Article

Arts & Humanities in Higher Education

2015, Vol. 14(1) 79–94
Cultural value, ! The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1474022214533892

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Dave O’Brien
Cultural Industries, City University London, UK

Abstract
No matter what the national context, the question of how to understand the impact of
government programmes, particularly in terms of value for money, has emerged as a
complex problem to be solved by social scientific management. This article engages with
these trends in two ways. It focuses on the UK to understand how these tools and
technologies are used for valuing objects and practices. By showing the rationality for
using these techniques for understanding culture, it creates a link between studies of
cultural policy and broader questions facing the arts and humanities. The article’s
second contribution is to our understanding of the role and function of arts and
humanities by showing, in the British example, how a true understanding of the value
of culture is impossible without the disciplines and fields that are currently peripheral to
both government social science and, more broadly, higher education in the UK.

Keywords
Cultural studies, cultural value, measurement, public policy, Sony

Introduction
There is currently a tension between the way public policy understands value and
the way value is understood and created by the arts and humanities. In public
policy, value is understood through the lens of economics, as a social science,
and the economic, as financialised market exchange. In the arts and humanities,
value is understood through a variety of disciplinary lenses that are opposed to
economics’ view of human agency (Haubrich and Woolf, 2005) and to the reduc-
tion of cultural practices to financial proxies (Belfiore and Upchurch, 2013).
This article presents reflections on three intersecting discussions that are import-
ant in understanding the dilemmas facing arts and humanities in the context of

Corresponding author:
Dave O’Brien, Cultural Industries, AG16 College Building, City University London, London EC1V 0HB, UK.
Email: dave.obrien.1@city.ac.uk

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80 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14(1)

their distance from public policy. In the first instance, it outlines changes in central
government management and administration practices, particularly the impact and
aftermath of new public management (NPM). It then moves to consider reactions
to these trends, using culture and cultural policy as an example that has lessons for
a range of public sector activities. The final part of the article links these discussions
with the problem of measuring and measurement, which is now a dominant ques-
tion for society in modernity.
The starting point for these reflections is a personal, if anecdotal, example,
where these issues come together in a rather unpredictable and intriguing way.
Indeed, it is a case study that shows how two differing perspectives on value can
exist, in tension with each other, in the same example. Sony Studios in Liverpool
was closed by Sony in 2012 (Yin-Poole, 2012). The studio was associated with well-
known games such as Lemmings, Wipeout and Shadow of the Beast. The closure
was part of a broader reconfiguration of the computer games industry, most not-
ably towards app-based gaming, playable on mobile devices, as opposed to the
console-based gaming that had dominated the sector since the 1980s (Stuart, 2012).
The story of Sony Studios Liverpool will eventually bring us to a fundamental
tension between economic rationality and cultural objects, a tension that has been
difficult to solve within modern societies. The broader consumption patterns sur-
rounding games form part of the much discussed ‘convergence culture’ whereby
cultural forms collapse into one another, with consequences for the businesses
involved in the production of games. Lash and Lury (2007) summarise the blurring
of boundaries in cultural forms and economic practices:

For example movies become computer games; when brands become brand environ-
ments, talking over airport terminal space and restructuring department stores, road
billboards and city centres; when cartoon characters become collectables and cos-
tumes; when music is played in lifts, part of a mobile soundscape. (Lash and Lury,
2007)

Lash and Lury’s formulation is important to the example of Sony Studios

Liverpool as it points to the connection between the economic rationality of the
studio’s closure and the existence of the studio’s products as cultural objects,
whether experienced as advertising, games, music or phone apps.
The connection between economic rationality and cultural object is straightfor-
wardly resolved if those objects are understood as commodities to be exchanged in
market transactions. Indeed, this is the primary mode of experience for most of the
users of these cultural products. However, Sony Studios Liverpool’s output has an
element that is irreducible to commodities and market exchange. The games made
by Sony Studios Liverpool were part of a major exhibition of computer games,
Video Game Nation, that took place in Manchester’s Urbis in 2009 and in
Ashington’s Woodhorn in 2011 (Fletcher, 2011). Wipeout and Lemmings were
both given prominence in the exhibition, indicating that they had been transformed
by the act of exhibition from merely commercial cultural products to museum

