The politics of temporal sovereignty and the subaltern MA

Introduction

Following the financial crisis of 2007 and the knock-on fiscal crisis of 2010 the Scottish Government published a Refreshed Scottish Government Economic Strategy (2011a). The cultural contribution to that project was earmarked in the Scottish Government’s Economic Recovery Plan (2011b) and elaborated in its Growth, Talent Ambition – the Government’s Strategy for the Creative Industries (2011c). These are categorised as one of seven economic sectors ‘where Scotland has a comparative advantage over other countries or regions’ (5), contributing a 25% increase of Gross Value Added (GVA) between 2000 and 2010, compared to 14% in the economy as a whole, and which accounts for 6% of Scotland’s total export sales. During that period, creative enterprises have grown by 29% compared to 3% industrial growth in the rest of Scotland. Most of that growth, 97%, was in small enterprises (<49 employees), although 1% of large firms employed 51% of workers. Although not credited, the strategy summarises metrics from the Scottish Government’s 2009 Creative Industries Key Sector Report.

None of the publications discuss the growth of the sector despite the absence of significant government support during a period of wage stagnation and debt growth that culminated in a financial then fiscal crisis. Neither is the justification for allocating Government money and resources to support a booming economic sector explained. Instead ‘market failure’, the phenomenon which justifies State intervention according to the rules of neoliberal political economy, is discovered by the presence of firm size asymmetry in the creative economy. To solve the problem the Scottish Government will attempt to change a structural characteristic of the sector by reducing the prevalence of small and micro project-based network enterprises which characteristically scale up and down according to the variable flow of business opportunity. In other words, the policy will reduce the low productivity-high diversity characteristics of cultural production (Lee, 2017). In common with all neo-classical economics dominated thinking, the Scottish Government’s cultural policy installs the assumption that equilibrium and certainty will eliminate the irrationality of cultural economies (Lingo and Tepper, 2013). So, strategy and policy will divert the growth trend that its own metrics had used to justify it. Because intellectual property is the core product of the sector, according to the Scottish Government, its ad hoc structure is unable to exploit it to its best potential and ‘bring sustainable income streams and strengthen the company’s base’ (2011c: 12). So, government intervention will create more companies of sufficient scale and power to secure economic rents (Townley et al., 2009; Valentine, 2014). Improving international competitiveness and market and financial access will follow from that, and improved industry skills training will support it. The outcome will be an increase in GVA and employment.

The Scottish Government proposed to achieve that through ‘better alignment of the public sector’ and nominated the recently established (2010) Creative Scotland, which had amalgamated the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, to chair a Creative Industries Coordination Group that would steer it. One of the mechanisms supposed to achieve that will be through the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) support for ‘the development of enterprise education and entrepreneurship’ through the allocation of ‘£100,000 per annum to support additional postgraduate places in the creative industries’ (The Scottish Government, 2011c: 30). As noted by Kitagawa and Lightowler (2013), like its English equivalent, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the SFC is a ‘policy transfer agent’, a taker not a maker. In accordance with the Scottish Government’s plans for economic recovery in November 2012, the SFC invited eligible Scottish Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to tender for funding for taught postgraduate (PG) student places. The invitation was an outcome of its recently introduced Incentive Funding scheme through which tuition fees would be paid directly to the HEI at no cost to eligible students. The SFC scheme was additional to its normal allocation of PG funding to HEIs and was framed as a strategic intervention aimed at subsidising teaching in areas that were considered to be an economic priority according to the Scottish Government such as creative economy. Incentivised by the SFC’s invitation Edinburgh-based Queen Margaret University (QMU) responded by pitching an application to the scheme. The application was successful and SFC allocated funding for a limited number of places for an MA Creative Entrepreneurship which began delivery in September 2013 after it had been renamed Culture and Creative Enterprise.

The aim of this paper is to show how the provision of the MA is explained by its location in and emergence from a historically and spatially specific policy assemblage (Ureta, 2014) that articulates state and government, economy, nation, culture and University education. The paper follows Collier and Ong’s interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of an assemblage (1988) as ‘the product of multiple determinations that are not reducible to a single logic. The temporality of an assemblage is emergent’ (2005:12), with the revision that they are not random events but are politically overdetermined (Clarke, 2015). The objective of this paper is to show that the politically overdetermined component of the assemblage from which the MA emerged is the temporality of the Scottish Government’s project of fitting together and coordinating its components. To do so, the paper develops Jessop’s theorisation of the political problem of time through the notion of ‘temporal sovereignty’ (2008, 2009, 2015). According to Jessop, temporality has become critical as a historically specific consequence of the contemporary weakening of the sovereign capacity to politically determine the time of the present of action and the future of its consequences through fiat, command and hierarchy as a result of the impact of the forces of globalisation, permanent state and government structural ‘churn’, a phenomenon that political scientists categorise as ‘governance’, and the dominance of markets over sovereignty itself. Consequently, conflicts arise around attempts to hegemonise time as a resource and exercise power over different temporalities.

