The governance of national cultural organisations: comparative study of performance contracts with the main cultural organisations in England,France and Catalonia (Spain)

In some European countries, performance contracts have become an instrument for the governance and control of major cultural organisations by the public administration. The negotiation and signing of a performance contract are mainly aimed at developing the goals of cultural policies by means of large organisations in order to achieve the traditional objectives of cultural democratisation and other instrumental objectives (economic development, urban regeneration or social inclusion). Nevertheless, the development level of performance contracts varies when we compare England, France and Catalonia (Spain). Each particular level of development is conditioned by the overall administrative and institutional context and the development level of results-based management and an accountability culture. The level of public funding and the degree of autonomy of management within each organisation can also explain why in some cases governance has been contractualised whereas in other cases either progress is more rhetorical than real.     

Doing democracy and governance in the fast lane? Towards a ‘politics of time’ in an accelerated polity

This article examines the relationship between time, governance and political participation through a critical engagement with the ‘acceleration thesis’. Whilst the acceleration thesis argues that the ‘shrinking of the present’ is a condition of contemporary governance, others have viewed it as dysfunctional to the democratic process and effective policymaking. By drawing on a wide range of literature and through the use of illustrative examples, this article argues that slow and fast politics have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the practice of governance and democratic participation. In turn, questions are raised about how public organisations and others might manage temporality and change in an ‘accelerated polity’. The article concludes by calling for further research into the ‘politics of time’ and its effects on public policymaking and political participation.     

Complexity,strategy and the national interest

British strategy‐making has been subject to a sustained critique in recent years, from parliamentarians, retired members of the armed forces and scholars of strategic studies. This article examines the nature of this critique and the evolving character of strategic practice in Britain. It argues that the criticisms of British strategymaking are often misplaced, for two main reasons. First, many base their critique on a reductionist notion of unitary ‘national interest’ that fails to capture systemic patterns of complexity and contestation in the wider security environment and in Britain. Second, they underestimate or ignore the extent to which the UK strategic community is itself innovating in response to these themes, particularly since the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. This is not to argue that considerable challenges do not remain for strategy‐making in Britain. Most notably, these include: how to translate strategic innovation in departments and elsewhere into a coherent national strategic agenda; how to do this while maintaining institutional coordination and a shared sense of strategic purpose across government (and beyond); how to sustain and consolidate institutional expertise and experience in a rapidly changing civil service and at a time of continuing public austerity; and how to articulate and legitimate security policy decisions among a general public that is both disengaged from elite strategic discourse and sceptical of the efficacy of military force. Even so, the article concludes by arguing that it is possible to see the outline of an emergent and distinctive theory of action in contemporary British strategic practice, characterized by principles of adaptivity, anticipation, self‐organisation and nascent cross‐governmentalism.     

Recalibrating intercultural governance in Australian Indigenous organisations: the case of Aboriginal community controlled health

Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHSs) have a strong track record of delivering comprehensive primary health care in Australia, but the sector also suffers from governance challenges. This article argues that a combination of settler-state dominance of governance arrangements and inadequate conceptualisation of governance in the sector have led to the risk of ‘controlled communities’ – either quasi-government control of organisations or the control of individual ACCHSs by a small cohort of members. In response, we deploy a political rather than technical approach to governance to consider the contested and intercultural nature of ACCHSs governance alongside recent governance initiatives in Southeast Queensland that signal the value of disaggregating and delineating different forms of governance in the sector. Key conceptual steps and a matrix for recalibrating intercultural governance are presented to support further research, to clarify lines of jurisdiction, and inform governance reform in and around ACCHSs.     

John Maynard Keynes,the Bloomsbury group and the origins of the arts council movement

The article examines the origins of the arts council movement in the ideas of the Bloomsbury Group and John Maynard Keynes. The Bloomsbury Groups' sense of experimentation and flexibility, their willingness to take action to create new institutions, and their distrust of bureaucracy, influenced Keynes's development of a new model for state patronage of the arts in 1946. He took an organization established during the Second World War to employ artists and organize morale‐boosting tours of the performing and visual arts, and oversaw its development into the Arts Council of Great Britain, the first such arts council. His model – making grants of public funds through semi‐autonomous government bodies to private individuals and privately operated arts institutions – became a standard form of public funding for the arts by the end of the twentieth century in many countries around the world.     

