The Structure of Cultural Policy

Clive Gray

University of Warwick, UK

C.J.Gray@ Warwick.ac.uk

Centre for Cultural Policy Studies,

Millburn House,

University of Warwick,

Coventry CV4 7HS

United Kingdom

Clive Gray has published widely on theory and methods in cultural policy, the state and cultural policy, and the politics of the museums sector. He is currently undertaking research on structure and agency in the museums and galleries sector in England.

Abstract

This paper identifies the policy setting within which cultural policy operates. It identifies a range of behavioural and structural features that can be used to identify the key constraints on, and opportunities for, action that are associated with the cultural policy field. It divides these features between systemic principles (such as ideologies and rationalities), overarching policy structures (such as policy priorities and policy instruments), and sectoral policy specifics (such as organisational policy content and policy actors). The paper provides, in consequence, a framework that can be used for the analysis of cultural policy in both the public, voluntary, community and private sectors.

The approach that is adopted is developed from the cultural policy and public policy literatures and allows for the creative construction of a theoretically and empirically derived framework for the analysis of cultural policy. The structure of the framework is derived from a social realist ontological position and is thus not prescriptive of how analysis should be undertaken. By focusing on the relationship between structural and agential factors in policy analysis it is anticipated that the framework should allow analysts from a diverse range of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to locate their research endeavours within a common setting. This should also allow for the development of a more effective comparison of research approaches - and their strengths and weaknesses – than is currently available. It should also allow for the potential to develop effective policy learning in so far as it should allow for the identification of common themes, issues and approaches within cultural policy research as a whole. Finally, it should allow for the identification of under-researched issues within cultural policy, and for the development of future research agendas.

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Keywords: Structure and Agency; Policy structures; Politics

Word Count: 8,637

Introduction1

The focus of this paper is on the internal policy decisions that are made for the creation of cultural policies within individual cultural organisations. While the impact on these on the policies that are being pursued by a range of other, external, policy actors from central to local governments, to external funding agencies, to a range of community and voluntary organisations are seen as being significant in their own right, they are not the central topic of concern. Thus, precisely why government departments made the individual decisions that they did over topics ranging from cultural regeneration strategies, culture as a tool for social inclusion, or the promotion of cultural excellence is not necessarily the central issue: instead, the focus is on how staff within the organisations that are affected by these decisions manage them in the context of their own decision and policy-making strategies2. This discussion and analysis is framed within the context of the general argument within the social sciences about the interplay between structure and agency.

A common argument within this context concerns the relative significance of structure and agency for the functioning of individual and organisational decision processes, with policy actors being either, like Macbeth, ‘cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in’ by a set of relatively invariant structural constraints, or capable of claiming that ‘we are not a government poodle’ (West & Smith, 2005), able, instead, to make their own independent choices through the exercise of political agency. The extent to which such positions are either tenable or relevant to an understanding of structure and agency in the context of social action rather depends upon the underlying ontological, epistemological, theoretical and methodological positions that analysts assume (Gray, 2010). If a realist ontological position is adopted, where agency and structure are seen as continuously intertwined (Archer, 1988, 1995; 2003; Elder-Vass, 2010), with each being recognised as central to an effective analysis of policy activity, then the relative importance of differing structural and agential factors in any given individual case can only be determined empirically and is not amenable to definitional fiat. Of necessity such empirical analysis must incorporate both structure and agency to be effective, which raises questions about the appropriateness of differing methodological means for making sense of their interplay.

1 This paper is not intended to be taken as being a definitive exploration of the subject that it discusses, not least as it is part of a work-in-progress study of structure and agency in the museums and galleries sector in England. Any comments and, particularly, any suggestions on how to improve the content and the analysis that is contained in the paper will be gratefully received. All of the inevitable failings that go with conference papers are my responsibility.2 Clearly the internal decision processes of cultural departments at the central government level can equally be analysed through the mechanisms that are developed in this paper: the approach developed is a general rather than an institutionally-specific one. A shift in focus to the level of the decisions being made within a government department instead of at the level of an individual culture-producing organisation would simply shift the focus of the analysis to that of the central government department, with consequent changes in the location of variables that affect the choices that are made within it.

