Validar con las áreas involucradas en la DIGEPRES. CA/OS

Research into cultural work has grown alongside and sometimes out of cultural studies or creative industries research. This relationship is why I have considered relevant scholarly work on the cultural industries under the classification of cultural work. Cultural work literature has focused on different cultural worker roles and broad issues faced by workers seeking success in the cultural industries. Such issues include precarity and self-exploitation, but also the search for autonomy and pursuit of ‘good work’. Mark Banks is one of the key writers on cultural work and, in a summary of his recent book Creative Justice, he defines cultural work in relation to the cultural industries:

By cultural work I tend to mean activities of artistic, creative or aesthetic production that take place in the contexts of the cultural industries. This mainly includes the labour of artists, designers, musicians, authors etc.

(Banks, 2017b: 7).

I broadly accept in this research that cultural workers are those within cultural industries and that the popular music ecosystem forms part of the cultural

industries. In order to discuss popular musicians as workers, I will first explain the definition of the cultural industries and introduce the UK policy context of the

‘creative industries’, which has been significant to the ways cultural and creative workers are understood.

ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL INDUSTRY

It is important to establish the current cultural policy climate within which Momentum exists. To do so, the history of UK cultural policy is briefly traced through from the origination of the term ‘culture industry’ to ‘cultural industries’

and, finally, to today’s neoliberal ‘creative industries’ policies, which came to the fore during New Labour’s government in the 1990s. These policies still continue today, with the UK government in March 2018 creating the Creative Industries Sector Deal, where “more than £150 million will be jointly invested by government

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and industry to help the country’s world-leading cultural and creative businesses thrive” (UK Government, 2018). The major distributor of government funding for research in the arts in England is the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which also launched the Creative Industries Clusters Programme in 2017, as part of the government’s sector deal and the Industrial Strategy Fund.

This correlation of arts research funded by the AHRC with the creative industries, demonstrates the ongoing emphasis by UK government policies on the cultural sector’s economic and industrial value.

Four decades before the association of culture and industry became part of British cultural policy discourses, Adorno and Horkheimer, part of the influential Frankfurt School, wrote about their concept of the ‘Culture Industry.’ They described the notion of the ‘culture industry’ in their 1944 book the Dialectic of Enlightenment, where they critiqued the mass production of culture by arguing it only produces commodities and subjugates its audience. They derogatorily termed this the ‘Culture Industry’. Modern scholars are highly critical of this pessimistic view. Toynbee (2000) suggests that, for Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘Culture Industry’

means there is no market in the traditional way because commodities are pre-selected and then imposed on the public, thereby removing the individual’s control.

Toynbee questions this idea and suggests that it is possible for producers and consumers to connect in the market in less controlled ways, and that a certain institutional autonomy exists.

Hesmondhalgh (2002) focuses on the initial concept’s limitations and how the French sociologists, particularly Miège, reshaped the notion into the plural culture industries or industries culturelles, which then became the ‘cultural

industries’ in current discussions. Hesmondhalgh explains the primary issues the French sociologists took with Adorno and Horkheimer’s original concept:

1) The singular ‘industry’ implied all areas of cultural production were one thing with the same rules.

2) In contrast, they saw the cultural industries as complex.

3) They disliked the nostalgic romanticism for pre-industrial art, saying the industrialisation and easy commodification actually allowed for

innovation, as Walter Benjamin believed.

4) The cultural industries were not fully taken over by capitalism and there were places of resistance.

(Hesmondhalgh, 2002: 16)

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Thus, the plurality of cultural industries reflects the reframing of the concept to both highlight the distinctive features of such industries and to reintroduce the potential for autonomy and resistance to a top down capitalist domination of popular culture.

