Abstract
Cultural work attracts much sociological interest and is often seen as typifying ‘precarity’. However, this scholarship rarely examines how ‘placemaking’ policy interventions affect the concrete conditions of cultural work. We study a major recent public/private policy intervention in the United Kingdom: Hull City of Culture 2017. This intervention embodied a multifaceted set of policy logics, combining the desire to boost arts participation, with a market-facing imperative to bolster the city’s ‘brand’. We examine what happened to the city’s ‘cultural projectariat’ (meaning those workers whose career depends on assembling sequences of discrete, time-limited funded cultural projects) during this event. The influx of funds created opportunities for good-quality work, but specific sources of insecurity persisted and in certain respects intensified: including the need for significant unpaid work and permanent competition for resources. City of Culture’s nature as a market-oriented ‘placemaking’ intervention limits its capacity to ameliorate the conditions of cultural work, which has to be conceived as a policy end in itself if conditions of the cultural projectariat are to be improved.
Introduction
Cultural work is often precarious (Celik & Erkus-Öztürk 2016; Oakley 2014; Ross 2008; Shorthose & Strange 2004; Teipen 2008; Umney & Kretsos 2015). More specifically, many cultural workers can be seen as part of a ‘projectariat’ (Greer et al. 2019). In other words, their employment is contingent on recurrently obtaining funding in order to assemble sequences of time-limited projects, access to which may be highly competitive – as in a ‘portfolio career’ (Gill 2002; Shorthose & Strange 2004). By now it is commonplace for researchers to comment on the precariousness of cultural work. However, it is much more unusual to find scholarship situating this problem in a policy context and examining how particular interventions may lead to variations in the organisational landscape facing the ‘cultural projectariat’. That is the purpose of this article.
The cultural projectariat, while often insecure and poorly remunerated, is important to many regions’ developmental strategies. Cities compete for visitors and investment and may centralise the vibrancy of their cultural scenes as a means of achieving this (Baum 2018; Hewison 2014; Nicodemus 2013). The UK ‘City of Culture’ (CoC) scheme is a highly developed expression of this strategy. Cities compete to be awarded CoC status, which unlocks public and private funding with the brief of staging a year-long programme of cultural events. The most recent UK CoC is Hull 2017, a deprived city and historically a cultural ‘cold spot’, but which has explicitly integrated culture into its developmental strategy. Only a small number of recent studies have recognised the importance of examining the relationship between policy attempts to stimulate ‘creative cities’ and concrete outcomes for workers, which otherwise remains largely unexamined (e.g. Baum 2018).
The UK CoC scheme (or its European Union (EU)-wide ‘Capital of Culture’ inspiration) is an important example of a policy initiative designed to bolster local urban creative economies. CoC has often been critiqued as a market-focused ‘rebranding’ initiative with limited benefit for local cultural workers (Mooney 2004; Wharton et al. 2010). In studying Hull 2017, we ask whether the influx of CoC resources mitigated the precariousness of cultural project work. We address this question through key informant interviews with funding and policy actors, arts organisations and other relevant parties. Hull 2017 did create significant new opportunities for good-quality project work. It enabled certain cultural workers to gain new career security and evidently stimulated greater ‘confidence’ to participate in arts and cultural activity among many of the city’s residents. However, two specific sources of insecurity, acting especially on what we will identify as a ‘middle layer’ of cultural project workers, persisted and in certain respects exacerbated: the intensity of competition for project resources and the need for extensive and risk-laden unpaid labour. The competing pressures acting on CoC as an intervention, most notably but not exclusively its market-facing impetus (i.e. the need to ‘rebrand’ Hull as a destination for visitors and investors), present obstacles to addressing these problems.
We begin by reviewing literature on the sociology of cultural work, setting it alongside policy-focused analyses of ‘placemaking’ interventions like CoC. We argue there have been insufficient links drawn between these literatures – particularly regarding the causal relationships between policy initiatives and cultural working conditions. After explaining our research methods, our empirical evidence is presented. We examine the processes through which Hull 2017 funding was disbursed and consider how these processes were experienced by arts organisations. In contrast to preceding studies of cultural work, we place great emphasis on examining the evolution of this organisational fabric as a prerequisite for understanding working conditions. Then, we reflect on the opportunities and challenges they presented for the cultural projectariat in Hull, considering our findings’ implications for future scholarship.
The cultural projectariat
We use ‘projectariat’ as a more specific relative to ‘precarity’ and ‘the precariat’, which are problematically broad (Alberti et al. 2018; Manolchev et al. 2018). By it, we mean workers who are ‘precarious’ insofar as their careers are contingent upon successfully accruing sequences of discrete, time-limited funded projects for which they have to continually compete (Greer et al. 2019). This means their working lives are highly fluid and dependent on assembling ‘portfolios’ of disparate jobs in a context characterised by general ‘mass underemployment’ (Shorthose & Strange 2004). While authors, particularly in Capital and Class, have considered how the pressures of this context may disrupt or override the communitarian and self-determined creative activity often found in locally embedded arts ‘scenes’ (e.g. Miles 2004; Shorthose 2004), the focus here is slightly shifted, towards the conditions of cultural work as a form of paid activity. What dynamics shape the material experience of trying to make a living in the ‘cultural projectariat’ in the context of a local ‘creative ecology’ (Shorthose & Strange 2004) which is being radically remoulded by a high-profile developmental policy intervention?
Projectariat careers are endemic in arts and culture – that is, the fields of theatre, music, literature, dance and visual arts. Holden (2016) divides this sector into publicly funded culture (non-profits delivering ostensibly more ‘challenging’ or community-oriented work funded by public money), commercial culture (market-oriented productions relying on paying audiences) and home-made culture (‘the post-modern garage punk band and the YouTube upload’ (Holden 2016: 449)).
