CultHeRit Insights: Improving the Employment Situation and Accessibility of Jobs in CHIM

CultHeRit Insights: Improving the Employment Situation and Accessibility of Jobs in CHIM brings together findings from workshops, interviews and surveys involving nearly sixty professionals across Central and Southeastern Europe. Edited by Senka Gavranov and Sebastian Boniș, the volume documents the partnership's work and its approach to tackling employment challenges at multiple levels: individual, institutional, sectoral and societal. It documents and promotes a participatory approach adopted by CultHeRit, in which practitioners themselves identified problems, tested solutions and generated actionable knowledge grounded in lived experience rather than abstract theory.

Conceptual Lenses for Diagnosing Sectoral Challenges

This publication describes the conceptual lenses which informed the inquiry into problems and their solutions. The volume introduces and applies several frameworks that recur across all four volumes of the series. It investigates the extent to which they affect the recognition and perception of work in CHIM, examines their consequences and considers how conditions can be improved:

Precarity and the passion dynamic examines the effect of the romanticized narrative of working 'for love' on the employment situation in the sector.
The feminization of labor and the economy of care explores how occupations culturally associated with women's roles tend to be characterized by wage suppression, occupational segregation and the invisibility of essential maintenance work.
Frugal innovation describes the resource-conscious solutions born of necessity that permeate underfunded institutions, while cautioning against normalizing scarcity as a permanent condition.
Invisibility of work refers to the lack of public awareness about the diversity, volume and impact of work and tasks performed in CHIM.

These frameworks are not presented as definitive conclusions but as interpretive tools that helped the partnership navigate complexity and obtain actionable information to devise solutions and act programmatically to solve problems within their reach. Readers are invited to share their own analytical perspectives and join the ongoing conversations.

The CultHeRit Insights Series

This volume is the first in a four-part series. The companion volumes explore specific aspects of employment and professional development in CHIM:

Volume 1: Improving the Employment Situation and Accessibility of Jobs in CHIM
Volume 2: Mentorship in CHIM (with five Annexes)
- Annex I: Methodology and Inquiry Framework – The Evolving Dialogue
- Annex II: Voices from the Field – Perspectives on Mentorship in the CHIM
- Annex III: Mentoring Young Professionals – From Model to Practice and Evaluation
- Annex IV: The Mentorship Lab – Concepts, Proposals and Activities
- Annex V: The Mentorship Rulebook
Volume 3: Invisibility of Work in CHIM (with two Annexes)
- Annex I: Beyond the Exhibit – A Catalogue of Good Practices for Improving Visibility of Work in CHIM
- Annex II: The Diagnostic Mini-Survey – A Step-by-Step Guide for Practitioners
Volume 4: Employment of Persons with Disabilities in CHIM