This article presents an update to the Creative Trident model of creative employment that incorporates creative qualifications, revealing the extent to which they are employed in the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs) and in the general labour market. CCI research has struggled in recent years with methodological questions about how to incorporate creative qualifications, while some critics have used ideological and lifestyle arguments to question the coherence of grouping "cultural production" and "creative services" activities as the CCIs. The Creative Trident III approach presented here, and modelled with Australian data, addresses the methodological shortcomings of demand-based models of coding creative qualifications in a manner that can respond to current concerns about the labour market value of creative and liberal arts education. A major finding shows the coherence of the CCIs model at the level of qualifications - the only level at which the commonality of shared skills can be meaningfully addressed.

This chapter argues that the success of the Creative and Cultural industries in Australia needs to be understood in terms of the development of statistical mapping exercises that have brought the creative economy into existence as an experimental policy object. Key to this was the invention of modular coding frameworks that could accommodate two asymmetric economic concepts that have bedevilled policy debate; namely creativity as human capital input ("innovation" as automation-resistant human skills), and the cultural as publicly valued industry outputs ("goods and services"). Furthermore, the emergence of a skills agenda can be dated to Australia's first Cultural Industries policy formation in the 1980s.

Youth arts is a form of education that operates primarily through affect and, perhaps because of this, has not received attention in terms of its capacity to develop young people’s employability. In this paper we identify and discuss the much vaunted and highly desirable ‘21st century skills’ learnt in youth arts settings. Drawing on arguments first advanced by Dick Hebdidge and Raymond Williams, we show that while 21st century skills are learnt through affect, the processes through which this learning proceeds produces skills that are seen as valuable commodities. Taking the everyday seriously as a site for learning, we explore youth arts projects as a site for skills development and argue for a framing of micro-credentials that at once recognizes and problematizes this modality of training. We do so by outlining how our reading of cultural studies scholarship can provide a foundation for understanding the everyday spaces of youth arts as critical sites of knowledge production. Examining the intersections of identity, being and culture as pedagogical, we outline how the everyday experiences of diverse youth participating in arts might be captured so as to build pathways into the future based on competency in ‘the now’.

Research on work in the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI) often combines macro-level accounts of political economy with small-scale studies, often qualitative, of work in specific organisations and/or sectors. While rich in both the theory and qualitative detail of creative labour, and especially useful for the study of precarious and informal work, such studies cannot capture population movements within cultural employment over time, nor the factors associated with continuing employment. The Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset (ACLD) provides a unique opportunity to track a national sample of workers in a broad range of cultural occupations across two waves of the Australian census, 2006 and 2016. This provides an opportunity to consider the factors associated with both selection into, and continuity within, cultural production employment. The study of factors associated with primary employment in cultural occupations is significant, as such positions are a relatively privileged resource within a broader field characterised by temporary and informal work arrangements, including casual, contract and unpaid work, that are not captured in the Census. The question of who holds these positions is a question of social distribution. We examine the key factors such as gender, age, qualifications, geography and household dynamics, to compare their relative importance in determining the employment and continuity of work in the field of cultural production.

The focus on graduate employability for Creative Industries has tended to overlook the significance of the education sector as a destination. This article makes a case for the educational logic of music careers considered as an example of the developmental agenda embedded in the concept of ‘culture’. It further supports this account by looking at longitudinal graduate destination data in both Australia and the UK that shows the importance of education employment to music careers. It considers music graduate outcomes in both countries according to university tier, graduate level employment, and career satisfaction. It finds that outcomes differ significantly in terms of gender, and that careers in education are no less rewarding than those in music professions. Attention to the ‘educational logic of culture’ suggests there are opportunities for creative industries policy to better support links between the creative economy and education.

This paper situates creative industries discourse in the context of an emerging Higher Education (HE) focus on graduate employability. It draws on Ian Hunter’s genealogy of the ‘aesthetico-ethical exemplar’ in order to highlight how creative industries discourse recalibrates the figure of the artist in order to model an exemplary set of capacities for economic self-management. The article suggests such a project is both; (a) more robust than the broader creative industries policy push, in so far as its educational rationality does not rest on any economic argument for the viability of the cultural sector, and is in fact attuned to a deteriorating job market for arts graduates, and (b) limited, due to the values of the cultural field and embedded moral rationalities of arts education. Such a description encourages critics of creative industries discourse to engage in a wider discussion about what kind of transferable skills arts education provides.

N RECENT YEARS THE NOTION OF PRECARITY THAT FIRST APPEARED IN EUROPEAN SOCIAL theory has become of increasing importance for the humanities. Let me suggest three major reasons for this. Firstly, and most obviously, over the last two decades the academic humanities have been at the forefront of declining employment prospects and conditions within universities, in both Australia and the UK. This is mostly due to changed funding mechanisms, such as (in Australia) the construction of a quasi-market in domestic enrolments, the increased importance of full-fee paying courses to faculty budgets, and the emergence of a nationally competitive system of research funding that discounts the significance of humanities research (Marginson). Such developments have been accompanied by a massive increase in casualisation of the academic workforce since the 1990s and a significant increase in the number of PhD graduates (Turner and Brass). As a consequence of this process of restructuring public tertiary education according to the tenets of neoclassical economic ideology, the viability of the academic humanities as a teaching formation, academic career, and knowledge discipline does indeed appear precarious from a range of positions.

This article describes developments in Vietnamese Australian community arts in the context of recent reforms to Community Cultural Development (CCD) funding. While a discussion of two case studies suggests these reforms have encouraged a shift towards post-welfarist and enterprising modes of project development, the article argues that conspicuously 'cosmo-multiculturalist' and 'sentimental aesthetics' cannot be explained entirely in terms of post-1980s cultural policies of the Australian Labour government. The article concludes that recent attempts to link CCD work to professional arts networks were in fact anticipated by the explicit agendas of Vietnamese Australian CCD workers themselves, although for quite different purposes.

While the emergent field of creative labour research provides a timely evidence-based reply to the hyperbole of the creative industries policy push, studies have remained speculative as to why so many people would seek careers in the creative sector. This article proposes that to adequately address this question requires a change in the scope of creative labour from 'industries' to 'fields'. It briefly reviews cultural economic descriptions of artists' labour markets, and suggests that Bourdieu's notion of social inertia provides a plausible hypothesis concerning the social trajectories of those who are inclined to make a vocation of the cultural field. The article draws on a recent survey of student demand for university creative writing courses, identifying a cohort whose situation can be interpreted in terms of the social inertia effect. Such an approach shifts the focus of creative labour research from employment to 'vocation', and returns the notion of social status to the centre of explanation.

The critiques of practice-led researchThis special issue of TEXT was motivated by a concern that the notion of practice-led research had achieved something like a 'practical consensus' within university creative arts programs, and that this consensus was increasingly counter-productive for the field.Although discussions have routinely noted problems with the conception and application of practice-led research, it seemed to Paul and me, and the creative arts academics we spoke to, that such discussions occurred within a space which was pre-eminently advocatory and declamatory, with the result that any movement towards critique was already spoken for.The purposes of this issue were hence broad; we were open to contributions that problematised practice-led research in the spirit of critical clarification and renewal, as well as authors willing to forgo the concept altogether.If a certain group of authoritative references have indeed become 'run-ofthe-mill' in discussions, as Søren Kjørup suggests (2011: 39), then the purpose of this special issue was to invite authors to move beyond this run.