There is a projectariat in public and commercial culture insofar as work in both depends on accessing project-specific funds. It is the gatekeeper that varies: for instance, disbursers of public funds, such as Arts Council England (ACE), versus a for-profit investor supporting a commercial show. This emphasis on the project means a culture of short-termism with regard to working conditions that pervades public and commercial domains across various ‘creative’ sectors including the performing arts (Nordicity & Smith 2017) and video games design (Teipen 2008).
Approaching cultural work as a form of project work raises new questions. In general terms, the ‘precariousness’ of cultural work is well established. There are widely observed problems of low or unpaid work (Baum 2018; Greer et al. 2018; Nordicity & Smith 2017; Umney 2016) exacerbated by labour oversupply (Shortose & Strange 2004), risk-laden and unpredictable portfolio careers (Gill 2002; Murray & Gollmitzer 2012; Teipen 2008) and reliance on insider contact networks (Blair 2001; Umney & Kretsos 2015). It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a general overview of this literature. Important to note, however, that there continues to be a gap in our understanding of how cultural working conditions are moulded by policy context. Some limited literature examines how different welfare state regimes affect the experience of being a cultural worker (Greer et al. 2018; Murray & Gollmitzer 2012; Umney 2016). Others consider the impact of collective bargaining institutions in a context of competition for investment (Choko & Conor 2017; Coles 2016). These disparate studies notwithstanding, numerous authors have commented on an enduring analytical gap between cultural policy and cultural work (e.g. Banks & Hesmondhalgh 2009; Baum 2018; Murray & Gollmitzer 2012).
By focusing on cultural work as project work, we can shed new light on this gap because project work raises problems the extent of which, we will show, is sensitive to targeted policy interventions such as Hull 2017. In particular, there are two concerns about cultural project work which are explored in our data. One specific source of insecurity in project-based work is the dynamics of competition. Competition is not simply to get a foot on the career ladder, but becomes a permanent feature because new projects are continually needed to ensure continuity of income (Gill 2002; Greer et al. 2019). A second is the well-documented question of unpaid work, which also assumes particular forms for project workers. As we demonstrate, the process of continually applying for new funding necessitates recurrent periods of unremunerated labour. Moreover, rather than a ‘labour of love’, much of this unpaid work is particularly troublesome and ‘high-risk’ because it is geared towards meeting funder-imposed requirements and is often in vain if a bid is rejected.
What can extant research on project-based organisation tell us about precariousness in cultural work? Importantly, recent comparative research in social services (Greer et al. 2019; Schulte et al. 2018) indicates the problems with viewing the projectariat as inevitably and inherently precarious. Instead, they show the wide variability of the insecurity of project-based work. Organisational literature identifies various reasons why certain forms of project organisation may be more ‘precarious’ than others. Variables which have been influentially suggested include the nature of the task (some being inherently more ‘risky’ than others) (e.g. Grabher 2004; Whitley 2006), designated timeframes (Bakker et al. 2016; Karmowska et al. 2017) and institutional context (Christopherson 2002). In the latter case, there is some evidence that specifically ‘creative’ work may always assume a flexible model that transcends variations in national institutional configurations (Teipen 2008). However, Greer et al. (2019) show how the precariousness of project work can vary widely even when these factors are held relatively constant.
Instead, Greer et al. (2019) direct attention towards the network of qualitative relationships between funder and fundee that shape the landscape of project-based work at local level. They present these relationships as a determining factor on the extent of ‘projectarian’ insecurity in a given case. For instance, do funders seek to stimulate competition for project funding and facilitate the entry of new actors, or do they prioritise existing networks? (see also Jantz et al. 2015). Do they impose criteria on which to evaluate funding awards, or allow project workers to design their own tasks? These questions shape the de facto precariousness of project work even where the nature of tasks and formal timeframes are similar. Moreover, decisions made in dispersing resources, and the networks used in doing so, can determine ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in funding ecologies. The former, for instance, are those whose established relationships with funders enable them to regularly receive funds, and thus, in turn, become sources upon whom others rely for work. Hence, managerial actors at regularly funded organisations, while themselves dependent on that funding’s continuation, may gain the power to allocate opportunities between other contingent workers on a short-term basis (Samaluk 2017).
We argue here that this is a particularly useful frame to apply to analysing the relationship between ‘creative cities’-oriented policy interventions (Baum 2018) and cultural work. This is because cultural policy interventions are so often characterised by particularly large gaps between the ‘official’ objectives that policymakers themselves try to ‘engineer’ and established practices within those scenes themselves, a point well-examined in this journal several years ago (e.g. Miles 2004; Shorthose 2004) which is now in need of revisiting. As shown in the next section, CoC schemes have indeed been repeatedly subjected to these accusations. To understand whether and how these interventions can make a difference to the cultural projectariat, case studies are needed which look in detail at the way public and private funders, fundees and a range of different intermediaries interact in concrete local situations.
To this end, we examine a specific intervention – Hull 2017 – which channelled both public and private funding. Workers and organisations habituated to both contexts were hoping to access its resources and, in this sense, it transcended Holden’s (2016) typology. Note that Holden’s ‘home-made culture’ is also relevant to this study insofar as its creators were occasionally also able to receive CoC funds. There is currently little scholarship examining the causal links between policy context and the conditions of project-based cultural work. The latter is, justifiably, assumed to be precarious, but the mitigation or exacerbation of precariousness by particular policy interventions is rarely investigated. Looking at a UK local government context is likely to provide a stimulating case study. Macroeconomic policy decisions (i.e. austerity), which are particularly fierce at local level, have intensified the insecurity of arts workers (Fanthome 2013), as they have workers in general (Umney et al. 2018). In the United Kingdom, arts organisations are being pushed by government to diversify their income streams (DCMS 2017) and, in this sense, have to conceive themselves in more risk-embracing and ‘entrepreneurial’ ways (Lorey 2006; Oakley 2014); local governments have increasingly been required to encourage their regional arts organisations in this direction. Hence, there are good reasons to believe that what local policymakers do has an impact on local cultural organisational infrastructures, and by extension on the relative insecurity of cultural work. However, there are very few case studies detailing this articulation with reference to specific local interventions.
