The Art of Management and Organisation

The Sixth Art of Management and Organisation Conference, University of York, 2-6^th September 2012.

This was an emotive event for me, given my participation in organising a few of the previous international conferences, and again meeting many delegates who were there at the very first ‘Art of Man’ conference at King’s College London in 2001. Organised principally by Steve Linstead, this year’s theme was ‘Creativity and Critique’, and featured a range of events and exhibits from installation video to performance to Yorkshire sword dancing (the latter only as part of the opening night dinner, I assure you). Attendance at past conferences was generally kept below 200, so as to maintain a certain intensity of interaction, familiarity, community and network. Through the ACORN (aesthetics and creativity in organizational research) network everyone keeps in touch. Institutions like the Copenhagen Business School play a major role in flying the flag for the kinds of research represented at this conference.

The conference had as many practical and interactive seminars as academic paper-led seminars, this year strongly featuring documentary film. My own role was part of the ‘documentary as research’ experiment, which was meant to be an ‘intervention’, but ended up more of a ‘polite engagement’, if I can put it that way. The conference also featured our very own Dr Chris Bilton delivering a keynote (more of an ‘endnote’) disabusing the creativity enthusiasts among us that creativity is not what it’s usually taken to be.

What purpose does an ‘Art of Management and Organisation Conference’ serve? It brings together creative practitioners (from artists, consultants, curators) with academics and industry researchers. The mix really does work. The purpose is to find ways of reflecting on management and organisation theories and practices through creative experimentation (even if that creativity is purely discursive). This doesn’t mean there is no solid empirical research content to the conference – there is in fact quite a lot. There were papers on the creative industries, artist residencies, new incubator spaces, design, the uses of performance, creative pedagogy, prototyping and model making in management training, and on and on.

The location for the conference was the amazing Ron Cooke Hub at York’s impressive new ‘sustainable’ Heslington campus [If you don’t know about it, it’s worth taking a look at the RIBA’s case study on it: see link below]. There were notable conference highlights for me – David Hickman’s presentation on slavery with excerpts from films he made for Al Jazeera; Pierre Guillet de Monthoux on the avant-garde; Jane Gavan’s video installation Aire in the Ron Hub 360degree projection room; and Daved Barry, Henrik Schrat & Cathryn Lloyd’s interactive sessions called ‘City of Thought’, where we contemplated the relation between critical thought processes, architecture and urban community. 

Research questions I came away with: too many to mention here. On a practical note, the many sessions referencing or featuring documentary were an inspiration to continue to explore film as a research media. Documentary raises some significant possibilities for developing a non-‘art’ creative media. How do we broach the tensions between visual and linguistic in mainstream academic research, and how do we use ‘objective’ empirical content as a means of exploring experience and social engagement as well as research questions? How can film reestablish an active relationship between the body, space, place and dialogue within research? The conference has its roots in organizational aesthetics and the investigation of perception, affection, emotion and the symbolic landscapes of the corporate environment; these subjects still feature in our gatherings. However, the times have moved on, and most organizations think of themselves being creative actors, employing design agencies, spatial designers, creative management consultants. Apopos Bilton – how does the ideology of creativity actually inhibit organizational management and prevent an exploration of the essential thought-content and reflexivity of creativity?

See:
ACORN: http://www.aacorn.net/index.htm
York’s new campus:
http://www.architecture.com/Awards/RIBAAwards/Winners2011/Yorkshire/HeslingtonEastMasterplan/HeslingtonEastCampusMasterplanUniversityofYorkatnight.aspx

Jonathan Vickery : 12 Sep 2012 18:21 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Self–Organisation

On August 22^nd I attended a day-long symposium called ‘Public Art and Self-Organisation’. Hosted by public art think tank Ixia, and hosted at Enclave, (an alternative art space in Deptford, East London), the day was mostly attended by artists and art managers of one kind or another. The day was convened by artist curator Paul O’Neill, and featured engaging talks by digital artist Anthony Gross (Enclave), urban artist Jeanne van Heeswijk (Netherlands), curator Varri Claffey (Dublin), consultant and academic Sophie Hope (London). The theme of the day was pertinent to the both the decline in public funding for public art as well as the growing role of artists in urban redevelopment.