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O’Brien 81

objects with cultural value. The importance attached to Wipeout shows it had
specific cultural value, to be ranked alongside other important games such as
Elite or Sensible Soccer and seen to matter more than other games by the same
studio, such as G Police or Rollcage.
There is a dual narrative to the closure of Sony Studios Liverpool as a story of
economic value and a story of cultural value. The institutionalisation of its prod-
ucts in a museum exhibition is one example of the creation of cultural value, but it
is also part of a much wider story of cultural value experienced by the players of
these games, the social networks created around that play and the function the
games had as part of the creation and maintenance of players’ (and more broadly
British society’s) sense of identity.
The Sony example provides a route into three intersecting discussions that are
the focus of this paper and are also reflected through the special issue. On the one
hand Sony are part of a creative economy that has become an increasingly dom-
inant narrative in discourses of the purpose and function of arts and humanities in
higher education. On the other, to understand the Sony story, the value of the
products they created that became cultural artefacts, requires a series of intersect-
ing arts and humanities approaches. Finally, the Sony example indicates how the
arts and humanities themselves are caught between two ideas of value, one eco-
nomic, the other reflexively defined by the arts and humanities themselves. The case
study of cultural value in public policy, framed by the broader context of both the
structure of arts and humanities in the UK and NPM in government, provides a
way of further elucidating the importance of dialogue between the two forms of
value discussed in the Sony example and the importance of the arts and humanities
to that relationship.

Where are the arts and humanities approaches?

However, the intersecting arts and humanities approaches have an uncertain status
within the academy – both those approaches that are most useful to analyse the
Sony case and arts and humanities research more generally within the British uni-
versity system. Miller (2012), surveying the American academy, has written about
the increasing polarisation between differing forms of arts and humanities institu-
tionalised within US universities (in a similar narrative to Turner’s (2012) more
general discussion). This analysis crosses over into the British context. Miller dis-
tinguishes the humanities of cultural studies and their associated expression in the
labour market for creative industries. By contrast, there are the humanities of elite
institutions, with their associated elite social and economic activities. It is not
entirely fanciful to apply the dual narrative, of practice opposed to elite
approaches, to the English context, given the acceleration of the division between
elite, research intensive universities and teaching-focused institutions predicted by
McGettigan’s (2013) recent work. It would be unsurprising to expect that the
arriviste activities of cultural and media studies, despite their historical association
with elite universities such as Birmingham (in the form of the now defunct Centre

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82 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14(1)

for Contemporary Cultural Studies), would prosper more in the teaching institu-
tions (with notable exceptions such as the Institute of Communication Studies at
the University of Leeds), where they have found a cross- and inter-disciplinary
home. The institutional evolution of the study of culture, as it has sought to
break out beyond the disciplines associated with a literary, historical or social
scientific canon, can be seen to reflect a broader political economy of university
funding and organisation, as much as judgements of the value and worth of the
cultural artefacts that are the object of study.
There are, then, two stories of the production and study of culture that point
towards the way a broader perspective is necessary to fully understand their mean-
ing. In the case of Sony Studios, it is a narrative of the transformation of the social
status of computer games into objects of legitimate cultural interest, institutiona-
lised within museums, which moves beyond a narrative of changes in gaming con-
sumption and corporate organisation. In the example of the possible bifurcation of
the humanities, the narratives of value, worth and, ultimately, of legitimacy which
permeate discussions of canons, require the broader political economy of the
English University to complete the story of arts and humanities in higher
education.
This article will attempt to follow the trends underpinning the twin movement
between the centrality of creative economy and the peripheral nature of the subjects
best suited to understand the symbolic values within that economy. The article
shows how following the points of resistance to the intersecting trends noted in the
previous sentence leads along an unexpected route, highlighting the problems of
economic reductionism evident elsewhere in this special issue. The starting point
for this article outlines changes in central government management and adminis-
tration practices, particularly the impact and aftermath of NPM. This is important
because it sets the context for both the complex problem of understanding the value
of culture within regimes of both auditing and market-driven understandings of
society and the marginalisation of emerging academic areas within governmental
attempts to understand the value of arts and humanities that can be seen as reflect-
ing the same problems of fitting culture into management.
This finding then leads to a consideration of the reactions to these developments
in government, using culture and cultural policy as an example that has lessons for
a range of public sector activities. The final part of the article links these discussions
with the problem of measuring and measurement, which is now a dominant ques-
tion for society in modernity and a crucial aspect of how government has been
reconfigured by managerialism. By exploring these three debates, the article aims to
contribute to understanding the broader political economy surrounding policy
concerned with difficult topics that do not fit easily within the prevailing market
paradigms.
The article focuses specifically on the British, indeed English, context. This is for
two reasons. In the first instance, it is because of the importance of the UK as an
exporter of policy models for culture and creativity. This has been the case in both
state-funded forms of culture, with the close links between the Commonwealth