In Hull, CoC has meant that, against a national backdrop of austerity, there has been a sudden influx of funding concentrated mainly (but not exclusively) on a programme delivered throughout the calendar year 2017. Hull had to rapidly develop an infrastructure for dispersing these resources and formulate a strategy for the investment’s ‘legacy’. This rapidly and significantly reshaped relationships between local funding organisations and the city’s cultural projectariat. While some insecurity is inherent in cultural project work, we ask whether this new infrastructure created opportunities for good-quality work that mitigated the problems of perpetual competition and high-risk unpaid labour. In the next section, we discuss in more depth the nature of CoC as an intervention.
Policy and placemaking
Shorthose and Strange (2004; see also Miles 2004) identified tensions in cultural policy interventions, contrasting attempts to engineer cultural development from above in a manner subordinated to the goals of capital, with the self-determined and communitarian activity that permeates existing networks of artistic workers. Certainly, the goals of CoC may conflict with the priorities of those ‘on the ground’, as will be shown below. However, even on its own terms, CoC is a fusion of various policy logics. Social and artistic goals are explicitly stated: certainly in Hull, the desire to expand community engagement in culture, and to establish the city as a venue for elite exhibitions and performances, feature prominently (University of Hull 2018). However, these goals sit alongside a more market-oriented agenda that can be termed ‘placemaking’. This phenomenon is weakly understood among sociologists of work but provides critical context for analysing precarious cultural project work.
Placemaking is used in urban and cultural policy literature to denote the idea of ‘putting a city on the map’. It assigns arts and culture a central role in generating ‘instrumental value to non-arts stakeholders’, particularly by fostering a sense of ‘vibrancy’ that bolsters wider economic activity and investment (Nicodemus 2013: 214). Artists are thus expected to embed themselves in an overarching project of city renovation and ‘rebranding’ (García 2005; Scott 2006). Hence, placemaking strategies epitomise the longer running ‘instrumentalisation’ of arts and culture as tools for advancing economic development strategy (Belfiore 2012; Hewison 2014; Miles 2004), which in the United Kingdom has also reoriented national actors like the Arts Councils (Brighton 2006). They reflect the wider need for post-industrial cities to compete against each other for highly mobile capital and, supposedly, the favour of a cosmopolitan and wealth-generating ‘creative class’ (Florida 2005). This policy outlook has been critiqued as relatively superficial, gentrifying certain districts while exacerbating existing structural inequalities (Baum 2018; Scott 2006). While this urban planning debate is beyond the scope of this article, the market-oriented component of placemaking schemes, we will argue, also limits the extent to which they can improve the conditions of cultural work itself.
Placemaking initiatives take various forms, including public art commissions (Hewison 2014), flagship infrastructural projects (Miles 2005) or more nebulous concepts like the designation of ‘cultural quarters’ and ‘creative clusters’ (O’Connor & Gu 2010; Miles 2004; Montgomery 2004). CoC is a particularly developed expression of placemaking. The UK CoC programme was announced in 2009 to emulate the European-wide Capital of Culture initiative, whose British recipients had included Glasgow (1990) and Liverpool (2008). The first UK CoC was Derry in 2013, with Hull 2017 the second. Cities compete to be named CoC, which unlocks investment from a range of sources including local and central government, the Arts Councils and Lottery and potentially large volumes of corporate sponsorship and philanthropic contributions. These funds are used to stage a year-long programme of cultural activities.
Scholarship on placemaking interventions has often emphasised the distance between policy intention and concrete experience ‘on the ground’ (Jayne 2004; McCann 2002); what Shorthose (2004) alludes to by distinguishing between the ‘engineered’ versus ‘the vernacular’. Scott (2006: 15), for instance, critiques the desire to ‘import’ a thriving creative scene through policy schemes without first fostering ‘a wider concern for conviviality and camaraderie’ in a city.
This theme is also pronounced in studies of CoC interventions, of which there are numerous in cultural and urban policy research but significantly fewer among sociologists of cultural work. Mooney’s (2004) study of Glasgow 1990 argued that CoC could do little but put a market-friendly gloss on the city’s structural problems, in the naïve hope that rehabilitating the city’s image would be enough. This view has been influential: indeed, O’Brien and Miles (2010) see it as predominating in critical academic literature on the subject. Wharton et al. (2010) view the European CoC process as driven mainly by business interests. Campbell’s (2011) study of Liverpool 2008 finds general warm feeling about the city’s improved image, but little sense that work prospects for the city’s cultural projectariat had been substantially improved. Below we offer a view that is more guardedly optimistic and highlights ways in which ‘engineered’ interventions can give voice to autonomous activity within an arts community. However, when viewed from the perspective of working conditions, we still need to situate CoC’s impact within important limits.
Hull’s CoC status was announced in 2013. Hull is a comparatively small coastal city of around 250,000 people. It has historically had strong shipping, fishing and ports industries, but in a context of post-industrial decline, has become one of the country’s most deprived local authorities (University of Hull 2018). Its poverty levels and relative geographical isolation mean it has often been negatively stereotyped in public perception (Corcoran 2017). While all participants testified to the city’s innovative arts scene, it has generally been considered a cultural ‘cold spot’ in comparison with larger and wealthier Northern cities like Leeds and Manchester. However, CoC was the culmination of the City Council’s decision, in 2013, that a core development priority should be using its cultural sector to revitalise the city’s image as a place to live and work.
