Contemporary Cultural Policy Research Articles

Researching the social impact of the arts: literature, fiction and the novel

This paper offers a contribution to current debates in the field of cultural policy about the social impact of the arts. It explores the conceptual difficulties that arise in the notion of ‘the arts’ and the implications of these difficulties for attempts to generalise about their value, function and impact. It considers both ‘essentialist’ and ‘institutional’ perspectives, first on ‘the arts’ in toto and then on literature, fiction and the novel with the view of making an innovative intellectual connection between aesthetic theories and contemporary cultural policy discourse. The paper shows how literature sits uneasily in the main systems of classifying the arts and how the novel and fiction itself are seen as problematic categories. The position of the novel in the literary canon is also discussed, with particular reference to the shifting instability of the canon. The paper suggests that the dilemmas thrown up in trying to define or classify the novel are likely to be encountered in attempting to define other art forms. The implications of these findings for the interpretation and conduct of traditional ‘impact studies’ are explored.

Uses of civilising claims: Three moments in British theatre history

During the last ten years British cultural policy has seen a remarkable rise in the discourse of culture's civilising and governing powers, which are commonly called the ‘social impacts’ of culture. Existing analyses present two contrasting views that see this phenomenon as (a) the instrumentalisation of culture or (b) an example of culture's inherent governmentality. This article attempts to suggest an alternative analytical framework by pointing out historical intersections between the claims of culture's civilising function and the development of cultural field in Bourdieu's sense. For this purpose, the use of civilising claims at three moments in the British theatre history is investigated and the following is discussed. First, the claims’ implementation tended to be shaped primarily by professional and artistic intentions such as the pursuit of social respectability, aesthetic excellence and autonomy. Second, as powerful rhetoric, the claims justified new institutional arrangements, which led to the establishment of the theatre as non-commercial, subsidised and exclusive high art. It is concluded that the analysis of contemporary cultural policy should consider such historical consequences of culture's civilising claims, which now set an important context where the policy is perceived and implemented.

The Rise of the Creative City: Culture and Creativity in Copenhagen

Culture and creativity as drivers of development are established features of the urban policy agenda. This article examines the interplay of culture, creativity and city planning using the example of Copenhagen, Denmark. Denmark presents an interesting example because whilst it has a tradition for linking culture with urban economic boosterism, recent research has suggested a social emphasis in its more contemporary urban cultural policies. The paper argues that the arrival of creativity upon the urban agenda has abruptly altered this policy context. Both culture and creativity have become central to attempts to stimulate the cultural and creative industries and to promote the city at an international level, attracting investment and the “Creative Class”. In tracing this development, the article discusses potential changes to the planning system designed to facilitate Copenhagen's transformation to a creative city and points to the potential impacts of these.

Liberalism and Cultural Policy in Indonesia

The beginning of contemporary cultural policy in the West is tied to the emergence of liberalism and its formulation of the subjects of governance as free individuals. Culture was judged a field where the state could teach its subjects to exercise a ‘responsible and disciplined’ freedom without impinging on that freedom. In colonial contexts, indigenous subjects were judged incapable of exercising freedom responsibly and the state considered them to require a degree of state control thought inappropriate for Western subjects. In this paper, I explore how cultural policy in Indonesia has been influenced by engagement with these two applications of liberalism from the late colonial period until the present, against the background of a changing international climate and political events in Indonesia. I also address the post-Suharto period where, due to the absence of a strong political movement for reform to drive change and the decentralisation of a number of policy areas including culture, a variety of cultural policies reflecting a variety of engagements with these interpretations exist together. I demonstrate that understanding the complexity of the application of liberal methods of governance in a colonial and postcolonial context is central to appreciating the cultural policy of that location.