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O’Brien 83

nations and the Arts Council model for subsidy, as well as with the concept of
creative industries as a policy approach to more commercial or market-driven
forms of culture. Second, British case is often instructive as, although policy trans-
fer is never an exact science, the UK has often been seen as a site for policy
experiments, particularly in cultural policy, which provide the blueprints for
other nations to interrogate and adapt. Questions of measurement in culture,
recently an important agenda item for the European Commissions 2013 culture
forum1 where influential figures in British cultural policy discussed the UK’s meas-
urement agenda, are a good example of this. Where budgets are shrinking, par-
ticularly within Western Europe, questions as to how to understand the economy,
efficiency and effectiveness of cultural funding will face similar issues to those dis-
cussed below in the UK examples.

Management, modernity and the citizen consumer

The requirement, perhaps demand, for the fusion of attention on valuation of
cultural worth with a perspective on the social and political circumstances leads
to a focus on the activities of central government. All over Western Europe, gov-
ernments are struggling with questions posed to the welfare settlements in their
respective nations, questions associated as much within the practicalities of day to
day funding decisions as with longer term economic or demographic trends. In the
UK, these problems have manifested themselves in the way the British state has
adapted to the risks and uncertainties posed by modernity (O’Brien, 2013a) using a
series of solutions that, whilst drawing on Neo-Liberal trends (Harvey, 2007;
Stedman-Jones, 2013), have a specificity related to the British context.
Underlying the problem facing cultural studies, and indeed arts and humanities,
teaching and research is a distance between the management approach that has
come to dominate government since the 1980s and the type of value produced by
the arts and humanities (for a discussion of this topic see Bate, 2010). Initially, in
the UK, this approach to government was associated with NPM. NPM reflected a
reaction to the Fordist state settlement, a settlement under which the arts and
humanities expanded, both in terms of student numbers and in terms of disciplin-
ary areas, during the 1960s.
The Fordist era was characterised by the types of hierarchical bureaucracy
described in Max Weber’s early 20th-century attempt to capture the application
of reason and law, as opposed to tradition and personality, to organisational for-
mations. However, in keeping with the narrative of multiple modernities suggested
by Wagner (2012), Weber’s ‘ideal type’ bureaucracy took many differing forms
across the world. In the UK, the gentlemanly bureaucracy replicated the existing
class system backed by a generalist classical education.
The British example offers a straightforward case study of how government
bureaucracy, with the attendant consequences for arts and humanities, has changed
since the 1970s. Burnham and Horton (2013) describe three elements of ‘trad-
itional’ public administration, based around (1) the separation of politics from

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84 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14(1)

