A review of literature from the field of cultural policy revealed the need to engage with different data sources in order to understand AD as a cultural phenomenon embedded within the neoliberal policy paradigm. Literature in this area often refers to the way that the policy paradigm implements decisions, and how this affects the everyday context of practitioners. At times, this is
determined by how authors understand statehood, either ideologically or as a mechanism of power. As described by Clive Barnett: “ideology versus
power/knowledge, consciousness versus practices, Gramsci versus Foucault”
(Barnett, 1999, p. 381). According to Barnett, the focus on statehood means authors in this field have tended to analyse policy documents as either blunt instruments of hegemonic state power, or as an exercise in “disciplinary power”
through “cultural technologies” (Barnett, 1999).
This, Barnett argues, aligns organisations with “policy statements” and assumes a false linearity between “statements with actions and actions with actual
outcomes” (Barnett, 1999, p. 374). In assuming an un-deterred sequence of policy statements, actions, and outcomes, the field of cultural policy has often overlooked the nuance of decision-making. Furthermore, claims Barnett, it also assumes causality, without a critical analysis of where statements, actions, and outcomes might deviate from one another (Barnett, 1999, p. 374).
Caroline Agnew refers to this as “instrumental rationality”: the idea “that contemporary policy practices actually reflect an entrenched commitment to rational choice methods” (Agnew, 2013, p. 2). In this sense, cultural policy studies have tended to focus on the actions of government officials and refrain from questioning the role that individual citizens might have in shaping the policies that govern them (Barnett, 1999). The resultant field is methodologically attentive to analyses of state-produced policy documents or narratives, and this has led to the adoption of two main methodological approaches. The first tracks policy alongside the different ideological persuasions of successive
governments (Trotter, 2002; Hinves, n.d.). The second uses broad theoretical paradigms, and questions what it means to govern culture considering these (Lewis & Miller, 2003). These approaches limit the extent to which individual action is incorporated into the field. As quoted in Barnet, citizens become “a pre-formed self as the necessary target on which the machinery [of government]
works” (Barnett, 1999, p. 377; Donald, 1992, p. 93).
This has also influenced the way that cultural leadership is understood. Cultural leadership has been shown to be complex and multi-faceted, and contemporary turns in its study have sought to understand the ways in which artists can
become leaders in cultural settings (Price, 2016). The Artist as Leader
Research Report (Douglas & Freemantle, 2009) is a reference point for many
working in this area (for example: Price, 2016), and it is interesting to note how the potential working relationships between artists, cultural organisations, and the policy sphere has been depicted. The Artist as Leader Research Report expresses a
[…] need to encourage and develop methods for both artists and cultural organisations to engage with the policy context and to understand how and why opportunities to work in the public sphere are shaped by policy.
(Douglas & Freemantle, 2009, p. 8)
Here, the suggestion is that policy dictates the opportunities for artists, but not how artists operating in the policy sphere might impact on policy. There is the additional suggestion that artists must secure a seat at the table as leaders in their sector as a way of influencing policy (Hewitt, 2005; Douglas & Freemantle, 2009; Price, 2016).
Furthermore, in the report there is an underlying assumption that engagements between artists, cultural leaders, and policymakers (as those producing policy documents), must be focussed on consensus. Anne Douglas and Chris
Freemantle (2009, p. 8) identify a need to “share […] new forms of practice and related evaluation emerging between artists, organisations and public policy”.
“These could”, they state, “address the need for artists, organisational leaders and policy makers to work together” (Douglas & Freemantle, 2009, p. 8). This idea of liberal consensus formation as a way of initiating change has been heavily critiqued by writers such as Nancy Fraser (1990) and Mouffe (1999;
2000a; 2000b; 2005a; 2005b) who assert that the liberal agenda of consensus actively results in the suppression of voices that counter the dominant policy paradigm.
To inject a more nuanced understanding of the power relations that surround the practice of cultural policy, Barnett recommends the field is also attentive to the role of individuals.
