Using cultural theory to navigate the policy process (original) (raw)
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dms – der moderne staat – Zeitschrift für Public Policy, Recht und Management, 2021
This book is a forceful and entertaining argument why culture and values should be taken much more seriously, both by policy makers, but also in the curricula of modern Public Policy and Public Administration programs. The author is not a fundamental sceptic of managerial politics and administration, but he shows the inherent limits, contradictions, and blind spots of this kind of policy making. He succeeds particularly well because he can draw on many years of experience as a civil servant in different British ministries, in the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. The book adds little to the conceptual and theoretical discussions of cultural factors in policy making, but it does provide many interesting examples of their significance and why it is dangerous to ignore them. It should be read by students in advanced public policy and public administration programs, who should find it helpful to see the technical solutions to all sorts of policy problems in a so...
New Directions in Cultural Policy Research
This chapter looks under the bonnet of research, interrogating data and evidence used in social and cultural policy. It looks at data in the culture-well-being relationship in three ways. First, if well-being data can indicate whether policy spend on culture is good for society. Second, a review of two projects that evaluate ‘cultural occupations’ and ‘artistic practice’ in the UK and the US. Despite ostensibly similar approaches with well-being data, different understandings of these categories affect findings. Third, Italian research found ‘cultural access’ was vital to well-being, but its operationalisations are curious in ways that affect the conclusions and recommendations. Understanding well-being data—and the contexts of their use—is critical in appreciating evidence, its limits and uses in social and cultural policy.
Policy and culture
1. Don’t waste the crisis The 2008 subprime crisis caught institutions and experts off guard, laying bare the interdependence of societies and markets but also the fragility of the global economy, and the inability of states to govern these challenges. The crisis accentuated the difficulties that many countries already encountered in global competition. The forms of austerity imposed progressively on public budgets brought to harsh political confrontation and contributed to the growing inequalities. Although crisis and austerity have been experienced globally since then, it had a major impact in the Mediterranean and Southern European countries (including Italy and in some particular regions and cities in the South), which had undergone stop-go austerity processes since the beginning of the 90s, declining further since 2001. This book - and more, in general, the Culture and policy-making: The symbolic universe of social action series of which this volume is the third book- has its roots in such a scenario. The problems and issues motivating it and the main ideas it attempts to address were firstly elaborated within the framework of the Horizon 2020 Re.Cri.Re. research project (Between the Representation of the Crisis and the Crisis of the Representation; www.recrire.eu). The purpose of the project was to assess the impact of the crisis on the European identity within the societies of the European member states. The project responded to an EU call, officially drafted between 2013 and 2014, that saw the economic crisis as a major challenge and, accordingly, asked for analyses aimed at assessing its possible negative effects on citizens’ feeling of membership of the European Union and commitment to the European institutions as well as for the proposal of measures aimed at addressing such negative effects. Re.Cri.Re. project interpreted the call as requiring a deep understanding of the cultural dynamics underpinning the feared change in the European identity. In doing so, Re.Cri.Re. introduced the culture as the mediator between the material context (i.e. the economic crisis) and its psycho-social and institutional consequences (i.e. the value people attributed to European citizenship and the attitude towards/commitment to European institutions).
Cultural cognition and public policy
Yale Law & Policy Review, 2006
Abstract: People disagree about the empirical dimensions of various public policy issues. It's not surprising that people have different beliefs about the deterrent effect of the death penalty, the impact of handgun ownership on crime, the significance of global warming, the public health consequences of promiscuous sex, etc. The mystery concerns the origins of such disagreement. Were either the indeterminacy of scientific evidence or the uneven dissemination of convincing data responsible, we would expect divergent beliefs on such ...
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to …, 2012
Since the 'cultural turn' of the 1970s, scholarly conceptions of culture have changed significantly. This chapter outlines these changes and illustrates how they have been refracted in the cultural analysis of politics. Conceptual innovations have reformulated long-standing perspectives on national culture, status politics and political symbolism. Newer lines of analysis emphasize the influence of discourse and cognition. Promising research in this vein centres on state formation and state policy making, topics that serve as focal points for an agenda that pushes cultural analysis in productive directions.
Culture and Welfare State Policies: Reflections on a Complex Interrelation
Journal of Social Policy, 2004
In comparative welfare state analyses, cross-national differences have often been explained both by the specific profiles of welfare state institutions and the constellations of social actors. However, the way in which cultural differences also contribute to the explanation is often ignored, or at least treated as a more marginal issue. The aim of this article is to reflect on the relationship between culture and welfare state policies, and consider how it might be analysed in a comparative perspective. A theoretical framework for analysis is introduced in which the relationship of culture and welfare state policies is conceptualised as a complex, multi-level relationship which is embedded in the specific context of a particular society and can develop in contradictory ways.
Cultural Policy”: Towards a Global Survey
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2009
The field of "cultural policy" has acquired sufficient purchase internationally to warrant a comparative global survey. This article examines questions that arise preliminary to such an endeavour. It looks first at the problems posed by the divided nature of "cultural policy" research: on the one hand policy advisory work that is essentially pragmatic, and on the other so-called "theoretical" analysis which has little or no purchase on policy-making. In both cases, key elements are missed. A way out of the quandary would be to privilege a line of inquiry that analyzes the "arts and heritage" both in relation to the institutional terms and objectives of these fields but also as components of a broader "cultural system" whose dynamics can only be properly grasped in terms of the social science or "ways of life" paradigm. Such a line of inquiry would address: the ways in which subsidized cultural practice interacts with or is impacted by social, economic and political forces; the domains of public intervention where the cultural in the broader social science sense elicits policy stances and policy action; the nature of public intervention in both categories; whether and how the objects and practices of intervention are conceptualised in a holistic way. A second set of interrogations concerns axes for the comparison of "cultural policy" trans-nationally. One possible axis is provided by different state stances with respect to Raymond Williams' categories of national aggrandizement, economic reductionism, public patronage of the arts, media regulation and the negotiated construction of cultural identity. Another avenue would be to unpack interpretations of two leading current agendas, namely "cultural diversity" and the "cultural and/or creative industries". "Cultural policy" has acquired sufficient purchase internationally for a comparative global survey of different "cultural policy" stances and measures to appear both feasible and timely. The reflections that follow are prolegomena to such an endeavour, some of the necessary preliminaries to a systematic inquiry into "cultural policy" worldwide. At the outset, or even before the outset, two sets of issues should concern us. Both deeply influence the pertinence and usability of the literature one might have recourse to in carrying out such an ambitious project, short of carrying out an ethnographical inquiry in x number of selected or representative countries. First, the divided nature of research on "cultural policy": on the one hand policy advisory work that concerns itself little with higher ends and values, and on the other socalled "theoretical" analysis which has little or no purchase on policy-making. Could a third party deploy conceptual tools that could bridge the divide and if so how? The second set of interrogations concerns ways of comparing "cultural policy" trans-nationally. I shall suggest several axes of differentiation that appear relevant, but only tentatively, as I have yet to settle on an overarching analytical framework.