‘Seeking a Passionate, Committed and Energetic Person’: Cultural Fit Signals in UK Arts Job Advertisements

Despite sector-wide diversity initiatives and the stated equality aims of many arts organisations, the arts workforce remains relatively homogeneous. While existing research highlights how precarity, low pay, informal networks and occupational culture shape access to the sector, less attention has been paid to how these conditions inform expectations of workers as articulated within formal recruitment criteria. This article examines signals of cultural fit in 1750 arts job person specifications, focusing on terms associated with adaptability, interpersonal ease, and passion. The findings show that 45% of listings included at least one of the identified terms. Passion was the most requested (25%), followed by personability (24%) and adaptability (21%). Logistic regression models reveal that customer service and hospitality roles, as well as positions paid £10k to £20k, are significantly positively associated with passion terms. This research explores how seemingly neutral worker expectations can reinforce systemic inequalities in the arts sector. The significance of these findings is not that job advertisements create such expectations, but that they reveal wider norms through which arts work is organised. As access to the resources needed to embody these qualities is socially uneven, such expectations can contribute to persistent inequalities in access to and progression within the arts workforce.