The Scottish Government’s attempt to establish ‘temporal sovereignty’ through governance was constituted through a conflict between two significant temporalities. Firstly, the historically sedimented project of national self-determination which accelerated after the devolution of Scottish power had been granted by the UK Government in 2000, and which was strengthened by the election of the Scottish National Party minority government in 2007 which legitimated its campaign for full Scottish independence subsequently tested by a referendum in 2014. Even though the referendum was lost, the SNP won the subsequent election of 2016, albeit as a minority party. Secondly, and at the same time, the temporality of that historical project was disrupted by the global financial crisis of 2007 and the European fiscal crisis of 2010. Consequently, the Scottish Government was faced with the problem of producing an economic future that would be consistent with the independence project. The inscription of the figure of the entrepreneur in Scottish Government economic, educational and cultural policy provided a solution to that problem as something that would emerge from within Scottish society itself and therefore minimise the distinction between a political project and an economic problem.

However, that solution entails the problem of the temporality of the entrepreneur, which is often overshadowed by the destructive characteristics emphasised positively by the Schumpeterian tradition (Cowen, 2002; Potts, 2011; Schumpeter, 2010). The entrepreneur is constituted towards a future that is not determined and is parasitic on that in the present. Therefore, entrepreneurs ‘construct time’ as a political activity in the present in order to gain resources for a future, including the resource of time. If the entrepreneurial future is to occur, then at best it will be destructive. The more likely scenario is failure which, from a purely economic perspective thing is a good thing, as it is evidence of the existence of markets, but from a political perspective not so much precisely because it brings into question the capacity to exercise ‘temporal sovereignty’. Following Garud et al. (2014), Gehman and Soublière summarise that perverse dialectic in the following terms: in order to ‘gain legitimacy entrepreneurs create expectations about the future, but these expectations are bound to be disappointed, thereby undermining their legitimacy’ (2017: 66). If those expectations were to be satisfied then a market would have failed.

So with respect to its creative economy policy, the temporality of entrepreneurialism does not fit easily with the Scottish Government’s desire for the economic equilibrium of indigenous culture industry oligopolies and the future stability of independent sovereignty. Of course, the predicament of the Scottish Government is not unique to the extent that it has adopted what Gehman and Soublière (2017) sarcastically call the ‘grand narrative of entrepreneurship’ in which entrepreneurs are cast as wizards ‘capable of conjuring economic prosperity, interpersonal fulfilment, and even societal progress, all with the wave of their wands’, and captivating precarious surplus workers left behind by the neoliberal tide. More specifically, the figure of the entrepreneur is wired into the circuit of received ideas about cultural economy and policy (e.g. Coulson, 2012; Oakley, 2014). In so far as governments and Universities buy into and tell entrepreneurial stories, then the question arises of to the extent to which hegemony – the relation between leaders and followers, the balance of coercion and consent – can be maintained as an intertemporal process and disappointment avoided or deferred?

Following Gramsci (1971), the subaltern is critical to that project as the mediator between government and the governed. As such it can enjoy autonomous political action, but up to a point:

Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only ‘permanent’ victory breaks their subordination, and that not immediately. In reality, even when they appear triumphant, the subaltern groups are merely anxious to defend themselves… (52)

Hegemonic time and ‘future present’ policy

Despite the appearance of a top-down and tightly regulated and governed post-devolution Scottish policy context, for example as a consequence of the creation of the National Performance Framework (NPF) in 2007 (Cairney et al., 2016; Galloway and Jones, 2010; Orr, 2008) and the adoption of cultural policy established by the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport by Creative Scotland (Schlesinger, 2009), the reality is more complex and, in institutional and organisational terms, political. In common with other cases where the global orthodoxy of the cultural economy script is adopted in local contexts, a simple straightforward process of ‘policy learning’ and mimetic transfer rarely occurs (e.g. Dzudezek and Linder, 2013; Lee, 2016; Matthews, 2015; O’Connor, 2015; Pinherio and Hague, 2014; Rindzeviciutte et al., 2015). That is probably because, as Peck and Theodore argue in their distended case studies of the global shadowlands and ‘administrative weeds’ of ‘fast policy’ (2015), policy regimes are not explained by the agency of rational, deliberative actors operating in and between governments, organisations and institutions that can be modelled in diagrams where arrows represent supposedly observable linear relations between cause and effect usually pointing from top to bottom, input to output, or algebraic formulas which balance, that are commonly used to represent policies as transcendent and immediate structures. Policy formation and implementation is as much about mutation and invention as it is about models of command and deference to evidence. As Peck and Theodore explain:

Even under conditions of marked power asymmetries, policy networks are inescapably relational constructs. And the policy ‘objects’ that pass through these networks are not only transformed on the journey, they are also transforming of both the network and its nodes. (25, original emphasis)

