ANALYSING CULTURAL POLICY:
INCORRIGIBLY PLURAL OR ONTOLOGICALLY
INCOMPATIBLE?
CLIVE GRAY
DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY
PROBLEM: RESEARCHING CULTURAL
POLICY
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Different questions
Different ontologies
Different epistemologies
Different methodologies
Different disciplines
Different questions
WHAT TO LOOK AT?
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Theories?
Methods?
Research areas?
Disciplines?
DISCIPLINARY DIVERSITY
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Aesthetics
Anthropology
Cultural Studies
Economics
History
Sociology
Philosophy
Political Science
WHAT IS LOOKED AT
• Definitions of ‘culture’
• What is understood by ‘cultural policy’
• Dominant methodologies
‘CULTURE’ IS ...
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An essentially contested concept
Multiply defined
No empirical test of ‘correctness’
Modifiable
Internally complex
Appraisive
CULTURAL POLICY IS ...
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Cultural sustainability and heritage
Cultural and creative industries
Lifestyle culture and eco-culture
Cultural planning
Controversial issues
Whatever it is that governments say it is
Production of cultural citizens
Representation, meaning, interpretation
A transhistorical political function
METHODOLOGIES
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Positivist
Interpretivist
Realist
Ideographic
Nomothetic
CULTURAL STUDIES
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‘Culture’ is ...
Materialist/idealist
Ideal
Recorded experience
Way of life
Signifying practices
POLITICAL SCIENCE
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‘Culture’ is ...
Societal contexts
Evaluations, feelings, knowledge
Formal/informal rule-governed behaviours
SOCIOLOGY
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‘Culture’ is ...
Meanings, symbols, structures
Arenas of social action
Formal/informal rule-governed behaviours
Social life in general
ECONOMICS
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‘Culture’ is ...
Shared behavioural/value norms
Activities and products
Particular, ‘cultural’, goods
The ‘arts’
CULTURAL STUDIES
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Cultural policy is ...
Literary/psychoanalytic readings of texts
Gramscian ideology
Foucaultian governmentality
Habermasian communicative action
POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Cultural policy is ...
• What governments do in the field of ‘culture’
• What governments do not do in the field of
culture
• State actions affecting cultural life of citizens
SOCIOLOGY
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Cultural policy is ...
Actions affecting cultural life of citizens
Government policies affecting cultural arenas
(But cf. Cultural capital/audiences/leisure)
ECONOMICS
• Cultural policy is ...
• Government policies pursued for cultural
purposes
• Government policies in the cultural arena
• A normative concern
METHODS OF ANALYSIS
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Cultural studies: interpretive
Economics: positivist
Sociology: realist
Political Science: realist
BUT variation exists
CONCLUSIONS
• Unless/until ‘cultural policy’ studies develops
their own methodologies and definitions of what
they are doing they will be dependent upon
conflicting disciplines for their tools and forms of
analysis
• Without a willingness to engage with different
disciplines ‘cultural policy’ studies will fragment
into mutually antagonistic, discipline-based, subgroups
• Celebrate disciplinary diversity and read!
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World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various
• Louis MacNeice, Snow