Intrinsic and instrumental rationales in UK cultural policy: negotiating cultural values in the climate of neoliberalism

Intrinsic and instrumental cultural values have represented core rationales for public cultural policies in the UK. However, the increasing dominance of neoliberal logic in recent decades has increased the tension between these policy rationales, making the question of how to negotiate and define intrinsic cultural values a key concern for cultural practitioners. This thesis investigates the intellectual, historical and sociological basis of intrinsic and instrumental cultural values, encompassing the times of classical Greece to the present day. The role of cultural values in the emergence of UK post-war cultural policy is explored. This aims to reconnect implicit cultural policy assumptions with their conceptual roots, and offer a theoretical perspective from which to appraise contemporary cultural policy developments. The analysis of liberal humanist ideas is complemented with an assessment of the network of discourses informing instrumental policies, in particular, social inclusion and urban regeneration. The thesis suggests that the contemporary instrumental cultural policy approach represents a misappropriation of the liberal humanist cultural discourse. In the neoliberal policy framework cultural and social concerns are usurped by entrepreneurial, managerial and consumerist imperatives, as cultural policies become a social and economic panacea. The neoliberal instrumental framework undermines key principles of public provision, with detrimental effects on social equality, local communities and cultural programming. The theoretical part of this project is complemented by qualitative field research, which is based on semi-structured interviews with 25 cultural managers from across the UK cultural sector. The key finding of this study suggests that cultural managers deflect the tension between intrinsic and instrumental policy rationales by proposing a synthesis between intrinsic and social instrumental cultural values. This recognition allows cultural managers to incorporate competing cultural policy assumptions into a broad cultural political framework. Cultural managers justified cultural policy making by resorting to enlightenment reasoning, public responsibility, cultural democracy and funder's demands. The critique of instrumentalism was deflected in to an opposition to impact-driven and commercial values.