No abstract

To adapt and horribly mangle Marx's great lines, cultural workers are entrepreneurial, but not as they please and not under self-selected circumstances (Marx 1852/2005). One of several paradoxes of a group of workers, alternately celebrated (Handy 1995, Florida 2002) and the subject of concern (McRobbie 2002, Ross 2003) is that, like Marx's revolutionaries, they are sometimes creating something that did not exist before, but in an environment of increasing precariousness and constraint. The entrepreneurialism they display is often of the forced, or at least adaptive, kind. They set up businesses because that is the easiest way to carry out their practice. They get premises because they need to work away from the kitchen table. They take on projects to pay the rent, and other projects on the back of that, because they now have new expertise. They socialise relentlessly to the point where it resembles work more than play. They often articulate social and political concerns about the kind of work they do; but they carry it out while exploiting themselves and others, often with the barest of acknowledgement. This chapter looks at the phenomenon of the self-employed cultural worker, sometimes described as a 'cultural entrepreneur' or even 'culturepreneurs' (Lange 2006). In common with other writers (Naudin 2013), I am regarding entrepreneurship as encompassing aspects of self-employment, freelancing and portfolio working, as well as the more 'conscious' entrepreneurship of those who set up small businesses within the cultural sectors and seek to either work alone, or employ others as they grow. The chapter draws on many years of researching cultural entrepreneurs and considers the discourse of entrepreneurship and what it has meant to policymakers, advocates, critics and cultural workers themselves. It looks at various drivers of cultural entrepreneurship, including the growth and availability of digital technology, policy support for small businesses, and structural changes in the cultural sectors that have made the employment model a less stable one. It also looks at the growth of a more individualised attitude to work and the seeming willingness of cultural workers to take on the 'brave new world of work' (Beck 2000). Alongside this, the chapter argues that the wider structural questions,

This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom's. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London's cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an "engine room" of social mobility, London's dominance in fact reenforces social class disparities in cultural employment.

Since the birth of the 'creative industries' a decade ago, there has been a series of attempts to link the cultural sectors with innovation policy and to downplay the connection between them and traditional arts or cultural policy. The theory appears to be that innovation is where the big money is, and that the cultural sectors can only benefit by being rescued from the 'ghetto' of arts funding. This paper seeks to query this notion and to draw attention to some of the problems that have resulted and may result from it.

For most of the 20 th century, the UK 'art school' was widely seen as an accessible alternative to University. In Art into Pop (1987), Simon Frith and Howard Horne revealed how this state-funded art and design training, linked to manufacturing industries and backed by relatively low or informal entry requirements, offered the prospect of social and economic uplift for hitherto marginalised working-class youth. More recently, however, while enrolments have expanded, art schools have become absorbed into conventional universities and the class profile, at least at the more prestigious colleges, has changed significantly.Simultaneously, art schools, together with other forms of higher education (HE) have been yoked to a broader public policy agenda of the 'creative economy' -one that often marginalises working-class people. This paper takes the changing nature of the art school as its starting point for discussion of class, higher education and the creative economy workforce.