MEASURING CULTURAL VALUE (PHASE 2)

Dr Claire Donovan, Brunel University

PRICELESS? A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO ‘MEASURING’ CULTURAL VALUE

Dr Claire Donovan, Brunel University

The context AHRC/ESRC Public Service Placement

Fellowship in partnership with Department of Culture, Media and Sport

competitive research grant based at DCMS part of wider DCMS initiative

Phase One (O’Brien, 2010) concluded that the cultural sector must use the concepts and tools of economics to make the case for public funding

The very idea of measuring cultural value

highly contested territory cultural value is either ...

measureable by assigning monetary value, e.g. willingness to pay choice analysis hedonic pricing

or ‘intangible’ so cannot be measured at all two cultures of valuation:

cynics sentimentalists

Two cultures of valuation

“What cynics you fellows are!”“What is a cynic?”“A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”“And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of a single thing.”- Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 3.

The approach

A ‘cynical-sentimental’ approach mirrors debates in assessing research impact, especially in

humanities, creative arts and social sciences (Donovan 2008; 2011) resistance to economic reductionism ‘state of the art’ includes, and extends beyond,

economic measures Empirical testing of measures

do these potentially add value to making policy decisions about funding the cultural sector?

include measures of supposedly ‘intangible’ benefits alongside indicators drawn from cultural economics

The approach

Cross-sector credibility Stakeholder involvement

workshops the ‘Priceless?’ blog; Twitter

Stakeholder consensus A ‘cynical-sentimental’ solution Does the use of social media authentically

represent public engagement in the cultural value debate?

Welcome to the measuring cultural value debate which began in 2003 …. I wonder if you are

trying to reinvent the wheel?

Phase Two conclusions A holistic approach to ‘measurement’

quantitative (monetary) quantitative (non-monetary) qualitative indicators narrative approaches

Proportionality ‘measures’ to fit scale of enterprise and desired

outcomes Abandon ‘toolkit’

sector guidance more valuable what ‘measures’ to use and when

Next steps Final report (Summer 2012) Dissemination

final report online (and hard copy?) the ‘Priceless?’ blog academic conferences and seminars academic journal papers (with Dave O’Brien) SRAC Practitioner-oriented conferences and seminars

Can these novel approaches apply to ‘measuring’ other areas of public investment?

Any questions?

claire.donovan@brunel.ac.uk