Analysing cultural policy: incorrigibly plural or ontologically incompatible?

Abstract

Approaches to the study of cultural policy are currently tied to particular disciplines. This can lead to a failure to appreciate the real differences between these disciplines in terms of what they are investigating, and how they go about these investigations. The differences that exist at ontological, epistemological and methodological levels between differing disciplines mean that it is not possible to simply adopt what each discipline is saying about cultural policy at face value. Without greater theoretical and methodological understanding of the tools that are available for the analysis of cultural policy, it is unlikely that a more sophisticated approach to analysis will be generated. The consequences of this for both the analysis of cultural policy and future directions of analysis in the field are discussed.

Keywords:

• analysis
• theory
• methodology
• cultural policy

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Oliver Bennett and Per Mangset for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, to Geir Vestheim, Javier Stanziola, Lisanne Gibson and Kevin Mulcahy for their questions and to the anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and support: responsibility for the final contents of it, however, rest with me.

Notes

1. Thus, Lewis and Miller (2003, pp. 2, 4) criticise approaches that do not share their own concerns as being ‘straightforwardly elitist’. Whilst this may score points for being politically on the side of the (radical) angels, it is by no means the case that other approaches are as simply ‘elitist’ as is claimed. Likewise, Hesmondhalgh’s (2002, p. 19) mention of ‘public goods’ misunderstands the economist’s notion of indivisibility and refers to multiple usage instead: at best this is simply inaccurate. Similar concerns can be found in other cases and a more detailed investigation of this point could be informative for understanding the consequences of this for the analyses that are then undertaken.

2. The approach adopted in this paper is an interpretative one on the basis that this is intended as a starting‐point for future discussion within the cultural policy arena, sketching in some key questions, rather than an attempt to provide a definitive answer to these questions. Other approaches, from the philosophical to the bibliometric, may be more useful in later developments of the arguments that are presented here.

3. The extent to which induction actually escapes from an underlying theoretical basis can be debated and whether the ‘facts’ can simply speak for themselves has yet to be convincingly demonstrated.

4. Unless, of course, the analyst would like to attempt to extract a screw with some sandpaper.

5. See Lewis and Miller (2003), Scullion and Garcia (2005) and McGuigan (2006) as examples of this tendency to close off analysis.

6. Ideographic and nomothetic methodologies could also be added to these but a restriction of coverage, for reasons of space, has been employed for the current paper.

7. A comparison of McGuigan and Gilmore (2002) and Gray (2003) on London’s Millennium Dome is difficult to undertake as they are effectively talking about different things: the former about the content and meaning of the Dome and the latter about how the Labour Government managed the public relations disaster that the Dome became.

8. This difference is emphasised when consideration is made of the American versions of cultural studies where the distinction between materialist and idealist is, perhaps, even stronger than in either the British or Australian variants, for example.

9. As in Lewis and Miller (2003, p. 1), ‘cultural policy is … a site for the production of cultural citizens, with the cultural industries providing not only a ream [sic] of representations about oneself and others, but a series of rationales for particular types of conduct’, or Scullion and Garcia (2005, p. 125), who see cultural policy research as concerning ‘the “policing” (in Foucault’s terms) of the state and combines an engagement in representation and formulation’.

10. McGuigan (2004, p. 90) sees the British Millennium Dome as ‘a disappointment in spite of the strenuous efforts made by visitors to make it better than it really was’. In this case, the analyst obviously knows better than the visitors what the Dome was ‘really’ all about. As an example of the ‘elitist’ perspective that cultural studies are so intent on attacking, this is hard to beat.

11. It could be argued that all governmental policies have such a cultural effect in one way or another. This would effectively make all governmental policies cultural ones. At this extreme, the objection levied at some sociological research – that it is so all‐inclusive that what is specifically ‘cultural’ about such policies can become lost – equally applies.

12. The common complaint from cultural studies, for example, that disciplines like economics ignore questions of value is untrue if approached from the direction of economics where questions of value are actually central to what the discipline does – particularly in Marxist variants. What is meant by ‘value’ in either discipline remains, however, a matter of some considerable debate and is as much a methodological as a definitional issue. Again, the common complaints about ‘elitism’ from the cultural studies literature are unhelpful in the context of political science, where elitism and neo‐elitism are analytical approaches rather than a set of accusations.