When it comes to questions of cultural policy there is probably more ‘ideological bandwidth’ for ‘fast policy’ because the terrain is characterised by both ambiguity – culture can often mean several things at the same time, which allows different interests to converge on the same topic and attach to prevailing policy narratives – and disagreement – almost all interests are opposed to an authoritative and exclusive definition except their own which is pursued in order to establish position (Gray, 2004, 2015). In practice, as Taylor points out, that means that ‘the very notion of the creative economy is subject to a degree of semantic pragmatism. It carries different meanings subject to context and application’ (2015: 364). In any given instance this instability is ‘fixed through practices’ that Taylor categorises as ‘intermediation’. Although Taylor, following Jessop, refers to the notion of ‘spatio-temporal fix’ to account for the contribution of the ‘creative economy’ imaginary to hegemonic stabilisations of accumulation regimes, in general the explanatory emphasis is on the ‘spatio’. This perhaps reflects the disciplinary and methodological development of ‘creative economy’ research in spatial disciplines such as geography, often to investigate the claims of ‘creative class’ urban boosterism.

But perhaps the emphasis on the ‘spatio’ also reflects the assumption that, aside from cases of war and border conflicts, a territory can be governed more easily than time so anything that happens within it is subject to sovereignty. Normally ‘temporal sovereignty’, the capacity to authorise an action at t1 which will be obeyed at t2, t3, t4 and beyond, is exercised through instituting repetition in which time is reduced to space. The difficulties arising from that have been recognised since at least Machiavelli’s reflections on fortuna in The Prince (Pitkin, 1984). For Machiavelli, the main problem was the treachery and backstabbing of knaves and rogues. For Jessop, the contemporary problem of ‘temporal sovereignty’ is that it has itself become contingent and no longer assumed or guaranteed because the capacity to coordinate and unify the temporalities of different spheres of action, including its own, has been undermined by various factors including government overload and the dominance of disruptive globalised capitalism. Consequently, for Jessop, the temporality of policy is no longer constrained by legislative schedules or democratic oversight but is subject to speeds and durations outside its control. Although these different temporalities are related through domination and subordination, attempts at their hegemonic coordination are intertemporal and its expenditure, or ‘opportunity cost’, creates inertia and entropy. That does not mean that sovereignty abandons temporal projects. Rather, their temporal aspect is politicised.

One of the ways in which that is done is shown by Beckert’s (2013a, 2016) development of Koselleck’s notion of the ‘future present’ (1988) which, amongst other things, provides a political account of the ‘management of expectations’ and, like Peck and Theodore, breaks with explanatory assumptions about the basis of action in rational calculation of utility optimisation and risk evaluation. Although Beckert’s object is the microfoundation of economic actors in capitalist economies, the general framework is applicable to other domains of action, not least because ‘imaginaries of the future’ are bounded by structural, institutional and cultural contexts but also because mobilisations of the ‘future present’ arise in common conditions characterised by uncertainty, unknowability, indeterminacy, disruption and crisis to a greater or lesser degree. Beckert provides a theory of what might be characterised as Nietzschean style political conflicts that arise over which interpretation of the future shall prevail because actors seek to preserve or improve their present position to secure its eternal recurrence. In doing so, actors construct and mobilise ‘as if’ worlds in stories, theories and discourses, as well as statistics, models and diagrams, to influence the expectations of others and gain support or neutralise and defeat competitors in the struggle for resources. It is perhaps for that reason that the dominant are so concerned to invent rituals and disciplinary idioms that encourage participants to perform commitment to their imaginary ‘going forward’, as they say. In that way imagined futures shape the present and contingency appears as necessity.

To push the Nietzschean theme further, actors ‘actively forget’ the contingency of their own expectations, especially if these do not prevail in the fullness of time despite their having occupied a dominant position which mobilised resources to achieve them. The reason for that is, as Beckert explains: ‘contrary to the main claim of rational expectations theory, predictions regarding future states of the world are not necessarily accurate in the aggregate’ (2013b: 341), even though those predictions fixed actions in the present which had consequences that were not imagined, or at least acknowledged, and which may have elbowed out pessimistic expectations of the Cassandras and Jeremiahs that proved to be closer to the reality of the future that arrived. In such circumstances, the horizon scanning political actor will act swiftly in order to avoid the costs of hegemony through detachment from scenarios which have accumulated too much falsifying baggage that, with good fortune, quietly trickle into the sand. Through strategic amnesia and ‘memory churn’ actors can avoid getting stuck in a path dependent slow lane obstructed by difficulties and failures of implementation. In Peck and Theodore’s cutting observation: ‘The measure of hegemony, they say, is never having to pay the price for one’s mistakes’ (2015: 140). No one wants their past to bite them in the ass ‘going forward’, as they say. Davis (2018) and Ball and Greenway (2018) provide entertaining accounts of how those subjective attributes are positive skillset components of elite actors and their minions in the UK.

