Abstract
This article considers the role of reporting processes in the assessment of arts and culture and argues that a determination of an organisation’s or event’s value is the result of a chain of administrative and political interactions. The ‘conferral of value’ on a particular cultural activity may be seen as the outcome of a multi-stakeholder dialogue involving governments, funding agencies, cultural organisations and individual artists. The article emerges from a mixed-methods research project, Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture, underway at Flinders University. The project works with three industry partners: the State Library of South Australia, the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the Adelaide Festival. A sketch of the history of the problem of culture’s value is given, together with the historical background of the arts in South Australia. The article concludes with a brief overview of two innovative reporting frameworks – sustainability reporting (GRI) and Integrated Reporting (IR) – and the potential gains for the cultural sector in the reporting reforms now happening in South Australia across all public bodies at a state government level.
The aim of this article is to introduce into the debate about determining and communicating the value of culture the issue of reporting that has not received attention. The article describes reporting principles and procedures that could be used for evaluating the activities of the cultural sector in Australia, specifically those associated with the Global Reporting Initiative ( GRI, 2002) (sustainability reporting) and Integrated Reporting (IR) (International Integrated Reporting Council, 2013a, 2013b) frameworks. The problem of assessing value in culture is neither new nor unique to modern democratic states (Pick et al., 1988). It is a complex, trans-disciplinary discussion that goes back centuries, and touches on philosophy, history, politics, economics, social theory and creative arts practice (Belfiore and Bennett, 2008; Klamer, 2002; Throsby, 2000). Over this time, the rationale for determining culture’s value shifted significantly (Throsby, 2010). The last 35 years have seen a ‘quantitative turn’ in assessment approach, seeking to measure the contribution that culture makes to a range of external areas, especially the economy (Klamer, 2016; Meyrick and Barnett, 2017; O’Brien, 2010, 2014; O’Connor, 2012, 2016). Thus, while earlier debate focused on culture’s qualitative characteristics (Fiske, 1989; Rowse, 1985; Turner, 1993), researchers today are more likely to focus on the quantification of culture’s effects (Bailey and Richardson, 2010; Ferres et al., 2010; Johanson et al, 2014). It is possible to trace this trajectory back to the genesis of Cultural Studies at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Research in the 1950s, and the factionalising of English Departments in both the United Kingdom and Australia (Goodall, 1995). In this contentious period, culture was less a matter for empirical investigation than sociological commentary, the identification of ‘cultural formations’ (Williams, 1958) and the deployment of different critical theories in respect of them. While some activities were subject to close scrutiny, the matter of comparative evaluation did not present in a calculative way. The problem of culture’s value was subsumed by the problem of cultural critique (Cunningham, 1992).
With the so-called ‘policy moment’ in Cultural Studies in the 1990s, a more positive attitude towards numerical assessment, via Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’, may be noted (Glover, 2014; Hawkins, 1997; O’Regan, 1992). Accompanied by the increasing influence of neo-liberal economics in policy-making circles across Western nations, the issue of ranking government-supported activities against common criteria came to the fore (Power, 1997; Pusey, 1991). Research shifted from culture’s scope and definition to the benefits it provides (O’Brien, 2014). If these could be demonstrated via acceptable proofs of worth, then a case for public investment in the sector might be made. The problem of culture’s value was subsumed by the problem of measuring the cultural sector, exemplified by a move from theorised critique to economic impact studies.
The ‘quantitative turn’ has not gone unchallenged (Belfiore, 2004; Klamer, 1996), but three decades later, it has created considerable tension between what cultural practitioners believe they are doing artistically and how governments measure what they are doing numerically (Meyrick, 2014b; Meyrick and Barnett, 2017). This has parallels in other fields where value is also hard to measure in precise ways, notably higher education (Collini, 2012, 2017). Scholars in the field of ‘cultural value’ have urged the re-balancing of an overly dominant economic perspective (Belfiore, 2006, 2009, 2012; Belfiore and Bennett, 2007; Crossick and Kaszynska, 2014; O’Brien, 2012, 2014), and the use of a greater variety of assessment categories (Throsby, 2000, 2010). Their view was endorsed in the 2016 UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) report Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture, which commented, ‘Emerging trends in evaluation of cultural activities and experiences reflect the appreciation that evaluation models … must be more sensitive to what they evaluate, as well as more forward-looking. The increasing interest in participatory evaluation… adds a further dimension’ (Crossick and Kaszynska, 2016: 127).
