telling the story of culture's value. ideal type analysis and integrated reporting (professor...

DRAFT ONLY

Professor Julian Meyrick, Flinders University, December, 2015

Telling the Story of Culture’s Value. Ideal Type Analysis & Integrated

Reporting (<IR>)

Professor Julian Meyrick, School of Humanities & Creative Arts,

Flinders University, December 2015

Abstract

Why has the outcry about a proposed National Programme for Excellence in the Arts been a carbon copy of the so-called Great Redistribution Debate – an angry conflict between smaller and larger cultural organizations – from thirty years ago? Either we have not solved a problem; or we don’t understand the problem; or there is a disconnection between how we talk about the problem and how we are tackling it. My aim in this paper is to encourage the reunion of economics and sociology in respect of culture’s value currently underway in the work of David Stark and Michael Hutter. I propose cultural reporting as an important domain it might address, not just descriptively, but analytically, as way of getting to the heart of what is happening when we engage in activities that confer value on other activities we call culture. Cultural reporting is a field of investigation no less integral to the problem of value as matters of definition and measurement. To ignore it, is not only to disavow a political real, but to overlook the bureaucratic logic by which culture is named, categorised, and processed. Using Weberian ideal-type analysis I briefly examine the distinctive mode of contemporary cultural provision, attempting to disinter it from the welter of contextual features in which it is embedded. Ideal-type is a simplifying tool, a heuristic whereby hidden attitudes and assumptions can be identified and compared. I argue there are features of modern bureaucratic systems that account for the significant failures seen in cultural provision, rather than economic rationalism being solely to blame. Economics is not the problem. Rather the problem is a bureaucratic logic to which economics attaches as a performative vehicle. I then turn to the International Integrated Reporting Framework, explaining the basic principles and concepts of a ‘capitals’ approach. <IR> has the capacity not only to streamline reporting, but to equip it with more appropriate narrative accounts, mitigating the financially reductive aspects of contemporary cultural provision. Part of this is a better alignment between qualitative and quantitative proofs of worth – stories and statistics. Another is acknowledging the singular aspects of the cultural sector and the requirement for policy directions that can cope with its varied, complex, sometimes contradictory needs. Without better reporting mechanisms, all the measures of value in the world won’t stop an NPEA-style crisis from happening again.

DRAFT ONLY


2

To cite this article: Meyrick, Julian. “Telling the Story of Culture’s Value. Ideal Type Analysis & Integrated Reporting”. Social Theory, Politics & the Arts 2015 Annual Conference. Keynote address

DRAFT ONLY


3

SLIDE 1

Consider the following quotes from The Sense of Dissonance, a book on the sociology of value:1

Faced with an avalanche of information from many and varied sources, we need to

select the information we will take into account in going about our business… The

more information is available to many simultaneously, the more advantage shifts to

those with superior means of interpretation. (Stark et al. 118)

By interpretation we refer to processes of categorization, as when [we] answer the

question ‘what is this a case of?’ but also processes of recategorisation such as

making a case for. Both work by association – of people to people, but also of

people to things, things to thing, things to ideas and so forth (Stark et al. 139)

These can be put in a more direct way:

To hell with facts. With need stories. Ken Kesey

Your tale, sir, would cure deafness. The Tempest

1 Stark, D., Beunza, Daniel, Girard, Monique, & Lukacs, Janos. (2011). The sense of dissonance: accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

DRAFT ONLY


4

SLIDE 2

Now consider what quantitative measures of culture will not tell us (usually):

Why measured benefit is of value

The nature of singular cultural phenomenon

How the measured benefit confounds with benefits generated by other activities,

persons or places

How the measured benefit contributes to the general value of an activity, person, or

place over time

The intellectual content of culture, its contribution to the social fund of knowledge

These issues require an assessment approach that takes into account the fact that the

relationship between culture as a category of experience and culture as a point frequency is

highly asymmetrical.

We think that measuring things is hard/expensive, and that telling stories is

easy/cheap.

Actually, it’s the opposite. A narrative capable of integrating not only quantitative

proofs of worth, but addressing the above issues is time-consuming and arduous to

achieve.