At time of writing, Hull 2017 has only recently ended, so our study cannot offer a verdict on its socio-economic legacy. To date, the Cultural Transformations report (University of Hull 2018) is the main evaluation output. The report highlights various positive findings around metrics like audience engagement: for instance, spikes in cultural ticket sales and widespread (90%) ‘engagement with cultural activities’ in a survey of Hull residents. It reveals more ambivalent data relating to arts workers’ and organisations’ experiences: in some cases, they reported intensified competition for scarce resources and expressed reservations over the delivery organisation’s role as gatekeeper to funds. Given the recentness of the intervention, we explore these issues through an in-depth qualitative study of the work involved in delivering Hull 2017, while events are still fresh in the minds of key participants: How did the CoC intervention affect the work landscape for Hull’s cultural projectariat?
Methods
We offer a qualitative examination of the way funds were dispersed during Hull 2017 and how this altered the city’s arts infrastructure. In doing so, we can better understand the context facing Hull’s cultural projectariat: how their prospects were affected by the influx of funds, and the limits to this impact. This requires a focus on detail, and responsiveness to the complex changes that continued throughout data gathering (January–October 2018), as the programme transitioned from delivery to ‘legacy’. Hence, rather than canvassing a sample of views from one particular type of actor, we sought to gather the testimony of well-placed actors occupying key nodes in the local arts and cultural environment. This meant a key informant approach to sampling, prioritising specialised knowledge provided by people with unique practitioner insight into a highly specific situation.
We gathered interviews with 21 respondents, each of whom was well-placed to provide detailed insights into what is happening in Hull. This included interviewees from within the delivery organisation, local government, actors from employer/worker representative organisations, alongside respondents from arts organisations. In the last-mentioned case, interviewees usually had multifaceted roles. Since many arts organisations (particularly in Hull) are small, with people often taking on both administrative and creative functions out of necessity, our respondents tended to have insight into the bureaucratic mechanics of Hull 2017 delivery as well as its impact on the experience of cultural workers. These organisational-level respondents were often part of the ‘projectariat’ insofar as they were all dependent on winning project-based funding to continue their careers even where they also had managerial roles in their companies. As we will show, the de facto level of insecurity they experienced varied widely. Participants marked with an asterisk in Table 1 are those who fell into this category. Participants without an asterisk were those who, because they were managerial or administrative cadres in other types of organisation (such as public funding bodies or permanent sectoral support structures), could not themselves be considered part of the projectariat. Instead, they employed, represented or directed funds towards project-based cultural workers. Hence, while 10 participants were able to speak directly of their own experience in the projectariat, the main focus of the research was understanding the organisational mechanics influencing cultural work rather than canvassing people in this situation as widely as possible.
Artists 4 and 5 were interviewed jointly.
Table 1 is deliberately broad in describing participants, refraining from specifying length of service, specific roles or any specific description of their organisations. We also use generic words like ‘leader’ to account for varied and complex roles (which, as noted, typically combine administrative and creative functions). In all cases, respondents were either the sole, or one of the key individuals, responsible for obtaining funds and overseeing projects. This lack of specificity is because of the smallness of Hull’s cultural scene. Even slight clues, such as length of time in the city, or more specific organisational description, would enable deduction of identities by someone who knows the Hull arts scene well. At certain points, we use anonymous citations; this is because the specific nature of the data reported, combined with even a generic participant code, would risk revealing identities. This matters because we will relate conflicting views about Hull 2017, and it is imperative to us not to jeopardise our participants’ relationships with those around them.
We conceived our interview strategy as tracing a causal trail across three stages: first, deciphering the specific interventions through which funds were dispersed during Hull 2017, and the key priorities driving them. Second, examining how organisations experienced and responded to these interventions. Third, considering how these changes directly affected project-based work. To what extent did the new funding infrastructure create a context in which the problems of perpetual competition and risk-laden unpaid work could be improved? Questions were adapted as our understanding of the context developed and in response to different interviewee roles. They included both ice-breaking general queries (e.g. ‘Describe your role in the CoC programme’; ‘How do you feel participation in CoC affected your career?’) to highly specific ones (e.g. ‘what kind of guideline pay rates were imposed as a condition of your project funding?’; ‘what measures did you take to encourage a wider applicant pool to your funding schemes?’).
Sampling used desk research followed by cold contact. Through a preliminary reading of available documentation (strategy documents, news reports, programme details), we identified the organisations and individuals involved in the delivery of the programme. We approached them over phone, post or email. In some cases, existing interviewees directly introduced us to other key informants who had been difficult to access. We used our knowledge as industrial relations researchers to identify relevant unions and employers’ associations. Most interviews lasted approximately an hour. The shortest was 30 minutes and the longest was 2 hours.
Analysis used thematic coding of full interview transcriptions. By the final interviews, no new codes were emerging and instead we were corroborating and reinforcing existing themes. We took this to indicate data saturation. Next, we present these data in three stages: an overview of the general CoC delivery infrastructure in Hull; examining how arts organisations interacted with this infrastructure; and reflecting on how these developments affected cultural projectariat work.
Hull 2017
We begin with a relatively detailed overview of the organisational infrastructure in the Hull arts ecology and how it was reshaped during CoC 2017. This, we argue, provides vital context for understanding the concrete changes to the relative (in)security of the city’s cultural projectariat described below.
