Welcome to the inner circle?:Earnings and inequality in the creative industries

Do women and workers with a migration background earn relatively less in the core creative arts or in commercial creative sectors such as advertising? In this paper, we seek to (1) uncover to what extent workers’ socio-demographic characteristics and the sub-sector of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in which they are active affect how much they earn, and (2) unravel to what extent the context of sub-sectors affects inequality in earnings between different socio-demographic groups. Using Statistics Netherlands register data on all workers with earnings from the CCIs, we show that earnings are lowest in the sub-sectors in Throsby’s (2008) inner circles of the CCIs. Both having a migration background and being a woman affect earnings in the CCIs. Especially gender inequality in earnings is extensive and omnipresent, being least pronounced in sub-sectors such as literature, music and visual arts, and most severe in e.g. film and photography.</p

Handshakes and hashtags:how changing social interactions make us feel awkward

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing measures were implemented across the globe. These measures demanded replacing taken-for-granted social practices such as shaking hands with new interaction rituals. Based on our personal observations, this collective process of learning new interactions often resulted in feelings of awkwardness. Awkwardness, in this sense, is more than an individual emotion; it is also a cultural marker helping us understand how interactions, interaction rituals and social norms are constituted. Therefore, we aim to obtain a better understanding of both what people perceive as failed interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they perceive these awkward moments. We do so by looking at how awkwardness is discussed in social and news media during the first wave of the pandemic. Combining a topic modelling of tweets and a thematic text analysis of news articles, we show the main topics representing awkwardness in relation to COVID-19, and how this links to new forms of face-to-face and mediated interactions. Moreover, we demonstrate that experiences of awkwardness often relate to the necessity of bodily and situational co-presence, creating a stronger sense of intimacy, synchronicity and sequency.</p

Cultivating fertile learning grounds: Collegiality, tacit knowledge and innovation in creative co-working spaces

Recently, the rapid global rise in co-working spaces and shared workspaces has sparked a re-emergence of the clustering debate. Similar to the pr