administration within (2) a hierarchical, permanent organisation underpinned by

(3) meritocratic forms of advancement. These elements of public administration
were bound up with the rise of state forms of research, the sciences of governmen-
tality, which were then subsequently used to transform public administration
into NPM.
The rise of scientific forms of management, alongside the growth of techniques
such as cost benefit analysis (CBA) for governmental decision making, is one site
where the roots of the incommensurability between arts and humanities and gov-
ernmental decision making may be found. At the end of the 1980s, management
theorists such as Osborne and Gaebler (1992) captured the prevailing sense of the
limitations of public administration and government. Although highly influential in
right wing political projects, the critique of public administration built on left wing
objections to the use of state power through institutions such as medicine and
education. The state was seen to be unable to deal with the demands of modernity,
demands which have unfolded and intensified since the 1970s when the era of cheap
petrochemicals came to an end. The economy was no longer something to be
controlled, ‘rowed’ in Osborne and Gaebler’s terms, but rather needed the state
to act as an institution to set the rules and parameters for market competition, to
steer the ship of social and economic life. For writers and politicians of the NPM,
markets would offer solutions to social issues that, bureaucracies, potentially self-
interested and budget maximising, could not. These market solutions, provided by
the contracting out or privatisation of public services and organisations, would be
controlled by social scientific techniques of management and monitoring, as
opposed to the direct intervention of state bureaucracies as managers themselves.
NPM became dominant in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s and was highly
influential across the world at the same time. However, the solutions offered by
NPM did not seem to solve the social problems they purported to deal with.
Indeed, in many settings, they created new and more complex issues. Moreover,
the promise of more efficient and effective approaches to social issues, based on
social scientific management techniques, seemed to replicate the problems of the
social scientifically driven interventions within Western Democracies seen during
the 1950s and 1960s. In 1997, when the Labour party entered office in the UK,
NPM was refined and remade to focus much less on simply how the state could
facilitate the market and much more on how best to manage and motivate both
organisations and individuals. Effectiveness, couched in the technocratic language
of ‘what works’? (Nutley et al., 2007), was the dominant question, a question to be
answered by the application of forms of measurement, targets and incentives.
Targets and incentives, used to move beyond NPM’s yardstick of success that
was grounded almost solely in the price of public interventions, formed part of a
wider culture of faith in auditing as the core practice of government (Power, 1997),
against the backdrop of rising government spending (Hood, 2008). The irony of
this faith was that audit regimes seemed to deliver measurable outputs that func-
tioned well within mechanisms of oversight, but had problems in creating the out-
comes that policy makers desired. The results of these regimes, in the UK at least,

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O’Brien 85

were seen to be the decimation of professional autonomy and judgements, along-

side an obsession with the delivery of outputs that made only marginal impacts on
the social problems these outputs were intended to change. As the summary by
Wilson et al. (2009) indicates, in the case of health policy they created inappropri-
ate over- and under-spends alongside gaming of targets in services such as ambu-
lance provision.
Alongside the objections to NPM and a subsequent audit, culture of targets and
incentives were a range of arguments that drew the focus away from questions of
efficiency or economy of spending. In these discussions (e.g. McGettigan, 2013;
Wyatt, 2002 on higher education), the role of professional judgement and expertise
was foregrounded to object to the idea that citizens could be equated with con-
sumers, acting in markets.

Government and the problem of culture

The rise of the imagined, notional consumer, acting within the market, is central to
this article’s narrative of government activity in the UK. The ideal type consumer
sits alongside social scientific forms of management to govern the markets in which
these imagined consumers would carry out their transactions. These two ideas, the
consumer and the social sciences, provide the context for a consideration of those
objects and activities that do not easily fit within this paradigm. The close of the
previous paragraph suggested that higher education was one such area where much
of the discourse (e.g. Collini, 2012) has centred on the appropriateness, or other-
wise, of seeing education as a commodity to be bought and sold by clients and
consumers, rather than students or learners.
Part of the counter-revolution to the management techniques discussed in the
previous section can be seen in this example from British higher education debates,
which used the assertion that public services delivered something unique that could
not be captured by market mechanisms or the management techniques applied
across the British state. Two recent books (Bate, 2010; Brewer, 2013) have used
an American management theory that became influential in the UK during the
2000s. Public value, both as a term and as a theory, came to prominence as an
alternative to the NPM of the Conservatives during the 1980s and 1990s and the
managerialism associated with the Labour administration of 1997–2010.
There has been extensive work done on how public value has played out with
regard to cultural funding (see O’Brien, 2013a, 2013b) and it is unnecessary to
rehearse those debates here. It is sufficient to say that public value became a dif-
ficult concept to clearly define. Alford and O’Flynn (2009), in an excellent overview
of public value, set out how the term has several meanings for different groups,
ranging from an overarching policy paradigm responding to NPM; a rhetorical
strategy for under-fire bureaucracies and public managers; a narrative or ethno-
graphic account of the world and practices of public managers; and a framework
for measuring the performance of organisations and staff that moves beyond the
narrowly managerialist focus of much NPM.