CULTURAL POLICY ADOPTS THE INDUSTRIES APPROACH

In the 1980s, the first attempts to create a definition and framework for the cultural industries started with UNESCO, and, in the UK, the idea of formal policy

intervention into the cultural sector – beyond the funding for the arts that already existed – emerged through local policy documents produced by the Greater London Council (GLC), with whom Nicholas Garnham was significantly involved, and Sheffield’s cultural policies (Hesmondhalgh and Pratt, 2005: 4). The French Ministry of Culture was also early to the cultural industries policy table, creating specific policies mainly for cinema and film that preserved national identity (ibid.).

It would appear that, through this focus on ‘cultural industries’, the 1980s marked an increase in state interventions in the media and cultural sectors for Britain and France.

Beginning in the late 1990s, a political shift from ‘cultural’ to ‘creative’

industries policies occurred in the UK. Important to this shift was the Creative Industries Mapping Document published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in 1998 that spelled out the cultural sector areas included in the term ‘creative industries.’ Creative industries were: “Those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (From the 1998 DCMS document cited in Flew, 2002: 3). The document emphasised individual creativity, moving away from culture as a public good towards culture as individual creation.

Garnham (2005) and Hesmondhalgh and Pratt (2005) see the shift to creative industries as deriving from a larger political shift towards neoliberal policies. Garnham was an early supporter of cultural industries policies but

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critiqued creative industries policies. Like Hesmondhalgh and Pratt, Garnham argues that the creative industries policies are focused on economics and reframe culture in business terms. In this view, Momentum would perhaps be more valued by the UK government for its economic return from increased export opportunities than promoting the ‘excellence’ in music.

There remains a debate about definition, which Garnham argues has led to the inclusion of industries that inflate the reported economic value of the creative industries (2005). The term ‘creative industries’ is used partly to delimit the most commercially profitable areas of the cultural sector, like music and games, in order to further policies that invest in economically profitable sectors. The Momentum music fund, as a publicly supported arts fund for popular music, would appear to fit well into the UK government’s sustained interest in profitable areas of the cultural sector. In this section, I considered work on the policy level regarding cultural and creative industries policies, which relate to the context Momentum was founded and exists within. Next, I discuss the micro level of the cultural industries to discuss literature on the experiences of individual cultural workers, contributing to the understanding of popular musicians as workers.

PURSUING ‘GOOD WORK’ IN THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

Despite the growth of interest in the cultural and creative industries after the 1998 government mapping document and ‘Cool Britannia’ policies of the Labour

government in the 1990s, policymakers gave little thought to what work in the cultural industries was like. In 2007, Banks wrote in The Politics of Cultural Work that, “until recently, academics had relatively little to say about cultural work” (4).

At the time, Banks saw creative economy literature as the main source of writing on cultural work and cultural workers. This has shifted greatly in recent years, with a large body of work on the working conditions of cultural workers emerging as its own field. In this section, I discuss the research that examines cultural workers and the emerging concerns which are relevant to research considering popular musicians as workers. Earlier in the chapter, I discussed literature that specifically considers musicians and popular musicians as cultural workers. Next, I focus on

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key themes in cultural work research, including ideas of ‘good work’ and inequality in cultural work.

When Banks wrote about a theory of cultural work in 2007, he was attempting to provide a comprehensive summary of labour theories and cultural work, particularly in relation to empirical studies of workers. In recent years, the number of scholars studying cultural work has increased, to the point that distinct streams of work have emerged which explore the precariousness of work (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Ross, 2008) and those which focus on inequality, inclusion and

diversity in cultural work (Banks and Milestone, 2011; Bull and Scharff, 2017;

Malik, 2013; O’Brien et al., 2016; Saha, 2017; Scharff, 2015; Taylor and O’Brien, 2017). Banks’ 2017 follow up work Creative Justice attempts to move forward from theorising cultural work to a sort of action plan based on the research and

empirical data amassed in previous years.

The reason it is important to look at work and, in my research, to consider the musicians as workers is because their work (and that of those around them) is a potential site of value creation and an avenue for exploring and understanding the other facets of value beyond the economic value created. Banks critiques a

‘creative economy’ approach to value and culture, which is linked with the creative industries policy agenda explained above, as limiting the understanding of value.