CoC is awarded to cities where the Council is perceived to be serious about centralising arts and culture-led development, but where there is not yet a sufficiently developed cultural infrastructure to realise this (Funder 1). Hull made this commitment in its 2013 strategic plan. It is unusual, compared to most UK councils, in maintaining a dedicated arts office with four staff and an annual spending pot of £40,000 (Council 1, Funder 2). It is also relatively distinctive in retaining direct Council control over some key institutions including several museums and the flagship New Theatre (Council 1). However, the city has also been a cultural ‘cold spot’ in terms of audience size and depth of provision. One participant (ArtsOrg 3) describes culture in Hull as innovative but unstable: Hull . . . [has] places which have often opened and closed, things have collapsed, people have lost their jobs, but I would argue created a slightly more dynamic scene but also a more fragile scene. So amazing things have happened and then people have left elsewhere, because there’s no sustaining.
Hull is a comparatively poor city, and spending pressures have led to several independent local cultural organisations being closed over the last 20 years (ArtsOrg, 3; Council 1). Consequently, despite its recent strategic profile, the arts infrastructure has deteriorated, particularly in dance, literature and visual arts (Council 1). Even during 2017, major cuts to Hull City College closed full-time degree courses in visual arts and dance (Council 1, ArtsOrg 2). However, theatre remains a comparative advantage. Hull is home to nationally regarded theatre institutions including Hull Truck, New Theatre and Middle Child.
An austere national context, combined with Hull’s ‘cold spot’ status, has counterintuitively made Hull attractive to some cultural project workers. The low cost of living and working, combined with the emergent CoC buzz, had inspired some respondents to move there (Theatre 4, ArtsOrg 4, ArtsOrg 5). Others had arrived long before CoC, specifically to find a lower competition environment in which experienced arts workers would stand more chance of winning project funding. ‘I came back deliberately because there was only one theatre company . . . [Hull] flashed like a beacon’, as somewhere to partner with national funders looking to direct resources to under-served areas (Theatre 3).
Hull’s first CoC bid was rejected for featuring insufficient input from its independent/non-profit sector, instead vaunting its Council-run assets (Council 1). It centralised independent and community engagement throughout its second, successful bid. The delivery organisation itself was established as an independent actor destined to function as an entirely new Hull cultural institution (Delivery 3). After being awarded CoC status, Hull raised £32m from various sources, core funds from the City Council and ACE, which was leveraged to encourage private donations. This sum exceeded the initial £18m target and coincided with additional central government grants to refurbish New Theatre and the city’s major art gallery, the Ferens.
The new delivery organisation therefore had to develop an infrastructure to absorb a sudden spike in funding, stage a major year-long festival, while also paying attention to ‘legacy’. It pursued a mixed economy model using various tools (Delivery 3). The need to stage a dense events programme that could stand out in terms of quality led to a focus on direct commissioning. Major flagship commissions mostly went to organisations outside Hull with a national profile, for example, to well-established studios with elite producers (Council 1), to deliver large-scale projects that were beyond local organisations’ capacity (Employer 2, Delivery partner 1).
The delivery organisation also commissioned, or launched co-commissions with, key local organisations such as Hull Truck and the producing house Middle Child (Delivery 3). Where this happened, organisations were able to unlock significant additional resources due to their association with CoC and expand the scope of their work (Theatre 1, Delivery 3). One such company was able to enter ACE’s national portfolio (i.e. receive a 4-year structural funding settlement) following Hull 2017. These partnerships were particularly significant in theatre, capitalising on Hull’s existing comparative advantages. This, alongside elite national-level commissions, reflects the demands of rapidly assembling a dense programme of major cultural events for exhibition on the ‘national stage’.
These processes – focused on external commissions and existing local strengths – are in keeping with CoC’s placemaking impetus: the need to quickly ‘rebrand’ Hull as a venue for cultural innovation and excellence. However, this logic was intertwined with other social policy objectives. In Hull’s case, this included an emphasis on increasing local communities’ arts participation. The main instrument for this was the Creative Communities (CC) scheme. This was a funding pot of £6,00,000, making smaller awards (up to £10,000) open to any applicant on a competitive basis. Applicants needed to demonstrate plans for community engagement and were encouraged to partner with community groups in Hull (Council 1, Delivery 2, ArtsOrg 2).
Initial plans to amalgamate the Council arts unit’s own budget with the delivery organisation’s were shelved (Council 1). Hence, the Council arts team retained its own long-running brief: to strategically support projects that could enhance the depth of quality of the Hull arts scene. Council funds are small-scale and discretionary, often concentrated on areas of strategic weakness, and its formalised procurement apparatus has been stripped away in recent years (Council 1). Its focus on addressing weaknesses contrasts with the delivery organisation’s placemaking focus on comparative advantage; a tension we examine below.
CoC status enabled Hull to buck the national austerity-driven trend of dismantling local arts and cultural infrastructure. However, the Hull 2017 situation is exceptional and, importantly, temporary. 2017 saw large, time-limited spikes in public funding and private sponsorship in a context where the former is being drastically squeezed and the latter is usually ‘pie in the sky’ outside London (Council 1, Theatre 3). Does Hull 2017 therefore amount to a temporary feast amid inevitable famine for cultural workers? Some respondents asked whether expectations had been raised to unsustainable levels (ArtsOrg 3, Theatre 1). We reflect on these questions in the following sections.
Successes and tensions at organisational level
Hull 2017 enabled certain local organisations to escape – or substantially mitigate – the ‘short-termism’ (Employer 1) and precariousness of cultural project-based work. Importantly, this effect appeared strongest in prioritised areas of comparative advantage, particularly theatre. One theatre company’s profile was raised to the extent that they gained ACE national portfolio status. This enabled four core staff to be given permanent contracts for the first time. However, the performers and technicians working on individual shows would remain contingent freelancers (anonymous). This status also greatly reduces the risks inherent in applying for additional resources (Employer 2, Theatre 2). Without long-term structural funds, cultural workers spend large quantities of unpaid time and effort creating bids which are more often than not rejected (Theatre 4, ArtsOrg 1, ArtsOrg 3). Theatre-centred infrastructural initiatives were also launched, including a ‘Made in Hull’ Edinburgh Festival showcase, and the Hull Independent Producers’ Initiative (which commissioned a celebrated producer to mentor young local companies). These developments suggest that, in particular cases, Hull 2017 created conditions whereby certain cultural workers could develop their careers and profiles, and even escape the cultural ‘projectariat’ entirely (or for at least 4 years).
