Arts audience segmentation: data,profiles, segments and biographies

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines how segmentation is used to identify, understand and engage arts audiences. Policy reports and academic publications are reviewed to establish the priorities of arts policymakers and practitioners for understanding arts audiences and their continued focus on audience data and segmentation. This article then makes two contributions. Firstly, critical perspectives on the use of data for audience profiling are applied to arts audience segmentation. Secondly, research using biographical methods is introduced as a new approach for critically evaluating arts audience segmentation. This research, employing biographical methods, shows the exploration and negotiation of audience identity positions. This article takes these insights to critically examine the implications of how profiles and segments are used to define and understand audiences for the arts. The conclusion addresses the implications of segmentation in terms of the design and communication of cultural experiences, the complexities of aligning audiences’ identities with segments, and the seemingly inevitability of exclusion. This article will be of relevance in the scholarly study of arts audiences and for arts and cultural organisations and policymakers in reflecting on the implications of quantitative and qualitative approaches in designing and undertaking audience research.     

Cultural History’s Absent Audience

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders Peter Mandler’s essay ‘The Problem with Cultural History,’ and the complexities of locating evidence of culture’s impact upon ordinary people, or ‘throw.’ A brief examination of the history of market research and public opinion surveys in the 20th century offers important lessons for the cultural historian faced with locating and interpreting evidence of audience response that is either rarely there, or more disturbingly, rarely meaningful by our current standards of interpretation. Ultimately this paper asks of my fellow cultural historians: Does culture matter as much as we cultural historians want it to?     

Accounting for quality: arts evaluation,public value and the case of “Culture counts”

Arts policy has a longstanding relationship with the concept of “quality” and the ways in which organisations measure, evaluate and account for it. Culture Counts, an evaluation system and digital platform, compiles data from standardised evaluation surveys of different stakeholder groups – organisations, audiences, critics, funders and peers – and provides the means to compare and triangulate data in an accessible format. As a result, it claims to provide a more effective, democratic tool for quality measurement of art, which demonstrates the public value of funding [Department of Culture and the Arts, & Knell, J. (2014). Public value measurement framework: Measuring the quality of the arts. Perth: Department of Culture and the Arts.]. Through qualitative research with two consortia of organisations involved in Culture Counts pilot projects in Manchester, England and Victoria, Australia, we explore these claims, comparing the reception and promotion of the system in both countries and considering its potential incorporation into policy assessment frameworks and adoption within arts organisations’ existing evaluation capacities.     

Rebuilding the homeland in poetry and song: Simin Behbahani,Dariush Eghbali,and the making of a transnational national anthem

ABSTRACT

This article traces the transformation of an Iranian nationalist poem by Simin Behbahani entitled “I Will Rebuild You, Homeland” (1981) into an expatriate national anthem, and the poem-song’s subsequent incorporation into protests and political speeches by individuals and groups in and outside of Iran. Employing musical and textual analysis, interviews, and a transnational perspective on cultural circulation and reception, I show how exile pop singer Dariush Eghbali’s adaptation of the original poem mobilized the text and opened it to audience participation. The article argues that the poem and its musical–textual permutations exemplify contemporary Iranian practices of national identification in which conflicting parties attempt to motivate “the Iranian people” to political ends. As actors from around the world and across the political spectrum repeatedly turn to nationalist poetry, song, anthem, and political speech, we observe how mass-mediated popular culture reveals ongoing recourse to nationalist forms even in transnational space.     

The work of the audience: visual matrix methodology in museums

ABSTRACT

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.     

A possible teleology of cultural sector data in England

ABSTRACT

In March 2019, Arts Council England (ACE), an official statistics producer, started collecting a new set of data from its National Portfolio Organisations intended to reveal whether those organizations’ intentions correlate with the perceptions of their peers and audiences. In a world dominated by quantitative data, the Impact and Insight Toolkit addresses a perceived lacuna and marks a substantial investment in qualitative metrics. ACE also expects it to address a number of other concerns – help organizations self-evaluate, measure their short-term outcomes and advocate more effectively. Indeed, it envisages that an aggregation of the data collected will support the case for sustained public support of the sector. The Toolkit’s launch comes at a time when changes to the UK’s official statistics are encouraged, and policymakers are looking elsewhere to inform their thinking. The campaigning aspect of ACE’s aspirations suggests a model of data collection and analysis distinct from that of official statistics production, valued for its impartiality. This article considers what might happen if the Toolkit, which relates to ACE’s role as a development agency, encourages data to be collected and analysed in order to deliver specific outcomes. It reflects on three visions of cultural sector data from the past 50 years: Toffler’s The Art of Measuring the Arts, DCMS’s Taking Part and ACE’s Impact and Insight Toolkit. These suggest a trajectory of cultural sector data determined by increasing importance being attached to institutional interests, and implies that the future of cultural sector data in England may be determined by how ACE addresses its potentially conflicting interests as an official data provider and development agency. Greater investment in the former would more accurately reveal the arts’ contribution to economic and social development; greater investment in the latter would encourage the teleological development of cultural sector data designed for sectorial advocacy.     