Anti-racist activism and the memory of colonialism: race as Republican critique after 2005

In 2005, French public debates increasingly focused on coming to terms with the memory of colonialism. This new interest in the country’s colonial history owed a great deal to the activity of a new kind of anti-racist organisation that prioritised the need to trigger a broad public debate about issues of race and memory. This article will examine the emergence of two of these organisations: Les Indigènes de la République and the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires. Both organisations were founded in 2005 and established themselves as well-known actors in France’s anti-racist scene through the appropriation of different aspects of France’s memory of colonialism. Indeed, their interventions concentrated on the way colonial legacies influenced contemporary Republican discourse and especially on the role of ‘race’ in contemporary France. Simultaneously, however, these organisations differed in their goals and understandings of activism. Through their cases, this piece will argue that anti-racist activists initiated a public debate on the memory of colonialism in order to find new ways to combat contemporary discrimination in France rather than thematising memory for the sake of remembrance.     

In the front line: women,work and new spaces of labour politics in Poland

Pessimistic accounts of women's lives in post-communist Poland view women as powerless and passive victims of the transformation process. In contrast, this article argues that while political change and the restructuring of the economy have closed down some spaces of articulation and organisation, others have opened up. The article focuses on the way in which women in their spheres of work are shaping and actively resisting change through new organisations and individual and collective actions, which are in some ways a break with the past, but in other ways build on previous forms of activity. The work draws on qualitative research conducted over the last decade across Poland. This has coupled extensive interviews with women workers, national and regional trade union leaders, activists and feminists in a number of major Polish cities with reviews of Polish media and policy. We examine the economic and ideological context in which these new articulations are taking place, against the background of Poland's post-war communism and the rise of opposition movements. We look at the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the implications for women within the labour market and in their domestic lives. In particular, we examine initiatives from below in workplace organisation, by focusing on new unions and new actions in the public sector, and the beginnings of organisation in the new areas of the economy such as supermarkets. Finally, we look at how women are articulating their interests beyond formal workplaces. We conclude that we should be optimistic about these new spaces of activism. While some are well established, others are embryonic but provide a strong foundation on which women can increase their participation in spaces that promote their varied interests.     

Protest Cycle,Political Violence and Social Movements in the Basque Country

A close look at the groups, organisations and social movements among which a terrorist organisation seeks refuge and support, will provide a fundamental and strategic view of its evolution. By means of the concept of a protest cycle, I analyse the relationship between political violence and social movements in the Basque Country. With the help of Tarrow's fundamental variables in the political structure, to which I have added the degree of consciousness‐raising and mobilisation in civil society, I aim to study the protest cycle of ETA's violence from its social origins at the start of the 1960s, through its consolidation in the 1970s, to its decline from the mid‐1980s onwards. The idea I will defend is that political violence should be seen as a form of collective action directed towards a mobilisation of society, and that its vicissitudes depend on the structure of interactions set up between the armed organisation, social movements and civil society.     

Networks of Adjacent Action Situations in Polycentric Governance

Within the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, the concept of an action situation generalizes a game to allow for endogenous changes in its rules. This article re‐visits this core concept to explore its potential for serving as the foundation for a systematic approach to the construction of more elaborate models of complex policy networks in which overlapping sets of actors have the ability to influence the rules under which their strategic interactions take place. Networks of adjacent action situations can be built on the basis of the seven distinct types of rules that define an action situation or by representing generic governance tasks identified in related research on local public economies. The potential of this extension of the IAD framework is demonstrated with simplified network representations of three diverse policy areas (Maine lobster fisheries, international development assistance, and the contribution of faith‐based organizations to U.S. welfare policy).     