One might ask why, in the last three years of arts funding cuts, public art has been hit far harder than the established institutions of fine art. It's partly because, ironically, Public art’s revenue base is broader – local authorities, property developers, construction companies, architects, cultural organizations, local health authorities, and so on. They have all faced austerity. Also, public art is mostly project-based, hence its easier not to commission more projects than to discontinue funding an organisation. Public-urban artists are a mobile, flexible, low-paid labour force, with few fixed capital assets. Public art is not a heavily institutionalised sector of contemporary art, and, despite its central aim of public engagement and its profound civic visibility, it has always been marginal to art world and cultural sector priorities.

Public art, however, is no longer (merely) ‘public art’ in the sense in which we used the term 20 years ago. It now attracts a panoply of mainstream contemporary artists, urban activists, political artists and new media artists, all who see the social sphere as a crucial platform for ideas and cultural engagement. This seminar featured discussions on the politics of art funding, the development of cultural policy models out of engaged cultural production, the roles of artists in developing new urban spaces and alternative forms of urban regeneration.

The theme of ‘self-organisation’ was elusive, as most artistic production is self-organised in all kinds of ways. In this symposium the term ‘self-organisation’ functioned as a marker for both self-initiation and self-direction outside the usual models of project management, cultural sector patronage and local authority commissioning that hitherto have been the conditions of creative practice for most urban-public artists. There is a sense in which self-organisation is an alter-ego of business entrepreneurialism, in another sense it refers to some new means of using art as a social enterprise. In this seminar, it is resolutely anti-capitalist, participatory, pluralist and avoids the ideological territory of major cultural institutions. It is leadership without management and decision-making that works through dialogue with a gathered community of interlocutors, usually the inhabitants of the urban spaces that are the site for the art.

Questions I came away with: First, as Anthony Gross himself said, imagine ALL public funding of the arts being withdrawn: What then are we capable of doing alone, on existing resources? It’s an important preliminary thought-experiment for a subject of this kind. Second, in relation to myself as a critic, researcher (‘intermediary’?), is self-organisation necessarily artist-led? Perhaps Universities have a role in this. The category of ‘artist’ has in any case become tenuous and needs revision for the emerging complexities of the urban-public sphere. If we are to develop the means of effective creative self-organisation for urban-public spaces, how can these ‘means’ be formalized as models of practice (without becoming formulae, or artistic tropes)? How can we synthesize curatorship, project management and artistic production in ways that address the growing need for autonomy in an ever restrictive social order? We need to re-work the research pioneered in advanced management and organisation studies within the context of public-urban projects, developing an entrepreneurialism that is not simply derived from business models. More urgently perhaps is the need for new ways of occupying and renovating urban spaces without the patronage of local authority-led urban regeneration.

See:
Ixia public art think tank: http://ixia-info.com/
The Enclave: http://enclaveprojects.com/
The Old Police Station: http://www.theoldpolicestation.org/

Jonathan Vickery : 12 Sep 2012 17:57 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

This is my 4th favourite blog post

I’ve recently had a new book chapter published –‘ List-culture and literary taste in a time of endless choice’ in From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Anouk Lang of Strathclyde University. The book gathers contributions to a conference in 2008 – Beyond the Book – at which scholars from a range of disciplines, together with librarians and policy makers discussed the new reading practices that are emerging in the light of new technologies and changes to the broader literary landscape.

My chapter reflects on the ‘list’ – a perennial staple of cultural journalism as a mediating ‘technology’ in the judgment of authority and value – and not one that is just confined to the field of reading. A recent example of the kind of phenomenon I was considering is provided by the relegation of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane from its position as ‘the greatest film ever made’, according to the BFI’s decennial surveyof critics and its replacement with Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Vertigo was second in the list in 2002 but not even in the top 10 in the 1972 poll; Citizen Kane has been top since 1962 - but wasn’t even in the top 10 in 1952. Given that neither of these films have changed since their releases - 1941 for Kane and 1958 for Vertigo – how can one now be ‘better’ than the other, after being ‘worse’, sometimes significantly so, for so many years? The answer is of course that the films don’t change, but that cultural value is a dynamic thing. The criteria of judgment of, in this case, serious film critics aren't fixed. Lists of this kind act can, then, act as intriguing indicators of the shifting sands of cultural authority.

