From Coombs to Crean: popular music and cultural policy in Australia

The many bodies administering Australian arts activity were incorporated within the Australia Council, established in 1973 by the Whitlam Labor Government to oversee Commonwealth arts policy under the direction of H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs. This article takes the establishment of the Australia Council as a starting point in tracing changing attitudes towards the practices and funding of popular music in Australia and accompanying policy discourses. This includes consideration of how funding models reinforce understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, the ‘cultural’/‘creative’ industries debates, and their effects upon local popular music policy. This article discusses the history of local music content debates as a central instrument of popular music policy and examines the implications for cultural nationalism in light of a recent series of media and cultural reports into industries and funding bodies. In documenting a broad shift from cultural to industrial policy narratives, the article examines a central question: What does the ‘national’ now mean in contemporary music and the rapid evolution of digital media technologies?     

A cultural justice approach to popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities

ABSTRACT

Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the ‘creative city’ phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urban renewal. This article considers the potential role that popular music heritage might play in revitalising cities grappling with industrial decline. Specifically, we outline how a ‘cultural justice approach’ can be used within critical heritage studies to assess the benefits and drawbacks of such heritage initiatives. Reflecting on examples from three deindustrialising cities – Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK – we analyse how popular music heritage can produce cultural justice outcomes in three key ways: practices of collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.     

Contemporary ‘Folk’ Dynamics: Shifting Visions and Meanings in the Goalpariya Folk Music of Assam

Abstract

Goalpariya music is a genre of folk music sung primarily by women. Common among the rural labouring classes, the songs deal with women’s desires, emotions, sensuality, and longings. Since the 1950s, major transformations have emerged within the performative space of the folk tradition, especially with the coming of Pratima Barua Pandey into this field. From an original mundane setting, Goalpariya music has now moved to an international musical performance context. This article explores this transition of the music from the ‘common folk’ to a ‘respectable’ platform. The article analyses how folk traditions may undergo a range of shifts to adapt to various social, economic, and cultural forces. Paradoxically, these transformations also lead to the emergence of a politics of authenticity, leading to a questioning of the concepts of tradition, authenticity, and cultural purity. The findings of this study are the outcome of fieldwork conducted in Gauripur and Guwahati in Assam, India.     

Learning policy—the contextual curtain and conceptual barriers

Many European states are now giving attention to strategic planning as a means of coordinating and democratizing local government. The UK government is not alone in seeing some form of ‘community planning’ as a means of promoting closer sectoral integration in policy‐making and service delivery while also encouraging public participation. This suggests scope for comparative research to inform lesson drawing, especially from Norway, which has been rolling out kommuneplan at the municipality level since 1985. Cross‐national lesson‐drawing is hazardous, however, given the different legal, political and cultural traditions which make policies ‘work’ in particular local settings. In this article these difficulties are acknowledged and ethnographic research is used to explore further problems in lesson‐drawing, especially the very different ways in which concepts of participation and integration are given meaning in particular national contexts. Through comparative ethnographies of community planning processes in Asker Municipality, Norway, and South Lanarkshire Council, Scotland, remarkable similarities are revealed in the language and objectives of the planning documents in each setting, but show that this belies important differences in the relations between administrative and political domains, in the governing role of plan statements, and in the underlying theories of democracy.     

Making creative industries policy in the real world: differing configurations of the culture-market-state nexus in the UK and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.     

Authenticity and heritage conservation: seeking common complexities beyond the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ dichotomy

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the claimed gulf between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ concepts and approaches to heritage conservation through an analysis of the common complexities surrounding authenticity. The past few decades have witnessed an important critique of ‘Eurocentric’ notions of heritage conservation, drawing on ‘non-Western’, particularly Asian, contexts. Authenticity has been a core principle and defining element in this development. Endorsed by a series of charters and documents, a relativistic approach emphasising the cultural specificity of authenticity has been introduced alongside the European-originated materialist approach in international policy and conservation philosophy. However, the promotion of Asian difference has also contributed to an increasingly entrenched and unproductive dichotomy between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ approaches to heritage. This article reveals common complexities surrounding authenticity in two countries crosscutting this dualism – China and Scotland. Drawing on a number of ethnographic projects, our analysis identifies themes that characterise the experience of authenticity across different cultural contexts. It contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the evolving relationships between heritage conservation and contemporary societies with important implications for global heritage discourses and collaborative ventures crosscutting ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ contexts.     

Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration,digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.     

Managing the gendered dynamics of parenting during the UK New Labour government years

This article considers what a ‘structure of feeling’ approach can reveal about the gendered dynamics of parenting during the ‘New Labour’ years of the UK government. It explores some of the ways in which contestations about gender roles were evident in policy and in popular cultural discourses and demonstrates how these discourses both contained their own internal tensions and contradicted each other. It then reflects on the strategies that parents engaged in need to make sense of and manage these contestations and makes clear some of the pressures that had come to bear through policy and popular culture on parents' personal lives.     

Having an impact? Academics,the music industries and the problem of knowledge

This article reflects upon recent interest in knowledge transfer from higher education to the creative industries, using the UK music industries as a case study. It suggests that traditional academic values of impartiality and concern with research methodology can come in to conflict with instrumentalist agendas that see research as valuable only insofar as it fits with pre‐existing worldviews and policy ends. In this setting, knowledge resistance is often more significant than knowledge transfer and may be expected to frustrate any attempts to have an ‘impact’.     

The new patron state in South Korea: cultural policy,democracy and the market economy

ABSTRACT

This article explores conceptual frameworks for understanding Korea’s contemporary cultural policy by looking into the historical transformation of the culture-state-market relations in the country. It argues that Korea has become ‘a new kind of patron state’, which emulates the existing patron states in the West firmly within the statist framework and ambitiously renders government-led growth of cultural industries (and the Korean Wave) as a new responsibility of the state. The formation of Korea’s new patron state has been driven by a ‘parallel movement’ consisting of democracy and the market economy, which has defined the political and socio-economic trajectory of Korean society itself since the 1990s. Democracy has been articulated in cultural policy as cultural freedom, cultural enjoyment and the arm’s length principle; meanwhile, the market economy of culture has been facilitated by a ‘dynamic push’ of the state. After discussing the parallel movement, the article points out the tension, ambiguity and contradiction entailed in cultural policy of the new patron state.     

The Return to Social Policy and the Persistent Neglect of Unpaid Care

The failure of orthodox economic policies to generate growth and eradicate poverty has led to renewed interest in social policies. The return to ‘the social’ has seen contending conceptualizations of social policy, premised on different values, priorities and understandings of state responsibility, vying for influence. This article argues that the currently dominant agenda of social sector restructuring is likely to entrench gender inequalities in access to social services and income supports because of its failure to recognize the structures that underpin those inequalities, which are pervasive across labour markets and the unpaid care economy. Despite the ‘pro‐poor’ and occasionally ‘pro‐women’ rhetoric, the design of social policies remains largely blind to these gender structures. Addressing them would require a major rethinking of dominant approaches, placing redistribution more firmly at the heart of policy design, valuing and supporting unpaid care, and providing incentives for it to be shared more equally between women and men, and between families/households and society more broadly.     

‘Homes’ and being ‘at home’ in New Zealand: women's place-making in internationalised higher education

Research on students' experiences in internationalised higher education largely assumes students' autonomy and privileges their public selves. New Zealand research is no exception. Little attention has been paid to students' lives beyond classroom contexts; how national policy and institutional practices shape students' everyday experiences and ‘home’ lives similarly and differently. In addition, gender is afforded scant attention or considered only as a secondary concern, and people whose partners or family members are international students are invisible. This article endeavours to address the relative inattention to gender in international education research and the invisibility of women whose partners are international students. It draws on data from interviews with 17 women involved in a broader doctoral research project during 2005 and 2006. The women were either migrant or international students or had partners enrolled as international students. The article uses ‘home’ as a lens for examining women's situated and transnational place-making and factors that promoted or precluded a sense of belonging in New Zealand. It draws connections between women's accounts of ‘home’ and feeling ‘at home’, and broader politics, policies and institutional practices in New Zealand higher education.     