These developments were not exclusive to theatre. Receiving a large CoC commission, for instance, enabled one arts organisation to hire resident artists on a year-long contract rather than the typical one-off events contracts. Upgrades to the Ferens and the creation of the new Humber Street Gallery were also perceived as significant opportunities for Hull-based visual artists to develop their profile and exhibit work (ArtsOrg 1, ArtsOrg 2). These, however, are prospects, rather than the more demonstrable outcomes described in relation to key theatre institutions (described as ‘the usual suspects’ by one interviewee (anonymous)). In some cases, even the smaller scale CC scheme had a transformative impact on cultural workers’ careers. One participant describes using a CC grant to lever additional public and private match funding, leading to their CC project developing an international profile: a ‘seismic’ career boost (ArtsOrg 1), precipitating more frequent and better-paid jobs.
These success stories often follow a familiar path. It is common for cultural workers to hope one project’s success can produce a ‘break’; that is, reduce insecurity by rendering them more in-demand. As shown, this goal was realised for some of the Hull projectariat following CoC work. However, the limits of these successes need to be understood in the context of some of the tensions that emerged through the Hull 2017 process.
There is a tension between the temporal logic of CoC as a city rebranding initiative, necessitating a spectacular and concentrated programme of events, and the long-term requirements of the Hull arts infrastructure. One respondent (anonymous), whose organisation received a CoC commission, argued that more benefits would have followed from receiving the same amount staggered over a longer period. Some noted that the regularity is more important than the total sum, providing leeway to apply for additional resources (ArtsOrg 3) and making it easier to offer work to people (Employer 2).
The temporal question is also illustrated by divergences between the strategic priorities of the delivery organisation and the Council. A Council agent had initially provided a list of ordered priorities for arts development in Hull, placing areas of weakness at the top, hoping these could be corrected in the interests of depth of quality (anonymous). In fact, these were inverted: the pressures of implementing the 2017 programme meant the greater focus was on areas of existing comparative advantage.
Consequently, our Council interviewee argued that one area of reduced impact was a middle tier of arts workers: those with professional skills adequate to realistically compete for project funding, but who fell outside commissioning priorities and who were not sufficiently geared towards community engagement to win CC applications. The Council was asked to support this tier but had very limited funds with which to do so (Council 1). It was from this kind of actor that the most critical comments on Hull 2017 emerged. Various respondents (while not always endorsing these views themselves) reported encountering dissent from those who, being neither embedded in existing areas of strength, nor within community networks, felt shut out by a new gatekeeper (ArtsOrg 1, ArtsOrg 2, Theatre 3).
This critique illustrates the dialectical relationship between professionalism and participation in the arts. Professional careers depend on an engaged audience, and vice versa, but when participation increases so do the competitive pressures on professionals. This tension frames the recurrent argument among interviewees that one of Hull 2017’s major achievements was increasing ‘confidence’ in the city. During the CC stream in particular, there was great emphasis on outreach work to encourage applicants with no experience of funded arts projects, in some cases, providing detailed pre-submission advice (Delivery 2). The scheme’s organisers knew that many potential participants would not be professional artists and would have varied ‘exit points’: many would not be interested in working in culture long-term (Delivery 2). Consequently, there was scope for creators of ‘home-made culture’ (Holden 2016) to access previously unobtainable funds, if a community engagement aspect could be demonstrated.
The participation-competition tension also emerges in the Cultural Transformations data. The report highlights a general sense that residents’ pride in the city had increased, but also makes the more specific point that artistically engaged Hull residents are now putting in substantially more applications for project funding (University of Hull 2018). Its survey of arts workers also found that 70% had been involved in projects made possible by CoC, and 90% had been able to learn new skills and try new ideas. However, it also revealed concerns over intensified competition for funding, access to venues and for audiences. We unpack this further in the next section.
In 2018, the delivery organisation was renamed Absolutely Cultured and converted into a permanent organisation with a brief to develop the Hull 2017 legacy. It has a reduced budget, and its agenda concentrates on certain functions: staging three to four major public events annually; maintaining the highly visible volunteer corps that handles many crowd direction and stewarding functions at Hull cultural events; and overseeing new strategic assets like Humber Street Gallery (Delivery 3). Its work will be closely aligned with the Council’s development strategy of expanding the ‘visitor economy’. Consequently, it will also provide branding functions, such as offering tours and travel tips to social media ‘influencers’ visiting the area (Delivery 3). Some participants expressed concern with the focus on public events, since this could compete with existing events organisations (Council 1) and would not provide an ongoing source of employment for the city’s local cultural workforce (ArtsOrg 3).
Our aim is not to critique specific decisions made during Hull 2017. Rather, it is to highlight tensions inherent to the CoC project: between events delivery and strategic investment, between rebranding and sustainability, between the participant and the professional. These tensions reflect the complex logics embodied in CoC as an intervention: it is an attempt to improve a city’s arts infrastructure, but set in a context where market-oriented placemaking demands are a short-term imperative and in which social policy demands are also pressing. In the final section, we reflect on how these tensions intensified certain sources of insecurity for the cultural projectariat.
