Cultural policy archetypes: the bathwater and the baby

ABSTRACT

Cultural policy archetypes have been fundamental to comparative cultural policy study and continue to be influential in both everyday and scholarly characterizations of national cultural policy systems. This paper explores the proposition that cultural policy archetypes reflect what people believe to be true about culture – their cultural ideologies. Cultural ideologies are integral to the formation of cultural policy and, thus, must be considered in any theory that hopes to measure the extent to which and explain why cultural policies differ. Cultural ideologies embody ideas about why culture is important and how it should be governed. Those ideologies spotlight certain administrative mechanisms, overemphasizing their role in systems that actually are deeply administratively hybrid. This makes archetypes poor tools for analyzing the mechanisms of cultural policy; however, because archetypes tell us about cultural ideologies in straightforward and powerful ways, it is essential that they continue to be a part of comparative cultural policy study.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative cultural policy
• cultural policy models
• cultural policy archetypes
• cultural ideology

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Mulcahy develops his framework over a series of articles; I have chosen what I view to be the most synthetic and fully elaborated of these.

2. While this definition of ideology is not related to the Marxian notion of ‘false consciousness,’ it does recognize a difference between participant (emic) and analytic (etic) understandings. Further it views ideologies and their objects as fully social phenomena, leaving room for the influence of power, position, and systemic lack of or partial knowledge in the formation of ideology. Many linguistic anthropologists have explored that space (for a classic discussion, see Irvine 1989).

3. Today, we would want to elaborate this dimension. A fuller portrait would replace “decentralization” with federalism and subsidiarity as recognized types and would specify that this spectrum has to do with vertical centralization (or integration versus stratification, see Rosenstein 2018).

4. One way to better frame this administrative dimension is to think about types of centralization along the horizontal plane (or concentration versus fragmentation, see Rosenstein 2018). A cultural bureaucracy may be highly concentrated into a Ministry, may organize some cultural agencies into a constellation while leaving others fragmented, may be fully fragmented, may be highly decentralized through the incorporation of an arm’s length quango or may be fully decentralized by devolving certain functions to civil society.

5. Chartrand and McCaughey do not provide an archetypal example of an Architect nation, but the one example they use to illustrate this form is France and this archetype regularly is understood to represent France. However, in France, “standards of artistic excellence” are, of course, fully incorporated into the institutional cultural policymaking and administration. In their brief discussion of France, Chartrand and McCaughey would seem to suggest that highly institutionalized processes for assessing and regimenting artistic excellence represent a kind of “community standard” that undermines “support for creativity.”

6. For a full explanation of the differences between these instruments see Rosenstein (2018). Briefly, the public provision of culture is found when culture, cultural infrastructure, or cultural programs are a part of the public sector and are used to serve cultural needs. Sometimes this is termed direct provision. Public sector ownership of cultural material or cultural infrastructure is a foundation of public provision. In public provision, the public sector also governs cultural resources. The public sector may administer cultural resources, as well. In public provision, third-party government can be in evidence. However, government remains the lead policymaker, retaining its governance authority. Governments also can provide for cultural needs by paying out public dollars in the form of a subsidy to nonprofit and commercial cultural enterprises or to another part of government (as in the intergovernmental grants-in-aid given to federal–state partner cultural agencies in the U.S.). Subsidy is different from public provision because the provider is independent from government in its ownership or terms of incorporation, governance, and administration, and the provider retains its own authority over the provision of culture.

7. The notion of political culture comes from Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963).

8. I leave aside Mulcahy’s typology of forms of cultural funding because his discussion of them is minimal and some of his types seem mistakenly applied. For example, Mulcahy associates France with subsidies (2003,97) although French cultural policy exemplifies the policy instrument of direct public provision.

9. Of course, this is deeply contested. Nonetheless, it is distinctive and characteristic. For a justification for interpreting Arm’s Length cultural authority as having to do with great lords, see Williams (1979).

10. Although the NEA retains some grantmaking functions, while the Commission does not engage in grantmaking.

11. In a compelling analysis of Holmes’ metaphor, Balsi argues that “In this regard, the features of markets that merit are those that also figure prominently in efficacious governance, scientific inquiry, and natural selection: openness to new capabilities, thirst for better information, responsiveness to changing conditions, encouragement of innovation and initiative, punishment of rigidity, slowness, lack of awareness, or the failure to audit. Whatever their limits and shortcomings, free markets are a powerful force against inertia. So is free speech” (2004, 45).

12. This is how Moggridge, paraphrasing Alan Peacock, describes John Maynard Keynes’ argument for state support for the arts (2005, 546).

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Carole Rosenstein

Carole Rosenstein is an associate professor of arts management and affiliated associate professor of folklore studies at George Mason University. She studies cultural policy, cultural democracy, cultural equity, and the social life of the arts and culture. She has led commissioned research for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Urban Institute. Dr Rosenstein holds a PhD in cultural anthropology, and she employs qualitative approaches and interpretation as well as quantitative data and analysis in her work. From 2000 to 2007, Carole worked on the cultural policy portfolio at the Urban Institute, where she was a research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. In 2007, Carole was Rockefeller Humanities Fellow in Cultural Policy at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, DC. Her most recent publication is the book Understanding Cultural Policy (Routledge 2018).