However, complicating Beckert further, and sticking with Nietzschean ethics, another political logic becomes visible if it is considered that political actors may opt for a weak and subordinate position in relation to the hegemonic ‘future present’ as a hedge because doing so provides protection and opportunities for resource accumulation in the present, and because opting out may be easier if the future starts to look different from the expectation. No one wants to piss into the wind. Such herding strategies undermine the principal-agent, dog-tail distinction and are associated with phenomena such as ‘voluntary accountability’ (Karsten, 2015). In other words, political actors may seek the advantages and security of the subaltern in order to receive the benefits of intermediation. In doing so, they can enjoy a degree of wiggle-room in mediating between the dominant and the dominated and take advantage of opportunities to manage expectations upwards. In terms of temporal politics, subaltern actors, takers not makers, can submit to a hegemonic ‘future present’ in order to benefit from the allocation of resources available to make it happen even if it does not (and even if they know that it would not). It should not go without saying that all that creates opportunities for Machiavellian knave and rogues. The next section shows how the MA was attached as subaltern to the Scottish Government’s strategic subordination of the creative economy to the governance of the ‘future present’ national-popular ‘temporal sovereignty’.

Auditing compliance with the hegemonic ‘future present’

In obedience to the Scottish Government’s NPF, all Scottish HEIs are required to submit to an SFC audit of performance outcomes, which establishes a quasi-contractual relationship. Through it HEIs describe what they will do, and why they will do it in order to justify the money allocated to them and, if possible, get more. To comply with that QMU states in its 2013–2014 ‘Outcome Agreement’ published in February 2013 that it seeks ‘to position QMU as an engaged and entrepreneurial University, supporting our graduates and our industry partners, particularly SME’s, in realising Scotland’s economic aspirations’ and will provide ‘an infrastructure and environment that actively supports graduate start up’ (SFC, 2013: 13). These intentions will be supported by research and knowledge exchange that provide the ‘evidence base for policy and inter-professional practice’ which will enable ‘the translation of excellent research to the Scottish indigenous SME base’ and have ‘a direct economic, cultural and societal impact for Scotland’. Furthermore, in ‘supporting the refreshed Scottish Government Economic Strategy 2011, we will seek to support and stimulate high growth companies in accessing the knowledge base’, in turn supporting ‘Scotland’s international ambitions by assisting key sectors in the translation of research into economic prosperity’. To establish credibility for these claims the agreement states that: ‘The creation of QMUs Business Innovation Zone (BIZ) reflects our commitment, supported by ELC [East Lothian Council, the Scottish local government territory in which QMU is located], to being an entrepreneurial University’. Clearly, in the agreement, QMU matches and mirrors the Scottish Government’s ‘future present’ and ideas about how it will be achieved in order to demonstrate loyalty. By the same token, should the ‘future present’ fail the University is unlikely to be blamed for compliance.

The attachment is reinforced when it comes to the objective of University and industry collaboration as an output for 2013–2014 will be ‘continued alignment with the Scottish Government sectors of Food and Drink, Tourism and Creative Industries; and Life Sciences through working with key government agencies and participation in relevant networks’ (original punctuation) with the agreed outcome that QMU will be established as a ‘preferred partner in strategic collaborative networks in our areas of research strength and as a centre of excellence for SME engagement’. A further output will be: ‘Development of long term sustainable academic/SME collaborations with Scottish Enterprise High Growth Companies’ which will create the outcome of ‘Increased collaborations with Growth Pipeline and Account Managed Companies’ staring with 4 of the first category in 2013 rising to 12 by 2016 and 5 of the second in 2013 rising to 10 by 2016. Lastly, outputs and outcomes desired by the University will drill down to the level of transforming student subjectivity through the creation of entrepreneurial ‘Graduate Attributes’, the ‘intellectual and personal qualities we seek to foster in our students’ which have become incorporated ‘into the fabric of our activities’ (19). In order to develop ‘their entrepreneurial skills’, QMU provides a ‘Business Gateway’ service that ‘exemplifies QMU’s commitment to supporting the development of small and medium-sized enterprises and to assisting entrepreneurial students and graduates considering setting up their own businesses’. To stimulate that undergraduate students reading for degrees in Film, Media and Performing Arts are able to study courses on ‘New Enterprise Creation’ and ‘Creative Entrepreneurship’ that will ‘prepare graduates for employment in a sector which, particularly in Scotland, is dominated by SMEs, and where the development of sustainable entrepreneurial expertise is central to the Scottish Government’s desired growth for that sector’ (20). The MA Creative Entrepreneurship is an output supporting that, with the outcome that the ‘higher skills and intellectual demands’ of the Creative Industries will become graduate attributes.

