Auditing culture : the subsidised cultural sector in the New Public Management

This article explores the effects of the spread of the principles and practices of the New Public Management (NPM) on the subsidised cultural sector and on cultural policy making in Britain. In particular, changes in the style of public administration that can be ascribed to the NPM will be shown to provide a useful framework to make sense of what has been felt as an “instrumental turn” in British policies for culture between the early 1980s and the present day. The current New Labour Government, as well as the arm's length bodies that distribute public funds for the cultural sector in Britain, are showing an increasing tendency to justify public spending on the arts on the basis of instrumental notions of the arts and culture. In the context of what have been defined as “instrumental cultural policies”, the arts are subsidised in so far as they represent a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In this perspective, the emphasis placed on the potential of the arts to help tackle social exclusion and the role of the cultural sector in place‐marketing and local economic development are typical examples of current trends in British cultural policy making. The central argument purported by this article is that this instrumental emphasis in British cultural policy is closely linked to the changes in the style of public administration that have given rise to the NPM. These new developments have indeed put the publicly funded cultural sector under increasing pressure. In particular, it will be shown how the new stress on the measurement of the arts' impacts in clear and quantifiable ways – which characterises today's “audit society” – has proved a tough challenge for the sector and one that has not been successfully met. The article will conclude by critically considering how the spread of the NPM has affected processes of policy making for the cultural sector, and the damaging effects that such developments may ultimately have on the arts themselves

Economic impact - inconclusive evidence

In Britain, the economic arguments around the value of the arts first acquired popularity in reaction to the cultural policies of the 1980s. Eleonora Belfiore explores some more recent thinking

"Defensive instrumentalism" and the legacy of New Labour's cultural policies

The paper identifies “defensive instrumentalism” as a main feature that has characterised New Labour's cultural policies, and which constitutes an important aspect of its legacy. Yet, resorting to instrumental arguments to defend the arts and to make a case for their usefulness is hardly an invention of New Labour. However, in the past, such defensive arguments were built into a more constructive and creative attempt to elaborate a coherent theory of art and an intellectually sophisticated view of the effects of the arts on individual and societies. What the paper argues, then, is that instrumentalism under New Labour has retained its longstanding defensive character, but was deprived of the attendant effort to elaborate a positive notion of cultural value

'Impact', 'value' and 'bad economics' : making sense of the problem of value in the arts and humanities

Questions around the value of the arts and humanities to the contemporary world, the benefits they are expected to bring to the society that supports them through funding have assumed an increased centrality within a number of disciplines, not limited to humanities scholarship. Especially problematic, yet crucial, is the issue of the measurement of such public value, in the context to an ostensible commitment to evidence-based policy making over the past twenty years. This article takes as a starting point a discussion of the ‘cultural value debate’ as it has developed within British cultural policy: here, the discussion of ‘value’ has been inextricably linked to the challenge of ‘making the case’ for the arts and for public cultural funding. The paper discusses the problems with the persisting predominance of economics in shaping current approaches to framing articulations of ‘value’ in the policy-making context for both the arts sector and higher education. It concludes with a plea for a collaborative effort to resist the economic doxa, to reclaim and reinvent the impact agenda as a route towards the establishment of a new public humanities

Sounding board - a matter of value

In recent years, funders, politicians and commentators have emphasised the need to evaluate the impact of arts projects, but often this evaluation has not been as objective as it may appear. Eleonora Belfiore asks whether weve been overstating the case for the arts

Sounding board - evaluating value

Debate about how best to justify support for the arts has evolved in recent months with the notion of cultural value. Eleonora Belfiore provides her views on the notion of placing a value on the arts

The methodological challenge of cross-national research : comparing cultural policy in Britain and Italy

This paper explores methodological issues that need to be considered when embarking in cross-national cultural policy research. The first part offers a discussion of the limitations of much of the currently available comparative research in the field, and particularly work that relies heavily on comparison of cultural statistics. By drawing on an extensive discussion of the case study of Britain and Italy, the second part of the paper attempts to put forward a number of suggestions with a view to developing a more appropriate and more holistic comparative research methodology for the field of cultural policy studies. To this end, inspiration is drawn from the contribution of a number of disciplines in the field of social sciences – as well as public policy studies - where comparative research, and related problems of methodology, have long been discussed and theorized. In particular, the concept of contextualization will be shown to be extremely useful when comparing notions of culture and policies across nations

Ubi maior, minor cessat : a comparative study of the relation between changing cultural policy rationales and globalization in post-1980s England and Italy

This thesis presents a comparative study of cultural policy in Britain and Italy. It provides a historical reconstruction of the cultural, legal and administrative contexts for cultural policy-making in the two countries, with a view of highlighting how cultural policy priorities have changed over time. The discussion of the growing popularity, in Italy, of notions of the cultural heritage as an engine for local economic development and as a resource that can allow the government to find the resources it needs to finance infrastructural works is given particular emphasis. Indeed, this probably represents the most original contribution made to the field of cultural policy research, in that Italy is a much under-researched country, and extant literature in English is almost non-existent. The main argument that the discussion aims to substantiate is that, despite being rooted in very different cultural and administrative traditions, both the British and Italian cultural policy debates seem to display a growing popularity of an instrumentalist rhetoric, which justifies public subsidy of the cultural sector on the grounds of the alleged beneficial impacts of the sector in the social and economic spheres. The main contribution of the thesis to the current understanding of instrumental cultural policy is therefore to offer plausible explanations for this recent trend. The thesis argues that the current situation, both in Italy and the UK, can be best understood in the light of the global phenomenon of neo-liberal globalisation, and the tendency for policy-transfer between countries that it tends to promote

Reflexivity and the perpetuation of inequality in the cultural sector : half awake in a fake empire?

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