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86 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14(1)

In cultural policy, public value developed an association with cultural value. The
process of public value becoming interchangeable with cultural value is historically
specific to a series of cultural organisations in the UK, including the BBC and the
Arts Council, alongside the work of think tanks such as the UK’s Demos. This
process has a complex history (detailed by O’Brien, 2013a), whereby cultural value
in the context of public value was first used in a speech by Ellis (2003), but through
the work of Holden (2004) became internationalised into a portmanteau for
research and advocacy around organisations’ worth.
For Holden (2004) cultural value has three constituencies: the public, the pro-
fessionals and the politicians. These three different groups are related to three
differing types, or three different stories, of value. The value created by cultural
organisations takes three forms, including the intrinsic value of the experiences
generated by the organisations, the instrumental value created for public policy
purposes and the institutional value created by the bonds between organisations
and their various publics.
The importance of excellence to cultural organisations as an essential part of their
activity is bound up with the adaptation of public value as a framework for meas-
urement of the added value of cultural activity that goes beyond NPM conceptions of
value. The assertion of the uniqueness or difference of cultural organisations, as
compared with other areas of public policy, is grounded in the supposedly unquan-
tifiable nature of the benefits of culture, an unquantifiability often defended by mod-
ernist and romantic conceptions of the transformative power of cultural experience.
The unquantifiable nature of culture is sometimes used by particular cultural
policy interest groups to argue that the forms of decision making associated with
modern government are not applicable to cultural questions. The ‘audit society’
(Power, 1997) of accounting and management techniques founded on the commen-
surability of differing policy interventions to a single monetary metric, to be com-
pared and contrasted with other policy options, may find it difficult to place the
worth of the museum, the gallery, the theatre or the concert hall. Indeed, in the
early debates surrounding the birth of cultural value statements such as that by
Adrian Ellis were typical:

The current language of performance and its quantification is unlikely to be jettisoned

by this or any future administration. But it needs to accommodate the vocabulary of
cultural value. Unless a common and public language can be found in which to discuss
cultural purposes and intrinsic – alongside instrumental – value, then funders will tend
to focus on a partial view of cultural institutions and the funded will chaff and sulk,
dependent through they are on the public purse. So policy makers and the cultural
community have an opportunity to face a common set of challenges on common
ground. (Ellis, 2003)

Comments such as those by Ellis provided the context for the operationalisation of
the rhetorical aspects of public value as a defence of cultural organisations into a
measurement framework to articulate value to both policy and the public.

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O’Brien 87

However, the definitional disputes associated with public value, alongside its
attachment to New Labour in the UK (an attachment that is an important part
of Eleonora Belfiore’s article in this issue (2015)), have seen it become more of a
rhetorical device for defending public services, such as the arts and humanities in
higher education (Bate, 2010), despite several attempts to deploy it as a tool for
measuring and managing aspects of activity that went beyond market and business
frameworks, including heritage, the arts and public sector broadcasting (O’Brien,
2013a, 2013b). By the advent of the Coalition government in 2010, the term did not
seem to have made many inroads into shifting an economic rationality applied to
culture.
Understanding public value is important for two reasons. In the first instance, it
is a useful narrative of the failure of an alternative to measurement and audit-based
management to gain traction in the context of UK government bureaucracy.
Second, what followed public value, in the example of cultural policy and the
cultural sector, has important lessons for a wider discussion of arts and humanities
in higher education, again a point stressed by Belfiore’s article in these pages. The
failure, or at least the limitations, of public value to become dominant in the UK as
a replacement for NPM, both within government generally and the arts specifically,
saw further attempts to achieve a rapprochement between culture and government
by drawing more heavily on the languages of economic valuation.

Economics, culture and measurement

The previous section described how culture and cultural policy is one area that does
not seem to fit easily with the sorts of regimes of management dominant in UK
central government since the 1980s. The task for those sections of society not
subscribing to the ideals of NPM and the monitoring systems developed by central
government has, therefore, been to find a way to accommodate their narratives
with government’s management systems (O’Brien, 2010). The previous section out-
lined one such approach, public value, which became rhetorically useful for cul-
tural, then subsequently higher educational, organisations but did not seem to
change the prevailing mode of government in the UK.
The way central government in the UK sees its decision-making process is set
out in HM Treasury’s Green Book on policy appraisal and evaluation (HMT,
2003), with any government proposal requiring a ‘business case’ that complies
with Green Book standards. The essential aim is to make sure ‘no policy, pro-
gramme or project is adopted without first having the answer to these questions:
Are there better ways to achieve this objective? Are there better uses for these
resources?’ (HMT, 2003: 1).
The Green Book begins with the assumption that reasons for government activ-
ity can be understood in terms of markets, whether to correct failing in markets or
to encourage specific social goals that might be associated with equality or the
distribution of social resources, things which are unevenly delivered by markets.
As a result government policy has to be tested and rationalised in terms of its