This article explores what the notion of ‘participatory evaluation’ might practically entail. It argues that measures of culture should be viewed as occurring within a given administrative and political reporting environment. This is not to reduce methodological questions of value to ones of social and historical description. But it recasts them in a way that acknowledges the institutional and temporal contexts in which evaluation necessarily takes place. When researchers compare different activities in the cultural sector, they deploy forms of discourse and generate types of evidence that are ‘useful’ for government purposes (Bennett, 1992), even where the state does not directly sponsor the research. 1 This finds expression in demands on cultural practitioners and arts organisations in respect of governance, auditing, face-to-face interactions, and the generation of quantitative and qualitative data that, taken together, form a reporting chain both narratively structured and people-focussed.
Governmentalized reporting is a social process with social meaning, even where this takes the form of supposedly technical demands from anonymous bureaucratic systems: submission deadlines, scheduled reviews, bi-lateral negotiations (‘bi-lats’), budget estimates, and strategic priorities. The reporting chain takes up certain instruments of account (e.g. annual reports) and embeds in them agreed (or imposed) measures of value (e.g. KPIs). There is little sense in measuring a variable that will not be reported on, at least potentially, and little benefit in reporting on a variable that cannot be measured, though both of these can and do happen. In theory, measurement and reporting create a space that governments then imbue with evaluative sense. The problem of measuring culture’s value and the problem of reporting it, ideally co-structure each other.
It is in this way that we can talk about culture’s value being ‘conferred’ rather than measured. We argue that reporting is a key site in which the value of an arts or cultural activity is worked out in a dialogue. Measures of value play a part, but a final determination is a result of the reporting process, which fixes it via an act of policy perlocution (Meyrick, 2014a). 2 Typically, a number, or set of numbers, is agreed and the value of a particular cultural activity is publicly acknowledged for a period of time. Without a narrative that situates them (be it explicit or implicit), these numbers have no meaning. The narrative is not unassailable, but it needs to be broadly defensible, which is the point of the conferral process: to come up with a result that can be ‘justified’. There is no need to ironise the concept of public accountability to see this for the moveable feast it is. Measures of value must be flexible if they are to serve the conferral process in a useful way. By considering the role of reporting in assessing culture, a different picture emerges from the standard measurement one. This is culture not as elusive creative substance with distant spill-over effects for the economy, but as a matter firmly located in the administrative and political interactions by which it is described, judged and communicated by different stakeholders. It is the problem of value as a matter of pragmatic determination between informed parties with shared anchoring assumptions (Dewey, 1939). 3
The reporting of culture is a diverse domain. The most visible reports are ones from various subsidised bodies to government agencies. The former range from individual artists in receipt of grants of as little as US$500, to multi-million dollar cultural organisations reporting as statutory authorities, with documents tabled in special sittings of Parliament. 4 The level of complexity may vary, but reporting is a ubiquitous dimension of support for culture today. Many clients feel it keeps growing without reason or return (see below). For perhaps no other area of government policy sits at such distant remove from its policy object. The nomothetic categories used to assess culture, the scientistic classification, aim to construct a fit between so-called operators of capture and real-world activities. As culture is recalcitrant in respect of numerical measures and indices, debate about its value is chronically divided. On the one hand, there is discussion about artworks and creative arts practice by artists, audiences, and critics. This generates what Arthur Danto and Howard Becker call an ‘art world’ (Becker, 1996, 2008[1996]; Danto, 1964), in the form of critical commentary coalescing around situated production and distribution systems. On the other hand, there is a vast swathe of academic and grey literature research measuring culture’s existence as a data function. The two occupy different life-worlds, in a Habermasian sense. As a result, cultural experience, the thing that embodies culture’s value directly, is not present in measurement indices save in an illustrative way (Belfiore and Bennett, 2007). Many arguments may be advanced as proof of culture’s value, but culture itself is not a value argument. Proof lies in the rhetorical apparatus constructed around cultural activities which are, from a functional point of view, infinitely substitutable. Operators of capture originally appended as situated adjectives – ‘excellent’, ‘innovative’, ‘accessible’ – float free as abstract nouns on a plane of indiscriminate bureaucratic pertinence (Meyrick, 2016, 2017) and cultural experience is visible in official assessment only by proxy. Cultural activities amenable to proxy can be metrically demonstrated to be of benefit while others not so amenable lose policy purchase (Meyrick et al., 2018). A quantitative attendance count at the opening of an exhibition is more salient than qualitative judgement about its meaning and influence over subsequent months and years.
