New perspectives on instrumentalism : stratagems, subversion and the case of cultural diplomacy (original) (raw)
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This paper draws on a larger research project that investigates the networks and institutions shaping cultural policy across national, international and supranational contexts. Taking Britain as its touchstone, it identifies and maps some of the operational relations between culture, governance and nation shaping the development and orientation of contemporary cultural policy. It thus highlights key formal and informal domestic relationships and contexts within which Britain’s local, regional and national cultural policy initiatives are situated. The British context – in which England figures strongly for historical, political and demographic reasons, and so draws a corresponding resistance across other constituents of nation – is shown to be both internally differentiated along various lines, and also embedded in the larger sphere of the European Union that redraws the boundaries of cultural policy and governance. In tracing the contours and interrogating the constitutive elements of Britain’s domains of cultural policy, we seek to provide a foundation for understanding the intersections and influences that exist between fields of cultural governance, and their interdependence and fluidity.
Reframing Cultural Governance: Instrumentality and the Discursive Turn in Cultural Policy
Journal of Public Policy and Administration, 2024
Cultural policy is far from being a neutral facilitator of cultural production and consumption. Contemporary cultural governance is profoundly influenced by the strategic, and often implicit, agendas and political projects of its key actors. Cultural policies, indeed, have evolved into an instrumental tool leveraged by governments to address broader policy issues and state interests such as education, social cohesion, economic development, and even diplomatic relations. This article examines the intersection of governance, policy, and discourse within the context of cultural policy. It argues that approaching cultural policy through discourse is essential for unpacking its foundational concepts, structural arrangements, and agents involved in its propagation. It explores the notion of cultural governance with an emphasis on the instrumental turn in cultural policy, which serves to advance specific political and economic agendas. Contemporary societies are characterised by a complex web of governance structures and cultural dynamics, where traditional forms of government are increasingly challenged by the evolving concept of governance. The transition from government-centric approaches to the broader framework of governance has sparked vigorous debate within mainstream disciplines such as political science, policy sciences, and public administration, but also in other disciplines such as Cultural Studies and cultural policy studies.
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Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and …, 2009
This article addresses the roles of intellectuals in the shaping of cultural policy. Three distinct but interrelated political levels are discussed: the EU, the UK as a member state and Scotland as a stateless nation. The cultural and political space of the European Union is contradictory: it has a cultural presence but member states have full cultural competence. The EU's public sphere is fragmented, poised between regulation and federation. The member state therefore remains the principal focus for analysis of cultural policy debates. Next, a variety of theoretical positions on the intellectuals and the strategic uses of expertise in a 'knowledge society' is explored, illustrating how the cultural policy field is typically constituted. The article goes on to discuss how intellectuals in the UK have shaped government policy on the 'creative economy', underlining the importance of a New Labour 'policy generation' in taking ideas forward that have been globally influential as well as in Scotland. A discussion of stateless nationhood is the backdrop to showing how the Nationalists in power inherited their Labour-LibDem predecessors' approach to developing a new cultural institution, Creative Scotland. This underlines Scotland's deep policy dependency on creative economy ideas fashioned in London. Cultural policy, states and intellectuals 1 This article draws on 'The Politics of Cultural Policy', my inaugural lecture at the University of Glasgow, delivered on
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Twenty one years ago the cultural theorist Tony Bennett suggested that cultural studies should develop a new discipline which was interested in issues of policy and governmentality. Today the field of cultural policy studies is highly active but the connections between it and a critical empirical interest in the policy process and policy formation are missing. In this article the roots of that absence are discussed. It is suggested that the consideration of policy process theory and the application of policy analysis tools can help fill that gap. By placing policy at the centre of cultural policy studies the discipline is better equipped to develop and grow further.
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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.
