Arts funding & the Diamond market ... an analogy to shed light on the current position
The current state of arts funding is rather like the diamond market before de Beers lost their monopoly on supply. If Arts Council England is the equivalent of de Beers then HE institutions are the diamond mine owners. There are key lessons and key differences of course.
Key Lessons:
- we cannot continue to control supply in a rapidly growing market [especially when the supply grows yet faster than the market]
- primary producers benefit from a highly fluid yet immobile workforce as this maintains stability whilst minimising the labour costs.
- there is a huge power imbalance between the HE institutions and the labour force. In the creative and cultural sector this means that HE institutions obtain benefit from cheap, regularly renewed, highly competitive labour markets. The associate lecturers receive very little benefit from the current structure of these labour markets ... this keeps this labour force below the poverty line in many cases
- this position is compounded by the cap on daily rates imposed in the grant system by ACE because they have been historically unwilling to engage with the economic and policy challenges that come with the reviewing their position
- the workforce are immobile because they don't have sufficient transferable skills or resources to move into sectors which deliver higher incomes
Key differences:
- the diamond market seeks to push up prices rather than reduce cost as the mechanism of increasing/maintaining profitability i.e. it works with demand economics not supply economics
- the diamond mine workers are less mobile than those in the creative industries. a
As the creative workforce realises that there are options beyond teaching and grant funding they will diversify their income portfolio. to do this they require either a) entrepreneurship skills and/or b) to acquire skills needed to get a job in a creative sector or any other. The process of development of skills to increase employability does not operate very well in the creative industries
- the elasticity of demand is well mapped out in the diamond market but is not in the Creative Industries ... I suggest that the elasticity is greater than the subsidy system thinks it is.
Key Lessons:
- we cannot continue to control supply in a rapidly growing market [especially when the supply grows yet faster than the market]
- primary producers benefit from a highly fluid yet immobile workforce as this maintains stability whilst minimising the labour costs.
- there is a huge power imbalance between the HE institutions and the labour force. In the creative and cultural sector this means that HE institutions obtain benefit from cheap, regularly renewed, highly competitive labour markets. The associate lecturers receive very little benefit from the current structure of these labour markets ... this keeps this labour force below the poverty line in many cases
- this position is compounded by the cap on daily rates imposed in the grant system by ACE because they have been historically unwilling to engage with the economic and policy challenges that come with the reviewing their position
- the workforce are immobile because they don't have sufficient transferable skills or resources to move into sectors which deliver higher incomes
Key differences:
- the diamond market seeks to push up prices rather than reduce cost as the mechanism of increasing/maintaining profitability i.e. it works with demand economics not supply economics
- the diamond mine workers are less mobile than those in the creative industries. a
As the creative workforce realises that there are options beyond teaching and grant funding they will diversify their income portfolio. to do this they require either a) entrepreneurship skills and/or b) to acquire skills needed to get a job in a creative sector or any other. The process of development of skills to increase employability does not operate very well in the creative industries
- the elasticity of demand is well mapped out in the diamond market but is not in the Creative Industries ... I suggest that the elasticity is greater than the subsidy system thinks it is.
posted by Brambles at 7:17 AM
2 Comments:
hi sarah
I'm loving your blog postings, really thought provoking and stimulating! Thanks for them.
I'm the arts worker half of a arts/diamond partnership (my partnership is in the jewellery trade) and this post is one of few we can read with equal interest....
The focus on ACE within your analogy is inevitable I suppose, though personally, as someone who tries to increasingly apply creative entreprenurship in my work across the creative sector, but who isn't plugged in to the HEIs and has reservations about doing so, I find your decision to foreground the HE sector here to be at least questionable. Aren't public sector orgs, the pockets of rich individuals, etc, as much 'diamond mines' as HEIs?
Could you also expand a little more on what you mean by elasticity of demand? I'm not very familiar with the concept....
Thanks!
tj,
this post was specifically focussed on ACE and HE's as i was sitting in a conference at NESTA where people were banging on about funding. i too am in favour of creative entrepreneurship rather than funding. i too have reservations about creative entrepreneurs plugging into the HE sector as I don't think HE's are objective and indeed there are occasions when i think they are down right unethical in their engagement with SME's.
elasticity of demand is an economics term, wikipedia will give you a better explanation than i will but essentially it means that if demand is inelastic that prices can go up without people buying less
Post a Comment
<< Home