In the chapter I explore the relationships between different kinds of authority evident in the ‘great books’ lists of the turn of the twentieth century (produced by writers such as Arnold Bennett in 1909 and John Cowper Powys in 1916), the bestseller chart which rose to prominence with the consolidation of the cultural industries in the mid-twentieth century, the list as popular poll – exemplified by the BBC’s The Big Read initiative - and the most recent iteration of list-culture – the listmania feature of Amazon, through which readers post lists of their favourite books for the benefit of other browsers. These different types of lists share an overriding aim to navigate readers through the abundant choices that the ‘industrial’ production of literature provides them with. The early twentieth century lists were proposed as a kind of practical ‘canon’, guiding readers towards the kinds of books they ought to read and away from those which might be salacious or radical. By the late twentieth century this patrician element of list-culture was less evident, replaced with a more apparently democratic republic of taste in which the authority of ‘serious’ critics competed with the often subtle promotional tools of publishing industry (literary prizes, TV book clubs) in managing readers’ choices. And in the early twenty-first century, on-line lists, complemented by the algorithms of retailers like Amazon, mean that readers can find what they want through like-minded readers (‘customers who bought this also bought…’) without recourse to any obvious ‘authority’ at all.

There are some revealing tensions in this story. Critics of various kinds dismiss popular lists in particular as trivializing or commercializing culture – and there are elements of the list which can re-cast cultural judgment as a crude form of competition. What they also do, though, is open up the kinds of dialogue and debate which John Frow refers to as the ‘circulating energies of culture’ – the seemingly irrational pleasures of liking and disliking, and sharing your likes and dislikes with others, which are a fundamental part of the fun of cultural consumption. This is clearly a challenge to established forms of cultural authority – though one that is, in my view, broadly to be welcomed.

You can read a review of the book in the Columbia Journalism Review here, and follow my research on academia.edu.

David Wright : 11 Sep 2012 14:50 |  Tags: Creative Industries; Cultural Studies Taste; Technology; Value; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What’s brewing? The #culturalvalue Initiative

The most perceptive and observant readers of this blog will have noticed references to some recent happenings here at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, such as mention of a cultural value workshop in the thoughtful post by my colleague Jonathan Vickery, and in Maria Barrett’s compelling report of the recent ICCPR conference in Barcelona. Indeed, something has been brewing, and I am now really excited to reveal all, or at least some of the activities that I have been working on developing over the past year or two (yes, really that long!).

There is widespread agreement within the cultural policy community (and I’m not talking just the academy) that ‘cultural value’ is shaping out to be the defining debate for the foreseeable future, not just in our relatively small field, but more broadly: the recent announcement by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (the main public funding agency for arts & humanities research in the UK) that they have set aside £2 million for a cultural value project headed by prominent social historian Geoff Crossick testifies to a broader relevance of the topic, and a shared sense of urgency as to the timeliness of a serious and rigorous engagement with it.

For me, personally, the identification of cultural value as a key area worth of in-depth exploration has resulted from my long-standing engagement with researching the idea that the arts have transformative powers, and the related notion of the social impacts of the arts as a driver of cultural policy-making. I might at this point subject you to my full publication list on the topic, but I’ll spare you that, and instead I’ll summarise in a few sentences the conclusion that the past 11 years of research have led me to: in spite of public declarations of commitment to evidence-based policy making, what has been driving cultural policy in Britain (and elsewhere, of course, but I’m sticking here to what I have focused on myself) is a belief in the ameliorative and positive effects of the arts. Such belief has a very long history in Western civilisation (ever heard of Plato & Aristotle?). Due its resilience and continued elaboration over time, such belief in the transformative powers of the arts has become embedded, normalised and institutionalised: it lies at the heart of the workings of our cultural organisations and our educational system. In other words, we have a cultural policy because we have some notion of cultural value as something worth nurturing. Whilst I am not dismissing the growing importance of empirical evidence in aiding decision-making, it is clear that looking at the evidence alone does not explain what has occurred in cultural policy in the past 20-odd years.