As a vehicle for its self-categorisation as an ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Mautner, 2005), the outcome agreement deepens QMU’s solidarity with the Scottish Government through a coincidence of intentions. One of the governments’ is the Refreshed Scottish Government Economic Strategy 2011, a post-crisis update of the previous 2007 version, which describes the political aim of the Scottish approach to governing as: ‘To ensure Scotland’s Government and the whole of the public sector are aligned towards one purpose’. The justification of that position is laid out in the following terms: ‘Effective government is fundamental to the successful implementation of the government economic strategy, as it is only by the actions of the public sector being fully coordinated and aligned can maximise Scotland’s potential’. In economic terms SMEs are decisive economic agents as they ‘are the bedrock of our economy’ employing over one million people. To create ‘faster, sustainable economic growth’ and a ‘more dynamic and faster growing economy’, the Scottish Government proposes to align investments to ‘growth markets’, to create a supportive business environment for SMEs and to improve links between universities and private sector companies. To justify support for the creative economy, the strategy points out that the economic value of the creative industries is worth £5 billion, produced by 60,000 jobs, and contributing 5% of Scotland’s exports. The Scottish Government expects to see a 50% increase in the value of exports by 2017. Hence, the QMU outcome agreement supports those expectations.

QMU was by no means an outlier amongst Scottish Universities in its performance of alignment with the Scottish Government’s ‘future present’ and in its pitch to its creative economy imaginary. In its 2011 publication, Scotland’s Creative Economy: The Role of Universities, Universities Scotland, an umbrella group that represents ‘the voice of Scotland’s Universities’ (or at least their bosses), outlines the case for Government support for Scottish Universities support for the Scottish creative economy. The report acknowledges that it ‘draws heavily’ on the findings of an earlier report, Creating Prosperity, published in 2010 by Universities UK, ‘the voice of Universities’ (or at least their bosses), and applies them to the Scottish context which is mediated by reference to the 2007 Scottish Government Economic Strategy that had categorised creative industries as growth areas, and the 2008 New Horizons initiative established by the Scottish Government and Universities and the SFC which had intended to create ‘a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increasing sustainable economic growth’ governed by the NPF, and reinforced by reference to ‘ministerial guidance’ to the SFC in 2008 which identified creative industries as an area of national importance. The creative industries were located within what was then understood as the ‘knowledge economy’, which was supposed to drive broader economic growth, and the report supports the Scottish Government’s emphasis on engagement with SMEs.

If Universities Scotland could be credited with nudging the SFC and the Scottish Government towards creative economy related PG provision, then it was done on the back of a series of decisions at UK and Scottish Government level to push Universities towards solving business problems and contributing to national economic growth. The entry point for Universities has been the drive towards ‘third mission’ activities (in addition to teaching and research) pushed by the big deciders of multi-level meta-governance at the EU and OECD and World Bank levels, and steered, in the UK and post-devolution Scotland, by increased institutionalisation and incentivisation often under the catch-all concept of ‘knowledge exchange’ and its hard-wiring with ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘innovation’. Kitagawa and Lightowler (2013: 6) outline a background history of successive UK government steering decisions beginning with the UK Department of Trade and Industry’s 1998 Building the Knowledge Driven Economy, and culminating with the Wilson 2012 Review of business-university collaboration. All of these texts generally tell stories going from bad to better in order to imagine the necessity of an even better future, and which are implemented by a succession of tools such as innovation and knowledge funds that have been established in order to set aside and allocate cash and resources to Universities in support of those decisions, and more generally to determine that teaching and research is geared to compliance with the overall framework (‘embedded’, as they say). For example, a component of the UK Research Excellence Framework is an audit of the research of individual universities which has an ‘impact’ and which is largely understood to mean a preference for an economic one.

According to Kitagawa and Lightowler, this trend and its structural effects have been entrenched in Scotland by, for example, Knowledge Transfer Grants awarded by the SFC since 2001. In addition, in 2011 all Scottish Universities received a baseline allocation of £70k per annum from an SFC General Fund in order to build capacity to apply for money from a Horizon Fund, and from additional tools established following a ‘Joint Future Thinking Taskforce on Universities’ in 2008 which sought to bring activities in line with the Scottish Government’s strategic priorities, of which Creative Industry was one, and which was supported by an SFC competition, Strategic Priority Investment in Research and Innovation Translation, which distributed £14 million to 20 projects to create ‘greater coherence’ and ‘improved capability’. In addition, the SFC provides an Innovation voucher scheme, and Interface, a matchmaking service for Universities and SMEs. Given that these tools are policy backed, and given the Scottish Government’s aim of public sector alignment behind them, their failure will be the consequence of a failure of government coordination of public agents. Economic failure will also create a political cost. Hence, if public sector agents comply with government coordination then the finger of blame cannot be directly pointed at them if the expected benefits of doing so do not materialise. In that case, questions of evidence to determine and evaluate policy tools feed into questions about the hegemonic balance of coercion and consent, sticks and carrots, and the distribution of political risk. These questions are particularly acute in the light of what is known about the economic characteristics of the creative industries: A high failure rate (the ‘stiff ratio’), accumulation of sunk costs in large projects that are expected to fail (‘Ten Ton Turkeys’), ‘runaway budgets’, ‘all hits are flukes’, ‘nobody knows anything’, ‘winner takes all’ and distribution of risk to the weakest agents in the ‘value chain’ (Caves, 2000).