Crafting the local: the lived experience of craft production in the Northern Isles of Scotland

ABSTRACT

National creative and cultural industries policy agendas tend to focus on the economic impact of the sector often favouring scalable digital activities based in global clusters, which underpin notions of growth. There has, however, been a re-emergence of craft, which may not be scalable in the same way, into public debate, with benefits linked to educational, cultural and economic policy agendas. Accordingly, policymakers have begun to view craft as a stimulus to develop local and regional economies, skills and materials in relation to wider networks. Within this push towards craft-driven creative place making and economic growth, it has been argued that more sophisticated understandings of the “local” are needed that go beyond those which are inward and parochial. Based on AHRC-funded empirical research undertaken in the Northern Isles of Scotland with craft practitioners, this article attempts to provide evidence of the place-based nature of craft work highlighting both opportunities as well as constraints linked to contexts that are often referred to as remote and peripheral when contrasted with urban locations. We argue for future investigation into, what we term, fractal growth – growth and development that considers multiple dimensions – as being a valid and valuable outcome of creative practice, and which cannot be easily scaled.     

Intersection of Asia,feminism and cultural studies: Yonsei University's experience in South Korea

Abstract

This article addresses the issues of how feminism, cultural studies and inter‐Asia studies can intersect amicably and meaningfully as an institutional program by using Yonsei University as an example. Speaking from the position of someone who is one of the founders and teachers of the Graduate Program in Cultural and Gender Studies at Yonsei University, I endeavor to analyze the possibilities and limitations of combining these fields together. This article suggests that practitioners of inter‐Asian cultural studies carefully formulate and establish a conceptual framework as foundation upon which we can begin to discuss some possible commonalities for future curriculum. I believe that the framework ought to focus more on the ‘post‐nation state paradigm,’ and incorporate the achievements of both critics of global capitalism and the neoliberal order, and creators of new meanings – including migrants and youths – as a possible transnational subjectivities. Inter‐Asia cultural studies also needs to learn some lessons from the history of the belittlement and groundless exclusion of feminism experienced by the Birmingham School and Korean cultural studies practitioners and the gender‐blindness they held.     

The art of the good life: culture and sustainable prosperity

ABSTRACT

The creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and re-thought, but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in particular, how it might encourage a kind of “sustainable prosperity” wherein human flourishing is not linked to high levels of material consumption but rather the capabilities to engage with cultural and creative practices and communities. We critically explore these ideas in three locations: a London borough, a deindustrialised city in England’s midlands and a rural town on the Welsh/English border. Across these diverse landscapes and socio-economic contexts, we look at different versions of the good life and at the possibilities and constraints of cultural activity as a way of achieving kinds of sustainable prosperity.     

Big Data and structural organisation in major arts bodies: an evolving ethnographic method

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use and impact of the so-called Big Data on arts organisations. The article argues that arts bodies have been slower than some business sectors to enter the data sphere and to contribute to the key debates even though many arts organisations have been developing data systems as a means of responding to the demands of funding bodies for more concrete measurement of impact. The article tests this hypothesis by examining the outcomes of a major NESTA/ACE/AHRC-funded project which applied ethnographic method to analyse the use of data by three major arts bodies operating in London, a project which built on the arguments forwarded in a previous NESTA document, Counting what counts (NESTA 2013). The project, managed by the Audience Agency, on which the present author was principal researcher, was delivered over 12 months from August 2014 to August 2015. The article outlines the methodology, and highlights the emergence of a new ethnographic form, “thick data” grounded in data theory and practice. This form is then used to illuminate some of the practices used by large arts organisations to handle audience data, and to develop inclusive and comprehensive future programming strategies. A range of embedded practices are discussed and examined illustrating the various strategies used by the partner organisations to address key data issues and problems. From this detailed analysis, the article then outlines a number of models for the organisation of data within arts institutions.     

“Make every Indian a creator of intellectual property”: Mumbai's casual labour as a creative class

Abstract

When the Government of India declares its plan to convert Mumbai's Kala Ghoda art district into India's equivalent of Times Square, it does something that many Asian countries are doing in their understanding of the needs of the creative industry. In Mumbai's case, however, such an act has several additional historical echoes. This paper proposes that the origins of the so-called ‘creative class' lie in the failure of the city's historic 1982 textile strike, which saw the return of an artisanal practice to the city, often practiced by a class of casual labourers being forced to turn into low-end entrepreneurs without financial security. Such an artisanal entrepreneurship has had a far more complex relationship with industrialization than most theories recognize, and today's cultural industries are effectively replaying a longer history of this class in Bombay that may go back to pre-colonial and colonial times. The paper explores both the colonial and developmental interventions into this artisanal class as essential histories to understanding their new relationship to the ‘creative’ economy into which they are being presently inserted.     

