Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality [Hardcover]

Creative Justice examines issues of inequality and injustice in the cultural industries and cultural workplace. It first aims to do justice to the kinds of objects and texts produced by artists, musicians, designersand other kinds of symbol-makers  by appreciating them as meaningful goods with objective qualities. It also shows how cultural work itself has objective quality as a rewarding and socially-engaging practice, and not just a means to an economic end. But this book is also about injustice  made evident in the workings of arts education and cultural policy, and through the inequities and degradations of cultural work. In worlds where low pay and wage inequality are endemic, and where access to the best cultural academies, jobs and positions is becoming more strongly determined by social background, what chance do ordinary people have of obtaining their own creative justice?

Aimed at students and scholars across a range of disciplines including Sociology, Media and Communication, Cultural Studies, Critical Management Studies,and Human Geography, Creative Justice examines the evidence for  and proposes some solutions to - the problem of obtaining fairer and more equalitarian systems of arts and cultural work.

Mark Banks is Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. His interest is in the cultural and creative industries, especially in relation to work and identity, employment, cultural policy and cultural value. He is the author of The Politics of Cultural Work (2007) and co-editor of Theorizing Cultural Work (2013, with Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor). In 2016 he was appointed as the Director of the Cultural and Media Economies Institute (CAMEo) at the University of Leicester.

Banks demolishes the creative industries hype about the new meritocracy of cultural work. Balancing data analysis with social theory, his valuable study shows that, after a brief interregnum when absolute beginnerslS,