But benefit is not value. The former is a series of observable effects lending themselves to precise enumeration. They can be scaled, targeted and benchmarked. Value is a broader concept and harder to define. In practice, it is impossible to separate the quantifiable aspects of culture from its qualitative ones, which is why ‘intrinsic value’ remains an intractable problem for cultural economics today (Bakhshi et al., 2009; Crossick and Kaszynska, 2014; Holden, 2006). There is always a surplus of value (Mehrwert) that resists the numerical means used to order it (Diederichsen, 2008). Ultimately, what cannot be measured is elided or overlooked. This may not be the way governments feel about the activities they seek to support, but unless a way can be found to bring cultural experience itself more fully into official assessment, emphasis will always default to metrical demonstration.
Researching reporting processes is a way out of this impasse. David Throsby (2003) has called for a ‘disaggregation’ of the economic and cultural components of culture as a prelude to successful value measurement. We call for ‘disarticulating’ the issues of measurement and reporting (Meyrick, 2015a) to highlight the space between cultural activities and the methods used to assess them. It is not up to any measurement index, however sophisticated, to determine the value of a cultural activity without reference to the people experiencing it. Culture’s evaluation should be a dynamic concern, with different types of evidence fed into a multi-stakeholder dialogue shaping their impact and use. This is the political Real of cultural assessment, where metrics are used to enhance rather than override convictions about what culture is and how it should be supported. The Real arises not from the true but trivial proposition that all value is socially constructed but from the fact that culture by its nature does not entirely suit numerical measures and these must be supplemented by informed stakeholder discussion (McMaster, 2008). Far from being a ‘flaw’ in measurement indices, this is ensures their meaningful application, making the problem of value a matter of collective conferral. Brokering through reporting is what occurs when any and all resource decisions are made. The numbers do not authorise decisions monadically, but justify judgements formed on the basis of plural understandings. Better protocols around reporting will assist this conferral of value to better occur.
Laboratory Adelaide: the value of culture
To show how these ideas might be pursued in the field, the rest of this article describes a humanities-based applied research project underway at Flinders University in South Australia. Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture partners three major South Australian cultural organisations with a team of cross-disciplinary researchers to ground measures of value in meaningful social and historical narratives. Since commencing in 2014, the project has taken an influential position in the on-going debate about quantitative indicators and qualitative accounts in the evaluation of cultural organisations and events. To date, a number of sub-projects have been carried out. A contingency evaluation method/willingness to pay (CVM/WTP) trial was undertaken with successive Adelaide Festival events, which has resulted in the generation of a numerical value index for both user and non-user groups (Andersson et al., 2012). By contrast, a long interview and focus group approach was employed at the State Library of South Australia, generating qualitative information about the experiential impact of the Library over time. Current research with the State Theatre Company involves mapping its reports to governments and funding agencies, reflecting the transition in the project from a concern with measures of value per se, to how the results are interpreted and communicated in the wider policy environment.
Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture seeks to contribute in an active, policy-oriented way to evaluative relations between governments, funding agencies and cultural practitioners. In 2015 and 2016, we published academic articles and public intellectual essays putting our views (Barnett and Meyrick, 2016; Meyrick, 2014a, 2015a, 2015b, 2016). Our researchers have considerable art-form knowledge and a significant network of industry connections, not only among the major cultural organisations in Adelaide, but among smaller ones across the country. In late 2016, we hosted a number of industry-based forums on the emerging results of our work in Australia and Singapore. In 2017, we began to outline an alternative to the metrics-based systems that dominate the assessment of culture in Australia and overseas today, which are often expensive, reductionist, and subject to political misuse. We engaged in a UK-based debate about Culture Counts, a system of quality metrics that originated in Western Australia and is being rolled out by the Arts Council of England (Phiddian et al., 2017a, 2017b). We entered into discussions with the South Australian Economic Development Board about how evaluative indicators for culture in the State might better reflect its non-monetary contribution. In 2018, we held an interdisciplinary summit to discuss approaches to the problem of value shared across a range of other, different sectors (‘When Did Value Become a Number?’). 5
Adelaide, and the ‘Festival State’ of which it is the capital, is an apposite context for our research. The centrality of cultural activities to the economic, social and psychological life of the city is reflected in a complex institutional and regulatory environment. It finds expression in the major cultural organisations that dominate its North Terrace precinct, and the way that arts and culture take over during the festival period (‘mad March’). Many cultural organisations are public bodies, a legacy of the so-called Dunstan Era in the 1970s (Parkin and Patience, 1981). But Adelaide’s cultural roots extend much further back into history than this. The Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains were the first cultural custodians of the lands on which the city is built, a fact reflected in the revival of Kaurna language and visual arts. At the outset of colonial settlement, the South Australian Literary Association, established in 1834, was formed 2 years before HMS Buffalo actually arrived in Holdfast Bay. The Literary Association became the State Library of South Australia, an organisation that continues to drive the Adelaide cultural scene from its location on North Terrace where it sits next to the Art Gallery of South Australia and the South Australian Museum. Andrew McCredie (1988) observes that in the 19th century there was a ‘conscious attempt of the bourgeoisie to develop cultural institutions, whether string quartet societies or repertory theatre guilds, for their own enjoyment and edification’ (p. 9). Such consciousness has pervaded all aspects of Adelaide’s cultural development since. A peak moment was the founding of the Adelaide Festival event in 1960, which cemented its name as a ‘city of culture’. Derek Whitelock and Doug Loan (1980) credit the now-annual event with transforming Adelaide from a ‘dull’ town to a ‘bold’ one (p. 33). During Don Dunstan’s time as Premier, the State government’s cultural interests considerably extended. Jo Caust argues that the main contribution was the implementation of policies that focussed on ‘the longevity of cultural infrastructure and on arts activity beyond short-term sugar fixes and electoral cycles’ (2005, p. 277). Since Dunstan, arts and culture have continued to enjoy bi-partisan political support, but the context and rationale for this have been coloured by a dominant focus on economic and social externalities. The current South Australian Strategic Plan (2011) mentions culture mainly in terms of economic impact. Culture supports ‘atmosphere’, ‘well-being’ and the difficult-to-measure ‘vibrancy’.
Where does this leave the problem of the comparative evaluation of cultural activities? Given the administrative and political nature of the reporting chain, objective measures of value do not exist and the sort of local history we outline needs to be contextually taken into account. Evaluation is less a matter of cultural organisations ‘learning the language of government’ (Pick, 2009) than of principles and procedures accommodating different voices in the reporting chain and allowing a better fit between cultural experience on the one hand and numerical data on the other. The attempt to assess all aspects of a cultural activity is key to a fair and effective assessment (Dekker, 2015).
Figure 1 provides a flow diagram of reporting relationships in the Adelaide cultural sector. Here ‘reporting’ refers to processes of officially communicating proofs of worth, ones that can take a variety of forms such as annual reports, project acquittals, mission statements, speeches, and social media posts by cultural organisations or individual artists. The first thing to observe about the diagram is that the reporting of culture is something that takes place all the time. Cultural organisations not only continually do things, they continually describe the things they do, in both direct and indirect ways. Indirect reporting occurs in the media, print and on-line, and includes accounts generated by cultural organisations and by third parties. It also includes feedback mechanisms – letters of complaint, congratulatory emails, Facebook and Instagram posts, Twitter, telephone calls, and face-to-face conversations. Direct reporting can be divided into three: the reports generated by artists and cultural organisations for internal use; the reports generated by artists and cultural organisations for external use; and the reports generated by a third party for external use. From time to time, artists and cultural organisations will undertake a review process, in which case a fourth type of report will be generated: one by a third party for internal use.
The reporting environment.
What does reporting accomplish? Clearly, it serves a number of purposes, one of which is to communicate the benefits of a particular cultural activity. But equally important is communicating the context in which those benefits are generated. Reporting is, or should be, a matter of thick description, of ensuring the policy-making process has enough experiential knowledge feeding into it to enable fair and effective policy decisions between incommensurable aims and activities. By way of starting example, the State Library’s official reporting outputs are listed in Table 1.
State Library of South Australia reporting outputs.
