Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture, Creativity and Government in the BBC (2002) (original) (raw)

Cultural Values: Journal of Cultural Research, issue on Culture & Governance, v. 6, n. 1-2, pp. 65-90.

The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, effi ciency, accountability and audit were translated into the public sector. The focus of this paper is an analysis, based on ethnographic research, of the BBC's culture of markets, accountability and audit in the mid to late nineties. Indebted in part to the Foucauldian concern with the relations between forms of political rationality and specifi c technologies of government, the paper charts the substance and the anti-creative effects of these techniques. But it stresses also their contestability and negotiability, how they evoke ambivalence and coexist with diverse forms of resistance. In particular, through the case of the BBC, the paper sketches the contours of a sociology of refl exivity based on a more differentiated account of refl exivity than is found in the speculative, often normativelydirected writings of Beck, Giddens and Lash. It points to the layering of refl exivities in and around the contemporary BBC, and to the competing and antagonistic refl exivities that may inhabit any social space.

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