The infrapolitics of cultural value: cultural policy, evaluation and the marginalisation of practitioner perspectives

ABSTRACT

This article is about the politics of cultural value. It focusses on the representations of value that exist in the epistemologies and methodologies of cultural impact evaluation and the discrepancies between these official discourses and the discourses that correspond to cultural practitioners themselves. First the article outlines the critique of dominant forms of cultural impact evaluation, particularly the instrumentalisation of culture. In the second half of the article we draw upon qualitative research conducted with arts practitioners in the East Midlands region of England during 2013 and 2014. In so doing we introduce the concept of the ‘infrapolitics’ of cultural value that draws on the work of radical anthropologist Scott [(1992) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, London]. The central argument is that representations of cultural value are discursive constructions constituted through the epistemologies and methodologies of cultural evaluation, and that there are key differences between these dominant discourses and the discourses of value of cultural practitioners themselves. One important although overlooked element of the significance of cultural value is therefore as a record of the performance of power within the cultural sector, an ‘official transcript’ that represents dominant discourse of cultural value in opposition to the ‘hidden transcripts’ that correspond to cultural practitioners. We argue for a research agenda that represents cultural value from practitioners’ point of view.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural value
• cultural impact
• instrumentalisation
• cultural evaluation
• infrapolitics
• hidden transcripts

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the organisations and individuals who took part in this study. We would also like to thank Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova who assisted on the project and two anonymous reviewers who made valuable comments upon an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Jack Newsinger is a lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. His research focusses on cultural policy and the creative industries, with a particular interest in the politics of cultural value, and the political economy of neoliberalism.

William Green is a lecturer in Innovation at the University of Leicester, UK. His research focuses on user-centred and inclusive digital design and innovation, with a particular interest in operationalising technology to empower cultural organisations.

ORCID

William Green http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4161-4490

Jack Newsinger http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4161-4190

Notes

1 The CASE programme is a three-year joint programme of research led by the DCMS in collaboration with the Arts Council England (Wallace), English Heritage (EH), the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and Sport England (SE). See http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/research_and_statistics/5698.aspx.

2 The Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value. See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/research/warwickcommission/futureculture/.

3 For a summary of all 70 projects funded under the Cultural Value Project scheme see: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/documents/project-reports-and-reviews/cultural-value-project-project-summaries/.

4 CIT was developed by John Flanagan in the 1950s (Flanagan 1954) and became ubiquitous in fields such as nursing, job analysis, counselling, education, medicine, marketing, organizational learning, psychology and social work (Butterfield 2005). Through the collection of detailed observations or reports of behaviour in relation to specific, significant phenomena (critical incidents) researchers can quickly build robust and reliable understandings with a range of immediate practical applications. From the late 1980s, CIT began to be utilised in research from a social constructivist perspective (Chell 2004, Butterfield et al. 2005). This research tended to focus upon CIT's utility to generate data on self-understandings of phenomena, and as an inductive tool to generate and develop theoretical models. Foundational in this was Lorette Woolsey who advocated CITs use in counselling psychology, with particular utility for theory and model-building (Woolsey 1986). CIT's use in the cultural sector as a measurement of impact has been criticised by Selwood (2002) as part of a more general reliance on ‘soft’, anecdotal evidence of the positive effects of cultural participation used in advocacy. Clearly CIT is of limited value in developing robust, systematic evidence of impact based on monitoring and evaluation. However, its usefulness as a generator of descriptive components of cultural value has not, to our knowledge, been explored. CIT is particularly appropriate for its utility to generate data on self-understandings of phenomena, and as an inductive tool to generate and develop theoretical models (Woolsey 1986, Butterfield et al. 2005).

5 In this we have been influenced by Eleanora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett's ‘determinants of impact’ model of cultural impact (Belfiore & Bennett 2007).

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this article is based was made possible through a grant from the College of Social Science at the University of Leicester and a period of academic study leave. We are grateful for this support.