The Imperial War Relief Fund and the All British Appeal: Commonwealth,Conflict and Conservatism within the British Humanitarian Movement, 1920–25

This article explores the intersection of internationalist and imperial humanitarian ideals in the aftermath of the First World War via a case study of a hitherto overlooked humanitarian organisation—the Imperial War Relief Fund. In an era of increased international collaboration between humanitarian organisations, the Imperial War Relief Fund instead promoted an imperial approach, seeking to unite the ‘efforts of the dominions and mother country’ for the relief of Europeans suffering the effects of the First World War. The Fund was enthusiastically supported in Britain by a number of leading conservative public figures, who hoped that an empire-wide humanitarian campaign might guard against imperial disintegration and reverse Britain's perceived loss of prestige in the postwar order. Despite its initial successes, the Imperial Fund was subsequently usurped by British humanitarian organisations which were more internationalist in their outlook and rhetoric, most significantly the Save the Children Fund. This did not represent, however, a straightforward displacement of imperial co-ordination in favour of more internationally focused humanitarian action. Rather, the Save the Children Fund was able to draw support away from the Imperial Fund only by echoing its imperial rhetoric. This article argues, therefore, that, while the Imperial Fund was a relatively short-lived venture, its lasting legacy was to ensure that the British humanitarian movement was a space in which notions of Britain's imperial status, and its concomitant duties, would survive within an humanitarian landscape in which internationalist ideals were increasingly prevalent.     

Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai

Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in Lane 49, a public housing community in downtown Shanghai. Utilising feminist geography and feminist political theorisations of material permeability this article contributes to Chinese geographies of protest, providing a local epistemology of housing activism which demonstrates the importance of drawing materiality into understandings of activist tactics. The article also contributes to radical geographies of protest by deconstructing the idea of public protest in a public place and thus offering opportunities to demonstrate how, through blurring public‐private binaries, protest can emerge and survive in authoritative governance regimes.     

Arm’s-length funding of the arts as an expression of laissez-faire

While questions continue to be raised over the continuation, nature and mechanisms of arms’-length funding for the arts, its theoretical foundations within a wider social and economic context remain under-explored. This article argues that the principle on which the arm’s-length relationship is constructed is defined by the concept of laissez-faire. It is this that sets rules for how the public and private spheres interact within a liberal and individualistic society. By this argument, providing public subsidy to the arts is a compensating act integral to the operation of a free-market economy and ensures the autonomy of individual artists, even while producing public benefits.     

Arts practitioners in the cultural policy process: spear-carriers or speaking parts?

This paper considers the argument that arts practitioners are rarely acknowledged by cultural policy researchers as being more than marginally involved in policy-making. Drawing on public policy analysis which pays attention to a breadth of policy actors, and on the concept of civil society, the paper examines whether these approaches can help to better investigate and understand the role of arts practitioners in the policy process. It discusses this subject in relation to cultural policy in general and in the specific arena of British arts policy, focusing on original case-study research of playwrights’ organisations and playwriting policy. The case-study evidence demonstrates that arts practitioners – through involvement in policy debate and implementation, and their own initiatives and activities – are frequently engaged in the policy process and thus more broadly in the democratic public domain. Understanding of cultural policy development is therefore considerably weakened if the role of practitioners is ignored.     

Public administration in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This article reviews publications on public administration in the Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS). A distinction needs to be drawn between public administration as a discipline and as a field of inquiry that engages specialists from several areas. The latter has been more significant in Australia in contrast to Europe and the United States. The questions discussed in the AJPS cover changes in the field and practice of public administration; the state and government; the structures of local government, public organisation and federalism; interfaces between public administration and other sectors and institutions; and issues with public sector reform and accountability. Despite the emphasis on governance in discourse and practice, the role of government continues to be central, and what emerges from experiments in new governance is that the authority of government and the significance of hierarchy (compared to markets and networks) very often remains pivotal.     

Claiming ‘creativity’: discourse, ‘doctrine’ or participatory practice?