The cultural projectariat during Hull 2017
Interviewees often reflected that, to understand the variegated impact of Hull 2017, one should differentiate between cultural career stages. In other words, we may distinguish between different ‘fractions’ within the projectariat. One (Theatre 2) expressed this as a three-stage model: first, a stage with negligible professional work but potentially with aspirations to progress beyond hobbyist status; second, a middle stage where artists can construct a viable but precarious career aggregating one-off project awards (i.e. the projectariat proper); third, where workers can be continually employed by an arts organisation. The previous sections suggest some propositions. The comparative advantage-focused commissioning strategy enabled a small number of workers, notably in theatre, to progress from the second to the third stage. Greater community engagement accelerated participation at the first stage and created expectations that new people could ‘graduate’ to the second. This intensified competitive pressures on people established at the second stage. This general picture is elaborated in the rest of this section.
CoC’s time-specific nature inevitably limits what can be achieved. Many respondents were worried about the post-CoC future. Even at major theatre institutions, fixed term contracts were not being renewed, and respondents worried that staff were likely to leave the city to pursue work elsewhere (anonymous Theatre). The closure of local arts degree courses may jeopardise Hull’s ability to grow its cultural audience (ArtsOrg 3).
We focus on two specific and closely linked problems facing the cultural projectariat that could not be significantly mitigated by Hull 2017, and in some respects, have intensified. First, perpetual competition for new projects. Second, the amount of high-risk unpaid work required to sustain a project-based career.
First, enhanced confidence can mean intensified competition, not just for funding, but for audiences and venue space. As noted, this was felt most intensely by those at the second ‘stage’ identified above. One such respondent reports, [It was] a bit unnerving because to begin with as one of the most respected companies in the city, we felt a little bit like we were pitching . . . We produced less work ourselves last year than any other year, which is weird, because obviously the market was saturated, there were no venues available. (Theatre 3)
This organisation had, therefore, become less secure during 2017. Access to resources decreased necessitating pursuit of additional commercial funding: an unpredictable and risk-laden venture, given the time it requires set against limited chances of success (Sector support 1). This directly affected the organisation’s capacity to provide work: So at the moment we’re trying to see how we can keep it rolling, whether we can keep it rolling, how we can find the finances to do that. So it’s always a scary time, because you literally never know. So it’s very difficult to put people on any kind of permanent basis . . . (Theatre 3)
Others corroborated the sense of greater competitive pressure on established organisations, but offered a different normative interpretation: I think some of the older guard would say that [it’s more competitive] . . . One of the reasons [my organisation] started to struggle a few years ago was basically we used to get all the work. And then there was more people around . . . But why should we have got all the work? It creates complacency . . . if you just hand blank cheques . . . to the same people who do the same stuff, for thirty years . . . So yeah, it is more competitive, but that means there’s more people engaged, more people aware that they can get funds. Whereas a few of the older artists were used to just ringing up the arts and development teams and saying ‘hi . . . I’ve got this idea for a project. You know me, I know you. (ArtsOrg 3)
It is not our intention to evaluate these differing normative views. This is a problem that advocates of bottom-up rather than top-down approaches to cultural policy need to wrestle with, since a more ‘vernacular’ approach (Shorthose 2004) does not in itself resolve this tension. For our purposes, we simply highlight this as evidence of the specific form taken by the participation-professional dialectic during Hull 2017.
This dialectic is also evident in responses to the CC scheme, which is where many potential funding recipients were directed seemingly by default (Theatre 3). The community engagement requirement shifted the attributes demanded by funders, meaning applicants had to quickly develop new ways of framing their work and build networks with new actors. ‘We certainly weren’t discouraging practicing artists to apply for funding, but if they were it would be a case of where’s the community element in this?’ (Delivery 2). Developing these relationships can involve extensive unpaid effort with weak chance of reward given the competitive nature of the CC pot (Theatre 4, Council 1, ArtsOrg 1, Delivery 2). Hence, competition not only intensified but the terms on which it was conducted also shifted, requiring new networks to be constructed, and new ways of framing one’s work had to be quickly developed.
The latter point overlaps with the second problem: high-risk unpaid labour. Note that, in project-based cultural work, particularly in the publicly funded domain, there is often a formal framework for regulating pay. In response to concerns around unpaid internships, ACE now requires itemised budgets, including labour, directing applicants towards guideline pay rates (Union 1, Funder 1, Funder 2, Employer 1). Some interviewees had previously had ACE bids knocked back for under-budgeting on pay (Theatre 2). In sectors like theatre, there is relatively comprehensive collective bargaining coverage over pay, and neither union nor employer respondents testified to major deterioration of, or exit from, these arrangements under austerity (Union 1, Employer 1, Employer 2). There is a consensus that adhering to agreed contractual pay rates is a signifier of professionalism (Theatre 4, Council 1, Employer 1, Employer 2).
However, these arrangements merely define nominal pay rates and cannot address the various ways in which unpaid work seeps into cultural careers. Under austerity, volunteering is becoming more important as a route into a career. This is now widely evidenced in theatre (Nordicity & Smith 2017; Employer 1) and, based on our informants’ testimony, is likely also true elsewhere in the arts (ArtsOrg 1, ArtsOrg 4, ArtsOrg 5). Moreover, guideline pay rates and collective bargaining are not well adapted to recognising the multiple contingencies that arise during cultural projects (Theatre 2, Theatre 4, ArtsOrg 2). One respondent describes an ACE project award made to enable them to contribute to Hull 2017, and which features extensive guidance on pay rates: But as individuals, you know, we’re all doing far, far more, over and above what we’re getting paid. I don’t know how you’d you get around that in the arts . . . If we really got paid for everything we’ve done . . . one of the things I’ve found is building up strong networks with other arts organisations. So I’ve been going to meeting after meeting, none of which I’m getting paid for. (ArtsOrg 2)
This interviewee mentioned some comparatively ‘benign’ forms of unpaid labour, such as expending additional effort on a labour of love (NB: clearly reliance on volunteering can be problematised, but this is beyond the scope of this article). However, we highlight forms of higher risk unpaid work that are specific to the cultural projectariat, and which are an inescapable part of Hull 2017. This is the extensive unpaid work that goes into preparing funding bids, which many participants saw as time-consuming and difficult (ArtsOrg 1, ArtsOrg 3, Theatre 4, Employer 2). This issue was intensified by schemes like CC that pushed applicants to engage with community actors, requiring them to build new networks often from scratch, and adapt to new ways of framing and reporting on their activities (ArtsOrg 1, ArtsOrg 2, Theatre 3, Theatre 4).
