Hesmondhalgh, D, Nisbett, M, Oakley, K et al. (1 more author) (2014) Were New Labour’s cultural policies neo-liberal? International Journal of Cultural Policy. ISSN 1028-6632
Abstract
This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a shift in prevailing rationales for cultural policy, away from cultural justifications, and towards economic and social goals. Neo-liberalism is shown to be a significant but rather crude tool for evaluating and explaining New Labour’s cultural policies. At worse, it falsely implies that New Labour did not differ from Conservative approaches to cultural policy, downplays the effect of sociocultural factors on policy-making, and fails to differentiate varying periods and directions of policy. It does, however, usefully draw attention to the public policy environment in which Labour operated, in particular the damaging effects of focusing, to an excessive degree, on economic conceptions of the good in a way that does not recognise the limitations of markets as a way of organising production, circulation and consumption.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted. |
Keywords: | cultural policy; neo-liberalism; instrumentalism; new public management; Labour Party; New Labour |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Media & Communication (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 07 Nov 2014 16:56 |
Last Modified: | 22 Oct 2017 04:02 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2013.879126 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor and Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/10286632.2013.879126 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:80973 |
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