Drawing on empirical work with a third sector community organisation in the UK and the young NEET adults (16–20 years old, ‘not in employment or education or training’) they ‘creatively’ work with, this paper explores the practices and meanings of creativity as they emerged through a project funded through public and third sector organisations. The paper argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between creativity as a process or method, evidenced in the approaches, practices and ethos of the community organisation I worked with, and the notion of creativity as productive outcome seen in wider policy. This is having an impact on the practices and values of community organisations, particularly as they are pushed to rationalise processes as a result of austerity measures. Indeed, in the era of wider public and third sector cuts, creativity as a process or method is becoming harder to sustain on a day-to-day basis.     

The continuing saga around arts funding and the cultural wars in Australia

Cultural policy, and arts funding in particular, has been a site of much contention and discussion in Australia over the past decade. The events of the past two years took this to another level showing major ideological schisms in the present political approach. While the established arts sector was protected and consolidated, the emerging sector, individual artists, and small organisations were all negatively affected. The policy changes demonstrate the implicit challenges of direct political intervention in arts funding. What this period highlights also though is the vulnerability of artists and the philosophical contradictions around the nature of arts funding.     

Professionalising the British film industry: the UK Film Council and public support for film production

This article examines the UK Film Council’s objective to reorganise and reallocate public funding for film from 2000 onwards. I argue that the model adopted by the UKFC was innovative on two levels. First, it separated public funds available for film production into three separate streams and then hired industry professionals to head each individual fund. I also examine how the funds developed over the lifetime of the organisation, with each appointed head shaping the principles of their respective funds in accordance with the wider objectives of the UKFC. Drawing on strategy documents, internal papers and interviews with key personnel, I argue that the UKFC worked to position itself as a ‘vanguard organisation’ seeking to shake up an independent sector seemingly reliant on state handouts and introduce a commercial perspective to the industry. This mission met an abrupt end, however, when the incoming Coalition government closed down the organisation in 2010.     

Questions of Symmetry: Programme Experiences Featuring Northern Borderland Development

In the North European border region between the Nordic countries and northwestern Russia, much of cross–border development continues to be steered by public authorities and channelled through programmes which are dominated by public actors–even though the participation of private partners such as businesses and various non–governmental organisations is strongly encouraged. This article examines one case of Northern European peripheral cross–border development by focusing attention on institutionalised co–operation programmes. This chosen approach brings to the fore some of the persistent obstacles and challenges of these development initiatives. Particular attention is paid to institutional conditions of and for collaboration, including administrative and legislative systems or economic and governance mechanisms, social structures, institutional systems and general living conditions across national boundaries. Symmetry between the participating countries' institutional environments is perceived as a necessity for the construction of balanced interdependence as well as the increasing involvement of a variety of actors (e.g. private partners) in the creation of a functional borderland.     

Protection,survival and growth: an analysis of international policy documents

This paper reports findings from the analysis of three international policy documents produced by a department of the UK Government, a leading British cultural organisation and a national arts development agency. The analysis takes an unorthodox stance, proposing that the international strategies are rationales for the self-protection, survival and growth of the government department, agency and museum, as opposed to the operational action plans that they first appear or are assumed to be. As such, they bear little relationship to formal policy and should be viewed as organisational stratagems. This research raises a number of questions about the nature, purpose and impact of policy and its making. Calling for a rethinking of key concepts within the field, this article returns to the fundamentals by asking what we mean by cultural policy and how we conceptualise and study it empirically.     

Claiming Their Own Space: Australian Women Missionaries in Korea, 1891–1900

The first group of Australian women missionaries arrived in Korea in 1891, representing the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union of Victoria. Their pioneering work was soon hindered by tensions that arose between themselves and a male cleric authority in the field. The article investigates this dispute, which lasted for several years and eventually entangled not only the individual Australian missionaries but also their home organisations as well as North American missionaries. It argues that Australian women missionaries’ involvement in this public dispute is a rare but significant example of a paradox in the foreign missionary enterprise, which imposed patriarchal order and at the same time established conditions that helped women enter the public space and even challenge the male-centred gender order. The article goes on to identify some distinctive characteristics of the Australian women’s missionary work.