DRAFT ONLY


5

Introduction

It is a well-known fact among historians that ancient Greek and Roman authors do not

critically examine slavery. The central institution on which their economic, political and

everyday life depended did not constitute an object of analysis for those experiencing it first-

hand. So it is that in attending to strategic problems – of which the measurement of culture’s

value is a good example – we miss the forces that bring it into existence. As measure follows

measure into a policy black hole, questions arise not about the validity of this or that statistical

technique, the balance between quantitative and qualitative indicators, but about the wisdom

of what Michael Pusey calls a transcontextual commensurability of reference;2 what

measurement of culture thinks it is doing generally; and whether it is doing it; or doing it well

enough. Mathematics may be ontology, as Alain Badiou the neo-Platonist philosopher

maintains.3 But counting is a directly political affair. When a set of numbers is generated, it is

by someone, for someone, about something. Once in circulation, numbers have an active life;

are taken up, replicated, aggregated, compared. Measurement is always measurement to a

purpose. But that purpose is rarely found in the figures themselves. We have to hunt for it,

‘running the numbers’, in that telling phrase, subjecting them to allowable mathematical

transformations until they prompt action in the real world we see as their necessary

consequence.

The relationship between how we measure culture and how we report our calculations

is the focus of my work on the Laboratory Adelaide project.4 Parachuted in as an artist and a

theatre historian, I do not have long acquaintance with the value literature. In respect of

culture, however, it is not a homogenous field. Sharply different perspectives arraign

themselves across disciplines and within disciplines. A basic demarcation is between

economic value and non-economic ones that, for the sake of brevity, we can call cultural.

This distinction is the bedrock of David Throsby’s work,5 and can be seen in the writing of

Michael Hutter and David Stark.6 To the extent that the division leads to a disaggregation of

culture’s empirical features, it is useful. But it would be wrong to suppose relations between

the two modes of discourse are equal. In Throsby’s words “economics is everywhere” (2010:

2 Pusey, M. (1991). Economic rationalism in Canberra: A nation-building state changes its mind. New York: Cambridge University Press p.11. 3 Badiou, A. (2005). Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. 4 http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/laboratory-adelaide/ 5 Throsby, D. (2000). Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6 See Hutter, M., & Throsby, C. D. (2008). Beyond price: Value in culture, economics, and the arts (Murphy Institute studies in political economy). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/laboratory-adelaide/

DRAFT ONLY


6

2).7 The models, methods, and assumptions of economics furnishes Anthony Giddens’s post-

traditional society with a foundational language of value qua value. There are reasons for this,

which I will touch on. They do not involve a critique of neo-liberal politics. They involve a

critique of the modern functional state, and its system of rational administration that Max

Weber described in his essays on bureaucracy a century ago.

It is a common perception among artists that neo-liberalism is the root of all

difficulties in the assessment of their work, an equation of value with impact, and impact with

price or other monetized metric. Against this, stands something like an idealized

understanding of culture’s self-exampling, alluded to by the term ‘intrinsic value’. This exists

as both something that can never be quantified, and as something that demands quantification

– a perfect number that, if we could compute it, would conclusively demonstrate the value of

culture to the modern world. The aspiration may be unattainable, but it is real in its hypnotic

effects. It imparts to the measurement process a manic-depressive air. On the one hand,

numbers cannot possibly capture the multi-dimensional nature of culture which eludes

standardized indices; on the other, they are condemned to try, over and over, Sisyphus rolling

a numerical stone up a evidentiary hill only to see it roll down the other side and start

calculating from the bottom all over again.

At this point we can do one of two things: continue to accumulate data without

assurance it will a rationalizing effect; or we can look at the way that data is tabulated,

documented and decided upon. This is the political real of cultural measurement – cultural

reporting. It is not a stable world, but a messy, human, sometimes desperate cross-

communication of aims, aspirations and achievements. Reporting is a two-way street. It is

not only about communicating the value of culture to a wider community. It is about

communicating the values of a community to a cultural sector. It is a conversation,

sometimes one-sided, sometimes even-handed. What it is not is a neutral arena for presenting

objective proofs to support unambiguous decision-making.

I think this is now better understood. The shift from measuring value as if it were a

static property, to deploying multiple evaluative strategies, not all of which need to harmonise,

is emerging in the value literature; a shift from universalist models that are basically appraisals

of economic externalities, to multi-attributional approaches. There are more case studies,

something that I have personally argued for,8 and these make legible, to policy makers and the

7 Throsby, D. (2010). The Economics of Cultural Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 8 “Leading By Example: Ranga Shankara and the Status of Empirical Referents in Cultural Description”. Asia

Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, Vol. 6 (1) 2009: 397-407.