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Structure, Agency and Policies

The basic starting-point for analysis is that policies arise from a combination of exogenous and endogenous factors. The exogenous factors may range from the policies that are adopted by sponsoring or funding bodies that are institutionally separate from the individual organisations that are the focus of concern but which are affected by these policies, to the ideologies that underlie policy choice, to the consequences of actions that have been undertaken in other policy sectors altogether. The endogenous factors are seen as deriving from the choices that are made by actors internal to the specific policy sector that is concerned, which can be influenced by, amongst many other things, organisational strategies, professional standards3 and the patterns of accountability that exist within these sectors. Overall policy is seen as being a response to the differing pressures that are generated from each set of factors, with this response being mediated by the conflicts and agreements that policy actors are involved with, both internally and externally. The conditions of uncertainty that exist in all of these serve to make predictions about the likely outcome of any given case extremely difficult to make with any credibility – but not impossible.

If both sets of factors – exogenous and endogenous - are important for understanding the precise detail of cultural policies then the question of how to make sense of what may otherwise appear to be a set of disaggregated component policy parts becomes analytically important. Archer (1995), from a position of analytical dualism, argues that, in effect, it is possible to start from a focus on either structure or agency as being the dependent or independent variable in question, with the choice of either being dependent upon the specific questions that the investigator wishes to analyse. The classic view from Marx (1973, 146) that ‘men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted’, for example, takes a structural starting point, requiring an identification of the surrounding ‘circumstances’ before sense can be made of the choices that are arrived at. This may be seen clearly in rational choice approaches to analysis where the identification of the underlying value preferences that individuals hold serve to structure the choices that are, and can be, then made4 (Hindmoor, 2006). More voluntaristic approaches, such as those deriving from a phenomenological ontology, would tend to focus on how actors make sense of these constraints in the first instance before investigating how they are then manipulated or managed by these knowing actors. Versions of interpretive analysis that concentrate on the role of individual actors in the creation of meaning through their manipulation of ideas and their reliance on personal experience demonstrate this approach to analysis: Newman, 2011, for example, argues that an analysis of individual responses to museum displays casts doubt on the efficacy of the top-down structural requirements of management tools to capture the actual cultural impacts that visiting museums and galleries may give rise to, and if these impacts are to be effectively understood then an investigation of the personal responses of actors to the contexts within which they are located is required and, indeed, assumes primacy in an investigation of visiting effects5.

A literature review of the range of variables that exist, however, is unlikely to do more than descriptively list the potential effects that they may have on policy. More helpful, it is argued, could be the identification of a framework within which the roles of a host of policy variables could be

3 And, indeed, by a general sense of ‘professionalism’ that is distinct from these standards. My thanks go to Andrew Newman for this distinction.4 Given the emphasis within rational choice on methodological individualism this may seem to be a rather perverse claim but, as critics have argued (see Green & Shapiro, 1994; Hay, 2004), if the underlying assumptions of rational choice are followed through then individuals can only make some choices out of the multitudes that potentially confront them, and those that are made are determined by the underlying value preferences that they hold. At the very least there are some methodological inconsistencies here. 5 Archer (1995, 2-12) discusses the problems and limitations of upwards and downwards conflation – an emphasis on individual or structural features – in the context of structure and agency issues.

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located, with their inter-relationships and causal connections, and their individually distinct consequences for cultural policies being integrated into an analytical whole. Policy is inherently messy involving, as it does, multiple organisations, actors, ideas, practices, arguments, discourses, paradigms, jurisdictions and justifications, with all of these having both independent and interactive effects. Rather than attempting to make claims about the relevant significance of any particular sets of factors for cultural policies at this stage it could also be argued that the development of features of policy that have been developed within the larger public policy field may be more helpful as these are concerned with policy as policy, rather than with the specificities of individual policy sectors. As such there is a certain generality in the policy features that could be included but this may be helpful in emphasising the fact that cultural policy does not occur in conditions of splendid isolation from what is occurring elsewhere within societies6. Of course, the identification of these public policy-based features are themselves based upon particular emphases that have been placed upon analysis in the past and,as such, they have generally been established on the basis of particular ontological and theoretical presuppositions, where assumptions about importance in practice have been used to give them importance in analysis7. Be this as it may, however, an awareness of particular sets of variables can serve to focus attention on what are commonly perceived as being the prime motivating forces behind policy choice that are independent of the peculiarities of cultural policy8.

