Cultural value, measurement and policy making

Dr Dave O’Brien has recently published an article in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education exploring the deabte over cultural value and its relationship to public policy. The article is available here and the abstract is below:

No matter what the national context, the question of how to understand the impact of
government programmes, particularly in terms of value for money, has emerged as a
complex problem to be solved by social scientific management. This article engages with
these trends in two ways. It focuses on the UK to understand how these tools and
technologies are used for valuing objects and practices. By showing the rationality for
using these techniques for understanding culture, it creates a link between studies of
cultural policy and broader questions facing the arts and humanities. The article’s
second contribution is to our understanding of the role and function of arts and
humanities by showing, in the British example, how a true understanding of the value
of culture is impossible without the disciplines and fields that are currently peripheral to
both government social science and, more broadly, higher education in the UK.