Where’s the ‘future present’ evidence?

The subordination of Universities to ‘future present’ economic policy has happened despite, as Kitagawa and Lightowler (2013: 4) point out, university commercialisation activities quite often resulting in a net economic loss. That is to say, the investment, or perhaps subsidy, is greater than the return, and greater still if the ‘opportunity cost’ is factored in, i.e. the likely return on an alternative investment/subsidy. With respect to ‘entrepreneurship policy’, Rigby and Ramlogan’s (2013) working paper written on behalf of think-tank Nesta examined research on its ‘impact and effectiveness’, including its implementation through education. One of the methodological sources of evidence deficiency they found arises from the temporal characteristics of entrepreneurialising itself which are irreducibly speculative. That is not a ground for criticism of entrepeneurialising, but it is difficult to reconcile it with the certainties of ‘future present’ policy. Where policy is subject to the sequential criteria of if/then, entrepreneurialism is subject to the virtual criteria of if/maybe. Similarly, it is difficult to test whether government policy would improve the performance of existing entrepreneurs, or increase the number of new ones, or whether positive effects in one area may be outweighed by negative impacts in others in the aggregate, and whether these would be measured in workers, sales or productivity, or by the creation of economic value that added to the overall pot. Thus, it is difficult to ‘trace causality because of the difficulty of defining discrete units of input, the presence of confounding factors and the length of time over which effects can build’ (30). Or not, as the case may be.

Under the more specific conditions of policy-driven entrepreneurial education, there is no methodology with which to evaluate its costs and benefits that would distinguish between pre- and post-test positions, identify a control group, i.e. those who received entrepreneurial education and did not become entrepreneurs, or those who received no entrepreneurial education, or any post-compulsory education at all, and did become entrepreneurs. There are no valid means to conduct a longitudinal analysis that would take account of the economic time lag, e.g. between obtaining an educational qualification and doing entrepreneurialism, and between doing entrepreneurialism and failing, and the reasons for failure, i.e. market competition, lack of motivation, narcissism, easier opportunities, etc., not to speak of possession, or not, of educational qualifications. In fact, the same problem can be applied to government entrepreneurial policy, i.e. would entrepreneurial performance have improved and activity increased without government intervention?

Rigby and Ramlogan also raise the question of whether entrepreneurialism can be taught at all, and thus learnt, in the positive and practical sense. Entrepreneurs may possess a ‘genetic disposition’, or at least an attraction to independence, contrarian thinking, uncertainty and ‘creative destruction’. Hence, the tautology of entrepreneurial subjectivity; entrepreneurs are people who have entrepreneurial skills, entrepreneurial skills are what entrepreneurs possess (Dawson et al., 2014). In any event there is little codifiable or positive knowledge that can be exchanged. At best, it is possible to present direct or indirect anecdotal stories with some off the shelf coaching, counselling and consultancy, ‘inspirational speakers’ and even popular psycho-cognitive-therapies like Neuro-Linguistic Programming and ‘mindfulness’, although Rigby and Ramlogan point out that: ‘It almost goes without saying that these schemes which are aimed at cultural and behavioural change are not designed in the short term to impact upon production or efficiency of economic enterprises’ (2013: 4–5), even if their providers try to push the impression that they are. At worst, education is reduced to the received wisdom of normal business models and methods, which is everything entrepreneurialism is not, especially in the promotion of management as sovereign economic actor, as these are phenomenon which emerge to create stability after entrepreneurial disruption (Valentine, 2014). Worser still, Rigby and Ramlogan identified a ‘sorting effect’ of entrepreneurial education in that those who receive it are likely to be put off from entrepreneurialising, especially when the importance of uncertainty, failure and ‘animal spirits’ become known, and despite the best of intentions. So, if information about the relation between qualifications and employment is necessarily imperfect (Figueirdo et al., 2017), then with respect to entrepreneurialism it is likely to be more so. Given the characteristics of the creative economy, adding culture into the mix will reinforce that, especially considering the knowledge deficit with respect to failure. Perhaps more than anywhere else, in the creative economy many are called but few are chosen.

