New Directions in Cultural Policy Research

This book investigates the role of arts practitioners in cultural policy-making, challenging the perception that arts practitioners have little or no involvement in policy and seeking to discover the extent and form of their engagement. Examining the subject through a case-study of playwriting policy in England since 1945, and paying particular attention to playwrights’ organisations and their history of self-directed activity, the book explores practitioners’ participation in cultural policy-making, encompassing both “invited” and “uninvited” interventions that also weave together policy activity and creative practice. It discusses why their involvement matters, and argues that arts practitioners and their organisations can be understood as participants in civil society whose policy activity contributes to the maintenance and enlargement of democratic practices and values.

This book provides a detailed account, and critique, of diverse approaches to the arts funding question, with a focus on the arm’s length arts councils that are the norm in the Anglo-American world. It builds on economic methods, the liberal-egalitarian framework of John Rawls, the communitarian opposition to the liberal framework, the capabilities approach to equality, and the cultural conservatism of Roger Scruton and others. In each case, the book considers the very practical aspect of public funding of the arts, namely, what are the implications for what ought to receive priority, and what parts of the cultural world are best left to their own, private sector, devices. It is not a work of “arts advocacy”. Rather, the book challenges assumptions, and sparks critical debate in the field.

This book traces the emergence and development of cultural and creative industries (CCI) policy in Europe in the last 25 years. Why and how CCI policy has been designed and implemented in Europe is a central question of the book, in particular with regards to negotiations and relations between policy actors across established policy domains. There are many policy publications and reports on best practice and general descriptions of how policy systems work, fewer describe policy development over time and from a comparative perspective. Drawing mainly on research in policy studies, this book aims to improve knowledge of the dynamics of cultural and creative activities as well as that of policymaking in a changing policy landscape and increasingly cross-disciplinary research frameworks.