Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries (Book Review)

Cultural policy is often seen as peripheral to overall debates in public policy, particularly relative to health, defence, or education (p. 1). O’Brien sets out to show how cultural policy is, in fact, an important part of general public policy (p. 130). In order to do so, he engages with disciplinary links between cultural policy studies and political science. Cultural policy studies grew out of cultural studies – in order to make critical engagement with culture in society more useful and thus applied. In spite of the strongly interdisciplinary nature of this field of research, the debate has largely remained in this sphere.

O’Brien rightly argues that cultural policy is a field where the tensions between aesthetics, markets, and bureaucracy are well understood. Nonetheless, “thinking through a defence of the bureaucratic, alongside the limits of the market, whilst recognising the role of aesthetic judgement, is a complex task” (p. 140). The pursuit of this challenge has been the raison d’être of cultural policy research all along; it is a field that can contribute to understanding “how society might rediscover the appropriate limits of the market paradigm for decision-making that uses economics as its chief social science” (p. 140). Surely, cultural policy research does not have the answers – at least not all of them. But over the past 20 years, the increasingly active debate has provided insights that have evolved in tandem with society.

In order to engage with this overarching question, the book builds on three core concepts to help locating cultural policy in society: modernity, government, and the social life of methods. These notions are introduced in the second chapter, which sets the theoretical context of cultural policy, and they are drawn upon throughout the remainder of the book. Modernity is associated with a secular, science-based scientific logic geared towards a society of individuals (p. 17). Government is, building on the work of Rod Rhodes, approached as a tension: “government is best understood as the decision-making by top-down hierarchical forms of control […] whereas governance involves the sharing of resources in decision-making by a disparate group of actors drawn from various settings” (p. 27, original emphasis). This contrast is later linked to the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, which provides a framework to critically engage with the complexity of governance under modernity (p. 29ff). Yet the guiding foundation of the work is the social life of methods – building on the idea that the methods of social science exist in a thoroughly hermeneutic relationship with the social processes they intends to understand and influence. This is particularly important for cultural policy, since this field of inquiry aims to understand the conflicting interests of stakeholder groups (audience, the arts and culture sector, and governments) in a wide variety of topics.

On top of the solid theoretical foundation that locates cultural policy within political science, the remaining chapters are dedicated to present-day cultural policy debates. Chapter 3 provides an intersection of the access versus excellence debate and the contemporary meaning of class, (non-)consumption and distinction through – among others – the notion of the cultural omnivore. Chapter 4 expands on the complexity and often-paradoxical nature of labour conditions in the creative economy. As such, it calls into question – among other things – how cultural policy should relate to education policy, given the precarity and under-employment of workers in the creative economy (p. 89). Chapter 5 focuses on the current importance of cultural policy in the urban context and challenges the discourse and practice of European capitals of culture (ECoC). O’Brien draws on his own extensive research on Liverpool (ECoC in 2008) to argue that its success was due to its existing infrastructure and (international) brand, and may therefore not be replicated easily. Chapter 6 links debates on cultural value to public value in more general terms. Through three (very brief) case studies of the Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England, and the BBC (pp. 125–128), O’Brien stresses that the politics of value are not neutral as they are linked to both stakeholder agendas in general and the politics of the UK New Labour government in particular (p. 129).

The book is excellent in its brevity. It covers an impressive theoretical and conceptual complexity in very few words. At the same time, it provides a detailed illustration of the major on-going debates, building on examples from the UK. And that is perhaps my main comment on the book: it is very focused on the situation in Great Britain. Whilst O’Brien rightly argues that the (largely British) Anglophone literature is still of importance in global discussions (p. 36) and reference is made to the increasing importance of South East Asian and Nordic discussions in the field of cultural policy research (pp. 35–36), he brings in relatively few examples and ideas from beyond the UK–Australian cultural policy debates. Granted, there are ample (albeit minor) references to the USA and France, yet these seemingly serve as a way of providing a contrasting illustration of the UK context rather than as a basis for a full discussion of the role of cultural policy in these countries.

However, the focus on the UK results in a detailed engagement and thanks to their strong theoretical foundations, the key messages yield importance well beyond the UK:

It is worth considering here that while O’Brien engages extensively with the term(s) of modernity, there is little attention to the postcolonial and anthropological understanding of modernities in the plural. Indeed, modernity is a cultural construct too, and one that is as much the result as it is the foundation of cultural politics. It would, however, be unfair to expect a truly global engagement with concepts and examples. As such, this book (review) should be seen as an encouragement to other researchers in the field to engage equally eloquently with debates on theoretical genealogy, conceptual metamorphosis, and the practical implications of cultural policies in different contexts.

In summary, this book is impressive in the way it links debates through theory, concepts, and illustrations, and it represents a welcome addition to the corpus of cultural policy literature. O‘Brien provides a combination of a different (political science) angle to the topic than earlier works (such as Culture: A reformer’s science, by Bennett (1998), Rethinking Cultural Policy by McGuigan (2004), and Cultural Policy, by Miller and Yúdice (2002)) and an engagement with recent evolutions in the field. The combination of theoretical rigour and empirical insight of his succinct critical introduction to cultural policy makes it an invaluable reference work for students and researchers of cultural and – hopefully – public policy in general.

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First published in Cultural Trends 24(1).

Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries, by Dave O’Brien, Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, 166 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-81759-2