DRAFT ONLY


7

public what Stark calls “the puzzle of value” (142) that culture often involves. Behind this is a

larger movement to do with a rapprochement between economics and sociology. Stark

discusses this in The Dissonance of Value, as do Sjoerd Beugelsdijk and Robbert Maseland in

Culture and Economics. I will not explore either turn here, but register my support for their

implications. Beugelsdijk and Maseland comment:

The most important insight… is that the history of the concept of culture and the

history of economics are intertwined… It was only at the beginning of the twentieth

century that the interrelated evolution of the concept of culture….and the establishment

of the boundaries between economics, sociology, history and anthropology, caused

culture to disappear from economic thought.9

Patronage vs. Subsidy

While the marriage between economics and sociology patches itself up in something like, I

hope, a ‘new old institutional’ approach, there are questions to put to a field that draws on

both disciplines in a sometimes opportunistic way. A place to start is to ask why measurement

of culture exists at all. While the fact of culture and the concept of value are as old as history,

their yoking together in measurement scales, a mapping from an empirical to a numerical

structure, each scale associated with a set of assumptions about the qualitative relations

obtaining among empirical objects, is particular to the modern world.10 Justin MacDonnell in

his book on Australian cultural policy Arts Minister?, makes a distinction between cultural

patronage and cultural subsidy.11 It is also a theme in Milton Cummings and Richard Katz’s

The Patron State.12 The difference is crucial. In the patronage system, experience of culture and

support for it exist within the same order of civil attention, the same encounter. What the

patron pays for, the patron gets. This getting can be delegated or deferred; but not displaced.

Historically, it interesting to note the pressure patrons were put under to experience

the culture financially beholden to them. In ancient Greek, two slaves with a red dyed rope

would run through the crowd to hurry people into the theatre; those found with dye on their

togas would be fined. In Rome, Julius Ceasar was forced to attend his own Games, but turned

9 Beugelsdijk, S., & Maseland, Robbert Karel Jozef. (2013). Culture in Economics: History, methodological reflections and contemporary applications. Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press. p.59. 10 See Eran Tal “Old and New Problems in Philosophy of Measurement”. Philosophy Compass 8/12 2013 11 Justin Macdonnell.(1992), Arts, Minister? : Government Policy and the Arts. Sydney: Currency Press. p.1 12 Cummings, Milton C Jr, & Richard S Katz eds. The Patron State. Oxford University Press. New York, Oxford. 1987.

DRAFT ONLY


8

his chair backwards, so he could continue administrative work. The introduction of

perspective scenery into European theatre in the sixteenth century, and the adaptation of

Vitruvian architectural motifs, particularly the scaenea frons – what is now the proscenium arch –

was based on privileging the view of the patron who was given the best seat in the auditorium

and expected to occupy it. Assessment of value was a matter of subjective validation, or

conferral. However perfunctory, inadequate or inebriated individual patrons might be, their

response was integral to any conception of value whatsoever.

Post-traditional societies have intercalated a distance between the experience of culture

and its support, such that a third party is the beneficiary of an encounter between a first and a

second. This distance creates a need for value measurement, a technical field Weber sees as

entailing specialized knowledge and staff. He observes there is no reduction in this in

different economic formations. What he calls monocratic bureaucratic administration (MBAs)

is central to modern states regardless of whether they are government controlled or market

driven. The Chinese Communist Party and General Motors are examples of the same kind of

expert knowledge that takes it cue not from political outlook but intellectual logic. The logic is

administrative, and in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, parts I and III, translated by first Talcott

Parsons and later C Wright Mills, Weber goes into detail about the nature, motives, methods of

the bureaucratic approach to what he calls imperative coordination.13

Weber’s writings on bureaucracy are economically, historically and anthropologically

informed. They are lucid, accessible and daring, concerned to highlight details where these

contribute to the task of comparison he sees as social science’s main job. His chief analytical

device is the ideal type, which he uses as a simplifying instrument around which to arraign

empirical examples for closer study. In this way he is able to unite the scientistic leanings of

French positivism with the German historicist tradition in an approach he called vershen

sociology. Its main attraction is its ability to encompass abstract concepts on the one hand

and experience structures on the other – handy for culture. To read Weber is to go on a

roller-coaster ride between these two vistas.

Parsons, the man responsible for introducing Weber to English-speaking readers, sees

the methodology of the ideal type as dividing human behaviour into two: rational and

irrational. He criticizes Weber for his unsystematic approach to this division, which he argues

is lacking in detail. At this time Parsons was preoccupied with his own elaborate theories of

13 In what follows I draw on The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, translated and edited by Talcott Parsons (1947, Free Press of Glencoe, London) and From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology translated and edited by H H Gerth and C Wright Mills (1948, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London). The difference lies in the fact that Parsons focuses on Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Part 1, while Gerth and Wright Milles focus on Part III. Both parts contain analysis of bureaucratic power, but in slightly different forms.