A return to the relationship of structure and agency can provide one means for establishing an effective framework within which policy activity can be located. Apart from simply re-stating the truism that both structure and agency matter and have an effect upon policy – assuming, of course, that there is neither complete structural determinism (downwards conflation) nor complete free will (upwards conflation) in existence – an explicit clarification of the relationship between the two is required if analysis is to be meaningful. In this context Archer’s social realism (1989, 1995, 2003) has been used to anchor the discussion. Archer (1995, 15) argues for an analytical dualism on the basis that ‘structure necessarily pre-dates the action(s) leading to its reproduction or transformation … elaboration necessarily post-dates the action sequences which gave rise to it’. Thus, all social action takes place within a particular structural context9. This context can be either maintained or changed through social action. If the latter occurs it then produces a new structural context within which later social action will take place. In this respect it is possible at any given time to differentiate between the effects of structure and agency on the actions and choices that are made: ‘although structure and agency are at work continuously in society, the analytical element consists in breaking up these flows into intervals determined by the problem in hand’ (Archer, 1995, 168).

It goes almost without saying that different organisations are subject to particular, specific, external forces and pressures that need not necessarily be present in the case of other organisations. Thus local

6 As will be emphasised in the model that is developed at a later stage in the paper where the importance of exogenous factors in accounting for endogenous choices is made clear.7 Regrettably, negative findings remain rare in the literature. This may demonstrate that things are even more complex than is commonly thought – the sheer number of factors that have been argued to affect policy, either singly or in combination, now runs in to the thousands – or it may demonstrate that there is simply an unnecessary complication of analysis, or that there has been a certain amount of re-naming of identical factors in different studies. It would make a change for a study to announce that the variable that has been studied has absolutely no effect on policy.8 The specificity of cultural policy should not be ignored, having, as it does, particular consequences for how the sector functions (Gray, 2009), but this specificity is given effect in how the framework that has been developed is put into practice. 9 This does leave it open to a recursive attempt to identify the original structuring framework that existed – although whether this is analytically helpful is open to question – but for analytical purposes the identification of the existing structural framework within which policy is made would be all that is required, unless the emphasis is on analysing processes of morphogenesis whereby it may be that changes in the structural context are being analysed through agential means with the latter being the focus of study.

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authority museums that are in a left-wing-controlled area will not necessarily be subject to the same expectations and policy structures that one in a right-wing-controlled area may confront. But, equally, two different left-wing authorities may have quite distinct approaches to their own museum services, and individual museums may also have their own organisational approaches to managing their activities. In the same vein two national museums may be subject to the same reporting requirements for reasons of public performance management but this does not mean that they will actually respond to these in the same way. Hood (2006), for example, differentiates between five types of ‘gaming’ strategy that have been employed in the British public sector10 any of which may be applied to performance reporting, while Smith (1995) has identified eight unintended consequences of performance reporting (of which gaming is one) which are subject to the choices that are made by organisational managers. To simply assume that managers will do what they are told to do does not seem to be an accurate reflection of the lived experience of organisational staff11. In this respect context assumes significance: simple generalisations do not necessarily reflect complex realities (see Howlett, 2012).

Be this as it may, it is possible to identify a number of common claims about what determines the structure and goals of policy, with these operating in two distinct arenas: policy as ‘policy’, and policy as action. The former of these is, in keeping with the topic of this paper, taken to be concerned with the structural characteristics of policy, whilst the latter is concerned with the practice of the policy process. Given the emphasis within realist ontology on the recursive relationship between structure and agency the identification of variables as forming a part of either of these groupings is as much a matter of analytical choice as it is one of necessity: what may appear to be a structural component in one line of analysis may appear as an agential factor in another, and vice-versa. At the very least this means that a clear statement of the initial starting place for analysis would be required to justify the analytical choices that are then made. Indeed, Elder-Vass (2010, 65-6) has argued that for a complete causal analysis of events five features of the analysed variables are required:

1. A list of their characteristic parts;2. An explanation of how these must be related to each other;3. An explanation of how they arose;4. An explanation of how they are sustained;5. An explanation of how the effects of the whole are produced by the organisation of its parts12.