These reports provide a resource for understanding what the State Library thinks it is doing, the benefits it believes it is generating, and the evidence it believes it has for those benefits. Generating reports is a highly complex process that can be either enabling or alienating. As a senior figure at the State Library described in respect of the organisation’s finance reports: We have a cycle of reporting within the Library itself: the quarterly reporting, the finance committee, and the Library Board. There’s a finance committee which is a sub-committee of the Library Board, so some members of the Library Board sit on that. Every quarter we have a finance committee meeting where we go through all sorts of financial issues, from financial statements through to the performance of our investments, to audit queries and responses, [and] financial delegations. Anything to do with finance is discussed at these meetings … I [also] do a lot of verbally reporting to Alan [Smith], [the CEO], [to say] how we’re tracking, financially performing in our budget because obviously … if you do run over budget … the government is not going to bail you out usually, so we need to closely monitor our finances. The same quarterly reporting I give to the Board I give to Arts South Australia [the State funding agency] as well, who are our parent overseeing body [and] allocate our funding. There’s annual reporting too. We always report to Arts South Australia but [also] to Treasury. When the government is about to do their annual state budget, what they like to see is performance indicators in terms of [the] previous year’s outcome, [the] current projections, and next year’s budget. That happens around April every year and the budget is handed down in early June. So that’s [external] reporting. Apart from that we have small groups who meet from within the library, [and] management groups who… produce reports to cover our ongoing financial position. (Interview with SLSA senior executive 23 March 2014)
6
Reporting is never just the relaying of numerical data. Where there is a question of value, there is a language of belief reflecting not only methodological concerns, but a deep sea of suppositions, aspirations and shared symbols, an experiential ground on which value propositions are constructed. It is this ground that determines the nature, purpose, and limits of value propositions, as well as their likely policy effects. The ground is never stable, and reporting presents an ever-changing set of categorical demands that cultural practitioners must struggle with even as they try and articulate their own particular needs and perspectives. As Alan Smith (CEO Cultural Organisation 1. Interview transcript 18 March 2014), the CEO of the State Library comments, It’s fair to say that over time the time spent on reporting has grown considerably. I reckon in the last four or five years … the time I’ve spent on reporting has doubled … That’s partly because of new legislation. You do a lot more reporting on health and safety than you ever did before, and about so many other things. There are things you have to report on that are now compulsory. The [amount] of reporting as dictated by Premier and Cabinet and Treasury’s instructions … just keeps growing all the time. They never knock anything off. [No] report ever replaces a previous type of reporting … They keep going on about government in silos and [yet] so much reporting doesn’t actually speak to each other, and there’s an awful lot of duplication and you say similar things or often identical things in slightly different ways to slightly different authorities or slightly different branches of the same authority. And that’s deeply frustrating. (Interview with SLSA CEO Alan Smith 18 March 2014)
Cultural activities are not necessarily better evaluated by being disaggregated across different value categories (economic, social, cultural etc.). Unless the problem of value is addressed as a political Real, as a world of administrative and civic interactions to be lived, not merely a set of claims to be proved, measurement methods risk reifying their own assumptions and collapsing into folk science. By contrast, if value is understood as the outcome of a conferral process in which reports are written, received and acted on (or neglected), there is sharper focus to the debate. Rather than regarding culture’s value as the product of an abstract algorithm suspended like a rope bridge between cause and effect, it may be seen as the collective scrutiny of instance and context. The question of value becomes a dialogue occurring in and around measurement, one that governments, cultural organisations, and the community can be empowered to shape. This is both what is actually happening and something that might happen better if there were fewer reports with better focus and more attention paid to them at the point of reception. How to achieve this?
Improving the value dialogue: sustainability reporting and IR
One way forward is to adapt new approaches to reporting value now appearing in the corporate sector, particularly sustainability reporting from the CRI and IR from the Integrated Reporting Council. 7 Jane Gleeson-White’s (2015) book Six Capitals asks, ‘can accountants save the planet?’ She is referring to the innovative accounting norms and procedures, gathered together in principles-based systems, which are changing the way corporations account for their activities. These socially responsible reporting frameworks seek to address concerns about breadth of stakeholder consultation, recording of intangible capital, acknowledgement of long-term impact, and the proper integration of quantitative data and qualitative data. They aim to produce fairer, more comprehensive and more meaningful communications of value, imbuing reporting relationships with a mutuality that leads to better decision-making over time. They set out principles and indicators that can be flexibly used to report economic, environmental and social performance, building on congruent reporting initiatives focused on ‘triple bottom line’ or Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indices (Eccles and Krzus, 2015). 8 GRI aims to ‘[move] from a periodic static document to ongoing reporting about [a] company’s financial and nonfinancial successes and failures’ (Eccles and Krzus, 2010: 4). IR adds to this an understanding of intangible capital and return over the long term. James Guthrie describes IR as ‘a strategic communication tool to integrate different perspectives on value creation, offering new insights into organisations’ approaches to sustainability, corporate governance, natural capital, intellectual capital, human capital and social capital’ (quoted in Adams and Simnett, 2011: v).