Hull 2017 had a lighter touch approach to monitoring funding awards than ACE, arguing it wanted to minimise reporting burdens. Interviews suggested there was a presumption fundees would follow ACE guidelines around paying cultural workers. It does not appear that labour costs were addressed systematically through competitive schemes such as CC. One recipient (anonymous ArtsOrg) received a CC grant including a small artist’s fee but which did not cover labour costs on the project (which required significant manufacturing and maintenance); these costs were only met when this award was matched by other funders. Elsewhere, organisations might receive commissions to curate their own stream within the wider programme. In this sense, they become intermediary dispersers of funds and this could be quite informalised. One participant (anonymous citation) had been engaged as a freelancer in this manner and received a fee they saw as positive given their early career stage, but which certainly fell significantly below recognised guidelines as signposted by ACE and relevant unions. The Council arts unit itself makes awards based on assessments of strategic need. While they are conscious of the problem of low pay, there is no formal or de facto commitment to maintaining established going rates.
Art workers are typically reluctant to police each other’s pay practices (Employer 2; see also Umney 2016). This dovetails with the recurrent perception that, in purely aesthetic terms, regular funding for cultural projectarians is a problem. One participant (anonymous) attributed the liveliness of Hull’s arts scene to its insecurity, arguing that organisations in wealthier cities with long-term funding guarantees had become ‘fat . . . complacent and bland’. Another (anonymous) described explicitly counselling another organisation to avoid employing a resident artist on a permanent contract, viewing this as a threat to the impermanence that inspires creative work. While Hull 2017 created numerous opportunities for good-quality project work, it did not challenge these dynamics in any significant way. Indeed, as we have argued, the divergent logics embedded in CoC as a placemaking intervention created tensions that crowded out the possibility of addressing them directly.
Conclusion
CoC 2017 was a major intervention, channelling an influx of funds into a relatively deprived city with a fragile but active cultural scene. This influx created new mechanisms through which cultural workers could access project work, and some of these projects enabled a sustainable boost to workers’ careers. In certain cases, it enabled people to entirely escape ‘projectariat’ life, for instance, by becoming permanent employees of an arts organisation. However, we have also argued that the logics embodied in CoC as an intervention – its placemaking impetus and wider social policy objectives – imposed limits on the extent to which it could reduce the insecurity of projectariat work, particularly among what we have called the professional ‘middle stage’. In this sense, we have sought to greatly flesh out previous studies which have interrogated the tensions between ‘vernacular’ arts scenes and attempts at ‘engineering’ developmental cultural interventions from above (Shorthose 2004; see also Campbell 2011; Wharton et al. 2010).
This article offers two main contributions to existing literature. First, it helps sociologists of work, specifically those interested in precarious work in cultural fields, pay closer attention to developments at policy level. To date, this is relatively uncommon, and there are only scattered examples of serious engagement between policy analysis and the sociology of work (e.g. Baum 2018; Murray & Gollmitzer 2012). While we examine a highly specific intervention, some general arguments stand out, with important implications. First, while problems like competition and unpaid work are well-recognised, the project-based character of work means these take specific forms and causes. Second, while cultural project work is usually ‘precarious’ to some degree, the severity of these problems are highly variable and directly influenced by the funding frameworks and policy interventions applied to a given context. Third, if cultural project work is to be rendered less insecure, this has to be identified as an end in itself. Other logics, be they market-oriented (the placemaking impetus) or social democratic (the emphasis on community participation), have tended to crowd out the goal of providing good-quality work for the existing cultural workforce, which did not figure prominently in policy-level interviews.
We also contribute to literature on cultural and urban policy, which has direct interest in CoC initiatives (García 2005; Mooney 2004; O’Brien & Miles 2010; Wharton et al. 2010) but which has typically remained distant from the sociology of work (Baum 2018). The causal relationship between policy and working conditions is an important gap (Banks & Hesmondhalgh 2009) which this article has addressed through a detailed case study. We hope it provides a useful reference point in considering how policy change interacts with the forms and determinants of insecurity. Finally, we contribute to literature on project-based organisation more generally. Following Greer et al. (2019), we show how the insecurity of project-based work is shaped by the qualitative relationships between distributors and recipients of funding that are embedded in local case studies.
A single case study has evident limits. We have not been able to provide an encompassing survey of the views of cultural workers in Hull. Instead, we have illuminated the mechanics through which the Hull infrastructure was changed during the process and used this to identify likely consequences with corroboration from well-connected informants. We have also been drawn on publicly available quantitative evaluation data (University of Hull 2018) to contextualise these insights. Despite the specificity of the Hull case, we have identified propositions which we believe have general relevance to the sociology of cultural work.
Does our research prompt specific practical recommendations? Certain interviewee comments could, potentially, be developed into policy ideas: notably the possibility of longer term delivery periods and greater prioritisation of areas of strategic and infrastructural weakness. However, we have also argued that the nature of CoC as a market-oriented placemaking intervention militates against these kinds of approaches. This, ultimately, reflects the national-level context, which emphasises the transformative capacity of cultural investment in a market-oriented context without addressing the problems of insecure work upon which the sector currently depends.
