Cultural work and contributive justice

Ideas of contributive justice are concerned with what people give or contribute to society, rather than what they get, as in ideas of distributive justice. This article deals with contributive justice as applied to a specific example of cultural work – work and employment in the UK publicly-funded arts, cultural and creative industries. It is offered mainly as a conceptual discussion rather than a set of concrete policy recommendations. However, given some of the limitations of current distributive models, a principle of universal distribution is postulated, supported by contributive justice as a complementary framework for conceiving and implementing programmes of equal opportunity and ‘creative justice’ in publicly funded cultural work.