Dave O'Brien

Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, And London’s Impact On Cultural Labor Markets

This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom’s. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London’s cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an “engine room” of social mobility, London’s dominance in fact reenforces social class disparities in cultural employment.

The social life of cultural value

In a recent discussion on the creative economy, Calvin Taylor (2013), a Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of Leeds, coined a useful reference point for many discussions in this area: ‘once more (with feeling)’. While neither directly discussing the debates around ‘cultural value’, nor, presumably, being a nod to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the same title, there is something in that phrase that seems to pertain to ‘cultural value’. The term has seen a steadily increasing usage during the twentieth century (see Figure 6.1) but seems to have reached a frenzy following the turn of the millennium.

Intellectuals, culture and public policy in France: approaches from the Left

How does academic work have an impact on the policy process? What should be the relationship between the intellectual and the state? These are pressing questions in the context of the current reforms to higher education in the UK and the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Research Excellence Framework. Jeremy Ahearne’s new book is a timely and instructive text when considering these issues, exploring the role of intellectuals in public policy in France. Whilst the book does not entirely fulfil its perhaps implicit aim of synthesising intellectual history and cultural policy studies with more mainstream analysis of the policy process, the text is an excellent intervention into the ongoing development of cultural policy studies itself, developing Ahearne’s work on implicit and explicit cultural policy. Notwithstanding the often dense nature of the text, it does reward careful reading as it contains illuminating reflections on the specific nature of intellectuals in France and their participation in public policymaking. The book begins with the classic caricature of the French intellectual, tracing the roots of the opposition between intellectual and State in France. The romantic ideal of a free-thinking provocateur, illustrated by the usual suspects of Sartre and Foucault, is unpacked by Ahearne’s careful contextualisation of the oppositional intellectual. This vision of the intellectual challenging the state is grounded in the historic specifity of the influence of the French Communist Party, the desire for intellectual freedom within the vision of intellectual endeavour in France and the influence of, and desire to break with, the Church. Indeed, the book’s central aim is “to show that becoming implicated in policy is not necessarily to be equated simply with losing one’s autonomy and siding with the powers that be” (p. 222). As a result of this challenge to the popular view of intellectuals in France, Ahearne attempts to ground specific intellectuals within the framework of the policy process drawn from political science. This, unfortunately, is where the book is at its weakest. Although there is excellent coverage of key ideas drawn from mainstream theories of the policy process, particularly the vision of the chaotic nature of policymaking and the well established “garbage can” model of the policy process, the book does not fully connect this overview with the case studies which follow it. Nor is there close enough attention to the specific form of the policymaking process in France. This was a considerable disappointment, because, as a reader familiar with key issues within French politics, I was hoping to get a more detailed grasp on the reality of the policy process within the French state. The text would have been greatly improved by a detailed consideration of French government and administration in the periods associated with the case studies, perhaps at the beginning of each chapter. The text comes closest to giving a real sense of the realities of French policymaking with the discussion of Malraux, although this is unsurprising given his

On brutal culture

If it is true that culture has succumbed to the ‘derivative logic’ of contemporary economies of circulation, deprived of essential attributes and working to scramble and undermine the very premise of culture as essence, the word nevertheless continues to be used to explain things that are politically difficult, intractable, and yes, undeniably brutal.

The Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy

Cultural policy intersects with political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics at all levels of society, placing high and often contradictory expectations on the capabilities and capacities of the media, the fine, performing, and folk arts, and cultural heritage. These expectations are articulated, mobilised and contested at – and across – a global scale. As a result, the study of cultural policy has firmly established itself as a field that cuts across a range of academic disciplines, including sociology, cultural and media studies, economics, anthropology, area studies, languages, geography, and law. This Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy sets out to broaden the field’s consideration to recognise the necessity for international and global perspectives. The book explores how cultural policy has become a global phenomenon. It brings together a diverse range of researchers whose work reveals how cultural policy expresses and realises common global concerns, dominant narratives, and geopolitical economic and social inequalities. The sections of the book address cultural policy’s relation to core academic disciplines and core questions, of regulations, rights, development, practice, and global issues. With a cross-section of country-by-country case studies, this comprehensive volume is a map for academics and students seeking to become more globally orientated cultural policy scholars.

Making Culture, Changing Society

Making Culture, Changing Society is a genuinely fascinating text, with a remarkable agenda. The book makes a very useful contribution to a range of areas, moving recent work around the social life of methods forward into the arts and humanities. In particular, the contribution of this perspective to museum studies and aesthetics should prove fruitful for researchers seeking to understand the social underpinnings of institutions and the intellectual and academic discourses that support them. However, the book is overly dense and does lack a certain level of coherence, whereby the individual parts do not really create a greater sum. In part this is down to the book’s ambitious aims, attempting to narrate the history and function of specific museums, offer a rereading of the role of aesthetics in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, take on anthropology as a series of methods with a social life, as well as breaking ground on the foundations for a new definition of culture. This ambition is to be applauded. However, the book’s genesis, as a series of papers, is clear within the text. This is not uncommon for academic books, of course, but in the case of Making Culture, Changing Society the effect is a collection of stimulating essays, rather than a fully focused book. The book’s starting point is with the cultural turn, or more precisely what a range of perspectives what that have sought to question that turn might have to say about an intellectual project that has been a long-standing concern for Bennett’s work. The text deploys four lines of argument to synthesise insights from cultural sociology, governmentality and actor network theory into questions of culture and, by extension, society and policy. In the first instance culture is not to be bracketed off as signs and symbols and thus as a universal common to all human societies. Rather it is ‘a historically specific set of knowledge practices’. Bennett’s long-standing Foucauldian influence is clear in this first argument, which offers culture as productive of individuals, because of its status as practices with a basis in expertise, rather than its status as collections of signs and symbols. Culture is not about meaning, in the first instance, but about knowledge and institutions, such as aesthetics and museums. Bennett calls this ensemble (showing the influence of actor network theory) a ‘culture complex’. The culture complex is related to the society and the social by an ontological politics that suggests methods require interrogation as to their social role. Methods, in keeping with the broader Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) project, have a social life, and it is with the social life of aesthetics and anthropology that the case study and theoretical discussions in the later part of the book are concerned. The other two arguments can be related to recent developments within historiography that have attempted to read both ideas and individuals through the lens of