Masculine Old Women or Feminine Old Men? Rethinking Gender and the Ageing Body in Early Modern English Medicine

This article challenges the almost universal historiographical claim that women's bodies were thought to become increasingly masculine as they aged in early modern English medicine, especially after menopause. It is not surprising that this ‘masculinisation hypothesis’ has endured with very little critical appraisal, as there have been few in-depth studies into medical conceptions of ageing womanhood. Drawing on c.140 English vernacular medical and popular health texts published between 1570 and 1730, this article interrogates and refutes key claims for the corporeal ‘manliness’ of old women. Instead, it argues that while medicine undoubtedly depicted old women and men as growing closer in bodily constitution as they aged, this generic ageing constitution had more ‘feminine’ corporeal attributes than ‘masculine’. Exploring references to ‘effeminated’ old men within medical books, it then questions the impact of these medical gender associations within wider cultural contexts.     

Whose cultural value? Representation,power and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The debate around ‘cultural value’ has become increasingly central to policy debates on arts and creative industries policy over the past ten years and has mostly focused on the articulation and measurement of ‘economic value’, at the expense of other forms of value—cultural, social, aesthetic. This paper’s goal is to counter this prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts. We know that different social groups enjoy different access to the power to bestow value and legitimise aesthetic and cultural practices; yet, questions of power, of symbolic violence and misrecognition rarely have any prominence in cultural policy discourse. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to creative industry scholarship by tackling this neglected question head on: it calls for a commitment to addressing cultural policy’s blind spot over power and misrecognition, and for what McGuigan (2006: 138) refers to as ‘critique in the public interest’. To achieve this, the article discusses findings of an AHRC-funded project that considered questions of cultural value, power, media representation and misrecognition in relation to a participatory arts project involving the Gypsy and Traveller community in Lincolnshire, England.     

Cultural policy as mythical narrative

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue that policy assumptions are shaped by mythical narratives carrying underlying beliefs and values. Drawing on narrative studies, organisational theory and Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory, we examine how sense-making narratives create consensus, how they imply causation and individual agency, and finally how narratives fragment to reveal alternatives to hegemonic ‘common sense’ assumptions. Applying this framework to cultural policy we examine the place of mythic, sense-making narratives in the historical development of foundational national cultural policies in the UK and Mexico – respectively, narratives of ‘the civilising mission’ and ‘social transformation’. We then consider narrative emplotment and individualisation underpinning assumptions about individual creativity in the UK creative industries policy. Finally, we address the postmodern turn in narrative studies, showing how fragmented, polysemous narratives fracture cultural policy into ‘personalised truths’ and give voice to other, counter-hegemonic perspectives. We conclude by proposing an agenda for narrative research in cultural policy.     

Epitomising the Modern Spanish Nation through Popular Music: Coplas from La Caramba to Concha Piquer, 1750–1990

Music is an important language of the emotions and can often arouse strong passions in its performance and representation, both from the individual's perspective of personal identity and for the individual's sense of identity and of belonging to a given community. Likewise, music can serve to whip up and reinforce nationalism and national chauvinism against the ‘other’ as well as serving as a badge of identity. In this article I explore a musical form, a song that has been defined as ‘Spanish’ and as the ‘national’ song: la copla. Copla is rooted in the past and first appeared as both a poetic and a theatrical form, but always accompanied by music. It was, however, during the eighteenth century, when nationalism made its appearance as a ‘concern’ in the Spanish political‐cultural arena, when coplas would be used as a mark of Spanish identity. Copla is a women's song. Although it has been interpreted by men, some of them internationally renowned like Miguel de Molina, the most famous performers have been and still are women. That is why perhaps a recurrent theme of coplas is unrequited love, whereby love and passion play an important role, either with regard to the individual or the community from which the individual hails. But there are also other themes such as the longing stimulated by alien rule, which is reflected by cultural opposition and resistance to discourses of power, not only in terms of open opposition, but in a more subtle form of resistance, particularly in gender terms. I claim that it is precisely this resistance to fixed discourses of gender that have made coplas excellent negotiators with the different musical, social and political contexts and in this way have made them an icon of the invented tradition that is fundamental in the creation of a nation.     

