains why we need to be cautious about culture.

Offering a powerful call to transform the cultural and creative industries, Culture is bad for you examines the intersections between race, class, and gender in the mechanisms of exclusion in cultural occupations. Exclusion from culture begins at an early age, the authors argue, and despite claims by cultural institutions and businesses to hire talented and hardworking individuals, women, people of colour, and those from working class backgrounds are systematically disbarred.

While the inequalities that characterise both workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised.

1 Introduction
2 Is culture good for you?
3 Who works in culture?
4 Who consumes culture?
5 When does inequality begin in cultural workers' lives?
6 Is it still good work if you're not getting paid?
7 Was there a golden age?
8 How is inequality experienced?
9 Why don't women run culture?
10 What about the men?

11 Conclusion
Index

Authors

Orian Brook is an AHRC Creative and Digital Economy Innovation Leadership Fellow at the University of Edinburgh

Dave O'Brien is a Chancellor's Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh

Mark Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the University of Sheffield