Satellite Dependency: The Problem of Legitimating Structures for Localized Arts and Cultural Policy

Abstract

Against a backdrop of growing interest in localized cultural policy, this article explores the example of Oldham, an “overshadowed” town (Pike et al., 2016) situated on the edge of the Northern English city of Manchester (United Kingdom). While urban planning discourse has acknowledged the impact of large cities on neighboring satellite areas, finding that regeneration projects can result in a weak sense of place for [such] secondary towns (Turok, 2009), few have considered the extent to which arts organizations in secondary towns are able to sustain their work and create their own narratives. Drawing from the thought of Pierre Bourdieu and from theories of institutional logics, I adopt a relational approach to exploring the ways in which organizations within the local cultural ecology understand their operating environment. Although cultural policy endeavors to use local arts infrastructure to build local capacity, this case study reveals a situation in which those organizations in satellite towns remain unable to gain the status enjoyed by their metropolitan counterparts. Further, it examples a field that remains highly institutionalized, hierarchical, and increasingly professionalized. Institutional arrangements result in organizations in the satellite-town depending upon its city neighbor for crucial legitimating capitals. Just as stories of class reproduce patterns of inequality, this situation is similarly true for organizations. Organizations are found to be complicit in the production and reproduction of inequalities within the institutional field, with dominant organizations appearing more able to access legitimizing capital than others. Ultimately, I argue that organizations in satellite towns are heavily reliant on symbolic resources supplied by the institutional fields of greater scope in which they are nested. Organizations are required to harness the support of elite individuals and dominant “world-maker” organizations, which lie beyond their immediate local context to secure legitimacy for themselves and their activities. This situation I term “satellite dependency.”