DRAFT ONLY


9

social action, so we should take the first criticism with a pinch of salt. The formally empty

quality of Weber’s notion of administrative rationality, however, is a misreading. Weber is

concerned not with rationality in the singular but with rational-ities, with plural logics all of

which satisfy the criteria of being administratively actionable. His case studies of different

bureaucracies, of which Mandarin China is perhaps the most exotic and suggestive, are

designed to highlight the variety of logics that can be found historically or socially imagined.14

He puts MBA alongside two other types of power, the charismatic and the traditional.

A focus is the struggle between bureaucratic, charismatic and traditional behaviour, and the

hybrid political structures this gives rise to. While all bureaucracies behave in a rational

manner, their view of what constitutes rationality varies considerably. Administrative logics

are not superficial things, but world-disclosing frameworks that determine value qua value.

Weber’s fundamental categories of bureaucratic authority15

1. Continuous organisation of official functions bound by rules

2. A specified sphere of competence

3. The organisation of offices follows the principle of hierarchy. Each lower

office under the control and supervision of a higher one

4. The rules that regulate the conduct of an office may be technical rules or

norms.

5. Members of the administrative staff are separated from ownership of the

means of production or administration

6. Absence of appropriation of official positions by incumbents

7. Administrative acts, decisions and rules are formulated and recorded in

writing, even in cases where oral discussion is the rule

8. Legal authority can be exercised in a wide variety of different forms

14

My reading of Parsons’ view is drawn from his introduction, “Weber’s Methodology of Social Science”

(Parsons pp.8-29), particularly his comments on ‘the problem of rationality’ (pp.15-17.) I am prepared to admit that in Weber’s description of the modern capitalist state he fits a supremely ‘rational’ fit between this economic formation and bureaucratic power. However, in the historical case studies provided in Gerth and Wright Mills we find a broader understanding of rationality; see especially “The Chinese Literati” (Gerth and Wright Mills pp.416-444). It may be that Weber was in two minds about the problem. 15 Parsons pp.330-333. These traits are elaborated further in the section “Legal Authority with a Bureaucratic Administrative Staff” (pp.329-341), which may be contrasted, as per Weber’s intention, with the sections “Traditional Authority” (pp.341-358) and “Charismatic Authority” (pp.358-363). In Gerth and Wright Mills, Weber deals with bureaucratic power in a sketchier way but gives more historical examples (pp.196-244).

DRAFT ONLY


10

What are the characteristics of bureaucracy in post-traditional society as these append culture?

If we deploy ideal-type it is to position measurement of value as an activity to be analysed

rather than a power to be served. This means a degree of skepticism about benign views of

governmentality and policy-making. It means developing a reflexive understanding of the

administrative logic underscoring our own bureaucratic provision mechanisms.

Bureaucratic power in the post-traditional society. Five provocations

1. No positive vision of ultimate ends. Defined by what Parsons calls ‘atomic

individualism’. ‘Values’ divorced from ‘techniques’. Treats means as ends eg. a

unimodal concern with efficiency. Formalism. A common observation about

bureaucracy.16

2. Prosecutes an infinite extension of relations of equivalence. ‘Nothing sacred’.

A point made by Baudrillard in an apocalyptic post-modern way. It is not necessary to

countenance this style of philosophizing to agree the pertinence of this central insight, however,

which is empirically observable.17

3. Purges words of their critical origins for use in functional discourse. This is the

issue I address in the rest of the paper.18

4. Hyper-focused on category making. Elaborates ever-more specialized

knowledge domains, even where the empirical fields these relate to overlap and

interpenetrate. Has increasing difficulty with ‘mixed’ situations. A related issue to

do with how categories of policy capture are constructed and how in turn these determine not

only what evidence of value is presented, but what is considered evidence at all.

5. Idealises change. Policy = policy change. As for Mandarin China, the ideal was

the absence of change, so for the post-traditional society constant change is the

ideal. I am still grappling with this one, and am not sure how to characterize it. It represents

a valorisation of ‘the new’ certainly, but perhaps something more?

16 See Parsons pp.340-1. 17 See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/ last accessed 29/12/15. 18 My concern with the role of ‘functional language’ in cultural policy processes is connected to my work as a theatre historian looking at the relationship between Australian theatre companies and the government in the post-1945. For a sample of my approach see “The Logic of Culture: Australian Theatre and the Empty Signifier”. Australasian Drama Studies, 64, April 2014: 133-154.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

DRAFT ONLY


11

These five characteristics are both spiritual ideals and management principles. One of

Weber’s insights is that bureaucracy is not a mechanical system but is concerned, like all types

of power, with legitimizing its own use of it. That this is expressed in administrative

regulations does not mean they are spurious. Weber talks about the tension between

substantive and formalistic rationality. It is in the gap between what bureaucrats pursue by

way of real world outcomes and what they must generate by way of countable outputs that my

five characteristics come into play. As abstract tendencies they have no moral valency.

