Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T15:14:59.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

one - The creative economy, the creative class and cultural intermediation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2022

Phil Jones
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Beth Perry
Affiliation:
The University of Sheffield
Paul Long
Affiliation:
Birmingham City University
Get access

Summary

Introduction

‘Culture is one of the things that unites us all and expresses our identity. We ignore that at our peril.’

Tony Hall, Director General, BBC

‘In challenging times, the diverse cultural riches of the UK provide some of our most potent assets, and play a vital role in presenting the UK as an international, outwardly focused and creative nation.’

Graham Sheffield, Director Arts, British Council

‘Arts are one of the greatest forces for openness and social mobility.’

Matt Hancock, Minister for Culture (2016-18), UK

‘What does theatre mean? Of course it means entertainment and provocation and the power of story as a way of understanding who we are. But increasingly it is important also that theatre is the centre of debate for what's going on in the nation.’

Rufus Norris, Artistic Director, National Theatre

How does culture relate to social inequality? The introduction to this book noted the aims of transforming individual and community lives by cultural engagement, while also showing, correctly, deep scepticism about this approach as it has been advocated and applied by policy makers. As a result, the book turns towards the role of intermediaries and intermediation; this is a focus which inevitably raises questions as to the broader structures of cultural production and cultural consumption within, or sometimes against, which intermediation takes place. This chapter aims to address these broader structures, setting the scene for the discussions that follow.

There is a relatively longstanding literature on who cultural intermediaries are and their position within cultural fields (Negus, 2002; Nixon and DuGay, 2002; Moor, 2008; Friedman, 2015). This set of discussions intersects with broader and more recent research exploring how the organisation of cultural production shapes, and is in turn shaped by, how consumption is patterned (Childress, 2017; Alaclovska, 2017; O’Brien et al, 2017). Within studies of cultural production and its workforce, exclusions associated with class, ethnicity and gender have come to the fore (Conor et al, 2015; O’Brien et al, 2016; Oakley et al, 2017; Saha, 2017; Gerber, 2017). Cultural work has thus become a site for understanding how cultural production, and the intermediaries and intermediation processes enabled within cultural production, function to replicate broader social inequalities (O’Brien and Oakley, 2015).

Type
Chapter
Information
Cultural Intermediaries Connecting Communities
Revisiting Approaches to Cultural Engagement
, pp. 27 - 42
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×