“Working the System”—British American Tobacco's Influence on the European Union Treaty and Its Implications for Policy: An Analysis of Internal Tobacco Industry Documents

Katherine Smith and colleagues investigate the ways in which British American Tobacco influenced the European Union Treaty so that new EU policies advance the interests of major corporations, including those that produce products damaging to health

The practice of cultural ecology: network connectivity in the creative economy

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. ABSTRACT: This paper reflects on approaches to collaborative knowledge exchange projects between UK universities and the creative economy. It develops a preliminary account of cultural ecology as a systematic approach to producing impact in the creative economy. It argues that such an approach is a powerful way to aggregate micro-businesses and small and medium sized enterprises in a meaningful network of new relationships. The paper uses social network analysis software to begin to visualise the pattern of relationships that constitute the ecosystem. The paper reports on the work of the Research and Enterprise for Arts and Creative Technologies Hub, one of four Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy established by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Commercials, careers and culture: travelling salesmen in Britain 1890s-1930s

Within the lower middle-class, British commercial travellers established a strong fraternal culture before 1914. This article examines their interwar experiences in terms of income, careers, and associational culture. It demonstrates how internal labour markets operated, identifies the ways in which commercial travellers interpreted their role, and explores their social and political attitudes

Contributing to the creative economy imaginary: universities and the creative sector

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper explores the relationship between the creative economy and universities. As funders, educators and research bodies, universities have a complicated relationship with the creative economy. They propagate its practice, ‘buying-in’ to the rhetoric and models of creative value, particularly in teaching, research and knowledge exchange. Third mission activities also play a role, seeking to affect change in the world ‘outside’ academia through collaboration, partnerships, commercialisation and social action. For arts and humanities disciplines, these practices have focused almost exclusively on the creative sector in recent years. This paper asks how the third mission has been a site where universities have modified their function in relation to the creative economy. It considers the mechanisms by which universities have been complicit in propagating the notion of the creative economy, strengthening particular constructions of the idea at the level of policy and everyday practice. It also briefly asks how a focus on alternative academic practice and institutional forms might offer possibilities for developing a more critical creative economy. The argument made is that the university sector is an important agent in the shaping and performance of the creative economy, and that we should take action if we wish to produce a more diverse, equitable space for learning, researching, and being under the auspices of ‘creativity’

Accounting colonisation and austerity in arts organisations

This Habermasian qualitative study considers the nature and extent of accounting and austerity colonisation in the context of widening arts engagement in England in a period of financial austerity. It also explores some of the key impacts of austerity and accounting monitoring and how arts organisations coped with them. The findings suggest that the discourses of accounting and austerity were associated with a variety of forms of colonisation and limited resistance along a continuum. The discourse of austerity was portrayed as much more problematic and colonising than the extensive accounting monitoring which was taken for granted. The discourses and practices of austerity were implicated in morally ambiguous and role-conflicted organisational behaviour suggesting sublimated legitimation crisis tendencies but there was no evidence of widespread Habermasian motivation crisis in relation to austerity or accounting monitoring. Some organisational members responded actively to accounting colonisation, and as a reorientation or reversal of colonisation, created transformations of accounting through a range of narrative and visual reporting methods. Their evaluation of such qualitative data revealed an expression of autonomy in the face of pathological accounting colonisation, whilst paradoxically creating self-challenging monitoring procedures

Making live music count:The UK live music census

In 2017 we conducted the first-ever nationwide live music census, allowing for unprecedented levels of detailed, comparable data on the live music cultures of different localities. Live music censuses have been increasingly used in recent years (e.g. Melbourne, Edinburgh, Bristol) to illustrate the value of music to policymakers. This has coincided with challenging times for urban live music venues, particularly small venues and clubs. We present key census findings here, reflecting on how local contexts both shape the census process and may be informed by it, and on the growth of the idea of “Music Cities” to inform policy

The work of the audience: visual matrix methodology in museums

Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-led, group-based method that creates a “third space” research setting to observe audience groups re-enacting lived experience of an event or process that takes place in the third space of a cultural setting. In this article the method is described through its use in relation to an art-science exhibition, Human + Future of the species, where three audience groups with investments in technology worked with exhibition material to achieve a complex, ambivalent state of mind regarding technological futures. The visual matrix has been designed to capture the affective and aesthetic quality of audience engagement in third space by showing what audiences do with what is presented to them. We argue that such methodologies are useful for museums as they grapple with their role as sites where citizens not only engage in dialogue with one another but actively re-work their imaginaries of the future