Applied as part of a concrete agenda it is a different matter.

There is no time to discuss this analysis of bureaucracy further. It is ideal-type, which

means what we find in the field is always a deviation or a blend. But I follow Weber in

identifying themes within certain types of power. The problem is not how to banish these, but

how to mitigate them. In the case of culture, the challenge is to penetrate the lie of

impersonality bureaucratic provision promulgates and reintegrate the experience of culture

with the mechanisms of its support. It is central to my argument that this is not well

understood at the moment, that measurement is not trying to traverse this regulatory distance,

but is putting its techniques forwards in lieu of the subjective validation key to value conferral

in the past (ie. as ‘objective’ proof). Here, economists must be careful. In 1955, J L Austin

coined the term ‘performative’ to describe the action-like nature of some discursive forms.

Economics may believe that it offers a disinterested analysis of resource allocation. But its

illocutionary coordinates – what in the theatre we would call its subtext – may be quite

different. A good marriage with post-traditional bureaucratic logic, it ends up its performative

vehicle. Economists get the blame. But it is the bureaucratic form of power using the

discipline as a register of political coercion that does the damage.19

Given that it is unlikely modern states will abandon the bureaucratic provision of

culture, what does this mean for measurement? Is it an empty rite? Or is there a way measure

can reposition itself on the horizon of experience to better represent culture’s value in the

distanced support processes of post-traditional society? I think there is. The key lies not in

changing the way we measure culture, but in changing the way we talk about it.

19 For the application of JL Austin’s How to Do Things with Words to cultural policy, see my article “Suiting the Action to the Word: the Changing Rhetoric of Australian Cultural Policy”. Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management. 10/1 2013. (http://apjacm.arts.unimelb.edu.au/article/view/128).

http://apjacm.arts.unimelb.edu.au/article/view/128

DRAFT ONLY


12

Functional Language vs. Critical Language

I will now concentrate on my third provocation, that bureaucratic provision purges words of

their critical origins for use in functional discourse. Let us look at a diagram drawn up by the

South Australian Creative Communities Network for the Local Government Association in

2012. I choose it because it is a sort that often appears in the value literature.20

“Cultural Indicators: Measuring Impact on Culture” Information Paper Prepared for the Local

Government Authority, South Australia, by the Creative Communities Network, July 201221

I want to focus on the five words in the purple bubbles that over-determine the rest of the

diagram.

20 This unpublished document has now been superseded, but remains a good example of the language problems

I highlight. I am grateful to Matthew Ives, Cultural Development Coordinator at the City of Unley, and Margaret Edgecombe, Unit Manager, Community Cultural Development, at the City of Marion, for their tolerance of my use of the excerpted table (p.25). 21 https://www.lga.sa.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/Cultural_Indicators.pdf last accessed 29/12/15.

https://www.lga.sa.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/Cultural_Indicators.pdf

DRAFT ONLY


13

These five words have different semantic orbits. Three are nouns (participation, creativity,

sustainability), one an adjective (connectedness) and one a claim for the existence of moral

universals (human values). Their etymological histories are different – as a trip to the

dictionary shows – as is their traffic of use, in Erving Goffman’s phrase. Normally we use

such words to refer to things, when we are trying to qualify things, or arguing for a particular

state of affairs. Here things are referred to words, and the trick of it relies on the reader being

able to entertain a host of imagined empirical scenarios to invest the table with sense. There is

a context of origins, then, but also a context of reception. What I am saying is that there are

habits of expression here that do not clarify the objects, ideas and relations we want to

understand. Foremost among them is the taking of words commonly used to describe the

properties of a system and employing them to describe its purpose. The first approach

deploys words is a critical way, the second in a functional way. Systems do have functions, of

course, and there are words we use to refer to these functions. But none of these five words

is regularly used in this way. Participation is an activity, creativity a quality, connectedness and

sustainability states of affairs, and human values an ethical theory. Functional use at best

truncates their meanings. At worst, it skims their verbal surface for rhetorical effect. This

charge is made by critics of so-called ‘management-speak’, of whom Don Watson is perhaps

the best known.22 I am concerned with the relationship between words and their application in

the way we report on culture. The thrust of my argument is that some so-called operators of

capture have a critical edge that is blunted, if not imperiled, when used in a functional way.

In bureaucratic provision, functional language structures policy categories, the means

by which instances of a like activity are grouped together, for the purposes of evaluation.

