Cultural policy as development policy: evidence from the United States

Cultural policies and cultural projects in the United States have been reframed to emphasize their economic benefits to cities. New alliances between arts advocates and place promoters are apparent at all levels, but are most prominent locally. These new alliances are facilitated by the changing interests of local officials and business people, who have come to believe there is economic value in the arts and of arts administrators, for whom attracting broader public support has become imperative. In some cities, entirely new organizational structures have sprung up to plan and implement projects that serve cultural and economic development advocates simultaneously. Such new institutions are most prominent in more economically disadvantaged cities.     

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.     

City subcenter as a regional development policy: Impact on the property market

The aim of this study is to perform a locally specific investigation of a polycentric development policy through the lens of the property market. The capital city of China, Beijing, adopted a subcenter program for the purpose of developing a new economic growth pole in the suburbs through the redistribution of administrative and economic resources. Herein, we exploit spatial and temporal differencing in microproperty transaction data to address the issue of nonrandom selection of the site for developing the subcenter. The results show that in the first year after announcing the subcenter program, property prices in the subcenter rose by 10.5%, stabilizing at approximately 20% after 2 years of continuous increase. Moreover, property price growth decreases sharply with increased distance from the new administrative center in the subcenter, which will host tens of thousands of civil servants under the subcenter program. In response to the subcenter-induced demand shock, locations with elastically supplied housing have experienced greater population growth and weaker appreciation in property prices. Although strict purchase restrictions have helped stabilize the subcenter's property market to some extent, the fever has spread to adjacent markets. The specific geography of property market dynamics provides an important channel to evaluate the impact of the subcenter program and offers insight regarding the development of tactics to optimize subcenter outcomes.     

Cultural rights and their contribution to sustainable development: implications for cultural policy

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the meaning and implications of cultural rights for cultural policies concerned with sustainable development. Although references to both cultural rights and sustainable development have become widespread within cultural policy documents in recent decades, the actual conceptual and operational implications often remain vague, as an ambitious discourse that may conceal a poverty of resources and capacities. As a result, the ideal horizon suggested by cultural rights and sustainable development may not always be achieved in practice, nor are the mechanisms to achieve it always well known. In this respect, the article aims to dissect the actual requirements posed by cultural rights and sustainable development, including their different notions and areas of synergy and intersections, in order to shed light on relevant cultural policy approaches. To this end, a range of examples taken from a variety of contexts will also be examined as areas of expressed needs or areas of possible solutions.     

Culture,technology and policy in the informal sector: attention to endogenous development

243 blacksmiths in Sierra Leone were interviewed in 1984-85 in an effort to focus on both the activities and attitudes of traditional blacksmiths in the country's economy. Due to the fact of an shortage of foreign exchange with which to import and maintain equipment, agriculture using high-technology equipment accounts for less than 15% of total production. Consequently, blacksmiths are vital to the nations' survival, despite prevailing attitudes toward them. The interviews were conducted in 9 of the 12 districts in Sierra Leone. The blacksmith operates not simply in terms of producing and servicing goods; cultural values frame his position in the community. In all of West Africa, and particularly among Mende-related peoples, there historically exists a mystique surrounding a blacksmith. In some societies, blacksmiths were believed to be witches. The arguments that most likely could account for this would probably lie in the fact that the blacksmith made farm tools and weapons of war, means of survival in the community. Thus, his position was vital. Traditionally the importance of the smith's profession lies in the fact that some of the implements he fabricates and the materials he uses are believed to provide elements of social control or to have healing powers. An appreciation of the cultural significance of the blacksmith demonstrates the degree of attachment of the population to this profession as well as the context within which one could relate to possible technological changes in the trade. An attempt was made in the interview to gather some information about levels of production. The figures represent averages, and production capacity varied owing to a number of factors, including the degree of organization of the unit, the capacity of the head of the forge to keep his team busy when work was intensive, and the degree of energy and determination of an operator to get the greatest amount of work done in 1 day. The most obvious factor influencing production levels was the size of the units. Pricing of commodities and the blacksmith's services depended on a combination of factors, but, generally, in semi-urban areas, where more impersonal relationships tended to obtain, prices appeared relatively more fixed than in rural areas. All smiths interviewed complained about the increasing scarcity of scrap iron. As there is every reason to envisage a continued dependence on informal-sector production by blacksmiths, official attitudes need to take these trades more seriously.     

Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice

The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the "culture as structure"/"culture as practice" divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse.     

On Dittmer's Popular Culture,Geopolitics, and Identity as a classroom resource

In this intervention, four geographers, all of whom have used Jason Dittmer's book, Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity, in their classes, assess its status as a teaching resource. All have had considerable success using Dittmer's book, alongside other resources, to cultivate critical thinking and critical knowledge production in a wide range of classes.     