As for evidence of government intervention and creative economy growth, research remains undecided and conflicted (e.g. Heinze and Hoose, 2013; Marco-Serrano et al., 2014) in a notoriously weak and distorted evidence field (e.g. Donovan and O’Brien, 2016; Madden, 2001; O’Brien, 2016; Tremblay, 2011; White, 2009). Furthermore, the distinction between ‘opportunity’ and ‘necessity’ or ‘reluctant’ and ‘accidental’ (Coulson, 2012) ‘unintended’ or ‘forced’ (Oakley, 2014) entrepreneurs tends to get erased. All in all, ‘rigorous evidence is required to investigate the ‘effectiveness’ of the ‘policy effectiveness’ models’ which is unlikely to happen because research shows that knowledge transfer, impact, etc. does not follow the linear causal direction represented in the models and diagrams routinely used to justify financial support for it, although it has demonstrated that the contribution of university research to business innovation is limited compared to other available sources of ‘knowledge’ (i.e. the firm, customers, suppliers, etc.) (Kitagawa and Lightowler, 2013: 11). However, it would be overly rationalistic to assume that policy decisions are disciplined by evidence, or are revised or abandoned at some future point at which reality falsifies the narrative. Instead, under conditions of ‘fast policy’, weak or absent evidence can support an established policy track by postponing its falsification. In any event, it is unlikely that methodologically determined evidence weaknesses will drill audit and monitoring down too deeply for at least two reasons. Firstly, the sunk costs of entrepreneurial policy are too visible, at least for the time being. Secondly, a forensic accounting approach might scare off opportunistic attachment to the various initiatives that support it and deter those with their ears to the ground, in and outside Universities, with the wit to exploit policy-driven money streams by providing ‘expertise’ for implementation.

In Scotland that is likely to be sustained by opportunities arising from the wiggle room created by its government’s policy conflation of entrepreneurs and SMEs. As Rigby and Ramlogan point out, the two subjects are quite distinct and differently substantive. SMEs are firms and businesses that already exist, whereas entrepreneurs are individuals, or groups of individuals, that seek to create new ones and may have done so previously. Moreover, it should be added that the creation of a new business is not necessarily entrepreneurial if doing so does not add to the aggregate stock of value by creating new value, in which case entrepreneurs receive an entrepreneurial rent, as distinct from simply introducing more competitors into a market in order to equalise prices and reduce rents. In fact, despite the mythical Schumpeterian notion of ‘creative destruction’ entrepreneurial practice might be about capturing, rather than creating, value (Hanlon, 2014), or what Baumol called ‘unproductive entrepreneurship’ (1990). These conceptual limits are confirmed by Mason et al. (2015) in their research conducted on behalf of Scottish Enterprise which pointed out that SMEs, High Growth Firms (HGFs) and entrepreneurs are not the same thing and the empirical phenomena captured by each category are diverse and heterogeneous. In many cases, HGFs, with growth of 20% per year (‘gazelles’), emerge from acquisition and buy-out/in, often of old family firms, rather than through organic development, growth is discontinuous and occurs through episodic fits and starts, and innovation is associated with modifications in niche markets rather than through the production of novelty. Scotland is usually just a head office location for workers employed outside it. Hence, the conclusion: ‘It might therefore be the case that fast growth businesses in small, geographically peripheral economies such as Scotland have a smaller direct local economic impact than their counterparts in core regions’ (11). An additional problem, characteristic of creative industries, is outlined by Parker et al.’s (2017) observation that investment in skill and technological capability of local SMEs does not address asymmetrical power relations of oligopolies in global value chains which encourage inter-regional competition to drive down prices, often below cost. In order to address those sorts of problems, Farr-Wharton and Keast (2015), using Australian data, argue for economically focussed cultural policies that ‘upscale the local’ to the global. The main reason for that is because creative industry oligopolies are not restricted by national spatial sovereignty.

The ‘future present’ of the cultural entrepreneurship policy assemblage unravelling

One criticism of entrepreneurial cultural policy, in this case arising from a critique of the Nordic version, is that it is a vehicle for public sector actors to claim the privilege of knowledge as a means to occupy leader positions in order to govern by prescribing action and subjectivity (Pyykkonen and Stavrum, 2018). Entrepreneurialism policy is a matter of faith which undermines the certainty of its contribution to the Scottish Government’s imagined future when present economic problems will be overcome. The victim-hero of the Scottish Governement’s ‘future present’ entrepreneurial story is the indigenous SME, which will solve the structural problems of Scottish creative industries through its cultural policy. The Scottish Government’s entrepreneurial policy is almost exclusively focussed on SMEs which it wants to see grow big and fast, even if they are not generally very entrepreneurial. Although Scotland’s predicament is quite specific, its overall approach is not unique. In that respect the SME is an ideograph within what Atkinson (2016), following Törrönen (2000), calls a ‘pending narrative’ which arises in ‘something needs to be done’ type situations in which broader social, economic and cultural changes have to occur before the proposed solution can be effective. SMEs are a solution in the UK because of their ‘generally positive connotation and emotional value’ (Atkinson, 2016: 23), e.g. they are often associated affectively with ‘local’ and ‘friendly’, and thus part of ‘us/we’ against ‘them’. Atkinson notes a quantitative rise in positive references to small businesses in the UK following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, where they are cast as victims and thus opposed to the distant, abstract and complicated causes of it. In fact, one reason the UK government gave for bailing out banks was so that they could lend to ‘small businesses’ (which is not what the banks did). Thus, the small business ideograph ‘is a conceit that private entrepreneurial dreams can make up for the excesses of an elite few’ (28) and thus capable of ‘mollifying a populace demanding of answers about a lack of employment and, most probably, seeking some hope of some sort through government intervention’ (32). As governments do not intervene, even if they knew what to do and could do it, the solution is pushed back onto the people who are already paying for the consequences of the problem. They have to become entrepreneurs and swallow the cost of their own failure.