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88 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14(1)

efficiency and effectiveness, with evidence that it would not be better for the gov-
ernment to just do nothing at all. The key tool for this assessment is CBA. CBA is a
technique that requires the costs and benefits associated with any given policy to be
compared with each other using a common standard or metric, which is money (as
costs are usually in monetary terms).
However, as the previous discussion and examples in this article have shown, it
can be very difficult to capture value in monetary terms for certain objects and
activities that resist market transactions. To get around these types of issue both
government and cultural sector have used estimates of social and economic impact.
Many commentators, (e.g. Cowen, 2006: 15) have identified that the use of impact
risks reducing culture to a device for delivering benefits that are not its primary
purpose. The deficiencies of both forms of impact measurement have still left the
problem of culture unsolved. The problem of valuing culture then becomes how
best to fit the unique aspects of culture, outside of the social and economic impacts,
into the economic language of CBA and the Green Book.

Cultural policy, the Coalition and economic value

The struggle over how to fit the intangible into CBA is taking place against the
backdrop of major changes to the funding of culture in the UK. Since the financial
crisis of 2008, a fundamental part of mainstream political discourse in the UK has
been about reducing state funding, in a range of policy sectors and organisations.
The Coalition between Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties that was
formed after the 2010 general election has not made a concerted effort to develop
a coherent cultural policy other than linking its cultural policy activities to the
dominant rationale of lower spending and deficit reduction (Cabinet Office,
2010), alongside the delivery of the Olympic Games. The most recent statement
on cultural policy, by the current Secretary of State Maria Miller (Miller, 2013),
outlines culture’s role as almost solely economic, suggesting it can have an eco-
nomic impact by encouraging tourist spending or helping with trade deals. This is a
return to the well-trodden tropes of cultural policy from the 1980s in the UK,
whereby arts organisations were explicitly commanded by government ministers
to prove the return on the subsidies offered by the state in terms of their contri-
butions to British GDP (Hewison, 1995).
This trope, mentioned in connection with the earlier discussion on impact, is felt
by many commentators on cultural policy to be the dominant rationale for invest-
ments in culture. A range of British policy documents and ministerial speeches and
statements support this view, first summarised by Garnham in a 2005 article that is
still relevant to current policy discourses. This has been a consistent theme under
both Conservative administrations of the 1980s, Labour in the 2000s and the cur-
rent Coalition administration. Indeed the focus on the economic role of culture has
accelerated following the change of government in 2010.
The equation of government with business and the dominance of a view that sees
society as coterminous with a market has continued to shape Coalition

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O’Brien 89

cultural policy. Encouraging American models of philanthropy has been an

important part of a reduced funding settlement and it is clear that New Labour’s
use of economics and other managerial forms of social science to measure perform-
ance has been allied with Miller’s redoubled stress on culture’s contribution to the
economy. Two further comments, from senior figures in the coalition government,
illustrate and emphasise this point. A speech by David Cameron in 2012 gives a
useful insight:

Our role, and that of the BFI, should be to support the sector in becoming even more
dynamic and entrepreneurial, helping UK producers to make commercially successful
pictures that rival the quality and impact of the best international productions . . . Just
as the British Film Commission has played a crucial role in attracting the biggest and
best international studios to produce their films here, so we must incentivise UK
producers to chase new markets both here and overseas.

– along with comments on the free museums policy by the then Culture Minister
Jeremy Hunt in 2011:

That child, student, working parent, retired person or tourist who first falls for art, or
who nurtures the spirit of discovery first in a national museum, becomes the cultural
consumer of tomorrow. I’d love it if all museums and galleries could offer free entry.
But to attack free entry to national collections on the basis that free entry cannot be
funded at all collections simply makes no sense. Free entry to national museums aims
for a noble goal: bringing our national inheritance – that which literally belongs to all
of us – closer to the people who own it.

Hunt’s speech shows the same focus on the citizen as consumer, in this case the
creation of future consumers. This same elision, of citizen with consumer, is at the
heart of the measurement systems that currently confront culture, education and
more widely public services in general in the UK. This system aims to go beyond
the limitations of both public value and NPM.