That approach, Banks argues, also ignores the tensions that are implicit within the cultural value and economic value relationship. The reason these tensions are ignored is:

Because such efforts not only serve to misrepresent the foundational

dynamic of the relationships between culture and economy, and narrow the debate about value, they tend also to exfiltrate the political and cultural questions that must necessarily arise in the context of any cultural industry evaluation. (Banks, 2014b: para. 5)

Banks goes onto explain that work has been the focal point of tensions between culture and economy. He argues that value can be understood in relation to the work process and we should be considering the work within the production process of culture as a potential site of value creation, and not just the

consumption or economic value (Banks, 2014a). In terms of popular musicians, I consider their labour and the ways they value funding in furthering their work as a

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site to explore the different tensions. For Bourdieu, as discussed above, these tensions might be represented through the autonomous and heteronomous hierarchical principles. Banks sees cultural work as the “locus” of the tensions between two types of value: economy and culture. In the case study of

Momentum, which brings public funding together with commercial potential and the market, these tensions will be clearly seen. However, my research seeks a more nuanced and multi-dimensional understanding of these tensions, and I aim to achieve this through the inclusion of perspectives of value from musicians, their managers, and the funders.

The potential of ‘good work’ in cultural and creative industries is raised in the work of Hesmondhalgh and Banks (Banks, 2007, 2017a; Banks and

Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). They explore the potential freedoms creative work might be seen or expected to provide in the normative concept of ‘good work’:

First, creative labour has such great potential as ‘good work’, because of its orientation, at least in principle, towards the production of goods that are often primarily aimed at pleasing, informing and enlightening audiences, and in some cases to the goals of social justice and equity. In this respect, the production of art, culture and knowledge can be understood to offer spheres of relative autonomy from markets, from state power and from religious imperatives. (Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009: 419)

The significance of defining ‘good work’ for this thesis is not in the creation of a definition, but rather in understanding the ways that conceiving ‘good work’ speaks to the values and rewards perceived by popular musicians and other workers in popular music. Some of those rewards can come in the form of increased personal, creative and professional autonomy.

INEQUALITY IN CULTURAL W ORK

Bourdieu’s work discussed above presents a prominent feature of cultural production relevant to this project: culture’s relationship to power and its association with social inequality. The concerns of inequality and diversity are significant to the Momentum case for the following reasons. Firstly, the Momentum

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fund monitored ‘diversity’ and incorporated efforts to improve the diversity of funded artists, which raised the research question of whether Momentum is intended to redress barriers to music-making and how. Secondly, diversity is

considered in the funding assessment process – as well as consideration of who is making funding decisions – and is linked to the ways that funders ACE and PRSF value the funding. This connects to the primary research question about the possible dimensions of value public funding for popular music can create. In this thesis I recognise the broad and vague nature of the term ‘diversity,’ and I have therefore investigated how the values are mobilised in practice without specifying a particular definition.

Along with discussions of autonomy and motivation, research into cultural work has recently turned increasingly towards questions of equality, inclusion and diversity within the cultural industries as a whole and in individual sectors,

including music. Cultural work literature has been a major site of exploration regarding inequality and diversity in work in the last few years. There has been a vast array of studies, many of which are from 2014 and later, on the issues of inequality within the cultural workforce and cultural production process.

One of the scholars whose ideas are influential to the consideration of inequality in this research is Acker, who coined the term ‘inequality regimes’ in 2006. Acker writes from an organisational intersectional feminist approach.

Acker’s work brings together different individual characteristics in her analysis, rather than focusing on only class or race. Her research explores the ways inequalities are produced through work and draws from empirical research within organisations. In this thesis, I adopt Acker’s idea of the ‘ideal worker’, which is the type of worker, be it a white man or immigrant woman, that an assessor envisions for a specific role. The ideal worker is potentially enacted in the hiring process by assessors. I will consider how the ideal applicant, or ideal popular musician, might be constructed in the Momentum funding process.