Every cultural policy decision is predicated on the existence of cultural value: every decision is in effect a process of valuation predicated on the exercise of cultural authority. This is where things get tricky of course (and terribly interesting): who has the authority to bestow cultural value on some cultural forms and not others? And what vested interests, mechanisms of social distinction and what recognition/silencing processes are at work in these value-bestowing practices? It is clear that, whatever the discipline of cultural studies would have you believe, outside of the academy, cultural authority has not really been democratised, and the power to allocate cultural value is still far from being inclusively distributed across society. In a policy context, a clear sense of this can be gained by having a quick look at arts spending data: in the UK most of the available funding still goes to a handful of big cultural organisations, (too) many of them located in metropolitan London.

Those of you who know me will not be terribly surprised to find out that it is precisely this slightly unsavoury, politically problematic aspect of the cultural value debate that I intend to explore; that and its connection to the politics of measurement and evaluation, another keen interest of mine.

Over the past few months I have been campaigning internationally to make ‘cultural value’ a central theme for cultural policy research, and have been overwhelmed by the response. So much so that, together with colleagues at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the University of Melbourne, my serial co-conspirator Dr Anna Upchurch of Leeds University, and the research departments at the English and Australian arts councils, I have been working on developing an international cultural value network of individuals and organisations who are committed to developing a rigorous, collaborative research agenda on cultural value. We are currently looking to find ways to resource the network with a view of facilitating this and opening up the debate beyond the core project partner and our current affiliates worldwide.

I am still recruiting for more cultural value champions for what I am calling The #culturalvalue Initiative, so I might soon appear at a research seminar near you! Whilst I work frantically on filling in funding applications to make all (or at least some) of the interesting projects ideas in my mind happen, you can share your cultural value related thoughts with me on twitter: the Initiative has its own account: @CulturalValue1 or you can tweet me directly: @elebelfiore.

In addition, thanks to generous funding by Warwick’s Arts Impact Officer (who ever said ‘impact’ was all bad?!), I have been able to have the June workshop on cultural value professionally filmed (another post on the workshop to come soon, I promise) and to enlist the help of a web designer to create a nice and functional blog for the #culturalvalue Initiative. This means that, hopefully soon, there will be some really interesting resources on cultural value freely available online, providing a great stimulus for what I hope will be a conversation you will want to be a part of.

More, much more is brewing… so watch this space, and get in touch if you want to be part of the Initiative!

: 09 Aug 2012 13:12 |  Tags: Cultural Policy Value; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

ICCPR 2012

I am compelled to join the recent posts on the ICCPR 2012 conference in Barcelona. It was, as anticipated, a salubrious affair. More important than the salubriousness (is that a word?) was the enormous range of cultural policy presentations, with an impressive range of contributors – individuals from governments, city councils, arts and cultural sector organizations, architects and designers, researchers, and of course, academics. Warwick probably had the highest corporate profile in the conference, given how many of us were there. In a strong sense, I felt that the conference expressed just how cultural policy has indeed become a coherent research field.

My experience of the conference was made richer by several research interviews I conducted while in Barcelona with architects, artists and city officials. My photo above is the main theatre hall of the conference, and below one of the adjacent walls of the plaza in which it sits. I have no idea what this second photographic display is communicating – please tell me if you know.

During the conference I attended most of the urban cultural policy seminars I could. While in Helsinki I had some detailed conversations with a number of fascinating individuals, among them Panu Lehtovuori (see: http://www.panulehtovuori.net/) and Stuba Nikula, MD of the impressive Cable Factory (see: http://www.kaapelitehdas.fi/en/). I came to the conference with a lot of issues swirling in my mind, from urban entrepreneurship and creative economy to more mainstream problems of cultural value and national arts funding. Incidentally, the Helsinki cultural policy research foundation Cupore (http://www.cupore.fi/index_en.php ) were at Barcelona, with an interested talk by Sari Karttunen on the rising policy issue of the role of intermediaries and distribution in cultural production. So what about my ‘issues’?

Many of the conference’s cultural policy issues revolved around the industrialization of arts and culture, cultural standardization and managerial regulation. Of course, if you see cultural policy as centrally about public policy and the political administration of culture, then we find all roads lead to the nexus between cultural economics and the social cultures spawned by the all-powerful market. However, in this framework a lot gets missed in vernacular, urban, social communities, religion and artist-led cultural management, even missing the substantial discursive innovations from professional sub-cultures like those of architects and urban designers. While in Helsinki I visited a new housing estate in a place called Arabianranta (literally, the beach of Arabia in East Helsinki). Artists were contracted to work with housing developers – where the latter were concerned with building, the artists made sure this building was socially sustainable, communal and aesthetically engaged. Between them artists and builders were generating some effective cultural policy frameworks for housing, particularly social housing. I thought of the UK situation and the appalling state of our house-building industry. The first proposal of The National Planning Policy Framework in the UK, whose final version was published in March of this year, culture didn’t even feature. Lobbying on behalf of the cultural sector (like the Arts Council) finally got culture a mention. It was telling, however, that culture still needed hard lobbying to obtain even minimal recognition. And we all know that we won’t end up with anything like Arabianranta.

