Abstract
Resilience is a key theme in contemporary post-crisis capitalism, prominent across government policy, popular discourses, business and management thinking and academia. This article is about the deployment of the concept of resilience in cultural policy and practice under conditions of austerity. It is based on an extensive engagement with literature, an analysis of cultural policy discourse and qualitative data drawn from 23 in-depth interviews with freelance cultural practitioners. The findings contribute to the literature on the politics of resilience in policy and society and the effects of austerity on culture. We adapt Robin James’ concept of resilience to show how arts leaders and practitioners generate performative narratives that seek to publicly represent their capacity to adapt to austerity, and we explore the different versions of resilience thinking that these narratives mobilise. We argue that resilience in cultural policy and practice unwittingly produces a discursive surplus which becomes reinvested in institutions, providing subsequent justification for the processes of post-crisis austerity itself.
Highlights
In a very short space of time the concept of resilience has become a major theme across government policy, popular culture, business and management thinking, and academia
In understanding post-crisis austerity as an opportunity to reconstruct the cultural sector in a new dynamic environment of constant adaptation to change and shock, we argue that resilience functions as a solution to the problem of austerity that supports austerity itself
The deployment of resilience in cultural policy and by individual cultural practitioners can be understood as performative: it discursively constructs a particular conception of the problem of austerity and the appropriate individual and organisational responses
Summary
In a very short space of time the concept of resilience has become a major theme across government policy, popular culture, business and management thinking, and academia. Resilience can be understood simultaneously as an individual psychological quality (resilient people), as a system of social relations (resilient communities; resilient sectors) and as a post-crisis paradigm shift (resilient futures) This conceptual ambiguity, between paradigmatic versions of resilience, individual psychological understandings of the concept and those associated more with social systems and social relations, is, we argue, very important to understand how and with what effects the concept of resilience has come to dominate so much policy and public discourse. We might go on to argue that one of the uses of resilience thinking is that it tends to erase differences between individual people and their subjective experiences and social positions, and the situated contexts of systems, hierarchical organisations, and general policy paradigms and goals which are the basis of government (see Burman 2018 for a similar point made about education policy discourses). This approach allows us to grasp the ambiguity inherent in the ways in which resilience has been adopted and reproduced by arts organisations and practitioners as a way of adapting to austerity, crucially, without challenging its normative basis
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