While GRI and IR share a common aim of expanding the understanding of value, their differences are important to investigate. GR4, the current iteration of GRI, is modular, providing Universal Standards (a base level of standard disclosure), then a number of Topic Specific Standards (economic, environmental and social), and then select metrical indicators. The procedure for defining a report’s content is: Context → Materiality → Completeness → REPORT → Review. The commitment is to an ‘improvement cycle’ where information on an organisation’s performance is placed in the context of how it contributes, or aims to contribute, to given areas of focus, underpinned by stakeholder discussion and checked for completeness. The IR reporting framework, on the other hand, focuses on assessing a range of value propositions that differ in physical manifestation and temporal shape, allowing for balanced evaluation of activities over short, medium and long terms (Eccles et al., 2010). Thus, GRI is a multi-stakeholder tool while IR is a tool for financial communication with a degree of responsiveness to a range of stakeholders. IR’s approach to value is venture focused, while GRI underpins IR ethically, and is a major force behind its propagation.
It is no exaggeration to say that in the last 10 years, there has been a quiet revolution in the way that corporations report throughout the world. In 2017, Deloitte (2017) released a survey of the annual reports of 100 UK-listed companies. They assessed their reports against a range of criteria, including the use of alternative performance measures to communicate value. A key finding is that compared to 20 years ago, when annual reports were, on average, 43% narrative and 57% financial data, in 2017 qualitative narrative made up 61% of a typical annual report. The trend suggests a shift to the strategic use of storytelling to convey information, both required and voluntarily offered. The report offers commentary on IR. It found that over 60% of the companies surveyed focused attention on communicating value creation for stakeholders rather than shareholders, and there was an increasing use of alternative performance measures related to employees, customers, and off-balance-sheet resources. A similar picture emerges from a recent King and Blasco (2017) report that examines the results of a survey of 4900 worldwide companies. This report also identifies the uptake of IR, with a focus on production of a Corporate Responsibility report and addressing of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It posits that ‘reporting integration is the new normal and ‘non-financial’ is the new financial’ (King and Blasco, 2017: 6) while ‘statistics lack real meaning without information on context’, and that the challenge is to communicate the impact of a company’s activities more comprehensively. In other words, to provide a narrative for a company’s corporate responsibility and sustainability measures, and for the consequences its actions will have on future value creation.
The IR and GRI frameworks offer new and interesting ways for articulating value in all its dimensions, and their adaptation for the cultural sector presents a significant opportunity to capture the complex missions of artists and cultural organisations. Both frameworks involve mixed methods and indicators. They encourage organisations to report all the benefits they generate for the community. Their approach is qualitatively structured, with an emphasis on precision of language and use of metrics to assist elucidation of meaningful narrative accounts. This is a necessary balance to the booster-ing that occurs around big data analytics, for which no activity lies outside algorithmic logic. The drive for the provision of more metrical information must be governed by an over-determining commitment to materiality, meaning and credibility in assessment processes. Cultural practitioners all over the world would profit from such dialogical approaches to reporting value.