What was great in the conference was the quantity of presentations about cultural policy outside the arts and national arts funding frameworks (the impact of Ahearne and Bennett’s ‘implicit cultural policy’ was significant). In one of the closing lectures, Pierre-Michel Menger gave a wonderful and sweeping history of cultural policy in the context of the European Union. What struck me was his description of the period 1950-70 that was characterized by a cultural policy that was nation-bound, Government agency dominated, heritage-legacy centred, ‘didactic, patrimonial and institutionalized’. In a time of radical recession, we are surely heading that way again, where ‘culture’ is concentrated in the reliable, established arts silos of patronage, creating oases of inherited refinement amidst an urban landscape of austerity. How about re-thinking cultural policy without the State and without economics, and see what we end up with. Imagine no public funding of any kind (or only for the current closed professional networks) – has cultural policy studies the intellectual resources to define a field of thought and action?

Jonathan Vickery : 27 Jul 2012 09:27 |  Tags: Iccpr Iccpr 2012; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Helsinki Design Lab

At the Helsinki EGOS conference (noted below) our stream paid a special visit to the Helsinki Design Lab, which was a truly revealing experience. The HDL sits within the company Sitra – the now famous The Finnish Innovation Fund. Our session was hosted by the excellent Bryan Boyer, who offered an articulate insight into both Sitra and HDL’s work, methods and driving values.

See his blog postings on: http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/people/Bryan_Boyer

Sitra began with a massive endowment, and operates largely with the revenues from that fund. This is significant when understanding their work, as they have no ‘clients’ and any contractual relations they enter into are not based on revenue considerations or competition factors. They purposively look for projects (or problems) with no ‘owner’, such as social problems not covered by existing public policy, or global sustainability issues to expansive for any one government or too complex for the existing capabilities of other NGOs. With an operating budget of around £50m a year, they undertake some impressive stuff: see Sitra’s website:
http://www.sitra.fi/en

What interested me personally about their work was their driving concern for Helsinki as a civic, public, urban space. Bryan spoke of their attempt to ‘normativize’ civic entrepreneurship – provide leadership, models, and effective strategy for ordinary citizens who just wanted to contribute to a process of change in their own urban environment. To this end they have developed some strong exemplar methods of working – one genre of which is their approach to strategic design.

Download their new, free, manual on strategic design (useful for any creative approach to general, strategic and project management and enterprise) here:
http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/instudio/

The project reminded me a little of Bruce Mau’s Massive Change, although much more pragmatic, theoretically-informed and concentrated on specific, locale-urban, methods of increasing sustainable development, ‘wicked problems’ and the ‘dark matter’ of public-civic policy application.

Jonathan Vickery : 27 Jul 2012 09:25 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Design in Helsinki

A few weeks ago I attended the EGOS conference in Helsinki – the European Group for Organization Studies, in Helsinki largely because the city is the 2012 City of Design. Thematising ‘design’, the conference contained many more streams than one could attend, with around 1800 delegates. I was part of the stream ‘Artifacts in Art, Design, and Organization’ convened by Stefan Meisiek, Daved Barry and Roberto Verganti. I contributed a session, with some convening myself (see photo) and with Ian King contributed a discussion on design, fashion and the organization. We had three objectives: (i) to unpack the concept of ‘fashion’, which is as relevant to the deep patterning of the global economy as it is the various acts of organizational self-presentation (i.e. dressing); (ii) to use the concept of ‘dressing’ (a ‘shifter’, as Roman Jakobson would say) to explore the symmetries between the self-presentation of the organization (how the organization ‘clothes’ itself) and the individual agent (how our modes of self-presentation articulate our shifting relation to the organization). We also discussed the way organizations in the global economy do not just wish to endure, or become fixed entities, but to embody the ontology of fashion – have the facility to move, change, respond and develop critical shifts in consumer desire; operate with an instantaneous market mobility and viral-like self-generating appeal. Fashion involves both aesthetics and commerce, both triviality and profound symbolic significance, and the interpenetration of strategic business and romance. We had some great moments of interaction and sessions of creativity (see the board in the photo – don’t miss my sculptural contribution in the form of the mobile coat stand).

