Cultural Capital by Robert Hewison

Author:Robert Hewison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

The debate about the value of culture was part of a wider debate about how to express the value of government itself. After more than twenty years of neoliberalism and the New Public Management, the ideology of the market had so thoroughly penetrated public discourse that the sole purpose of government appeared to be economic advantage: the only measure of government success was ‘growth’. But governments are not businesses, however much they may be expected to behave like them. Some things that governments do, such as guarantee the peace for civil society, cannot be expressed in monetary terms. They have a value beyond what they provide for any single individual, and indeed can only be generated at a collective level, since too often individual preference contradicts the general good. From this, two key principles can be established: that there are public goods that are not subject to the market because they cannot be bought or sold, and that there is such a thing as public value, which expresses the worth of what cannot be measured in exclusively market terms.

Most contemporary theories of public value are a response to the work of Mark H. Moore, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 1995 he published Creating Public Value: Strategic Value in Government, in which he discussed how managers of public services add value to what they provide in the same way that managers of commercial enterprises add value to the goods and services they sell – except that public administrators create, not private profit for shareholders, but public value for society at large.

Moore’s ideas remained of mainly academic interest in Britain until 2001, when Geoff Mulgan, who had become director of the Forward Strategy Unit at the Cabinet Office, commissioned a study from two members of his staff. The timing was significant, because resistance to the now less-than-new principles of the New Public Management was growing, and New Labour was having difficulty delivering the public service reform it had promised. Even where services were improving, people did not seem to notice. Mulgan’s team produced a discussion paper, released in October 2002, titled Creating Public Value: An Analytical Framework for Public Service Reform. As its subtitle suggests, this was a think-piece asking, as Jowell’s essay was to ask, how to go beyond targets in capturing the value of government. The document argued that public value ‘provides a broader measure than is conventionally used within the new public management literature, covering outcomes, the means used to deliver them as well as trust and legitimacy. It addresses issues such as equity, ethos and accountability.’24 The New Public Management was unable to understand or manage such hard-to-measure outcomes as trust, legitimacy and fairness.

The idea that public value was defined by the public themselves suggested a more subtle way of thinking about people as more than merely the inert objects of government performance targets. Citizens participated in the creation of public value not only by being willing to pay taxes to provide public services, but also by accepting the regulatory powers of the state.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.