Canadian Cultural Policy-making at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization

Canadian Cultural Policy-making at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization Sabine Milz (bio) The imperative for research is to identify precisely what remains national today in what has historically been constructed as national, to decode what national means today, and to ascertain the new territorial and institutional conditionalities of nation states. Saskia Sassen In the introduction to the special issue "Canadian Literature and the Business of Publishing" of Studies in Canadian Literature (SCL), Jennifer Andrews and John Ball observe that "in most studies of Canadian literature, the material stuff of publication is bracketed off in favour of what can be said about a text's (immaterial) words" (2). They further note that "[w]hen the study of the published book and the publication processes has been discussed, it has been treated as a specialized area of research" (2), as in the case of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University or in special issues such as the SCL one which sets out to foreground the processes of literary production in Canada, that is, the material side of literature. Andrews and Ball introduce the special SCL issue by calling attention to the many challenges Canada's book industry has faced over the past decades as an economy of small scale characterized by "huge geographical distances and regional differences ... [and] the easy availability of British and American books published with economies [End Page 85] of scale" (1–2). They point to the crucial role governmental policies and programs as well as the literary power struggles of the youth generation of the 1960s and 1970s—of "the many stubborn idealists, renegades, adventurers, bookworms, scholars, and, yes, fortune-seekers" (2)—played in the development of an independent Canadian literature and book industry. These actors not only initiated and advocated the Canada-wide emergence of independent Canadian-owned presses in the 1960s but also created a climate in which these publisers could take risks with promoting unknown authors and authors writing about unconventioanl themes. Recalling the nationalist vision of Canadian Literature's centennial "Publishing in Canada" issue, Andrews and Ball insist that "publishing in Canada is unique and vital to our national identity" (3); it performs a key national function, and that seems to be what motivates Andres and Ball's call for a method of Canadian literary study that recognizes the materiality of literature. While the argument developed in this paper is motivated by a claim or desire that also underlies Andrews and Ball's emphasis on the "national" —namely the claim or desire that the function of Canadian literary goods and services is irreducible to the logic of the market, that is, to the logic of "guaranteed commercial success" (4)—it reframes this claim or desire —expressed by Andrews and Ball as an issue of national culture and identity—as an issue of cultural decision-making and democratic public culture. Critical invocations of national cultural value such as Andrews and Ball's are complicated and troubled by the fact that, as this paper will show, contemporary cultural policies and programs are inaugurated by a federal government which subscribes to the neoliberal paradigm in its discourse of "national culture" and its protection of Canadian literature and its production from direct market dependency and commodification. In view of this nexus of the national and the neoliberal, I will argue, the contemporary study of the materiality of Canadian literature, and of its mediated-institutionalized structural modes in particular, needs to engage in processes of querying the habitual, modern notions of democracy and the public sphere and, more specifically, of how these notions currently play out in the contexts of Canada's public cultural sphere. This paper engages in such a process of querying to decode what the terms "national" and "public" mean today in the institutional contexts of Canadian literature and its production. I will start this process of querying and decoding by examining the issue of cultural protection/ism in the historical context of the post Second World War projects of cultural nationalism and cultural industries. Canadian critics such as George Parker and Rowland Lorimer have variously [End Page 86] demonstrated that "the history of Canadian book publishing policy dates back...

Turning Victoria into cultural capital: Victorian arts policy 1992‐1999

Cultural developments in Victoria represent an example of the industry approach to the arts, which guides contemporary public cultural policy. This approach evolved many years back but it is clearly expressed in the Kennett government's cultural policy document.

THE RETURN OF THE SOCIAL

This article is concerned with the social exclusion agenda in contemporary French cultural policy, exploring the relevance of aspects of postcolonial theory to an understanding of that agenda. The tensions involved in recent attempts to evolve policies addressing interculturalism, integration and “emergent” cultures (such as hip‐hop) while also staying true to the French republican tradition of universalism are illuminated by France’s problematic relationship with its colonial past. They are also shown to be related to a wider movement of post‐industrial, postmodern experimentation with aesthetic forms, from video and computer art to street arts, free parties and electronic dance music.

“Money for Nothing; Things for Free”: The Dire Straits of Contemporary Cultural Policy Analysis?

“Money for Nothing; Things for Free”: The Dire Straits of Contemporary Cultural Policy Analysis?

Paradoxes and contradictions in government approaches to contemporary cultural policy: an Australian perspective1

: Globalisation poses interesting challenges but does not undermine the ability of government to make decisions about cultural policy at a state, national or regional level. On the contrary, government has never been so active in cultural matters, adding support for lifestyle and cultural infrastructure to existing concerns with traditional arts forms. The dilemma for government, rather, is to find a rationale for an increasingly fragmented approach to state intervention on cultural matters. The model provided by contemporary economic policy, which favours industry development over individual projects, has some salience, and has encouraged a new emphasis on cultural industries. But the industry development approach cannot resolve fundamental issues around popular and elite arts. Using Australian case studies, this paper explores the competing logics of much cultural policy—and the likelihood government will live with inconsistency rather than pay the price of choosing one policy approach over all others.