Jonathan Vickery : 27 Jul 2012 09:23 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

#ICCPR2012 – A first timer’s view

It was fabulous to be in Barcelona for the 7th International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR) at the beginning of July. Of course I love conferences, and of course I love Cultural Policy, and I would just have to get on with the fact it was in Barcelona. We suffer for our research. This time in Barcelona it struck me profoundly just how much the city uses culture as part of its identity. Every surface is tattooed with identities political, commercial, regional and personal, from graffiti to logos, design to decoration. Every piece of street furniture is designed, every metal shutter is graffitited. This visual culture is official and unofficial, planned and unplanned, commercial and expressive, corporate and civic, strategic and ad hoc. It is identity through culture wearing its distinctiveness on its sleeve.

It is this broad, eclectic view of culture, and thus of cultural policy, for which the ICCPR – and indeed the discipline of cultural policy - provides a wide umbrella. This reflects the contested field of cultural policy. Cultural policy researchers and academics have taken into their purview not only the purposive actions of nations and states (and for that matter the supranational, and what might be called the ‘infranational’, i.e. the regional and parochial), but also the implicit, such as those policies not aimed at culture but which affect it, like town planning, and those actions which affect culture that come from what Althusser called the ‘private domain’, i.e. non-governmental agents such as the family, the church, education and so on. This wide ranging and eclectic field means that cultural policy academics come from a catholic range of disciplines. The conference reflected this, presenting research on a broad range of aspects of cultural policy and cultural politics.

The first session I attended was themed ‘digital culture’, and I was intrigued to find out about the Icelandic experience of extending democracy through social media. (Disappointingly, it turns out, there was not very much take up of Social Media by Icelanders as a way to engage in the democratic process. I have more followers - and tweet more - than Iceland. However, I would say that this was not so much a criticism of digital democracy per se but of a poor use of social media, and perhaps a cynical one at that.) The interesting thing for social policy discourse though was that this was in the same session as digitising museum and library collections, which is a very different subject. Pau Alsina (@paualsina) of the Open University of Catalonia tweeted that there was a ‘confusion between digitalization of culture and digital culture at #ICCPR2012’ and worried about a feeling of ‘techno utopia’. He had, I think correctly, picked up on an uneasiness about technology and what it means for, and more importantly where it fits into, cultural policy discourse. There is certainly plenty of space for future cultural policy researchers to tease out the strands of technology and separate subject from object, to define and to acknowledge the distinctions between and implications of phrases like ‘new technology’, ‘digitisation’, ‘social media’ etc.

As well as the emergence of the new, one of the things I really love about academic conferences is that received opinions and beliefs are challenged if not shattered. One of the shibboleths under reconsideration was that of French protectionism of films: JP Singh asked, “Why is France so welcoming of tourists but so protective of films? Why is cultural imperialism only discussed in terms of films?”, suggesting this was more of an economic than a cultural imperative. And Anna Upchurch disrupted my received understanding of the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain with evidence from the Arts Enquiry at Dartington Hall. Of course it was also good to have some things confirmed – Upchurch talking about the difficulties of getting theatre people together to meet in the 1940s, and even more so the reluctance of the then theatre managers’ association to release their statistics (compare that with the Society of London Theatres who only release theirs in anonymised form) showed that not much has changed.

In a sold out session (we had to change rooms to accommodate everyone), Ele Belfiore went further, suggesting a paradigm change. She reminded us that we did not have to accept the current terms of the debate, and declared her mission of ‘dethroning economics’, wishing to open the ‘cultural value’ agenda to humanists as well as those doing cost benefit analysis. Belfiore’s argument, built partly on Lakoff’s theory that frameworks shape the debate, is that we have given too much ground by arguing for cultural investment in economic terms, using the economic importance arguments of Myerscough, playing to the cost benefit preoccupations of the Treasury and so on. According to Belfiore, the argument ‘This is the only language this government understands’ is a counsel of despair which has set limits on the discourse by accepting an economic frame which reduces arts to numbers. This was very well received within the room, a delegate from Greece declaring, ‘The emphasis on just economic values has led my country nowhere!’, and I imagine this view would be just as popular with many arts practitioners. To find out more and to join Belfiore in her paradigm revolution, follow @CulturalValue1 and the hashtag #culturalvalue on Twitter.