However, it would be a totalising assumption supporting a fantasy of unlimited power (sovereignty) to conclude that such political desires are ever satisfied. It is possible that this paper may have over-emphasised the political and organisational consistency of the Scottish Government’s ‘future present’ policy. If so, then that has only been to draw attention to the key hegemonic dynamics. The reality of cultural policy in Scotland is inconsistent, contradictory and contested, which creates the space for subaltern wiggle room in which to alter the balance of coercion and consent. Things are not as ‘joined-up’ or ‘aligned’ in quite the way the Scottish Government might have preferred. For example, in its 2011 publication, Scotland’s Creative Economy: The Role of Universities, Universities Scotland had warned the Scottish Government against concentrating public support on Sciene, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, as had happened in Rest of the United Kingdom (RUK), with the justification that the provision of non-STEM subjects by Universities contributes to the creative economy, where knowledge exchange is characteristically non-linear, and consequently requested more funding for PG provision in creative disciplines and performing arts that will at the same time teach students to be competitive, self-employed (and employable), enterprising and entrepreneurial. Of course, none of that can be proven, but they are plausible claims which are attached to hegemonic expectations in order to obtain resource and legitimacy for non-STEM subjects. An SFC proposal to increase the proportion of its funding allocated to ‘strategic projects’ because other funding had not caused a strong focus on the requirements of the Scottish Government was knocked back by Universities Scotland as ‘not sustainable’ (Kitagawa and Lightowler, 2013: 8–10), an objection that trumps because no one would be against it even if it is not possible to verify.

On the ground the reality of the Scottish Government’s entrepreneurial cultural policy is far from univocal. Schlesinger and co-worker’s ethnographic account of the Cultural Enterprise Office (2015), a Scottish Government agency that supports creative businesses, described the everyday coping with the contradictions and conflicts of Scottish cultural policy. From within the cultural policy sector there has been opposition to the ideology of the entrepreneurial narrative in terms similar to the critical thrust of this paper. For example, in his former position as Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts, Clive Gillman, Creative Scotland’s Director of Creative Industries, a job jointly funded by the SFC, stated in an interview that one of the many problems of entrepreneurship in its attachment to creative industries is that it ‘has become adopted through repetition as being completely linked into what we might define as the last grasps that we have on the potential for economic growth within specifically Western Europe’ and described its political discursive function as

about the fact that given we have killed off most of our symbols of mysticism that we might use in our public lives, we create such terms in order to provide us with a sense of hope, that somehow or other the complex issues that we may not always be able to compute and process can be resolved by resorting to these kind of forms of mysticism. (Gilman, 2013)

As Gramsci observed, subaltern groups attempt to influence the programmes of hegemonic formations ‘in order to press claims of their own’ which is in turn related to ‘the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them’. Subaltern claims are of a partial and limited character, their autonomy existing within ‘the old framework’ but which may also demonstrate a ‘spirit of cleavage’ (Gramsci, 1971: 55). In universities, the emphasis is probably less on a ‘spirit of cleavage’, more on attachment to new parties of the dominant groups as and when they emerge. One reason for that is that they have become re-structured to focus on that task, chasing attachments to ‘fast policy’ and eliminating possibilities of critical distance. One driver of that is the emergence of what Kitagawa and Lightowler call ‘Knowledge Exchange brokers’ who win ‘political rewards’ for Universities, which, in the case of Scotland, amounts to support for the ‘future present’ of Scottish Government economic policy, by translating policy into income streams, or trying to. Questions of moral hazard aside, moving from ‘capacity building’ to evidenced ‘effective delivery’ criteria as a metric to reward policy-driven ‘third mission’ activities may raise ‘a number of issues about the career development and progress of these professional staff’ (Knight and Lightowler, 2013: 10) (as teaching and research audits have done for academic staff). However, in the context of the persistence of dominant economic narratives about KE, it is unlikely that policy will be dramatically dropped and it is likely that ‘KE brokers’ will exploit evidence weaknesses to forge solidarity coalitions (‘networks’) with interest groups (‘stakeholders’) who have sunk costs into the economic imaginary inside and outside the University, and with those who hope to ride the policy train until it changes direction (or ownership) or the bubble bursts (Maor, 2014) in order to win resource allocation games with dominant coalitions, even at the expense of teaching and research for anything other than ‘third stream’ activities. Protections of employment law will help to lock those activities into structure, especially if ‘KE brokers’ enjoy Trade Union representation. In that way, Universities will increasingly rely on ‘time tactics’ (Pollitt, 2008) in order to cope with changing and disruptive policy temporalities in common with other street level bureaucrats in, for example, child policy (Carter, 2016), NGOs (Petrick, 2016) and the policy-driven cultural sector itself (Beirne et al., 2017; McCall and Rummery, 2017).