Given the tendency from within the cultural sector as a whole to view the choices and actions of external agencies as being unwelcome intrusions on the independence and integrity of actors within the sector - the instrumental debate, for example, has seen numerous ‘accusations of rigid prescription, a loss of quality and artistic integrity, increased bureaucracy and an abdication of responsibility by the state’ (Nisbett, 2012, 2) – the role of external actors in establishing sets of requirements for the management of regulation, oversight, accountability, probity and many other top-down concerns, where these affect internal actors, would serve to establish the ‘circumstances’ (in the Marxian sense) within which staff in the organisations that are examined are operating. Indeed, the location of central government departments which have a responsibility for culture within a realm of structural requirements that are equally imposed on them in a top-down fashion can have significant effects on the centrality of these departments to the overall concerns of governments (Gray & Wingfield, 2011).The extent to which these function as invariant controls over which internal actors exercise no effective autonomy is thus a key dimension for investigating the structure/agency 10Neither is this peculiar to the public sector. The private and voluntary sectors have equally as varied responses to demands for information from both internal and external actors.11 The principal/agent model in economics usually ends with much the same conclusions, even if starting in a different place – see, for example, Goddard et al, 2000.12 While a broad consideration of these is contained within this paper a fuller discussion of them would require a rather different sort of paper to the current one.

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relationship. Whether structure is simply a set of constraining factors or whether it can serve as a means for the exercise of effective policy choices by independent actors thus becomes the major setting for the analysis.

The Structural Characteristics of Policy

At one level an identification of the range of factors that establish the structural conditions within which organisational staff function is clear-cut: a simple listing of the legal framework governing the particular sector in general, and specific organisations in particular,the reporting requirements that central and local governments have established, the international treaties and obligations that have been signed, the funding mechanisms through which the sector is financed, and the policies that central and local governments have introduced that govern what the sector and its component organisations are intended to do would be sufficient for this purpose. At another level, however, such a listing is noticeable as much for what it ignores in terms of establishing the context within which policy functions as it is for ignoring the less direct ways in which exogenous actors may seek to impose control over the sector. It is particularly noticeable for ignoring the unintended consequences of a range of actions external to the sector that could potentially have major repercussions for how it functions13. While the direct structural matters concerning top-down policy choices clearly have an importance for any sector it is possible to approach structure in a wider fashion that includes both the direct forms and the range of indirect and unintended structural factors noted above14.

One way of approaching this lies in identifying a range of structural constraints that are present in all policy settings and then to identify how these play out in the context of the cultural policy sector. The constraints that are identified here function at different levels (macro-, meso- and micro-) within the sector and operate in quite distinct fashions from each other. They cover a range of potential, externally-driven, constraints that have been identified as having at least some effect in internal policy terms. What these effects actually are in the specific case of cultural policy organisations (both individually and collectively) can only be determined through detailed empirical research, even if the assumptions concerning what these effects arelikely to be are relatively clear. What follows is a brief listing of the variables that form the general model of structural constraints and opportunities that has been developed.

At the macro-level three key structural factors are seen to be of significance: those of ideology, rationality and legitimacy. Each of these has a role to play in determining the general political, social and organisational context within which policy operates. Ideology - in the general sense of sets of beliefs, attitudes, values and norms15 – establishes the parameters within which policy choices will be made. At the most crude this could be represented by party political ideologies that establish different expectations about the role of the state in society – with conservative parties being generally more restrained about this than social democratic parties are. More generally such ideologies can establish the balance between collective and individual responsibilities within societies, as well as with establishing what are seen as being acceptable approaches to issues such as nationalism, ethnicity and gender. Needless to say, each of these is a matter of some concern within the cultural sector (see in the

13 As in the case of adopting new approaches to management across the public sector as a whole (Gray, 2008), or the impact of new technologies for/on the activities of public and private organisations in general (see, for example, Eisenstein, 1979, or Pettegree, 2010, on the impact of the printing press).14 This is important, for example, in the treatment of hierarchical relationships in Mouzelis’ (1995, 141-7) re-working of functionalism to integrate social action, leading to a rather different version of the relationship of structure and agency to that developed by Archer.15 These largely correspond to Archer’s (1988) notion of ‘culture’ but are here being used much more in the political science sense of ‘ideology’.