More research into the GRI and IR frameworks would certainly be timely in South Australia. Presently, there is a top-down reform of State government reporting across the public sector, aiming to condense official communication of supported activities. New guidelines issued in July 2017 note, Currently, 250 annual reports are presented to Parliament each year, totalling about 14,000 pages. They are published for a limited audience and the content is fragmented and duplicated across agencies. This is even more prevalent now that all agencies have significant volumes of information posted on their websites and centrally aggregated data is also published online. (Department of Premier and Cabinet, 2017)
The principles of the State reform are nine-fold: transparency, accountability, concision, openness, performance-based, factuality, comprehensibility, accessibility and digital availability. They are obviously drawn from the quiet revolution that has shaped both GRI and IR. For the cultural sector, the focus is Arts South Australia’s Grant Management System (GMS). This is a database accessible only to government staff for grant management purposes, and does not have an online presence. But the agency has appointed a business change leader to transform the GMS to allow online applications and acquittals, following the standards of other State agencies and the federal Australia Council for the Arts. The aim is both to lessen the reporting burden and to allow artists and cultural organisations to use the same datasets twice. Arts South Australia are tendering for the technical solution for this system make-over. These developments create a significant opportunity to reconfigure the assessment of culture’s value in a more meaningful, dialogic, and ultimately democratic way. This is a local example, of course, but similar opportunities exist elsewhere, and a grounded approach to value reporting has to take root in particular places if it is to successfully manage culture’s specifics.
Concluding remarks
The role that reporting, formal and informal, plays in the conferral of value in culture is little understood. The development of a more holistic reporting framework could provide government and funding agencies with better context-rich information about cultural activities, and reduce the cost for artists and cultural organisations of producing extraneous (and often irrelevant and distracting) data that does not represent their primary mission. Too often reporting is reduced to a ‘box ticking’ ritual that needs to be seen to be done, and important aspects of cultural experience are lost to the evaluative process as a result. But reforming reporting addresses a major political problem, not just a minor procedural one. The recent history of cultural policy in Australia indicates the urgent need for improved communication about the value of culture between governments and cultural practitioners. In 2015, the then federal Minister for the Arts, Senator George Brandis, severely damaged the trust between the federal government and the cultural sector by peremptorily removing 16% of the Australia Council’s budget and giving it to a new grant body directly under his own purview (Eltham, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Mendlessohn, 2015; Meyrick, 2015b). This prompted a nationwide grassroots protest and a Senate Inquiry attracting over 2700 submissions. Obviously, there is something wrong with the way governments and the cultural sector speak to each other if such negative actions can happen in a policy environment supposedly marked by bipartisan understanding of the role of culture. The production of further numerical measures of benefit, which has been the focus for cultural economic and creative industry scholarship (Cunningham, 2002; Throsby, 2000, 2010), must be complemented by research into how cultural activities can be better understood in the policy process after evidence of its value has been gathered.
Finally, research into the reporting of arts and culture can contribute to wider debate about value qua value. The Global Financial Crisis has generated multiple critiques of neo-liberal economics and econometric methods (Adkins and Lury, 2012; Beer, 2016). Reporting and accountancy reforms are helping to frame the problem of value for many areas struggling to escape a hyper-instrumentalism (Ball et al., 2014). In the corporate domain, concern about climate change has resulted in the introduction of sustainability reporting in a number of countries. In 2016, for example, the Singaporean government mandated sustainability reporting for all 3,500 companies listed on the SGX. In other countries, sustainability reporting is voluntary but strongly encouraged. In South Africa, IR is mandatory. The nature of the global economy has changed dramatically. In 1975, 17% of a typical company’s capital value lay in intangible assets. In 1995, it was 68%. In 2015, it was 84% (Johnson, 2014). Intangible capital is now the majority of our wealth. Research into reporting can bring to this wider debate about value the novel perspective of culture, one that has always challenged orthodox thinking. Having spent the last three decades producing sophisticated numerical proxies for culture’s value, it is now the moment to raise questions about their underlying purpose. As Alan Smith asks, Does one report into a void? Is any of what is reported analysed and used for decision-making? Which brings one back to: what is the purpose [of] reporting? And even the first principle of why is [something] being reported? Is it reported because historically it always has been and what, of course, happens in the nature of the world is that extra things are always added to what’s reported but very little, if ever, is taken away? So the quantum of reporting inexorably grows over time. But where is the point at which one stops and seriously looks at what is reported, why is it reported, and how that is used? (Smith Interview 18/3/14)
These questions demand better answers. We argue that now is the time to address them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the collaborators involved in our wider project, in particular our Linkage partners The State Library of South Australia, The State Theatre Company of South Australia, the Adelaide Festival Corporation and their respective leaders of the past Alan Smith, Rob Brookman and Karen Bryant, and our academic collaborators Richard Maltby, Steve Brown, Heather Robinson and Fiona Sprott. And a special thanks to Heather Robinson for transcribing the interviews.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage Scheme, Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture, project number LP140100802.
