research

 

 

 

The SIC is a system of classifying types of businesses into sectors which is used by business statistics surveys e.g. Annual Business Inquiry (ABI). The current system is SIC 2003. This is a modest revision of the SIC 1992 system.

 

Like any such system, has its limitations. These stem from two key reasons:

 

1. Market output versus industrial output. The distinction between 'cultural' and 'non-cultural' products and services is based upon an implicit judgement of the 'intended use' or the final market of each particular product or service. This is an everyday understanding of the sector – that is shared by policymakers – in which the cultural sector is composed of a set of industries that are defined by their market outputs, e.g. the film industry, the television industry, the music industry, and so on.

 

The SIC, however, uses a classificatory system that is based principally upon output defined as the result of an industrial process, e.g. 'the wholesale and retail trade', 'manufacturing industries' etc. Thus, using the SIC to describe industries that are understood in terms of their market is problematic. Generally, one can often only identify elements of a particular cultural domain; these then have to be artificially re-aggregated. This is a complex, specialist and time-consuming task.

 

 

2. Failure to keep pace with the rate of industrial change. The SIC was first developed in 1948. Despite a number of revisions since its inception, the SIC continues to offer good visibility for established activities, such as the traditional areas of the manufacturing sector. However, it is hard to precisely identify many activities within the service sector as a whole. It is particularly difficult to identify new or emerging activities – they are there, but not picked out in detail. This is because the service sector is sparsely populated with classifications, and is supplemented with a number of generalised 'not elsewhere classified' (NEC) categories.

 

The combination of these two factors means that tracking cultural activities using the SIC is very difficult, as much cultural activity is buried within generalised categories, or within specific categories that are mainly 'non-cultural'.

 

 

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The SOC is based on two concepts; kind of work, and type of skill. It is central to data available in the Census and from the Labour Force Survey. Details can be found under the latest classification , SOC 2000.

 

Despite the recent revision in 2000, an analysis of the SOC provides only a partial coverage of the cultural sector. The classification is of limited use for the purposes of measuring employment in the cultural sector, and should largely be avoided except for particular labour market studies, mainly those relating to skills. There are two key reasons for deficiencies in the SOC's 'fitness for purpose' where the cultural sector is concerned.

 

Firstly, the key purpose and function of the SOC is to identify the competency-defined roles of individuals (thus labelled as 'occupations'). Therefore, if one is interested in measuring the economic scale and scope of a series of inter-related economic activities (e.g. an industry or sector), the SOC is the wrong place to start. The reason for this is that the SOC primarily tracks what activities an individual undertakes; it is less concerned with the particular sector or industry in which these activities take place.

 

There is also the issue of 'non-cultural' workers who work within the cultural sector. For example, the SOC contains an occupation code for accountants, some of whom will work within the cultural sector. In principle, it is possible to identify these non-cultural occupations within the cultural sector by cross referencing occupational codes with SIC codes for the business unit in which the occupation takes place (so-called 'SIC-SOC mapping', or 'SIC-SOC matrix'). In practice, this analysis produces its own complications and, in any case, it requires a level of sophistication and access to data at such a fundamental level that it is beyond the scope of all but a handful of data specialists in the UK. This is the prime reason why using SIC codes as the foundation for the measurement of employment is preferable.

 

Secondly, new cultural activities are still not identified as 'occupations' within the SOC. For example, there is a new set of codes for IT workers, but these do not identify computer games occupations, digital sound and image production, or web designers, even though the numbers employed in such activities are now significant.

 

The framework definition classifies the sector in terms of domains. Classifying it in terms of functions is at present impossible due to the difficulties outlined above, so we rely solely upon the SIC in this respect. Occupational measures will, then, always be a significant under-representation of the true state of affairs.

 

As with the SIC, there are some notable absences in the codes. Many activities consequently remain invisible and uncounted (or rather, bundled up with others, so unidentifiable as cultural).