Trade,culture and the European Union cultural exception

ABSTRACT

The article examines how the European Union has addressed the ‘trade and culture debate’ in its international trade agreements. From a cultural exception approach based on an attempt to detach culture from trade provisions, the European Union economic agreements seem to evolve to a broader and more holistic position aiming to promote cultural exchanges through cooperation, while still safeguarding policy space in cultural matters through its traditional cultural exception. The article provides an overview of the European positions to defend the specificity of the audio-visual services sector at the multilateral (World Trade Organization Agreements), regional and bilateral levels. It also examines how the implementation of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions has led the European Union to negotiate cultural cooperation provisions in parallel to some of its recent bilateral and regional trade agreements and the way this Convention may impact the understanding of the ‘trade and culture debate’.     

Cultural democracy: an ecological and capabilities approach

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been sustained critique of the conceptual and normative foundations of UK cultural policy – the paternalism of ‘excellence and access’ and the neoliberal logic of ‘creative industries’. Whilst these critiques are well established, there is little work offering alternative foundations. This paper makes a contribution to this task. It does so in three ways. Firstly, by identifying ‘cultural democracy’ as a key discourse offering a counter-formulation of what the aims of cultural policy could and should be, and analysing uses of this term, it highlights the need to more effectively conceptualize cultural opportunity. Secondly, drawing on research with one UK-based initiative, Get Creative, the paper identifies a particularly consequential aspect of cultural opportunity: its ecological nature. Thirdly, it shows that the capabilities approach to human development provides ideas with the potential to help build new conceptual and normative foundations for cultural policy. Proposing a distinctive account of cultural democracy characterized by systemic support for cultural capabilities, the paper concludes by indicating the implications this may have for research, policy and practice.     

Living with Hollywood: British film policy and the definition of ‘nationality’

Focusing upon how a ‘national’ film has been historically defined in Britain, this article traces the history of legal definitions of a ‘British’ film and identifies some of the issues around nationality that these have raised. The article begins with a discussion of the introduction of quotas for ‘British’ films in the 1920s and the adoption of the Eady levy as a means of providing production finance to ‘British’ films in the post-war period. It then goes on to examine the introduction, in response to EU regulations governing the film industry, of a ‘Cultural Test’ for ‘British film’ in 2007 and to consider the way in which eligibility for tax reliefs has depended upon a film qualifying as ‘British’. In assessing whether the Cultural Test may be regarded as constituting a ‘break’ in British film policy in terms of a shift from economic to cultural objectives, the article not only indicates the manner in which cultural and economic objectives have been brought into alignment but also identifies how the definition of the ‘national’ for the purposes of tax relief has been designed to encourage ‘transnational’ Hollywood production within the UK. In doing so, the article also indicates how ‘national’ discourses and practices have continued to inform and structure the economic and cultural dynamics of contemporary ‘British’ cinema as well as engaging with, rather than necessarily standing in opposition to, ‘transnational’ and globalising trends.     

Interrogating the uses of culture in the politics of diversity: a case from South Korea

This article seeks to critically examine the ascendancy of culture in the arena of politics by analysing emergent multicultural discourses and policy development in South Korea as an illuminating case study. In exploring various discursive modalities of culture in the politics of diversity, it investigates how culture is identified as a source of social problems and concurrently employed as their solution. Combining discourse analytic and in-depth interviewing techniques, the article focuses on analysing how female marriage migrants and their children are constructed as cultural other, and how the language of culture is deployed to divert attention from issues of power and structural inequalities. In particular, it examines the discourse of ‘cultural deficiency’ and ‘cultural competence’ used in relation to migrants, and assesses the proposed conceptual shift in cultural policy development from multiculture to cultural diversity.