Of course I saw so much more (highlights include Clive Gray examining the structure of cultural policy itself, Ben Walmsley effortlessly presenting on organisational change, Monica Sassatelli and Franco Bianchini on festivals, Egil Bjørnsen on the social impact of culture), and, as is the nature of conferences, missed even more (apologies to Annette Naudin, Dave O’Brien and David Wright – bang goes the PhD!). I also had some really stimulating conversations around cultural policy and politics outside of the seminar room. Overall I had a very inspiring time, and am left reflecting on cultural policy as a project that is not settled, still under review and, like Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s greatest gift to Barcelona, a work in progress that may never be completed, and that may even be its strength.

: 24 Jul 2012 15:45 |  Tags: Cultural Policy Cultural Policy Studies Iccpr Iccpr 2012; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Culture, politics and cultural policies at the ICCPR 2012.

The Cultural Policy Studies research community descended on Barcelona for its bi-annual conference last week. I thought I’d share some thoughts on what I saw at the event.

Firstly it was a perfect setting. This was not only because of the ample opportunities for dining, socializing and flânerie that such a city provides, but of course these were welcome. The view from the top of the Museum of the History of Catalonia at the conference dinner was spectacular, and the venue for the conference itself, around the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, made for a dynamic, vibrant space. Delegates mixing with dog walkers, skate boarders, basketball courts and the general bustle of the city meant this felt some way from a detached ivory tower. The setting was also ideal because Barcelona inhabits or reflects the over-arching theme of the conference, Culture, Politics and Cultural Policies. It is a city that has been shaped, re-generated and re-invented by culture and creativity in its various forms - and not just ‘high culture’ (this, is after all, the home of Cruyff and Guardiola as well as Gaudi or Miro.) It is global in its orientation and make-up– with all the ambiguities that come with that- but still with a distinctive identity, bound up with local, national and regional political struggles. And, as the centre of a nation within a nation, culture matters here, as the eloquent opening speech from Ferran Mascarell i Canalda, Minister of Culture in the Catalan government attested. Cultural policy is wedded to politics in Catalonia in a more pressing way than it might be, in some other Western and Northern European countries as the city, nation and region negotiates with its own past, present and future.

This relationship between ‘politics’ and ‘policy’ was also brought home to me in the papers I saw, specifically in sessions on cultural development, and in conversations with colleagues from the Latin American diaspora. George Yudice’s account of the various grass-roots forms of cultural and creative activity, often facilitated by the use of new technologies, and their relationship to local forms of political activism and engagement across Latin America reflects a particular politics of culture. Cultural ‘development’ is not, here, being imposed by the World Bank or IMF but is being struggled over through, for example, competing visions of intellectual property and alternative models of cultural organization and distribution. These seem to me to be more fundamental ideas than those which accompany the somewhat co-opted narratives of culture’s benefit to the economy, to health, or community in the UK context. Somehow, in comparison, these latter stories seem to assume that the big political controversies in our democracy are settled – so cultural policy becomes a means of tinkering around the edges of institutions which, broadly, work.

There was thoughtful reflection on the British context too of course. Philip Schlesinger’s account of the game-playing , strategizing and career trajectories of policy-oriented intellectuals in the British research context was revealing. Dave O’Brien’s re-appraisal of civil servants as ethically oriented servants of the people’s representatives rather than, as they are often imagined, audit obsessed bean-counters, is also important in reminding academics that they aren’t the only people who can and do engage in useful thinking about these issues. Discussion with colleagues from Chile, however, also revealed some frustration and surprise that politics was not more front-and-centre in debates about what is at stake in cultural policy. In Chile, as Maite de Cea Pé’s paper revealed, a coherent, structured cultural policy is being created in a way which perhaps more readily reflects the underlying tensions and divisions in a society so recently emerging from a period of dictatorship. In this light the administrative and managerial questions which animate British cultural policy might be, in that dread phrase, ‘first world problems’. The politics of culture again matter in Chile and the competing visions of how cultural production and consumption might be organized and framed from a policy point of view feel closely linked to emerging visions of the kind of society Chile wants to be. These debates are far from settled, giving these discussions an urgency which their Northern equivalents might sometimes lack.