The paradox of measurement

The prominence of the economic vision of the consumer’s actions within markets as
the way to understand the rationale for government is a route to return the dis-
cussion to the initial starting point of how best to measure and value aspects of
culture such as those found in the example of Sony Studios Liverpool. It also
points towards the continued relevance of a specific form of cultural studies in
helping to deconstruct the domination of economic methods, whilst showing why
those methods can be useful when used as part of a wider set of policy-making
activities. Finally it shows not only the usefulness those arts and humanities meth-
ods that can interrogate economic methodologies, but also shows why only arts
and humanities research can do this.

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90 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14(1)

How the consumer, central to economic methodology, is shaped and created has
been an important interest for an area of academic study that addresses many of
the issues described by the previous sections. One of the original aims of the study
of cultural policy as it began to emerge from cultural studies was to draw attention
to how the tools and techniques of government, so often seen as a counterpoint, an
opponent or a contradiction to culture, are in fact deeply embedded in the creation
of what culture is. Rose and Miller, in the course of advocating the importance of
understanding governmentality, capture the way methods are implicated in the
creation and sustenance of modernity, the epoch and idea that utterly shapes cul-
ture today:

Governing a sphere requires that it can be represented, depicted in a way which both
grasps its truths and re-presents it in a form in which it can enter the sphere of
conscious political calculation. The theories of the social sciences, of economics, of
sociology and of psychology, thus provide a kind of intellectual machinery for gov-
ernment, in the form of procedures for rendering the world thinkable, taming its
intractable reality by subjecting it to the disciplined analyses of thought. (Rose and
Miller, 1992: 182)

The continued dominance of the economic in policy making is highly dependent on

social scientific methods. In particular it is dependent on those that focus on how to
measure economy alongside other cultural policy concerns, such as access and/or
the excellence, or not, of cultural activities. Much of the debate in this area centred
on the impact government intervention (along with government funds) might have,
as part of an attempt to fit cultural policy into the broader changes in public
administration described in the previous sections.
Currently there are a whole range of methods associated with the practice of
cultural policy by organisations and governments, as well as with academic work in
the area. There is no consensus on any one methodology or standardised set of
questions for investigation. There are, of course, extensive economic impact studies.
For questions of social impact, some approaches focus on qualitative narratives of
individuals’ engagement with culture, others on quantitative understandings of cul-
tural participation and engagement, or use a combination of both methods.
What unites these methods is that they all seek to evaluate the activities of
cultural institutions or programmes. Tellingly these methods fall foul of the same
issues identified by Selwood. In her critique of the gathering of cultural statistics,
Selwood (2002) offers a range of failings in the application of evidence-based policy
ideas to culture. The most pertinent to this paper is the over-production of data
which were then not directly used in policy making and lacked robustness when
compared to other forms of evidence gathered for use in other areas of policy. For
those methods based on judging the impact of cultural engagement, it seems there
has been little progress over the past decade of evaluation and research, leading
Selwood (2010: 4) to quote a member of the National Museums Directors
Conference, that ‘in terms of actual evidence of cultural impact, there is not a lot’.

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O’Brien 91

The other major trend within this area of research has been to reject economic
and social impact and to focus directly on excellence as seen from the point of view
of the audience. The most recent work using these techniques has attempted to link
attitudinal research with economic value, as value has become the key theme for
debating cultural policy as discussions move away from the limitations of research-
ing and measuring impact.
However, the key caveat underpinning all these similar impact studies is
summed up by Brown and Novak (2007: 21):

Impact scores reflect the unique symbiosis between artist and audience at a particular
location at a particular moment in time and should not be used as a means of
evaluating or comparing artists or the worthiness of their performance.

The act that is prohibited by Brown and Novak, in an attempt to assert the
continued uniqueness of the aesthetic aspects of cultural policy, is precisely the
use of research that is most essential for policy making and governance in
modernity.
Current UK government policy has been to reassert the importance of Green
Book compliant CBA (detailed in O’Brien, 2010). These approaches involve two
forms of economic valuation. One set attempts to solicit prices for non-market
goods by understanding how much people would be willing to pay for those
goods or willing to accept in compensation. This approach also uses individuals’
behaviour in markets, such as their willingness to pay higher housing costs to live
near cultural facilities, to find out prices for non-market goods. The other method
has been to use the relationship between individuals’ well-being and their income to
derive prices for cultural goods. This, however, is still an emerging approach
(O’Brien, 2010). Both of these economic valuation approaches are compliant
with the measuring regime of the Green Book. However, both are dependent on
the assumptions of the citizen and consumer that have been a central focus for
critiques from cultural studies over the last 40 years.
The use of measurement, whether on audience or on economy, can have a role
in policy making, notwithstanding the uneven take-up of research in the British
context. It must be related to a set of discussions that understand why and how
measurement is important to policy making. The central insight as to the import-
ance of measurement can then be examined by critically engaging with the his-
torical trends and managerial ideologies that have brought these methods to
prominence. This examination can only be conducted by arts and humanities
subjects that are attentive to history and culture. In the UK the academic
fields that can fulfil this need, against the backdrop of the need to fully explain
the value associated with culture, remain at the periphery of academic institu-
tions. These disciplines include cultural studies and cultural policy. As a result the
British will only ever have a partial understanding of the meaning and import-
ance of culture, even as the methods for its measurement become ever more
sophisticated.