Some of the current discussion on inequality occurring in cultural work literature examines talent (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013; O’Brien et al., 2016) and is driven by a critique of the assertion that work in the cultural industries is

meritocratic. In a meritocracy, the most talented, skilled and hard-working will

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naturally rise to the top and be recognised. Recent research has discovered that those working in cultural fields, particularly those in the most privileged positions, often subscribe to the meritocratic ideology and perpetuate it through their own rhetoric and actions (Taylor and O’Brien, 2017). Taylor and O’Brien argue that the acceptance and perpetuation of this concept of meritocratic systems by cultural workers themselves hinders the potential for change within the cultural sphere, where the fallacies of the meritocratic idea should be acknowledged. Taylor and O’Brien also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that those with less resources and the least rewards for their work were the most cognizant of structural inequalities in the cultural industries (2017).

Concepts of talent remain inextricably tied to ideas of meritocracy and success in cultural work. Within the UK cultural industries, McRobbie traced the proposed goal of supporting talent as a policy aim to an April 2001 UK government Green Paper:

The current Green Paper seeks instead to resurrect a traditional notion of tapping into talent. The source of such talent is of course ‘the individual’

who, if provided with the right kind of support, can then be best left alone to his or her own devices to explore personal creativity unhindered by

bureaucracy and red tape. (McRobbie, 2003: no page number)

For McRobbie, talent is not only individualising, but undermines the collective work and unionisation that can protect cultural workers and help level the field for

progression and reward. Talent is an important concept when determining who can and should be a cultural worker and is commonly linked to the idea of individual creativity. Both concepts have been integral to individualised

conceptions of cultural workers, but their associations with cultural workers do not come without issue, as failure becomes an individual's problem and not

emblematic of greater systemic inequalities. Such passing of blame or

responsibility for failure has consequences for those individuals who come to the cultural industries with less social, cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1984).

The organisations within the cultural industries – where or with whom individuals work – create their own hierarchies, gatekeepers, and sets of cultural values, which can reinforce inequalities. Joan Acker terms these ‘inequality regimes’, which are defined as:

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[I]nterrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular

organizations. (2006: 443)

Subscribing to the notion of talent might serve as a practice that maintains inequalities across multiple areas, including class, gender and ethnicity. I investigated this idea through my observations of the Momentum process and interviews with PRSF staff, seeking to determine to what extent emphasis on talent might lead Momentum’s assessors to maintain inequalities within the music industries.

Talent has rarely been theorised in relation to cultural work or within the cultural industries. The evidence Banks draws from includes the work of Burke and MacManus (2009) who interviewed tutors and observed interviews with applicants to art and design departments in the UK. In keeping with the individualisation of cultural workers, both works argue that focusing on whether the individual is thought to have – or not have – talent, as well as their appearance and whether they ‘fit’ the ideal candidate, distracts from the ways that talent is constructed and shaped within society.

According to Banks, when discussing ‘talent’, “What is significant here is that social factors are often imagined to play no significant role in the definition, cultivation or recognition of what is still presumed to be inborn or pre-existing talent” (2017a: 69). He continues, “If talent is a ‘gift’, then it is one that tends to be socially inherited and institutionally made” (ibid.). In a meritocratic view, where it is believed that the most talented will inevitably rise to the top, talent is the

mechanism through which inequality is excused and explained. In public funding, emphasising talent could hinder other aims that public funding might have of tackling inequalities.

Other scholars considering inequality, but within organisations, are Eikhof and Warhurst (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013; Eikhof, 2017), who argue that diversity is an outcome or product of particular decisions made about individuals in the hiring or admissions process in the cultural sector. Eikhof’s work draws on

previous research and is not able to test this theory through direct empirical work, but I have adapted her framework for analysis of Momentum’s funding and

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assessment process. I have done this by considering the three elements of the

assessment process. I have done this by considering the three elements of the