Spatial equity and cultural participation: how access influences attendance at museums and galleries in London

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses how neighbourhoods operate as opportunity structures for cultural participation, and therefore how unequal access to cultural facilities might influence levels of participation and profiles of participants. The neighbourhood effects literature identifies how where people live shapes their lives, including their participation in various activities, but this has not been applied to cultural participation. Sociological theory explores the importance of social stratification of cultural consumption, but has largely ignored the role of place. In this paper sociological explanations of cultural participation are extended to incorporate the influence of access to cultural infrastructure. An innovative accessibility index for museums and galleries in London, using online searches to weight their attraction, is linked to the Taking Part Survey, and used to predict attendance. Alongside social stratification, significant neighbourhood characteristics are identified, including, importantly, access to museums and galleries. Improved access has a strong positive relationship with attendance, which varies according to qualifications and ethnic group: those with degrees are most likely to attend, but the relationship with access also operates for those with fewer qualifications, who according to traditional explanations have little disposition to attend. The implications of the substantial spatial inequity in investment in museums and galleries are discussed.     

Arts councils,policy-making and “the local”

ABSTRACT

In the British Isles, national policies for the arts are primarily viewed as the responsibility of arts councils with statutory duties to distribute state funding that meet the requirements of both “arms-length” principles and national strategic frameworks. This paper explores the tensions between policy making for the nation-state and for “the local” through comparative research on the arts councils (and equivalent bodies) in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with senior representatives from these organisations, it explores their notions of, responsibilities to and affiliations with “the local”. Findings suggest that despite their different models and relationships to the nation-state, and the disparities in the scale of investment, these national policy bodies commonly rely on networked governance to facilitate their relationship to “the local” which risks reproducing national interests, limiting the localised agency of place-based approaches and contributing to a culture of competition within cultural policy.     

“To Reach the Lands of Freedom”: Petitions of Polish Displaced Persons to American Poles,Moral Screening and the Role of Diaspora in Refugee Resettlement

ABSTRACT

In 1949, in the wake of the USA’s Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the American Committee for the Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons received thousands of letters from refugees of peasant and worker background residing in camps in Germany and Austria. These potential immigrants appealed to the Polish diaspora for help with securing assurances of accommodation and work which would enable them to resettle in the USA. This paper investigates the discursive strategies of the authors and the wider meanings of their emigration endeavour. Firstly, it demonstrates that non-elite Displaced Persons (DPs) adopted the language of martyrology, patriotism, anti-Communism and freedom to maximise their chances of emigration. These DPs did not evoke the language of rights as they appealed to the traditional network of support, based on benevolence and familiarity. Secondly, it argues that the American Poles and Polish social elites played a crucial role in resettlement of the DPs, providing an additional layer of screening, here called ‘the moral screening’. It is an example of how ethnic and cultural communities mediated the resettlement procedures supervised by international humanitarian organisations. Using a ‘history from below’ approach, this article argues that during this episode of migration, political and economic ideological underpinnings intertwined.     

Rethinking social movements through retranslating the economy

Abstract

This paper not only gives an overview of the transgender word in contemporary Japan but also attempts to illustrate the male to female cross‐dressing (MTFCD) community in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which plays an important role in the overall transgender world and how people in the community think and live, by conducting comprehensive fieldwork. The MTFCD community consists of amateur cross‐dressers and their patrons, and it is formed around about ten bars/clubs in Shinjuku. This community differentiates itself from the gay community in their customs and consciousness; they tend to recognize gender based on gender performance rather than biological sex, which is usually accepted for distinguishing sex. Therefore, a MTF cross‐dresser with feminine performance is considered as a ‘woman,’ regardless of one’s physical and biological conditions. Because of this recognition of gender based on gender performance, people in the community are able to develop the ‘quasi‐heterosexual’ relationships as men and ‘women.’     

Re-envisioning media literacy education as feminist arts-activism

ABSTRACT

This project interrogates the premises of media literacy education – the predominant approach to equipping K-12 students to navigate the contemporary media environment – by moving it beyond teaching students to critique commercial media toward undermining ideological messages about health, violence, race, and gender embedded in media discourses. This participatory programme evaluation uses mixed-methods to assess the effectiveness of an alternative, performing arts education-based approach to media literacy called The Girl Project (TGP), a feminist artist-activist programme based at a non-profit community theatre in Versailles, Kentucky. The 12–18 high school-aged girls who participate in TGP every year are engaged in workshops by guest artists from around the nation to express what they think is important for their audiences to understand about their lived experiences as girls in a conservative sociopolitical environment.

The project employed “youth-adult partnership model” to programme evaluation that involved working with programme alumni as co-researchers to evaluate TGP 2017. In June 2017, a team of eight co-researchers comprising alumni from the 2014, 2015, and 2016 classes met to develop evaluation questions and make data collection decisions. Data collection included surveys and interviews conducted pre- and post-programme with participants, field notes of the co-researchers’ observations of workshops and rehearsals, and feedback from guest artists and audience members. The team met again in January 2018 to collaboratively analyse how the data answered their evaluation questions. The survey data allowed us to see that girls’ statistical scores on mental health and body confidence measurements significantly improved after their participation in TGP, meaning that girls are less vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. In talking with participants and audience members, we learned that TGP participation increases girls’ self-confidence and ability to set boundaries in friendships, family relationships, and romantic relationships.     

Known unknowns: research on Irish museums since 2008

ABSTRACT

In 2015–2016 the first comprehensive survey of museums in Ireland in a decade – the Irish Museums Survey 2016 – was undertaken as a collaborative project between the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin, and the Irish Museums Association. Since the Republic’s economic collapse in 2008 and the recession, museums have weathered significant shifts in governance and board structures, and drastic cutbacks that have affected programmes, staffing, and provision across the island. Yet, until recently we have not had an accurate picture of the “state of play” for Irish museums, hampering efforts to prioritise actions for museum support organisations, and preventing individual institutions to develop their own plans of advancement benchmarked against national data. Consequently, there has been a significant knowledge gap concerning the current state of Irish museums, stretching beyond the anecdotal, and bridging the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This essay addresses the major findings of the Irish Museums Survey 2016, contextualised within the landscape of recent research on museums in the Republic and the North, and existing research infrastructures. In reviewing forms of museum provision and policy in both jurisdictions, it argues that the haphazard nature of data collection and the worrying findings of some aspects of the 2016 Survey require the enhancement of an all-island research culture, audit of national collections and institutions, and development of improved strategic planning for museums.     

Variables Impacting Intercultural Competence: A Systematic Literature Review

ABSTRACT

The importance of intercultural competence in today’s global economy is evident. Achieving intercultural competence, however, has no single formula. This study explored the variables impacting intercultural competence development. Through a systematic literature review, it identified 48 scholarly sources, 11 unique variables and two sub-variables impacting intercultural competence development. The impact of programme characteristics was found to be significant across the board, while the impact of demographic factors was harder to predict. The findings of this research inform scholars, educators and practitioners of the most effective ways to design intercultural experiences and help participants maximize their learning at home and abroad.     

Access,efficiency and excellence: Measuring non‐economic performance in the English subsidised cultural sector

The requirement to evaluate policies and measure performance in the publicly funded cultural sector in the UK has become increasingly pressing since the early 1980s. This chapter reviews the various attempts to do that. It demonstrates how economic and other quantifiable measures have tended to be emphasised whereas the qualitative aspects of cultural provision, which are more difficult to measure, have tended to be neglected.

The chapter presents the first overview of the subject. It covers developments within what is referred to as the ‘cultural framework’ ‐ the infrastructure associated with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which includes the ‘arts funding framework’. It also looks at developments affecting local authorities’ provision of cultural services.

The chapter draws on various published and unpublished policy documents, and accounts, as well as interviews with individuals involved in the development of performance management in the cultural sector. Their views are presented throughout the chapter to illustrate the points raised.

The chapter opens by examining the history of performance indicators in the sector, and maps the current requirements to measure performance. The second section considers the resistance to measuring the performance of arts organisations and museums. In doing so, it examines critical inheritance of former attempts to measure performance, and the issues raised in relation to current aspirations to do so. The third section presents attitudes to future developments, and is based on speculations by those currently involved in museums, galleries, the arts funding system and the introduction of Best Value as to the kinds of impact that the introduction of performance measurements might have. The fourth and final section draws together a series of observations about the introduction of non‐economic performance in the English subsidised cultural sector.     

‘America’ as desire and violence: Americanization in postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold War

Abstract

Reflecting on a personal experience of ‘pre‐professional’ university education and reluctant engagement with Cultural Studies as an academic project, this article examines the now ambiguous role of undergraduate education under neo‐liberal management regimes. Arguing that a ‘new class politics in knowledge’ is emerging with the transnational policy‐sharing and international student exchange schemes with which diverse governmental cultures are responding to globalization, Morris suggests that the undergraduate classroom is becoming a ‘frontier’ of struggle over the future. Teaching cultural studies to undergraduates in a liberal arts environment is one way in which the discipline's emphasis on local knowledge can be put to institutionally creative uses.