On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research: notes from the British case (original) (raw)
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Tracing British Cultural Policy Domains: Contexts, Collaborations and Constituencies
International Journal of Cultural …, 2010
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.
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Cultural Trends, 2016
The very identity of cultural policy studies as a distinctive field of academic pursuit rests on a long-standing and widely accepted tension between 'proper research' and policy advocacy, which has often resulted in resistance to the idea that robust, critical research can-or even should-be 'useful' and have impact on policy discourse. This paper tries to navigate a third route, which sees policy relevance and influence as a legitimate goal of critical research, without accepting the pressures and restrictions of arts advocacy and lobbying. This is accomplished by exploring in detail the journey 'into the real world' of preliminary quantitative data produced by the UEP project in the context of its development of a segmentation exercise based on Taking Part data. The exercise used cluster analysis to identify profiles of cultural participation, and showed that single most engaged group corresponded to the wealthiest, better educated and least ethnically diverse 8% of the English population. This data fed into the consultation and evidence gathering process of the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, and was eventually cited in its final report Enriching Britain. The paper looks at the trajectory that 'the 8%' statistic has travelled, charting its increasing prominence in English cultural policy debates and argues that, despite the impossibility for researchers to exert control over the use and misuse of their data, policy influence is nonetheless a realistic objective if understood in terms of 'conceptual influence'.
The ethical dimensions of cultural policy
Originally presented at the 12th Conference on European Culture, Barcelona, October 2013. Governments and public institutions express cultural policy through language and initiatives reflecting the ideas, trends and arguments with which they wish to be associated. However, this paper investigates the premise that core establishment principles are revealed in longer term patterns of resource allocation, which may diverge from political declarations of intent. With specific reference to Great Britain, the paper examines the ethical bases of the relationship between art, the state and the public. Tracing the philosophical background to the foundation of the Arts Councils and the establishment of state patronage, it considers the social, cultural and aesthetic assumptions underpinning these developments. The continuing influence of older moral frameworks is explored through discrepancies between rhetoric and action in policy implementation. It is suggested that the principles and purposes of art in public life must be reconsidered by artists and policy makers alike if coherent future policy directions are to be generated.
The politics of media and cultural policy
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This paper considers the role of academics in current debates on media and cultural policy in the UK. Although theories of the intellectuals differ widely as to what such a role might be, they point to a more general issue: the struggle for social recognition by contending forms of expertise. The policy field is one arena in which such contention occurs. Although the digital revolution is beginning to erode distinct policy regimes, broadcasting policy debate still conserves some long-standing features. Dominated by a few protagonists occupying positions of institutional power and critical, academic influence is at best marginal. For its part, cultural policy is being increasingly displaced by creative economy policy. This has been a New Labour project, initiated and from time to time sustained by a policy generation rooted in think tanks, consultancy and advising, with its academic critics largely unheard. Despite its shaky foundations, creativity policy has achieved a hegemonic pos...
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
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.
The present study attempts to analyse and decode the so-called linguistic encoders of ideology that were used in the political discourse of the UK Government’s 2016 Culture White Paper, under the multidisciplinary prism of Critical Discourse Analysis. The chosen methodology enables the deconstruction of the political rhetoric, indicating how concepts can be operationalised in political texts and how people’s perceptions and attitudes can be influenced by language. The research findings are interpreted on the basis of a proposed statement, according to which the messages conveyed by the text derive from specific ways of thinking embedded in the language. In short, the analysis identified four ideational cornerstones the white paper sets out to strategically deploy its rhetoric, but overall the role of the arts and culture appears closely connected and aligned with the economy’s needs, whereas the role of education is rather devalued. Examined on the basis of a wider conceptual foundation, the Culture White Paper is perceived to be a policy instrument that reinforces specific ideological concepts deriving from the further correlations between the ways culture is regarded by the government and the prevailing political attitudes in society. Ultimately, this study represents an effort to adapt the concept of Critical Discourse Analysis to a specific communicative context and reinstate ideology as a major component of political discourse.