Measurement ideas like benchmarking, value for money, key performance indicators, ranking,

all rely on the first step of category construction, a step in which language is crucial to the

identification of things that will end up measured. The history of Australian cultural policy is

the history of disputed category construction: between amateur and professional artists;

between major and smaller cultural organisations; between Australian and non-Australian art.

22 Watson, D. (2004). Watson's dictionary of weasel words, contemporary clichés, cant & management jargon. Milsons Point, N.S.W.: Knopf.

DRAFT ONLY


14

What is included or excluded in categories determines how the policy process unfolds

thereafter, though the functional use of terms does nothing to illuminate this political reality.23

A major distinction between functional approaches to culture and critical ones lies in

their different understanding of time and its relationship to value. In neo-classical economics,

time is expressed in a formal algorithm of discounted flow, working back to a no-discount

time-zero, which is the present. What happens now is valued more than what happens later.

Emergent, delayed, ambiguous, dynamic or indeterminate value streams, of the kind culture

often involves, are hard to express in functional ways. They are hard to manage by norm and

rule, but stand in the critical corner, as sets of singular features. There are ways of blending

the two orders of understandings but their differences should not be under-estimated. Their

intentions are quite different though both use the same words. Most of us traverse the

boundary between them without being aware of it, or the consequences.

Functional language Critical language

Criteria based

Concerned with the observation

of regularities

Explanatory

Commensurably minded

Extensive sense of value

Instances based

Concerned with the elucidation of

singularities

Edifying

Specifically minded

Intensive sense of value

Functional approaches assume culture can be planned and actioned. They develop causal

models. Critical approaches are edifying rather than explanatory. They are less concerned

with obtaining outcomes than informing responses. Their approach to value is intensive

rather than extensive. Their focus is qualitative and specific rather than quantitative and

universal.

The job of narrative in cultural reporting is thus more than merely illustrative. Using

key terms in a functional way creates a need to reunite them with a meaningful context to

inform and discipline the policy process. Awareness of this has been creeping in at both a

government level and academic scholarship by way of enhanced qualitative description, set

23 This history is given in detail by Justin Macdonnell, and in useful overview by Deborah Stevenson (2000) Art and Organisation, U of Qld Press, St Lucia, Qld, and Lisanne Gibson (2001) Uses of Art: Constructing Australian Identities. U of Qld Press in association with the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, Griffith University. St Lucia, Qld.

DRAFT ONLY


15

alongside quantitative proofs of worth. ‘Embedded quotes’ is how this was described to me

by one economist. This misses the need not only to return meaning to particular words, but

to keep the rhetorical economy healthy. Again, the history of Australian cultural policy often

seems a Lazy Susan of terms – excellence, innovation, accessibility, vibrancy – which appear

and reappear, following a downward spiral of useful application. This leads to several

important deleterious consequences:

Consequences of Functional Obfuscation of Critical Language

1. Everybody has a different understanding of key terms. There is a sense of

redundancy, repetition and opacity in the policy process. It is not ‘ideas thick’. It

is ‘context light’.

2. Strategic planning is interpretively weak in terms of Stark’s “association of people

to people, people to things, things to things, things to ideas”. While it is not true

to say that one strategic plan is as good as another, the differences between them

are probably exaggerated. This adds to the sense of repetition.

3. There are dual orders of understanding each occupying the same language

structures. These orders are suspicious of each other’s motives, methods, aims

and effectiveness. This can be represented as an abrasion between ‘expert’

opinion and ‘ordinary’ opinion. But in fact it’s an abrasion between two types of

expert opinion, one functional, one critical.

4. Operational planning, which is ‘context specific’ is at a premium in restoring

interpretive force to the policy environment.

5. Measurement of value is caught in the cross-fire between functional and critical

language use; and between different adherents to these expert knowledges.

6. It is not a matter of defining terms. What is at stake are orders of understanding

that subsume definitions rather than being anchored by them. Clarity arises out

of good faith dialogue, meta-cognition (self-awareness) and better use of

language.

DRAFT ONLY


16

Integrated Reporting (<IR>) and the Importance of Narrative

To conclude with some brief remarks on Integrated Reporting (<IR>), an approach that aims

to confer value on assets whose existence lies beyond the immediately financial. Its impetus

comes from environmental economics, which faces the problem of pricing natural assets,

particularly non-renewables; and from the on-going technology boom, much of whose value

lies in intellectual property. Its methods include a potentially sophisticated use of narrative.

