Cultural Work and Higher Education

Over the last few decades, policy-makers have been busy in the fields of cultural industries and higher education (HE), as both undergo significant changes in an era of globalization, economic instability and austerity agendas. However, there has been a marked difference in the ways in which both these spheres have responded to the opportunities and challenges that they currently face. Despite ambiguities in their definition (Galloway and Dunlop, 2007), the cultural industries, or more accurately their partial political successor, the creative industries, have emerged as one of the most celebrated sectors of the UK economy (Confederation of British Industry, 2010). With strong, albeit controversial (Garnham, 2005; Tremblay, 2011), growth figures reported, these industries have been reframed and endorsed as part of a new knowledge economy for a digital society.¹ As a result, the sector is often framed as a panacea to numerous and often disparate financial and social ills, including economic development, urban regeneration and remedying social inequalities. At this moment, HE in the UK seems to lie on the other end of the spectrum of political taste.

The Creative Graduates Creative Futures (CGCF) project provides a unique insight into the experiences of creative graduates from across the UK, the value and benefits of a creative education and how this experience shapes working lives. It is the largest longitudinal study that has focused solely on creative graduates. The research was specifically designed to capture the realities and complexities of their lives, the totality of their experiences and contributions to the labour market, and the challenges faced and successes achieved in their early careers. These are aspects that are not adequately captured for creative graduates in annual graduate destinations statistics, as these statistics do not allow time for creative graduates to fully make the transition into work, and do not provide detail on graduates’ individual journeys.

This chapter takes as its focus the experiences of work placement students on undergraduate creative and media programmes at the Media School, Bournemouth University. The School has almost 3,000 students, most of whom undertake some form of work placement as a formal aspect of their studies. It is perhaps an axiom now that such programmes of study in the post-1992 university sector are more industry facing — the word ‘vocational’ is often applied — and have been the subject of a great deal of criticism (see Berger and McDougall, 2012).¹ However, we argue here that the work placement can also be an important and useful pedagogic experience if used in the right way, where students can develop further as critical thinkers.

In the past decade, much government policy has centred on helping young people discover and nurture their creative talents and leverage these as possible career opportunities (Banks, 2007; Oakley, 2009). Documents like Creative Britain (Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), 2008) prioritized the need for young people to develop creative talents at school and called for more structured pathways into creative careers. These ambitions were to be achieved through pilot programmes like ‘Find Your Talent’ and through better access to apprenticeships in the creative industries.¹

More than two decades of discussion of the cultural and creative industries by academics, educationalists and policy-makers has led, inevitably, to considerable interest in the experience and motivations of the people working in these industries. One interpretation is that such workers are drawn into a form of ‘self-exploitation’ (McRobbie, 1998) by their creative ambitions, becoming wholly subject to the requirements and interests of industries and employers. In this chapter, we draw on theory from social, narrative and discursive psychology to propose a more complex form of identification or subjectification (see Wetherell, 2008), which is linked to the multiple positionings and meanings in play around creativity and creative work. Our analyses of this complexity and multiplicity offer new explanations for the choice of a creative career and for problems confronted by creative workers. In particular, we explore conflicts around the taking up of a creative identity. These conflicts are shown to be associated with, and impact on, certain categories of workers, reinforcing previously ascribed ‘deficit’ identities (Reynolds and Taylor, 2005). The chapter therefore challenges previous arguments concerning the motivation and experience of creative workers.

This chapter examines cultural industries practitioners working within higher education (HE) and the contribution of those with ‘industry knowledge and expertise’ to students’ learning experiences. Empirical research with ‘teacher-practitioners’ from a range of industry sectors and disciplinary fields is drawn on to explore practitioner pathways into HE. A key factor that emerged from practitioners’ career stories was around working conditions, security and quality of life. Highlighting practitioners’ experiences of challenging cultural workforce conditions (Oakley, 2009; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011), the discussion turns to consider how industry practitioners help to shape the HE contexts through which students engage with ‘industry’. Specifically, the professional knowledge and learning communities generated through dialogue between practitioners and students are examined. The discussion closes by considering how the personal and situated accounts of working in industry provided by teacher-practitioners can help students make sense of their emerging identities as ‘cultural workers’ and critically reflect on their future cultural work environments.

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.

In higher education (HE), media studies, perhaps more than any other discipline, exemplifies the pedagogic challenges, but also the possibilities, of teaching ‘race’ and difference. The impact of Stuart Hall and his work on new ethnicities (Hall, 1996) in particular has given the study of ‘the politics of representation’ a central role within the cultural and media studies curriculum, providing a space for teachers to confront and contest students’ particular attitudes about difference, as well as potentially transform their own entrenched racialized subjectivities (Sharma, 2006). Indeed, one of the most productive elements of teaching media studies is in inspiring and encouraging students from minority backgrounds to enter the cultural industries and make their own productions — whether in television, radio, film, publishing, theatre and so on — that feature narratives and characters that challenge reductive representations of racial difference, and in the process contribute to a more progressive form of multiculture.

Higher Education (HE) is an important route into the cultural sector and published figures suggest that there is no shortage of women coming through the HE pipeline: women make up 60 per cent of the student population on HE courses aligned with the cultural sector in the UK (ECU, 2011). However, women represent 38 per cent of the UK cultural industries’ workforce (Skillset and Creative and Cultural Skills, 2011), below the UK labour market average of 46 per cent. Female representation varies significantly by sub-sector and occupational group but with markedly significant gender segregation across the sector: for example, in the audio-visual industries, 87 per cent of the workforce in make-up, hair and costume are female, yet women comprise only a very small minority in technical roles (Skillset, 2006). Despite being more highly qualified than their male counterparts, women earn less (Skillset and Creative and Cultural Skills, 2011) and are less likely to be found in top positions (Holden and McCarthy, 2007). Concurrently, workforce diversity agendas within the UK cultural sector have sought to increase female representation and progression.¹