This article is about the politics of cultural value. It focusses on the representations of value that exist in the epistemologies and methodologies of cultural impact evaluation and the discrepancies between these official discourses and the discourses that correspond to cultural practitioners themselves. First the article outlines the critique of dominant forms of cultural impact evaluation, particularly the instrumentalisation of culture. In the second half of the article we draw upon qualitative research conducted with arts practitioners in the East Midlands region of England during 2013 and 2014. In so doing we introduce the concept of the ‘infrapolitics’ of cultural value that draws on the work of radical anthropologist Scott [(1992) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, London]. The central argument is that representations of cultural value are discursive constructions constituted through the epistemologies and methodologies of cultural evaluation, and that there are key differences between these dominant discourses and the discourses of value of cultural practitioners themselves. One important although overlooked element of the significance of cultural value is therefore as a record of the performance of power within the cultural sector, an ‘official transcript’ that represents dominant discourse of cultural value in opposition to the ‘hidden transcripts’ that correspond to cultural practitioners. We argue for a research agenda that represents cultural value from practitioners’ point of view.
Is there something special about cultural policy
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This paper aims to reflect on the special character of the cultural field in relation to politics, policies and the political system. We usually talk about the notion of “autonomy” as one decisive ...
Researchers, bureaucrats and the lifeworlds of cultural policy
International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2017
This paper reflects on the value of cultural policy research, particularly when such research forms part of projects that seek to produce insights or 'outcomes' that are useful to non-university research partners. The paper draws from the author's involvement in a project examining cultural diversity in the arts that was funded as part of the Australian Research Council's Linkage Project scheme. It addresses Eleonora Belfiore's provocation that this kind of instrumental cultural policy research routinely amounts to 'bullshit. ' However, in order to understand the critical function of such research, there needs to be greater attention to the lifeworlds of cultural policy and the multiplicity of the policy-making process. This multiplicity both complicates the possibilities for usefulness in policy research, at the same time that it enables such research to be generative in unpredictable ways. The political and economic contexts in which universities operate are changing the terms on which humanities research is conceived and conducted. In countries like Australia and the UK, such research is increasingly shaped by the pressure to demonstrate its usefulness to publics outside the university. Strategies of 'engagement' and 'knowledge transfer' have become central to how universities are repositioning themselves as active participants in public life, while notions of 'public value' and 'impact' form the criteria by which the quality of research is assessed (Schlesinger et al. 2015). These reorientations stem from the belief that universities have too long been inward-looking and irrelevant institutions, cut off from the cultural, governmental and economic spaces in which policy and community-making take place. However, in seeking to bridge the gap between universities and their publics, these strategies can also reinforce the historical distinctions between these worlds, and downplay the more complex ways in which academic, policy and popular knowledges converse and overlap with one another. One of the starting points for this article is to ask whether it is possible to imagine the relationship between universities and 'the wider world' in less polarised terms. Universities have sought to become more relevant by imploring academics to reach out to a world outside academia, but also by importing managerial and evaluative practices from the public and private sectors. In this respect, the differences between these worlds are not as vast as is often assumed. Making academic work accountable to performance metrics is believed to guard against intellectual ARTICLE HISTORY
8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CULTURAL POLICY RESEARCH
Post-Apartheid South Africa’s government has officially adopted a national cultural policy in 1996 as a primary or overarching guide for cultural considerations. Within seventeen (17) years since its approval, the policy, labelled the “White Paper of Arts, Culture and Heritage”, has been subjected to a series of reviews and many strategies and action documents have developed out of it. This panel examines the review processes with the view to ascertain to what extent the exercises succeed in meeting the objectives for which they are set, as well as to evaluate them against international trends. The panel observes that, internationally, cultural policy is generally regarded as central to the development and reconstruction of cities and rural areas, as well as crucial in promoting social cohesion and economic growth. Thus, the panel advocates a legislative review approach that positions culture as a pivotal part of the country’s overall development framework that incorporates the construction of infrastructure, the creation of economic opportunities, and the building of social cohesion. The panel therefore aims to brainstorm and debate on the following key questions with regards to cultural policy implementation in South Africa: • What informs the cultural policy framework apparatus in South Africa post-1994? • How many reviews of the cultural policy have been done and to what extent did the reviews correspond with global imperatives and best practices? • How successful have the South African Cultural Policy instrument(s) been so far in the different creative sectors and in activation of national development? • Are there lessons offshoots from existing implementation praxis and community engagement? • Is South Africa’s Cultural Policy review critical to economic development as well as rural and urban development or regeneration? It is the overall objective of this panel to enter into this significant debate with a view to generate further understanding of cultural policy framing not only from a global base but from localised responses.