In 2013, an Integrated Reporting Framework was published by the International

Integrated Reporting Council and made publically available to improve the quality of

information in the corporate reporting process, promote a more cohesive approach to the

measurement of value over time, and widen the notion of accountability. It is a 37-page

document broken into four sections that anticipates it will become the reporting norm.24

Because it specifies five sources of value creation – financial, manufactured, intellectual,

human, and social – it is sometimes called ‘the capitals approach’.25 I identify three themes in

the Framework in respect of the connected reporting it wants to achieve. First, is a concern

with different time horizons. The word ‘time’ appears on 45 occasions in the guidelines, the

concept of timeframe a further 40. Second, a determination to go beyond financial audit and

offer a picture of dynamic value generation between the capitals. Third, a desire to recognize

the needs of all stakeholders in a value situation, not just those of financial investors. These

three themes, and the implied social and ethical values underpinning them, are captured in

Integrated Reporting’s fundamental concepts:

24 http://integratedreporting.org/resource/international-ir-framework/ last accessed 29/12/15. 25 For more detail on the definition and application of the concept of ‘capital’ within <IR> see http://integratedreporting.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/IR-Background-Paper-Capitals.pdf last accessed 29/12/15.

http://integratedreporting.org/resource/international-ir-framework/

http://integratedreporting.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/IR-Background-Paper-Capitals.pdf

DRAFT ONLY


17

An integrated report aims to provide insight about the resources and relationships used

and affected by an organization, collectively referred to as “the capitals”. It seeks to

explain how the organization interacts with the external environment and the capitals

to create value over the short, medium and long terms. The ability of an organization

to create value for itself enables financial returns to the providers of financial capital.

This is interrelated with the value the organization creates for stakeholders and society

at large through a wide range of activities, interactions and relationships. (Executive

Summary)

Integrated Reporting has much to offer cultural reporting. A useful methodological concern

is getting the right balance between quantitative and qualitative indicators. It makes a clear

distinction between outputs and outcomes, and pushes the efficacy of ‘the three Cs’ in

reporting– conciseness, completeness and comparability. The role of narrative is broached

though not explored. There is no analysis of language of the sort I have presented, but there

is awareness of the need to “avoid generic disclosures, often referred to as ‘boilerplate’” (3.38)

and provide “narrative flow that is logical given the particular circumstances of the

organization” (4.13).

Integrated Reporting is not a magic bullet solution to culture’s value. It is an

opportunity to pursue a better conversation around its intractable problems than some others

currently on offer. The Framework is couched in functional language. But it is dialogic and

self-aware, attuned to longitudinal value, society-wide impacts and ethical considerations. It

understands the role of reporting is to create trust as well as count indicators, thus minimizing

the disutility associated with performance paradox and cognitive bias. It is a leadership, rather

than a management, tool.

If we are to achieve a degree of poise between economic and cultural value; if we are

to action in a meaningful way the conception of cultural capital David Throsby has

consistently argued for, then a better relationship between words and numbers is key. In a

world of information surplus, the axis of measurement shifts from the generation of data to its

interpretation. Integrated Reporting is an important avenue for pursuing this, and Laboratory

Adelaide is committed to exploring its potential for culture.

Laboratory Adelaide is a research project that sits across the Humanities and social

sciences. I am perhaps not the best economist the English university system has produced.

But I have spent my life telling stories and I know a great deal about how they work. Here is

an interesting fact: human beings have a very poor sense of time. The two parts of our

neurophysiology we rely on to process past events and foresee future ones – our semantic and

DRAFT ONLY


18

our episodic memories – require considerable training and use. Stories are not only about

communicating content. They are about calibrating our sense of time.26 It could be argued

that the dominance of economic value over cultural value gives rise to short-termism. I

suspect it is the other way round. It is because our sense of time is so bad that economic

conceptions of present value preponderate. A number is a descriptive contraction.

Quantitative measure is a minimal recognition of qualitative phenomena, a mark that it exists.

To access its experiential features requires ex post facto narrativisation. Without this, we are

explaining things without understanding them, developing a value approach akin to a soup

dish – wide but shallow.

To show how better narrative can contribute to Integrated Reporting, I will explain

one concept: narrative supervenience. This is an idea that appears in Narrative and History by

Alun Munslow27 who explains how, when we want to represent temporal events we must

order their relations in a meaningful ontological way such that these have ‘modal force’. A

play; Australian drama; the history of theatre: each of these objects relies on the others.

