Abstract
ABSTRACTThe very identity of cultural policy 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 the journey “into the real world” of preliminary findings emerging from the Understanding Everyday Participation project: a segmentation exercise based on Taking Part data which showed that the wealthiest, better educated and least ethnically diverse 8% of the English population are the most engaged in culture. 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 charts the increasing prominence of “the 8%” statistic in English cultural policy debates and argues that, despite the researchers' limited control over the use/misuse of their data, policy influence is nonetheless a realistic objective if understood as “conceptual influence”.
Highlights
The problem with the ‘torn halves’ rhetoricThe very identity of cultural policy studies as a distinctive field of academic pursuit rests on a problematic but well-established and widely accepted tension between ‘proper’, and advocacy-driven research
This article, unlike the others in this Understanding Everyday Participation (UEP) special issue, aims to offer not a contribution to the study of everyday forms of cultural participation, but a preliminary reflection of what kind of impacts the UEP research might have for cultural policy as an area of both scholarship and practice
The ese points are illustrated via a detailed exploration of the journey ‘into the real world’ of a preliminary quantitative data analysis produced by the UEP project in the context of its development of a segmentation exercise based on the Taking Part survey. This piece of Taking Part data analysis provided key evidential foundation for a set of recommendations in the influential report Enriching Britain: culture, creativity and growth, published in February 2015 by the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value
Summary
The problem with the ‘torn halves’ rhetoricThe very identity of cultural policy studies as a distinctive field of academic pursuit rests on a problematic but well-established and widely accepted tension between ‘proper’, and advocacy-driven research.
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