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case of the museums sector, for example, Butts, 2007; Mason, 2011; Szekeres, 2002). Legitimacy is concerned with the basis upon which decisions and choices within society are seen to be acceptable ones, either in the sense that the right of decision-makers to make these choices is accepted, or that the decisions themselves are accepted as being the right ones (this approach is largely derived from the Weberian argument (1978, 212-99) about the nature of authority within societies). While legitimacy is unlikely to be an absolute state of affairs - in so far as not everybody always accepts without dissent or disagreement the right of decision-makers to act and/or the rightfulness of the decisions that are made –a basic level of legitimacy for the exercise of authority is absolutely essential to allow social life to be undertaken. As such, working within the confines of the established legitimate order is a necessity unless or until that legitimacy is subject to such extensive stress that it fails to function. Recognising such legitimacy issues may be simply at the level of knowing the ‘rules of the game’ of organisational and personal life that allow things to be done, at another level it involves an active acceptance of standards of behaviour and ways of working if one wishes to become accepted as a participant in the activities of the wider social world. Rationalities govern the ways in which people operate by identifying the key relationships that will be used to justify the choices and actions that individuals will take. Classic Weberian means-end, instrumental, rationality is not the only form of rationality that may be applied to any given situation – from sociology, affective and communal forms can be identified, in political science patron-client forms are seen, and in cultural policy a ‘ritual’ rationality can be seen to exist (Royseng, 2008) – even if it is a common one. Which rationality is being employed at any given time, however, has some important implications for how social behaviour will be or can be explained, and it operates as a limit to what are seen as being appropriate ways of behaving in any particular set of circumstances.

Such macro-level structural elements serve to establish the general framework within which more specific choices and decisions will be made. This set of factors may be variable in so far as parts of it may take different forms at different times (for example, with switches from instrumental to communal rationality when dealing with some issues) but it is a consistent feature across all areas of social life. As such it is expected to be unlikely that these limits to action will be at the forefront of policy actors’ considerations in most cases or for most of the time. Instead it is anticipated that they will function more as forms of ‘deep’ structure which do not need to be spelt out but which can be identified in the patterns of behaviour that they generate, or which can be applied post ante as justifications for the choices and decisions that were made. As such they have a causal capability that is independent of the individual actors who will operate within their limits and can therefore be seen to have a structural effect16. Further it should be noted that treating these variables as structural ones is a matter of analytical choice. Each could be equally treated as agential variables where they are deliberately constructed by knowing actors to serve particular policy ends (Ingram et al, 2007). By treating them as structural variables, however, the assumption is that actors/agents do not determine their content in a direct fashion at any particular time, even if their own choices are affected by them.Treating them as being a part of agency would involve agents being responsible for their content, construction and use which would require treating them as ‘emergent properties’ rather than as ‘relatively enduring character(s)’ (Archer, 1995, 9 and 168 respectively), which would have implications for how they could be analysed.

At the meso-level are a range of structural elements that are formed by direct exogenous policy considerations. In effect these form part of the general policy context within which cultural policies are located. Within this context five variables are noted as being of particular significance in policy terms. Firstly, the policy priorities and agendas that other organisations have are clearly of significance. Thus, in the British case, what these priorities and agendas are for national governments

16 Archer (1995, 168) argues that ‘the identification of structures is possible because of their irreducible character, autonomous influence and relatively enduring character’ all of which are met by ideology, legitimacy and rationality.

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can have quite clear policy effects on the cultural policy sector: the current coalition government’s strategy with regard to public expenditure has had inevitable knock-on effects across the entire sector, while the role of national government in establishing a framework for the management of public sector organisations during the 1990s and early 2000s17, through the use of ideas from the New Public Management, that influenced the development of instrumentalisation in the cultural policy sector (Gray, 2007, 2008) provides a second example.

Secondly, the structural policies that are used by national governments for managing the policy process in the public sector will have a constraining effect upon how individual organisations and policy sectors will be expected to operate. Ideas related to evidence-based policy (Davies et al, 2000; Sanderson, 2002) and ‘joined-up government’ (Pollitt, 2003; Ling, 2002), for example, have had clear impacts on the manner in which public organisations are expected to be organised and to make decisions, even if with limited effect in some cultural policy cases (Gray, 2006). Such general policy ideas may have limited long-term impact given that they often seem to be fashions and fads that can be, and often are, discarded with some rapidity, but in the short-term they can be used to direct policy actors along certain lines of action even if only at the level of providing the latest jargon for use in public and official policy statements. In this case the exact extent to which these policies operate as constraints or as opportunities for policy actors to exploit is a matter of empirical research and evidence but their role as structural factors is evident in either case.

Thirdly, the macro-policies that are applied across the public sector can establish the framework within which policy operators are expected to function. The emphasis on social inclusion and exclusion (Newman & MacLean, 2004), and the ‘big society’ in Britain, for example, have both been intended to be used as mechanisms to provide a focus and justification for the actions and choices that public sector organisations are expected to make in the exercise of their decision and policy-making activities. If they have rarely been used as the central policy focus that organisations are expected to concentrate on, they have existed as a set of general policy expectations that policy-makers should bear in mind when making their decisions and choices, and to ignore them entirely would be unlikely to be good organisational politics. Whether these macro-policies are simply a means for instrumentalising policy-making across policy sectors would depend upon governments actively behaving in a top-down policy fashion – and being able to impose their policy preferences on reluctant organisations and individuals – with little evidence that this has actually occurred. But, again, the precise impact of these major policy foci on the work of specific organisations is a matter for empirical research and evidence18.

