Introduction: Cultural Impact in Theory and Practice

Summary

WHEN THE RESEARCH COUNCILS IN THE UK recently required researchers to fill out an “impact” statement in their applications for public funding, resistance among the academic community was strong. The emphasis, all parties were quick to surmise, was primarily on justifying government spending of taxpayers’ money in terms of measurable economic returns, and a majority of academics across both the arts and sciences felt that such an approach to evaluating research projects was inherently misguided. In a lead article in the Times Higher Education (THE) in April 2009, not only was it judged to be a “pretty fruitless task” to try to devise a meaningful way of putting a price tag on the benefits of research, economic impact in itself was considered an insufficient category for capturing the various ways in which research brings value to the wider community. As the argument has unfolded, however, supporters of a “blended approach” to impact measurement that would also cover social benefits and more narrative accounts of impact have begun to embrace the idea of explaining at some level the value to society of the innovative work they do. “To reduce everything to just one number would not accurately capture the impact of research … But that is not to say that everything is so intangible that you can’t measure anything,” commented the chief executive of the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts in the same THE article.

Considered in the broader context of cultural output, this most recent attempt to quantify the effect or value of certain cultural activities is far less of an anomaly than some of the initial reactions might imply. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century the British poet, critic, and schools’ inspector Matthew Arnold programmatically sought to instrumentalize culture — meaning something akin to the recognized canon of highbrow cultural works at that time — as a means of social engineering, as laid out in his Culture and Anarchy of 1869. Throughout the twentieth century, leftand right-wing governments alike across the United Kingdom, United States, Continental Europe, and Australasia have seen nothing untoward in aligning cultural activity with key public discourses such as urban regeneration, national heritage development, and racial or national identity.