"Little Supplements of LIfe": Urban Governance and Quality of Life

This paper presents an approach to urban governance and quality of life that combines recent French theory with current English and Australian practice. The historical concepts of "culture" and "governance" developed by Foucault and Bourdieu (among others) are integrated into several case studies of contemporary cultural policies enacted in cities across the U.K. and in Australia. The present work thus seeks to combine theoretical concerns with practical applications, towards the investigation and understanding of a particularity held in common: quality of life indicators, as expressed in patterns of both social and cultural capital assessment, in both urban and community environments.

Creative Industries and Cultural Development — Still a Janus Face?

Since the 1970s, it has been possible to discuss cultural policy in terms of the discourses ‘art as industry’ and ‘cultural rights' (for a discussion of this history, see Gibson, 2001). ‘Creative industries' is the policy ‘buzz term’ of the moment. The ways in which the terms ‘creative industries' and ‘cultural rights' are understood in contemporary cultural policy encapsulate the ways in which the economic and humanistic benefits of creative practice have been articulated as existing in competition. I argue that it is counterproductive to understand these discourses as mutually exclusive. Are these discursive constructions — art as profit versus art as identity — constitutively oppositional? To pose this same question using the terms which frame contemporary policy debate, how do we negotiate between the (seemingly) competing logics of the creative industries and cultural development policy discourses?

New Labour's cultural turn: some tensions in contemporary educational and cultural policy

The election of a Labour government in Britain, after 18 years of Conservative rule, has seen the emergence of a new educational discourse, based on a distinctive combination of cultural, economic and social themes. In this article, we identify the components of the discourse, and explore how it is currently deployed in arguments for educational change. Specifically, our focus is on two recent documents: All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (NACCCE 1999), produced by an Advisory Committee appointed by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS); and Making Movies Matter (FEWG 1999) by the Film Education Working Group, set up by the British Film Institute at the request of the DCMS. Embodying in separate ways the features of the emergent discourse, these texts also position themselves very differently in relation to current educational policy. Through a critique of the reports, we identify some of the broader difficulties of the ‘cultural turn’ in education, and the possibility of a more productive alternative.

Citizenship, Participation and Media Policy Formation

A major debate in Australian cultural studies in the 1990s has been the “cultural policy debate.” Drawing upon theories of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault and others, there has been a move to understand cultural institutions in terms upon their relationship to the formation of citizens in modern liberal democracies. While such work can provide considerable insight into contemporary media and cultural policy processes, there are significant gaps in the Foucaultian approach, most notably its difficulties in incorporating the significance of citizenship rights to policy processes. The article explores general issues about the relationship between citizenship, participation and policy formation, and discuss their significance in light of Australian media policy debates about content regulation for commercial broadcasters, local content regulations and, more recently, censorship and the future of public broadcasting. It questions attempts to automatically equate citizenship with participation in policy processes, as well as attempts to present such participatory processes as an innately progressive alternative to bureaucratic or governmental decision-making. Instead it proposes that the relationship between expertise and participation constitutes one of the central animating dynamics of policy formation in advanced liberal political formations.

A hundred years of solitude?

ICOM's stake in the development of museums in Latin America and the Carribbean goes back to the very beginnings of that organization. Its Twelfth General Conference in Mexico strengthened ICOM's presence in the region, boosting its membership there, placing a heavier demand both on its Paris‐based secretariat and on the capacity of Latin America's museologists themselves to work together more effectively in the cause of the institution they serve.Focusing as it does on the Latin American and Caribbean variants of a worldwide problem—the still inadequate place of museums in contemporary cultural development and cultural policy—this issue is in a sense a manifesto for the whole international museum movement. This is why Museum sought the views of Luis Monreal, whose direct contacts with museums in Latin America have multiplied in recent years. He has read through the articles in this issue as a highly committed observer; he speaks not exlusively as ICOM's Secretary‐General, but also as a colleague and friend of Latin American and Caribbean museum professionals.