Music in Society: Music Industries and Working Lives in a Social Justice Frame

Lecture with Mark Banks, Correspondent: Emília Barna

This talk explores the grammar of cultural work and music industries research viewed through the prism of social justice. While research on working in the music industry has expanded greatly, with issues of participation, diversity and inclusion much to the fore, these investigations tended to be constrained by their own empirical limits – often content to enumerate inequalities rather than theorise how we might attend to their dismantling – and so the impact of such research on workplace organisation and practice has been decidedly uneven. Diversity and inclusion are themselves concepts increasingly under attack from both left and right perspectives.

So where are the new theoretical insights or notions that might extend or re-energise our progressive advances? The time seems ripe to revisit the progress that has been made, highlight the problems or lost opportunities, as well as theorise new concepts – such as creative justice and contributive justice, as I duly propose here.

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Mark Banks is Professor of Cultural Economy and Head of Subject for Cultural Industries in the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of The Politics of Cultural Work (2007) and Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (2017) and is currently working on two edited collections on cultural work.

Emília Barna is a sociologist and popular music scholar, Associate Professor and Head of the Communication and Media Studies MA at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. Her main research areas include the music industries and digitalisation, popular music and gender, cultural labour, and popular music and politics. Her monograph Working in Music on the Semiperiphery: Local Cultural Production and Global Capitalism was published by Central European University Press in 2025.