Both structural and macro-policies are normally determined by the dominant political organisation within national systems – in the case of Britain this would be at the national governmental level at either Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast, depending upon the distribution of powers within the overall system, just as in federal systems this would be determined by the constitutional settlement that underpins the distribution of power and authority within them. Such national policies, however, are not necessarily the end of the story. International policies can also contribute to the formation of the national policy landscape, either through the requirement to live up to international laws and treaties or through the impact of policy learning and/or policy transfer (see Cairney, 2012; Rose, 2005; Benson & Jordan, 2011 respectively). In the case of the cultural sector, for example, the UNESCO conventions on intangible heritage and cultural diversity and the Washington Conference

17 In Britain the New Public Management is no longer directly relevant having been replaced by newer models and ideas of effective and efficient public sector management.18 Gray (2012, 19), for example, quotes a museum curator as saying with regard to the ‘big society’ idea that ‘nobody can afford it and nobody can be bothered’ indicating a relative lack of direct impact in that specific case.

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Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art (amongst many others) can all have an effect on the production of both national and local level policies. As such the meso-level is not an enclosed world that is isolated from broader political and policy currents but is, instead, also subject to its own sets of structuring constraints and opportunities from the broader environment within which it is located.

The fourth meso-level constraint is constructed from the organisational universe that underlies policy activity. The allocation of functional responsibilities between government departments, local authorities and the world of quasi-governmental organisations – let alone between the public and private/voluntary/community sectors – has important implications for the distribution of hierarchical resources between them (Rhodes, 1981, 100-1), as well as for control of the actual implementation stage of the policy process19. Additionally, the organisational universe contains a host of inter-organisational, intra-organisational and inter-personal relationships that can have an important impact on the functioning of policy sectors. As such this factor extends between the formal structural arrangements that exist to the informal structure of relationships in the form of organisational ‘rules of the game’ that can serve to manage how policy will be put into practice. At this level there is a clear expectation that matters of agency will be of some significance for understanding precisely how the organisational universe will function, particularly in terms of reinforcing existing patterns of behaviour and rules or adapting or changing these (morphostasis and morphogenesis, respectively, in Archer’s (1995) terms). Be this as it may, however, the structure of the organisational arrangements that are in place within policy sectors will serve to regulate the formal dimension of operational activity and can thus be seen to have a structural dimension to them.

Fifthly, the policy instruments that governments employ to manage public policy serve as important restraints on the room for manoeuvre that public (and private/voluntary/communal) organisations have available to them. These instruments can be classified in various ways: Hood (1983, 4-6) refers to nodality, treasure, authority and organisation; de Bruijn & Hufen (1998, 17-9) to regulatory, financial incentive and information transfer instruments; while Howlett (2011) to information, advice, resources and structural instruments. Whichever listing is chosen, however, they are all referring to the mechanisms that are employed by governmental actors to turn policy preferences into actions. The combination of instruments that are employed at any given time will establish parameters for action within which actors should be expected to function20, they will equally close off other pathways that might otherwise have been pursued. As such they establish a form of what historical institutionalists would refer to as path dependency, where present choices are constrained by previous ones that direct individuals and organisations along particular routes, and limit the extent to which alternatives are likely to be pursued (or even recognised) (Hall & Taylor, 1996).The ultimately structural determinism of this view is questionable and accepting policy instruments as structural components does not necessitate an acceptance of such deterministic rigidity – instruments may serve as much to liberate policy actors as they do to constrain them, particularly at times of policy and organisational turmoil – and whether they function as constraints or opportunities is, again, subject to empirical research and evidence and also depends upon which questions the analyst wishes to ask. An emphasis on morphostasis, for example, may well lead to an examination of instruments as constraints, while an emphasis on morphogenesis may lead to an investigation of them as liberating components for policy actors.

19 This is of clear importance as it is at this stage of the policy process that policy success and failure are most commonly determined. 20 Whether they actually do so is a matter of agency rather than structure but treating instruments as structural components identifies the policy framework that is being employed and the boundaries to action that this then imposes on actors.