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92 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14(1)

Conclusion: Contesting economics, contesting culture

This article began with the complex problem of valuing a specific change to the
production of culture in the UK, the closure of Sony Studios Liverpool. This case
study showed how in one understanding of value, the economic, the studio was
seen as unprofitable. However, from the cultural perspective its value was clear, as
its work became legitimate via its display in the museum. Moreover, the case study
suggested that in order to understand the meaning and importance of the closure, it
would be necessary to draw on a range of academic disciplines, including cultural
studies and economics, to understand not only the business and economic logic
behind the closure, but the cultural value attached to the games produced.
Moving beyond the complexity of understanding a particular moment of cul-
tural production, the article has sketched a series of interconnected developments
within government, cultural policy and more widely culture itself. By bringing
together seemingly disconnected activities, such as NPM, cultural value, cultural
policy and evaluation and measurement, it is possible to see how important it is
to think across the disciplinary boundaries of social science and arts and huma-
nities. Much of the work discussed above has come from political science and
sociology. It needs to be engaged in an encounter with cultural studies and cul-
tural policy, as well as more traditional disciplines that shed light on education
and history.
This article has concentrated, broadly, on cultural policy and its association with
cultural value, set against the backdrop of both NPM and the rise of a specific
approach to methods seen within some elements of British social science over the
same period. These intertwined strands return to the original problem, of under-
standing the intersection of culture and its political economy, whether in gaming or
in higher education.
The preceding discussion has indicated that government has internalised, albeit
in an uneven and inconsistent fashion, marketised forms of policy making and
evaluation as the most effective, economic and efficient way to carry out the pur-
poses and foundations of the state. A range of sectors within public life have
attempted to adapt to this change, in a variety of ways. In the case of culture,
calls for specialness, appeals to aesthetic judgement and demands for recognition of
non-economic forms of value have a complicated and ambivalent relationship to
the dominant policy paradigm. This problem is not exclusive to culture, whether in
the form of its consumption or its study within the university, since fitting into the
prevailing policy-making framework is an issue that confronts a whole range of
public policy areas. Thus cultural policy’s dilemma may offer insights that can open
up new questions, new debates and the possibility of new alternatives across
public life.
The rest of this special issue offers articles considering this intersection from a
variety of positions. The question of measurement is implicit in Belfiore’s discus-
sion of the public value of arts and humanities, but it is made explicit when arts and
humanities are tasked with proving their worth, as Hazelkorn and also

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O’Brien 93

Molas-Gallart show. The intersection of culture and its political economy is a space
for the arts and humanities to display their worth. The acts of audit and measure-
ment, the social scientific techniques of government and the commodified transac-
tions of the ideal type consumer are insufficiently understood on their own terms
and in their own languages. As the discussion of the issues at the centre of this
article has indicated, arts and humanities research can illuminate the moments
when audits, social science and markets are appropriate and why they are appro-
priate to understand complex social phenomena such as culture. Crucially, they can
illustrate when those approaches do not make sense, by placing them into their
appropriate historical and cultural contexts, or revealing their theoretical or philo-
sophical limitations.

Note
1. The European Culture Forum is the Commission’s biennial conference on cultural policy.
More details of the 2013 event can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/culture/news/
20130502-european-culture-forum-2013_en.htm

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Author biography
Dave O’Brien is a Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at City University
London. He specialises in cultural value and urban cultural policy issues and has a
PhD in Sociology from the University of Liverpool. His first book, Cultural Policy:
Management, Value and Modernity, was published by Routledge in 2013.

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