Deep commoning: public folklore and environmental policy on a resource frontier

Abstract

This article explores the concept and practice of the commons as a holistic, multi-sectoral, cross-disciplinary framework for critical heritage work on resource frontiers. Drawing from my research on forest commoning in the Appalachian coalfields, I argue that land-based systems of commoning vital to communities in the path of resource extraction merit more attention from heritage workers. Commons tend to disappear through their atomization into siloed objects of study and stewardship. This disappearance, partly a function of reductionist, dualistic thinking, also signals a persistent colonialist myth of emptiness. I argue that the embodied, participatory field methods of public folklorists are particularly well-suited to the study and accreditation of land-based commons as heritage. Building on the idea of ‘deep ecology’, the notion of ‘deep commoning’ espouses our implication in worlds we bring into dialogue through the practice of public folklore as critical heritage work.     

Toward a Cultural Landscape Atlas: Representing all the Landscape as Cultural

Many government and non‐statutory registers utilise point datasets to represent cultural heritage places. An effect of this approach is to emphasise that cultural heritage comprises a series of spatially discrete material remains or ‘sites’, suggesting discrete locations which are somehow disconnected from their broader historical and landscape contexts. We advocate an alternative in which spatial representation of heritage is set within a cultural landscape framework, acknowledging that all parts of the landscape have inter‐connected cultural histories, associations and meanings resulting from long‐term and ongoing human–environmental interactions. Results from a collaborative cultural heritage research project undertaken at Culgoa National Park in Australia demonstrate the advantage of this approach. The mapping products produced by the work comprise an interactive electronic DVD Atlas and hard copy maps. Both focus on meeting the management needs of field‐based park staff.     

Cultural policy archetypes: the bathwater and the baby

ABSTRACT

Cultural policy archetypes have been fundamental to comparative cultural policy study and continue to be influential in both everyday and scholarly characterizations of national cultural policy systems. This paper explores the proposition that cultural policy archetypes reflect what people believe to be true about culture – their cultural ideologies. Cultural ideologies are integral to the formation of cultural policy and, thus, must be considered in any theory that hopes to measure the extent to which and explain why cultural policies differ. Cultural ideologies embody ideas about why culture is important and how it should be governed. Those ideologies spotlight certain administrative mechanisms, overemphasizing their role in systems that actually are deeply administratively hybrid. This makes archetypes poor tools for analyzing the mechanisms of cultural policy; however, because archetypes tell us about cultural ideologies in straightforward and powerful ways, it is essential that they continue to be a part of comparative cultural policy study.     

Cultural rights and citizenship in cultural policy: Taiwan and China

From the 1990s, academia has paid increasing attention to cultural rights and cultural citizenship. This paper reviews existing literature on the construction of cultural rights and cultural citizenship and argues that cultural citizenship expands the concept of ‘citizenship’, promotes citizens’ consciousness, and confirms the content of ‘cultural rights’. The concept of cultural citizenship provides a new perspective from which to examine the challenges of cultural inequality, taste differences, symbolic struggle in cultural participation, and consumption. Based on western theories, this paper discusses the development of cultural citizenship and cultural rights in cultural policy in Taiwan and China, and it finds the tension between control and autonomy and between the government and the civil society in the practice of cultural citizenship. In Taiwan, most cultural policies are developed and implemented by the government, and those affected by them often do not have the necessary critical awareness to judge or examine them. In China, the protection of cultural rights provides a new type of control rather than autonomy from the Chinese Government. In both Taiwan and China, it is important to empower civil society to balance the governments’ control over the practice of cultural citizenship.     

Footprint or fingerprint: international cultural policy as identity policy

This article focuses on government policy aimed at the presentation of the nation abroad through cultural activities and its relation to national identity, external cultural policy. The methodological framework is offered by the discourse analysis of Wodak and the notion of identity of Laclau and Mouffe, treating policy as a discourse. A closer look is taken at the concept of cultural diplomacy and the closely related term nation branding. This article will show how the shift in paradigm also changes the role of ‘the other’ in the construction of national identity and how this influences the role of the arts in international cultural policy.     

Peaceful development: China's policy of reassurance

The rise of China has aroused much concern and anxiety around the world. This has complicated China's foreign policy objective of securing a peaceful international environment for domestic reforms and development. Accordingly, reassuring the world of the benign nature of China's rise has become a central feature of China's foreign policy. This paper describes and analyses China's efforts in this regard. First, it outlines the central features of such efforts which constitute a policy of reassurance. Then it explores the major factors shaping the policy. Finally it tries to assess the result of the policy and speculate about its future development. It is hoped that this will help gain a better understanding of China's foreign policy.     

Cultural policy in the United Kingdom: Collapsing rationales and the end of a tradition 1

The aim of this article is to critically assess the content and rationale of the French 2003 law on private patronage and foundations. More specifically, it investigates the extent to which this law can truly encourage companies to become more involved in arts support. Before reviewing and explaining the major aspects of the reform and the advantages it is meant to bring to corporate donors, a short historical account is offered to demonstrate that even though the involvement of the private sector in the support of the arts has been on the agenda of various Ministers of Culture over the last forty years, the development of adequate and effective measures to encourage such an involvement has been difficult and erratic and, above all, has been met with little success. The third part of the article questions the relevance of a law largely based on tax reductions to support the arts in France and wonders whose interests it will really serve.