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Alongside these macro- and meso-level structural factors a means to identify the precise location and role of agency factors is needed if analysis is to be more than a simple description of structures that is isolated from the practice of policy activity within these structured boundaries. While it is possible to investigate the role of individual and group actors at a number of levels, for current purposes agency is located at a micro-level established in and of individual organisations. Within these organisations policy actors are not only confronted with higher-level structural constraints and opportunities but are also subject to the possibilities – both as limits and as room for manoeuvre – that are provided by specific organisational characteristics. Identifying these local structural factors will serve to provide a multi-dimensional image of the policy space within which actors will, or can, exercise their role as agents of choice.

These micro-level structural factors are, firstly, the specific policies that organisations have. These will identify the aims and intentions of policies, the targets at which policy is directed (whether these are people (for example, school-children) or processes (audience development or staff training, for example), or the distribution of functional competencies between staff members. These policies are the focus of the activity undertaken by agents in so far as they are concerned with introducing, incrementally amending, strategically changing and terminating particular directions and intentions that the organisation maintains. Regardless of whether agents operate in a proactive or reactive manner with regard to the policies that the organisation has, they do provide the ground-plan that regulates and controls organisational operations. These policies are determined internally by the organisations concerned and are thus analytically distinct from those operating at the meso-level in the form of structural or macro-policies.

Secondly, the policy instruments that are used at the level of the individual organisation operate in the same fashion as at the meso-level, establishing the parameters of action that organisational members are expected (and anticipated) to function within. Which instruments are utilised, and how these relate to those that are used at the meso-level of structure, are subject to empirical investigation, with an expectation that there will be variations both between levels and between individual organisations (as well as between differing policy sectors) as to these issues as a consequence of the different interests, policy concerns and expectations that actors have at differing levels of the organisational universe. In this case policy instruments are used to identify the policy processes and mechanisms that are made use of within particular organisations.

Thirdly, the people who inhabit the organisational space of individual institutions can serve as a structural factor: whether this be simply in terms of the number of staff that an organisation has, the split between full-time employees and volunteers, or the distribution of professional resources within the organisation, all can affect the policy capabilities that exist. At the simplest level the existence of in-house professional staff has obvious implications for what will be seen as ‘good practice’ and ‘best practice’ for organisational operations, while the argument of Newman & Tourle (2011) about the potential long-term implications of cuts in full-time staff numbers in the museums sector in England and Wales effectively focuses on the competencies and capabilities of the sector to serve the public at all. Regardless of the consequences in terms of agency choice that arise from these concerns, the general treatment of the human element as a structural constraint or opportunity for the functioning of the cultural sector shifts attention to the general staffing context within which these organisations operate.

Fourthly, the distribution of power within individual organisations, or which affects organisational functioning, has important implications for understanding the specific policy choices and decisions

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that are made. Whilst the relatively oligarchic nature of policy-making across cultural sectors has been commonly identified (see, for example, Gray, 2000 on the arts sector) what occurs within specific organisations is less clear. Certainly differences between, for example, national, local authority, private and community theatres would be anticipated not least because of the formal structural relationships that have been established between national theatre Boards and Directors and government ministers, local authority managers and elected councillors, and the Boards of private trusts and foundations or companies and their managers,directors, communities and/or shareholders. The level at which effective policy is made, and whether this is made in a top-down, bottom-up or collaborative fashion will affect the types of policy that are made, how these will be expected to be implemented and evaluated, and how they will relate to meso-level expectations in terms of policy priorities and agendas, structural and macro-policies. While the distribution of power would be expected to vary to some extent between issues and over time, for any particular policy case who the effective policy-makers are, in terms of who wields power, will be of some significance for the resultant policy outcomes.

Finally, the specific resources in terms of money that are available to the organisation or organisations concerned will have obvious policy consequences – not least in terms of the people and professional and technical competencies that organisations can make use of, let alone in terms of what can be produced and how much of it can be produced. Whilst finance (under various labels) is a common policy instrument (Howlett, 2012, 101-13), the actual detail of how it is used, and what it is spent on, in any given organisation is subject to the choices and actions of the members of that organisation21. These decisions and choices can then act as structural limitations to policy choices depending upon the degree of budgetary flexibility that is available to organisational members, and this flexibility can be limited by a variety of legal, political, moral and technical boundaries that have been established at all of the macro-, meso- and micro- levels. Identifying these boundaries to flexibility can thus help to establish the extent to which financing is subject to structural and/or agential limits and the consequences of this for patterns of policy choice.