Of course recent events, including the coalition response to the financial crisis and the various scandals affecting powerful institutions in British society reveal that political controversies are not entirely settled in the UK either – or are at least in a period of flux. It might be too ambitious to suggest that cultural policy scholars place themselves at the forefront of responses to these kinds of controversies. It seems to me desirable, though, for both scholars and policy-makers in this field to keep in mind the relationship between the kinds of policies we want for culture and the kind of place we want to live in – and to be more vocal in articulating and debating that relationship.

David Wright : 18 Jul 2012 10:32 |  Tags: Cultural Policy Studies; Iccpr Iccpr 2012; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Culture and Value

I have just attended the two day symposium ‘Cultural Value: developing the research agenda’, organized by colleague Eleonora Belfiore, held here at one of Warwick’s conference centres (11-12^th). It was a highly interesting event, with a wide range of issues effecting every area of cultural policy research – from arts funding to mega-events to social engagement. I am not going to summarise the event here, which would take a long time. I will just make a few points, which impressed themselves on me in the course of the two days (with its five presentations).

The concept of value is particularly interesting, as it is one of those public policy concepts that has deep philosophical origins, and thus forces the public policy mind to be more reflexive about the language it uses (at least, we hope). In fact, one of the recurring themes of the symposium was the relation between cultural policy and the broader political terrain of public policy, and how the language of the former is determined by the political realpolitik of the latter. For example, I personally am frustrated by the way the crucial term ‘public value’ has been so eaten-up by new public management regime strategists that cultural thinkers now keep away from it. Yet the term ‘value’ is inherently public as it is inherently cultural (subject to changing behaviours of judgment, regimes of taste, meta-ethical activities of ascribing value and evaluation). Because of that, the work of cultural policy on value can perhaps inform public policy thinking in this area. Cultural value is one region that opens up the complex nature of public value per se in its social, cultural as well as economic dimensions. In this area, cultural policy thinking can be the reflexive conscience of public policy.

Two more themes that emerged from the symposium (at least for me….I was there as a virtual gatecrasher): (i) Dave O’Brien’s argument for an ethically-driven bureaucracy challenged certain assumptions on the Left that have become pervasive to the enterprise of cultural policy studies. It is true, that public bureaucracy (from government ministries, NDPBs, quangos and so on) are generally understood as the embodiment of instrumental rationality, and whose methods can only be antithetical to real cultural democracy (indeed, do I remember rightly in thinking the term ‘bureaucracy’ was first used in reference to the British colonial administration in Ireland?).

This is an interesting discussion that needs to continue – we need to excavate some of the lost narratives of critical modernity, where bureaucracy is the mark of a modern civil society (I think of Hegel, then Weber). If we take the founding moment of modernity as the categorical separation of state and civil society, then bureaucracy was ideally the mechanism of democratic mediation that, though sponsored by the state, did not act in its own ‘interests’ (theoretically, it should have none – quite uniquely). Idealist perhaps (and critical and elite theorists, regime theorists and others, would laugh at this of course). Yet given that wishing away the world of bureaucracy is not an option for cultural policy (is not cultural policy a bureaucratic invention?) maybe we need to re-frame our cultural policy understanding of all forms of public administration and do so through intellectual engagement.

(ii) Yet Andy Miles’s presentation would cause one to hesitate. The abstraction or decontextualisation of value from actual forms of social life is endemic to the bureaucratic management of culture. There are some chronic ironies in the public policy management of culture – they want culture both to be business and to participate in social/community development. Yet they refuse the conditions of risk and of social interaction/conflict/difference that make actual business and real social life possible. Miles’s talk suggested a return to the actual everyday social sphere, the realm of urban life, and learn from the values, language and articulations of the populace. For me, this entails a return of some of the defining issues of ‘urban cultural policy’ to mainstream cultural policy debates. National funding regimes by and large have a very abstract grip on the spatio-temporal and urban contexts of culture.

Jonathan Vickery : 14 Jun 2012 11:39 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem