Participation and provision in arts & culture – bridging the divide

ABSTRACT

Successive policies and efforts to increase participation in a range of arts and cultural activities have tended to focus on the profile and attitude of individuals and target groups in order justify public – and therefore achieve more equitable – funding. Rationales for such intervention generally reflect the policy and political regime operating in different eras, but widening participation, increasing access and making the subsidised arts more inclusive have been perennial concerns. On the other hand, culture has also been the subject of a supply-led approach to facility provision, whether local amenity-based (“Every Town Should Have One” – Lane, 1979. Arts centres – every town should have one. London: Paul Elek), civic centre or flagship, and this has also mirrored periodic growth in investment through various capital for the arts, municipal expansion, urban regeneration, European regional development and lottery programmes. Research into participation has consequently taken a macro, sociological, “class distinction” approach, including longitudinal national surveys such as Taking Part, Target Group Index, Active People and Time Use Surveys, whilst actual provision is dealt with at the micro, amenity level in terms of its impact and catchment. This article therefore considers how this situation has evolved and the implications for cultural policy, planning and research by critiquing successive surveys of arts attendance and participation and associated arts policy initiatives, including the importance of local facilities such as arts centres, cinemas and libraries. A focus on cultural mapping approaches to accessible cultural amenities reveals important evidence for bridging the divide between cultural participation and provision.     

Mapping cultural assets and evaluating significance: theory,methodology and practice

Over the last decade in the UK, there has been a notable shift in the popularity and use of cultural mapping as a methodology for policy making at a regional and local level. This follows increased demand for an informed framework for planning arts and cultural facilities from local and regional government and from within the cultural sector (Evans, 2008: p. 65). The article begins with an exploration of cultural mapping within cultural policy, which explores the context for the growth in this area of activity, and why this kind of activity appeals to policy makers and organisations. It then goes on to examine four cultural mapping exercises which have been undertaken in recent years in the UK. These studies have been chosen because although they all focus the mapping of cultural assets within a specific geographic area, they differ to one degree or another in purpose, context, definition, geographic scale and methodology. They illustrate the narrow range of approaches deployed in the cultural mapping field in the UK, and as such provide a useful means of critically reviewing their limits as well as highlighting the issues and challenges faced by cultural cartography in practice. The article concludes by considering the type of mapping research that is “allowed” within the discursive confines of consultancy based cultural policy research.     

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.     

Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid

In March 2013, after six years of consultation, an Australian Labor government launched the national cultural policy document, Creative Australia. In July 2013, a Coalition government was elected, Senator George Brandis became Minister for the Arts, and the policy was dumped. With it went cross-party consensus about funding rationales and measurement strategies, with disastrous consequences for the cultural sector. This cautionary tale of gaffes, pay-back and abrupt changes of direction, highlights the fragility of policy memory that condemns artists and arts managers to a never-ending reinvention of the evidentiary wheel. Our paper examines the problem of collective understanding (“world”) in cultural policy-making in Australia, exacerbated not only by the short-term electoral cycles which undermine long-term cultural outcome timescales, but by a fixation on what Hannah Arendt calls “the peculiar and ingenious replacement of common sense with strict logicality”. Evidence of value is only meaningful when it occurs in a policy memory that can fully avow it and respond in appropriate ways. Measurement methods are over-determined by epistemology and by experience. We argue that the balance between these determinants of effective cultural policy-making has been lost. An emphasis on numerical data – especially economic data – has forced arguments for culture into a decontextualised register of quantitative proof. Recent events in Australia suggest that different, more direct ways of engaging with cultural policy-making are required for the problem of collective understanding to be successfully assayed.     

A picture of the contemporary combined arts festival landscape

The last 10–15 years has seen the rapid growth of festivals in Britain and overseas. This article examines the current situation of combined arts festivals in the UK in an effort to understand what the British festival environment looks like in the early years of the new millennium. A number of questions present themselves regarding the history and development of the current festival structure, the number of festivals, their size, distribution, audiences, geographical locations, programming content, duration, seasonality, influences, objectives, future plans and so forth. Combined arts festivals are defined as those containing more than one genre of arts, e.g., Edinburgh International Festival. Research methods include a survey questionnaire sent to 117 UK combined arts festivals (56 per cent response rate) to discern audience demographics, programming history, funding and future plans. In-depth interviews were also conducted with festival organizers. Based on survey data, it is argued that a homogeneous combined arts festival “type” is developing and replicating across the country. This argument is supported by the similarity in programming choices and festival format of a majority of the festivals surveyed. One of the main reasons for the increasing formulaic approach to festival programming and design is the increasing competition for funding as public and private funding sources expect combined arts festivals to achieve socio-economic targets and become more sustainable from one year to the next. This can be seen to be contributing to the increasing professionalism of combined arts festival organization, which has resulted in the majority of combined arts festival directors favouring “safe” content options that emulate the successes of several large, long-established festivals. Such an approach has had detrimental effects on the creativity of the arts festival landscape on the whole and may also be altering the symbolic meanings of festivals for communities and places.     

European funding of culture: Promoting common culture or regional growth?

Since the late 1970s, European funding of the arts has been a feature of the mixed‐funding regime and support of a range of community arts, training, heritage and regeneration programmes in Member States. In the late 1980s, following widened membership and more direct policy engagement by the European Commission, regional development began to support increasing levels of investment in culture, notably heritage, cultural tourism and city regeneration through arts venues. Meanwhile the Commission's own culture programmes have focused on Cities of Culture, language and heritage projects.

However, the funding of culture through the various Structural Funds (although not categorised as such at either European, national and regional levels) has dwarfed that of the Culture Unit. No cultural policy or plan for this significant amount of investment in cultural facilities has been evident, and such programmes have largely bypassed national arts policy, being directed through regional and local authority economic development, tourism and regeneration departments.

Promotion of European ‘Common Culture’ was expounded in the Maastricht Treaty and, it is argued, these objectives have driven increased city‐regional autonomy. Notwithstanding difficulties in categorising grant data in cultural terms, this chapter measures the impact and distribution of such regional funding across beneficiary countries and within the eligible regions. A UK survey provides a regional breakdown of projects receiving support in the 1990s and European funding used as part of partnership funding (lottery, regeneration programmes). The chapter concludes that, while the funding of these cultural projects has been under‐estimated and ‘hidden’, its concentration in city arts and heritage venues raises questions for both European and national cultural policy: whether cultural investment has been of the right type, in the right place; or whether European common culture aspirations have ignored local and more culturally diverse opportunities. In short, whether form has followed funding.     

Cultural plan implementation and outcomes in Ontario,Canada

Since 2005 there has been a surge of cultural planning initiatives in Canada, especially in the Province of Ontario. However, very little research has been conducted in the more established cultural planning contexts of Australia, Great Britain and the United States let alone in Canada to support the assertions that underlie much of the movement's continued success. In particular, there has been an absence of research on the actual outcomes of the cultural planning strategy. This article examines whether the wide range of strategic goals presented in most cultural plans are being met. The method for assessing the effectiveness of cultural plans involved analyzing which strategic objectives were implemented as recorded in progress reports and as reported on by cultural planners. The research findings show that cultural plans are being effectively implemented and the majority of strategic goals contained within most cultural plans are being achieved. In addition, it is observed that the strategic objectives being implemented are not limited to traditional arts sector concerns.     

Evaluating legacies: Research,evidence and the regional impact of the Cultural Olympiad

From the bidding stage onwards, the London 2012 Olympics has been framed by an explicitly instrumental agenda, with objectives including increasing participation in sport in the UK and economic and physical regeneration in host sites, through investment in the Olympic Park and its surrounding infrastructure. The bid also signalled the ambition that London 2012 should be the first Olympics to deliver legacy through a nation-wide cultural programme in the build up to and alongside the Games [Kennell, J. & MacLeod, N. (2008, November 6–8). A memetic framework for the conceptualisation and evaluation of the Cultural Olympiad of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Paper presented at the 2nd Bi-annual International Tourism Studies Association conference in Shanghai, China. Retrieved from http://gala.gre.ac.uk/3951/], deliberately putting in place infrastructure for each English region and nation, shortly after the bid's success was announced. The ensuing national Cultural Olympiad, part funded by Legacy Trust UK, was evaluated through a series of research exercises which aimed to document the legacy and impact of the cultural programme. Through the case study of a regional programme in the North West of England, “We Play”, this article considers how evaluation research has been used locally to develop policy stories and legacy narratives which interpret and interact with the changing landscape of arts funding and cultural policy in the UK.     

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.     

The measure of all things: on the use of time as a value indicator in arts impact assessment

Like money, time is a scarce resource. People used to economizing with one are likely to economize with the other. This proposition has serious implications for cultural economics (as for economics generally); three in particular are explored here. (1) Because cultural values are learned, and learning takes time, from the sorts of learning experience to which people have committed time in the past much can be inferred about their probable cultural consumption behaviour in future and about their attitudes to art. (2) The arts deliver socio-economic impact by encouraging new forms of belief – altering people's values essentially. Beliefs then influence action. Impact assessors must confront the question of value generation head on. (3) Use of time indicators will enable assessors to capture and quantify impacts which barely register on the usual money-economic scale, generating new categories of evidence directly if unconventionally relevant to cultural policy debate. The discussion is situated in historical context, drawing attention to a rich tradition of time-reflexive thinking within professional economics. The assumption underlying much of modern, purposely “neoclassical” cultural economics – that cultural value can best be measured in terms of willingness to pay or willingness to be paid money – is not strictly necessary either in economic theory or in economic practice, and for impact assessment purposes it is not always helpful. Sections following the historical introduction take careful account of recent developments in cultural economics, and to facilitate further reading frequently refer to the summative handbooks edited by Ruth Towse (2003) and Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby (2006).     

National cultural indicators in New Zealand

New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to report national cultural indicators – specifically choosing to use a conceptually based framework which was broadly underpinned by theories of culture, industry and political economy. One of the essential elements of this work was the incorporation of a Māori perspective in recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi and the importance of the indigenous Māori culture. Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage has primary central government responsibility for cultural policy and advice and the reporting of national cultural indicators. The term “culture” in this context broadly refers to Māori culture and the cultures of all New Zealanders, and to endeavours relating to arts, heritage, media, and sport and recreation. The Ministry is currently scoping a programme of research that aims to refine the indicators; relate indicators more clearly to the cultural policy role of government (and in turn their related cultural agencies); and more clearly articulate the relationship that cultural sector indicators have with those of other sectors. Cultural sector consultation to identify and clarify perspectives and reconfirm a common terminology (if not understanding) will be an essential and important part of this work. Better contextualising the national indicators will make them more meaningful and useful for reinforcing the importance and value of the cultural sector; monitoring the “health” and performance of the cultural sector over time; providing useful quality information; measuring the effectiveness of policy interventions and connecting across the cultural sector and to other sectors. This paper outlines the New Zealand context and the development and reporting of national indicators; reflects on the usefulness of reporting national indicators to date; and describes and discusses the intended direction of further work.     

“Supporting excellence in the arts: from measurement to judgement”

The DCMS paper “Supporting excellence in the arts”, also known as the McMaster Review, raised more questions than it answered in terms of how UK cultural policy is likely to develop in the future. Although many of its intentions are laudable, the report fails to resolve the inherent problems associated with defining, measuring and judging cultural “excellence”, even though this forms the core of McMaster's argument about how policy should develop. This may have significant implications for cultural institutions in the future.

In addition, many of the report's recommendations may either be contradictory or impractical in the current policy climate – such as the desire for institutions to take more risks whilst simultaneously increasing visitor numbers and meeting other targets. As such, without a wider change in the Government's approach and a re-acknowledgement of culture's intrinsic value, “excellence” may just become the latest buzzword for practitioners, rather than the key principle upon which future decisions will be based.     

Minding the gap: Elucidating the disconnect between arts participation metrics and arts engagement within immigrant communities

A growing gap between national metrics of arts participation and the many, evolving ways in which people participate in artistic and aesthetic activities limits the degree to which such data can usefully inform policy decisions. The National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) is the primary source of arts participation data in the USA, but this instrument inadequately evaluates how members of minority and immigrant communities participate in the arts. As the USA nears a historic demographic shift to being a majority–minority nation – non-Hispanic White individuals will no longer be a demographic majority by about 2041 – obtaining more accurate measures of artistic activities that are meaningful to a more diverse population will be of increasing importance for public policy-making. To better understand the extent to which the SPPA's questions capture the range of artistic activities engaged in by members of immigrant communities, we cognitively tested a subset of the survey's questions with Chinese immigrants to the USA as a pilot case. We found that interviewees participate in a range of culturally specific and non-culturally specific arts activities that they did not report in response to the survey's questions. In this article, we draw upon these interviews to discuss the reasons underpinning the gap and suggest implications for updating research tools and future research. A better understanding of the gap between measured and actual “arts participation” will lead to improved measures and information to support artistic expression and arts more reflective of contemporary society.     

From Bohemia to Britart – art students over 50 years

In the mid-1980s, Frith and Horne (1987) were describing the experience of British arts schools as, “an anachronism, with students desperately clinging on to attitudes to work and play, which had otherwise vanished” (p. 12). Among these attitudes were the importance of freedom and experimentation in one's work, the status of the artist as an outsider, and the superiority of art over other forms of activity, such as design. Despite huge social changes and contemporary concerns about the “instrumentalization” of arts policy and education (Singerman, 1999; Wilson, 2007), the article argues that the Romantic ideology of the artist is remarkably persistent, and continues to shape graduates' attitudes to their working lives. This in turn feeds into contemporary debates about the nature of cultural labour (Ross, 2003) and the role of the “artistic critique” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005), and, crucially, provides an empirically based view of these debates from the perspective of cultural workers themselves.     

Review of Scottish Arts Council's Quality Framework – guidelines for arts organisations (2nd ed.), 2009

The Scottish Arts Council's “Quality Framework” was launched in 2007 as a continuous improvement toolkit. It provides a flexible framework for arts organizations to evaluate the impact of funding decisions. Developing tools that allow organizations to demonstrate their impact provides robust information to further build the evidence base for the cultural sector. The second edition (2009) has been revised after evaluation and consultation with arts organizations and Scottish Arts Council staff. Taking this approach and gathering further evidence is an important step in the lead up to Creative Scotland (which is the newly established creative arts funding body within Scotland). Continuous improvement tools not only gather evidence but can improve work practices. The Quality Framework should be viewed in the context of the National Performance Framework, as gathering outcome evidence will also assist in the production of Local Authority Single Outcome Agreements. This review also looks at the Unified Quality Improvement Framework, an over-arching tool that will assist local authorities and other service providers to evaluate the quality of their culture and sport provision. Evidencing sector information such as arts activity will be an important part of this process. The Quality Framework is a tool to gather outcome-based evidence that will show how culture can contribute to a variety of policy objectives.     

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.     

The development of cultural indicators for Australia – policy-making in a federal system of government

The publication in 2010 of Vital signs: Cultural indicators for Australia was the culmination of a complex national policy development process, which exemplifies some of the challenges of making cultural policy in a federal system of government. This paper examines the policy imperatives which gave rise to the original proposal to develop a set of national indicators, the context which led to support for the proposal, the process of policy development which ensued, and some of the key issues which emerged, and which are relevant for future work. The paper was written from the perspective of a bureaucrat closely involved in the project: the author was, between 2006 and 2011, head of the Queensland state government arts agency, and chair of the Statistics Working Group, the multi-agency body which managed the cultural indicators project on behalf of the participating governments.     

Developing the evidence base for UK film strategy: the research process at the UK Film Council

The UK Film Council established a Research and Statistics Unit in order to gather data relating to film to inform the development of UK Film Council strategy and to provide an information service to the industry, government, the arts and cultural sector and the wider research community. The Research and Statistics Unit draws data from both official and unofficial sources and commissions its own special-purpose studies to gather information relevant to the strategic objectives of the Council. Key tasks are the measurement of the size of the market for film and the various elements of the film value chain, the performance of films supported by the UK Film Council and the performance of UK films in general. Special-purpose research projects currently include a detailed survey of the film production workforce, a study of the economic impact of the UK screen industries and studies of the social impact of local cinemas and the experience of Black- and Minority-led film production companies. A range of industry and official partners are collaborating in these studies. The Research and Statistics Unit also provides statistical and policy analysis relating to the wider policy environment of UK film, including issues such as the future of film tax incentives. This analysis has been developed within the HM Treasury ‘Green Book’ framework with particular reference to understanding market failure in relation to film. Central to the market failure argument is the cultural value of film in both its qualitative and its quantitative aspects. UK Film Council research is placed in the context of the literature on hedonic pricing and contingent valuation. The industrial challenges of increasing cultural value are discussed. Finally, consideration is given to the potential of film to contribute directly to ‘public value’.     

Capturing the Cultural Olympiad in Scotland: the case for multi-criteria analysis

This article examines the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad through the lens of a devolved Scotland, exploring how the Scottish cultural programmes and projects are being evaluated, and what this approach might offer for the wider UK and international context. Structurally, the article begins with a discussion of the relationship between sporting mega-events and culture, focusing specifically (although not exclusively) on the sport and cultural nexus around the Olympic Games. The discussion then moves to consider conceptual, policy and practice debates around cultural value, examining the extent to which existing research tools and techniques satisfactorily capture the contribution of culture to major events, public and social policy. Methodologically, the article draws on elite interviews with strategic stakeholders directly involved in the design, delivery and evaluation of Scotland's London 2012 Cultural Programme. The authors conclude that, when taken alongside other cultural evaluations conducted nationally and internationally, there is a need to develop a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) that can more effectively capture cultural value around major sporting events in the UK. This study has demonstrated a level of dissatisfaction within the Scottish cultural community about the limitations of existing mechanisms for measuring the value of culture within the mega-event platform. A robust, but nuanced, impact assessment is required because, unlike the UK as a whole, Scotland has a unique opportunity to undertake a longitudinal study assessing the conditions for legacy put in place as a result of the London 2012 Olympic Games for the subsequent 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. However, further research is required into the efficacy of the MCA for assessing cultural value generally and within the framework of major sports events, in particular.     

Under construction: Towards a framework for cultural value

This article explores, in the context of prevailing discourses around the value of the arts and culture, the reasons why the UK's Arts & Humanities Research Council launched a research project on cultural value and sets out the character of that project. It is concerned with arts and cultural engagement across the commercial, subsidised, amateur, and participatory sectors; embraces the full range of arts and cultural forms; and seeks to reach beyond dichotomies such as intrinsic and instrumental, high and low art, quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and public and private experiences. The article explains the project's thinking around the components of cultural value and the methodologies for evidencing them, and highlights some of the key research being funded.