Visualising Policy Structures

It is possible to bring together the range of variables that have been identified so far to pictorially illustrate the relationships that are posited to exist between them. Such identification is important unless it is assumed that there are simply a series of independent effects that these variables have on the overall structure of cultural policies. If, on the other hand, it is assumed that there are a series of connections between these variables which can serve to mutually reinforce, or work counter to, their individual effects, or, less dynamically, to simply demonstrate how they are related to each other, then some means of representing these reinforcements or relationships can serve to clarify the overall picture. Two images of these relationships are employed to demonstrate different ways of thinking about the interconnections that exist in terms of these structural variables.

Figure 1 is organised in terms of the increasing (from the centre out) or decreasing (from the periphery in) generality in terms of the specific impact that each set of variables has for the overall shaping of cultural policies. The precise effect of each set of variables (and each individual variable) on policies will depend upon what questions are being asked and what the focus of analysis is to be. In general terms, however, it is anticipated that the outer circle of ideology, legitimacy and rationality will tend to have more general effects on policy, and will operate in a largely constraining fashion in doing so. The inner-most circle, on the other hand, is anticipated to have much more direct effects on the internal dynamics of policy activity in any given organisational case, and may be constraining or liberating depending upon individual circumstances and cases.In effect this constructs a form of 21 Unless, of course, the organisation’s entire budget is determined elsewhere which is very rarely the case.

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core/periphery relationship between the variables that posits a relatively separate set of effects arising from each group.

Figure 2 adopts a different visualisation of the relationships that exist between the variables by concentrating on the inter-relationships between them individually rather than between them as levels. In this version it is possible to distinguish between different pairs, triads and larger multiples of sets of variables to indicate the possible inter-linkages that the model contains. This allows for the identification of potential causal relationships that could be present in any individual case. Whether such relationships are relevant for explanatory purposes will depend upon the questions that the analyst is asking in the first place, but they could also be informative if the answers to these questions are, at best, partial as a consequence of their identification of a range of intervening variables that the original questions had not considered to be relevant for analytical purposes. As such the model can also be used by the analyst as a means to clarify the causal content of their questions.

A secondary use of Figure 2 could be to identify the central concerns of already existing work in the field of cultural policy and how this work deals with the range of potential influences on policy that the model identifies. This would allow for the clarification of the relationships between the structural components of cultural policy across a range of individual studies thus providing the possibility for the accumulation of a more coherent map of the territory that cultural policy studies is concerned with. While such a mapping exercise may have illustrative possibilities of indicating areas which have currently been under-researched and analysed it is important to bear in mind the need for an underlying understanding of the ontological and epistemological issues that are associated with the particular individual studies that are included. Thus, it would be anticipated that the differences between behavioural and discourse approaches to analysis would lead to a concentration on particular elements of the model in each case whilst leaving other component parts relatively untouched. Likewise, approaches to analysis that focus on the structural dynamics of policy are likely to concentrate on different policy elements than would be found in analyses that focus on the role of agents. By clarifying the consequences of such differences for the forms of analysis that have been undertaken in the past an understanding of the appropriateness of analytical strategies for the field of cultural policy could also be developed.

Conclusions

This paper is an attempt to clarify the field of cultural policy analysis. The structural framework that it contains is constructed of key elements for the understanding of policy that can be applied across the public, private, voluntary and community sectors. How it is applied depends upon the ontological, epistemological and methodological choices that analysts make. It is anticipated that these choices will lead analysts to concentrate their attention on particular features of the structural framework rather than on others. As such the framework is open to a multiplicity of analytical strategies and is not presented as a plan for analysis that must be utilised if a full picture of cultural policy choices and actions is to be presented. The basis of this framework in an analytical dualism that is derived from a social realist ontology does not preclude the utilisation of a variety of alternative positions as the starting point for analysis as this depends upon the questions that the analyst is asking rather than these being a necessary consequence of applying the model in the first place. The model does provide an opportunity for analysts to consider how their work relates to previous research, and to identify what it is that they are not concerned with as much as with what they are. As such it provides the opportunity to both locate individual studies within a broader picture of the field of cultural policy analysis as well as to identify potential areas for future research exploration.

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.

Figure 1: Core/Periphery Relationships of Variables

Figure 2: Inter-Relationships between Variables

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