Chapter 4 builds on Chris’s own intelligent reflections on criminalisation and deportation. Chris said that he had to ‘be what society is’, and the chapter suggests that he did not ‘fail to integrate’, but was perhaps too well integrated into a violently unequal, racist and sexist society. The chapter explores Chris’s contradictions and complexities, and highlights the ways in which he developed relationships across lines of ethnic and national difference in quite unremarkable ways. The concept of conviviality is enlisted as an alternative to culturalist explanations for crime. Ultimately, the chapter explains Chris’s criminality in terms of material rather than cultural deprivation. The final section of the chapter discusses Chris’s attempts to appeal his deportation on the basis of ‘family life’. However, the Home Office effectively constructed Chris as irresponsible and undeserving on the basis of normative judgements surrounding race, class, gender and ‘the family’.

The final ethnographic portrait, Chapter 5, describes Denico’s painful separation from his partner Kendal and her children. Denico and Kendal’s own accounts are contrasted with Home Office correspondence and policy, which demonstrate the violence wrought by restrictive definitions of ‘family life’. The chapter then introduces two other deported people, Darel and Michelle, as a way of extending this discussion of deportation and ‘the family’. The chapter shows that although men are the primary targets of deportation, the consequences of their removal are borne by women, often in profoundly gendered ways (i.e. in relation to employment, childcare, housing and welfare). Overall, the chapter argues that deportation is a key site at which we can observe the state’s regulation of gender, sexuality and family.

Media and policy discussions sometimes make it seem as if there was a golden age for social mobility into cultural occupations. This chapter interrogates that idea. It shows how social mobility has been a long-standing problem for cultural occupations. First the chapter discusses the key theories of social mobility, differentiating the academic and policy uses of the term.It then uses the ONS-LS dataset to track social mobility into cultural occupations over time. In the early 1980s someone from a middle-class origin had about four times the odds of entering a cultural job, as compared with working-class origin people. These chances were almost the same in the early 2010s.The static rates of social mobility into cultural jobs suggests three things. First, that cultural occupations share some social mobility issues that are common in other elite professions. Second, that rather than things getting worse in recent years cultural occupations have perhaps always been exclusive and exclusionary. Third, there is a clear need to understand the mechanisms driving this long-standing problem.

The final sections of John Derricke's Image of Irelande, containing the contrasting tales of Rory Oge O’More and O’Neale, contain a shift of focus, metre and rhyme scheme. When the narrative perspective changes to that of Rory, Derricke drops into a ballad form of sorts. Both this form and the format of the condemned criminal lamenting his wicked life echo a popular early modern genre: criminal biography. Yet while there are similarities of format, there are also important differences between ‘biographical’ pamphlets and broadsheets and Derricke's rebel biographies – most notably that he contrasts the tale of an unrepentant rebel with that of a repentant one. This chapter compares the final section of The Image of Irelande to early modern criminal biography and proposes that Derricke adapted the popular genre to serve his main purpose of glorifying Sir Henry Sidney, who is a central character in the accounts of both rebels’ lives.

We usually think of culture as a good thing. Arts organisations and governments tell us that culture has a range of benefits for individuals and for societies. This is in addition to the value of culture for its own sake.However, culture is closely related to a range of social inequalities. There are inequalities in the workforce for cultural occupations. There are inequalities in the audiences for arts and culture. Culture also plays an important role in relation to how social inequality reproduces itself.This chapter introduces the book, its core argument and themes, and structure. It shows the importance of studying cultural occupations, as a framework for understanding culture and inequality. It also highlights the relationship between the workforce and the audience, demonstrating the consequences of the barriers to diverse and equal representation that is central to the analysis in the rest of the chapters.

One of the chief casualties of the extended economic crisis in the EU has been democratic politics. The EU's own mechanisms for decision-making have been set aside at particular moments; a core group of countries has assumed responsibility for crisis management. This chapter examines the increasingly strained relationship between the EU and the democratic process. It argues that ethical standards and competent decision-making are becoming casualties of the democratic deficit. The crisis which rocked the EU at the end of the 1990s briefly brought to the surface the view that the then thirteen-member EU was divided on a North-South basis in its attitude to public morality. The European Parliament, briefly emboldened by having taken resolute action against abuses inside the Commission, slumped back into torpor despite acquiring some increased powers as a result of the Maastricht Treaty.