Are the creative industries meritocratic? An analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey

TLDR

Britain’s cultural and creative industries are increasingly perceived as dominated by the privileged, contradicting policy narratives of meritocracy, yet the debate has been hampered by limited data on class origins. The study uses 2014 Labour Force Survey data to conduct the first large‑scale, representative analysis of class composition in Britain’s creative workforce and examines how class, gender, and ethnicity inequalities reveal occupational subcultures that challenge the broader CCI category. The authors analyze 2014 Labour Force Survey social origin data to assess the class composition of the creative workforce. The analysis shows that CCIs vary in openness, with a general under‑representation of working‑class individuals—especially in publishing and music—and that even when working‑class entrants succeed, they face a class‑origin pay gap; the study concludes that CCIs should be disaggregated and redefined.

Abstract

There is currently widespread concern that Britain's cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are increasingly dominated by the privileged. This stands in stark contrast to dominant policy narratives of the CCIs as meritocratic. Until now this debate has been clouded by a relative paucity of data on class origins. This paper draws on new social origin data from the 2014 Labour Force Survey to provide the first large-scale, representative study of the class composition of Britain's creative workforce. The analysis demonstrates that CCIs show significant variation in their individual "openness", although there is a general under-representation of those from working-class origins across the sector. This under-representation is especially pronounced in publishing and music, in contrast to, for example, craft. Moreover, even when those from working-class backgrounds enter certain CCIs, they face a "class origin pay gap" compared to those from privileged backgrounds. The paper discusses how class inequalities, as well as those related to gender and ethnicity, between individual CCIs point to occupational subcultures that resist aggregation into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's broader category of CCIs. The paper concludes by suggesting the importance of disaggregating CCIs and rethinking the definition and boundaries of CCIs as a meaningful category.