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and professionals have become dysfunctional. The ‘cultural system’ has become a
closed and ill-tempered conversation between professionals and politicians, while
the news pages of the media play a destructive role between politics and the public.
Given the increasingly recognised complexity of this whole policy environment that now
encompasses information technology, the globally rising ‘cultural industries’ and UNESCO’s
crucial Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions
(2005), it has to be appreciated that there are many interdependent policy areas involved and a
need to be able to distinguish ultimate, intermediate and immediate effects. These would range
from long-term objectives in social cohesion, economic and sustainable development at one
extreme and immediate direct links to policy, programme or project outputs and their evaluation
at the other.
All too often, the lack of robust evidence about cultural participation frustrates the possibility of
meeting the political aspirations of governments for building up a comprehensive picture of the
social impact of the sector, measuring change, tracking trends and being able with confidence to
assess its relative value for money. As a result, the ‘outputs’ (such as participants' continued
involvement) often have to stand in as proxies for ‘outcomes’ with users effectively being
bypassed in the process. Relatively few projects are even able to identify the socio-demographic
characteristics of the participants.
1.2 The changing understanding and nature of cultural activity
In principle, we may adopt the largest and most comprehensive definition of culture (e.g. the
UNESCO definition of culture as “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and
emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature, but
lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs” (UNESCO, 2001). In
practice, the bulk of available data mainly assists us in measuring the consumption of cultural
products or very specific and formalised cultural behaviours that are more distinctive of the
lifestyle of the European bourgeoisie of the past century than typical representations of the wide
range of possible meanings of cultural participation today. This European model of measuring
the consumption of cultural products and the material behaviour resulting from cultural beliefs
can, however, be adapted to people of other regions of the world. A prime example would be
New Zealand where statistical standards and surveys have included many indigenous Maori
beliefs and modes of behaviour alongside those of European settlers.
The strong European bias in data availability and the difficulties in measuring very complex
behaviour constantly force us towards a reductionist concept of culture, highlighting all the
variables related to phenomena that are easier to measure and pushing into the background
anything that is difficult to define, imprecise or related to immaterial and universal aspects of
culture.
Nothing new in this: it was certainly also the case in the 1950s and 1960s, when there were
initial efforts in Europe and the United States to establish statistics and datasets on culture at the
national level. The gap between the complexity of the cultural field and the availability of reliable
datasets has always been a major concern for cultural researchers and statisticians.
However, this gap is widening at a very rapid pace. The digital revolution is pouring a variety of
new cultural goods and services onto the market, enabling a wide new range of consumption
and cultural behaviours, “exposing” large masses of people in their everyday life to cultural
products in a very pervasive way, through the Internet and mass media, while also making the
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