Instance comes from below, order from above. To explain a play, we must explain an

industry, and also an art form. These levels, both analytical and real-world, exist in ways that

are interdependent but not interchangeable. In this way, the narratives we use differ from the

numbers we use. As we accumulate numbers, we can aggregate them. As we accumulate

stories we face not aggregation but a completely different kind of social fact. 28

26 For discussion of the role of time in story-telling, see ‘How Drama Works’ in my The Retreat of Our National Drama. Sydney, Currency Press Platform Paper No.39, 2014, pp.52-61; and of memory, “An Unfinished Conversation. Play Texts, Digital Projection, and Dramaturgy” with Katie Cavanagh. Special issue Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (forthcoming). 27 Munslow, A. Narrative and History. (2007). Palgrave Macmillan; Basingstoke, UK, and New York. See especially pp.83-84. 28 Munslow puts it this way, “Narrative supervenience, as a way of explaining the relationship between the reality of the past world and the history we devise to represent it, is as cognitive as any statement of justified belief or any analytical conclusion. As the philosopher Lewis Mink famously observed over thirty year ago, historians would be ill advised to relegate narrative to the level of ‘a merely literary grace’ for… ‘narrative is a primary cognitive instrument’” (83).

DRAFT ONLY


19

Narrative Supervenience

Theatre

|

Australian drama

|

A play

People move easily between different narrative levels when explaining their experience

of culture, and the value of a particular activity is intelligible only by reference to all of them.

Some are, obviously, immanent concepts. You can’t buy them in shop or find them in the

street. They exist as social imaginaries, but they have considerable interpellative force. Some

are objects, things you can measure. But the measurement is useful only to the extent that it

connects with the other levels that give indicators meaning. Increased data leads us astray if

we think we are learning more about something when in fact we are only adding to one aspect

of it we know already.

These narrative levels extend into the future too, since immanent concepts are

recursive and recruit empirical referents to their semantic orbits. When I say ‘Australian

drama’, I am referring not just to a finite list of achievement, but a potential, an imaginative

trajectory connecting what has happened so far, to what could happen next. If immanent

concepts didn’t work in this way, the only art we would ever see is the art we like right now.

It is this capacity of narrative to disaggregate an object’s features and reintegrate them in a

polymodal way that makes it such an important assessment tool. In Laboratory Adelaide we

talk about ‘parables of value’ rather than ‘paradigms of value’, stories that communicate what

Integrated Reporting calls “the essence of the matter” (3.51). It very hard to do. I wonder if

the last 30 years had been spent perfecting our descriptive techniques as well as our

quantitative measures the political landscape for cultural issues might be quite different.

The functional provision of culture is one in which the experience of culture is

necessarily displaced. This remove is particularly haunting for a theatre director. At the start I

showed a list of my shows – shows you did not see and will never see.29 All that exists of

29 2015 Dead Centre/Sea Wall by Tom Holloway & Simon Stephens. Red Stitch Theatre, Melbourne, Darwin and Brisbane Festivals, Old Fitz, Sydney. 2014 Neighbourhood Watch by Lally Katz. State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide Festival Centre. 2013 Hinterland by Jane Bodie. National School of Drama Art, Sydney. 2012 Tribes by Nina Raine. Melbourne Theatre Company, Sumner Theatre. 2011 Whiteley’s Incredible Blue by Barry Dickins. fortyfive downstairs theatre, Melbourne International Festival. The Breath of Life by David Hare. Tasmanian Theatre Company. 2010 Angela’s Kitchen by Paul Kapsis & Julian Meyrick. Griffin Theatre Company, Sydney. Do Not Go Gentle by Patricia Cornelius. fortyfive downstairs theatre, Melbourne. Lady Grey by Will Eno.

DRAFT ONLY


20

them now is the value they created. All value is destined to become a series of external effects.

But these effects are made meaningful by a sine wave of human feeling that keeps them

moving forwards through time, like ripples on a pond. ‘I am a part of all that I have met,’

wrote Lord Tennyson, summing up the enduring mystery of the relationship between intrinsic

and extrinsic value.

Value researchers face a choice. We can continue to pour hundreds of thousands of

dollars into quantitative measures in the unsteady hope of instructing so-called ‘evidence-

based policy making’ – evidence the last federal arts minister, at least, had little difficulty

setting aside. Or we can reorient to a new pragmatics, and look at the whole way culture is

framed, reported and decided upon. We can hack back into context, in the words of one

frustrated artistic colleague, who complained that in our system of functional provision, ‘the

main item on the agenda is never on the agenda.’

And if this new reporting clarity creates a degree of trouble for bureaucratic rules and

norms, then so be it. In Weber’s words, “freedom and democracy are only possible where the

resolute will of a nation not to allow itself to be ruled like sheep is permanently alive.”30

Inscription at the Griffin Theatre & Ray Lawler Studio. 2009 The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. Melbourne Theatre Company, Victorian Arts Centre. 2008 The Vertical Hour by David Hare. Sydney Theatre Company, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House. Tom Pain by Will Eno. Street Theatre, Canberra. 30 Quoted Gerth and Wright Mills p.71