[…] an adequate understanding of the relationships between culture and government should integrate a concern with the array of
everyday strategies through which practices of normalization, disciplinization, and government are deployed and subverted. The
‘agency’ of subjects is a critical consideration in examining the actual operations of governmental practices.
(Barnett, 1999, p. 15)
From this perspective, Barnett understands cultural policy as a way of
manipulating cultural outputs as spaces of governance. Understanding cultural outputs as an exercise in power relations, Barnett attempts to analyse how citizens might also use these cultural spaces to (re)gain power, and so cultural outputs become a site for government and individuals to exercise power in potentially contrasting ways. In this thesis, I agree that cultural policy studies should not overlook the role of the individual. However, I do so from the perspective of constructivist institutionalism.
Within constructivist institutionalism, individuals always hold the potential to re-configure the structural factors that contextualise them. This is due to its basis in the theory of political analysis, constructivism. In the late 1990s,
constructivism revisited and rethought the binary of structure and agency that had dominated conceptual explanations for “social and political phenomenon”
from 1945 until the early 1990s (Hay, 2002, p. 93). Broadly, structure, in this context, referred to the regularity in the “ordered nature of social and political relations”, manifest in the “political institutions, practices, routines, and
conventions” (Hay, 2002, p. 94). This assumes that “political behaviour tends to
be ordered”, and, generally in theories attentive to the way that society is ordered, “the greater the influence of structure”, states Hay, “the more
predictable political behaviour is presumed to be” (2002, p. 94). Agency was defined as “the ability or capacity of an actor to act consciously and […] attempt to realise his or her intentions” (Hay, 2002, p. 94). This definition tended to be interwoven with other concepts that rested on implied notions of “free will, choice or autonomy”, such as reflexivity, rationality, and motivation (Hay, 2002, pp. 94-95). Often, structure was understood as the prior force that determined the limitations of agency; individuals were passive recipients of the processes that surrounded them. Constructivism challenged the idea that structure and agency were oppositional frameworks for individual and institutionalised power, and re-formulated what the terms meant in the context of individual action.
Instead, structure and agency were theorised as lenses for certain behaviours, either structural or agential, and were proposed as frames of reference to understand the different factors at play within context and conduct (Hay, 2002).
Structural factors were those “beyond the immediate control of the actors directly involved; whereas agential factors emphasise[d] the conduct of the actors directly involved” (Hay, 2002, p. 95). Context is the blending of structural and agential factors that form the environment in which political actors can conduct their behaviour, and individual conduct always holds the potential – or power – to re-configure the context.
Agential factors are connected to an individual’s conduct, but are not what constitutes it. Instead, Colin Hay (2002, p. 128) suggests strategic action as a more apt phrase to describe conduct.This can be divided into “intuitive, routine or habitual strategies and practices” and “explicitly strategic action” (Hay, 2002,
p. 132). The former is “unarticulated and unchallenged”, states Hay, and is likened to “practical consciousness” in Anthony Giddens (1984).8 While both rely “upon perceptions of the strategic context and the configuration of
constraints and opportunities that it provides”, Hay’s description of explicitly strategic action accounts for agential strategies of change, and so the way that policy paradigms can shift. I expand on the conceptual application of change in relation to AD in Chapter 6.
On this basis, I decided to use artists, CG, and representatives of the policy sphere as my research participants. In doing so, I hoped to unpick the different layers of conduct and (re)contextualisation that wrapped around AD. In the rest of this chapter, I present how AD was understood by representatives of the policy paradigm, in literature, and by CG. In doing so, I hope to gain an
overview of how AD was understood within structural factors. ACE, therefore, behaved structurally, in that its direction was seemingly beyond CG’s and artists’ control, and CG represented the same for the artists in the study. In Chapter 4, I develop this understanding by incorporating the perspectives of individuals, namely representatives of the policy paradigm, artists, and CG staff.