The “problem” of participation in cultural policy

The need to increase recorded rates of cultural participation has become a recurring trope within cultural policy discourse despite evidence that demonstrates the breadth of people’s everyday participation across a range of cultural and creative practices. This chapter therefore challenges the very the notion of “non-participation” as a “problem” and instead questions the legitimacy of taste hierarchies on which established cultural policy is founded.

Adopting an historical approach, the chapter begins by identifying when and how certain forms of cultural participation in the UK were rendered problematic. It argues that rather than being a problem to be solved, the continuing existence of so-called cultural non-participation is in fact central to maintaining the status quo and affirming taken for granted power relationships within cultural policy. Drawing on institutional theory the chapter goes on to examine how the discursive logics of “the arts” provides the origins of the discursive subject identity of today’s cultural non-participant and constrains the possibility of alternative policy actions. It further shows how the concept of participation in cultural policy is not, as it would be understood within political science, about power and decision making, but instead is a more transactional concept centred on the invitation to “take part” in activities that others have decided are of universal value. It concludes that this has implications for who is legitimated to speak within the field of cultural policy, which can only begin to be addressed by abandoning the idea that anyone is a cultural non-participant.