Cultural Policy, Work and Identity

The Creation, Renewal and Negotiation of Professional Subjectivities

Jonathan Paquette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780815399384
• eBook ISBN: 9781317156307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Social Sciences

How have cultural policies created new occupations and shaped professions? This book explores an often unacknowledged dimension of cultural policy analysis: the professional identity of cultural agents. It analyses the relationship between cultural policy, identity and professionalism and draws from a variety of cultural policies around the world to provide insights on the identity construction processes that are at play in cultural institutions. This book reappraises the important question of professional identities in cultural policy studies, museum studies and heritage studies. The authors address the relationship between cultural policy, work and identity by focusing on three levels of analysis. The first considers the state, the creativity of the power relationship established in cultural policies and the power which structures the symbolic order of cultural work. The second presents community in the cultural policy process, society and collective action, whether it is through the creation of institutions for arts and heritage profession or through resistance to state cultural policies. The third examines the experience of cultural policy by the professional. It illustrates how cultural policy is both a set of contingencies that shape possibilities for professionals, as much as it is a basis for identification and identity construction. The eleven authors in this unique book draw on their experience as artists and researchers from a range of countries, including France, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, and Sweden.

Chapter 1
Theories of Professional Identity: Bringing Cultural Policy in Perspective

Jonathan Paquette

When studying cultural policy and identity, the first thing that comes to mind is the notion of spatial identity. Cultural policy is most often studied through the angles or through the lenses of national identity. More recently, many researchers have pointed to the importance of cultural policy in the construction or survival of regional identities (for examples, see Gattinger and Saint-Pierre 2008, Saint-Pierre and Audet 2010). This first approach revolves around a distinct conception of identity problematized, in most cases as citizenship. To suggest that cultural policies convey the state’s idealized conception of citizenship (‘good citizenship’) is a common place, albeit very important (not to say foundational) theme in the field of cultural policy research. Very important questions on this matter are still being researched and there is no doubt that this research area will persist as an important one for our field. An important variation on this theme comes from the cultural studies that have traditionally focused on the regulation of cultural practices by the State and other influential forms of social agency, making of class and social identities their primary matters of concern (Williams 1977, McGuigan 1996, Bennett 1998). These two major theoretical streams (or questions) from our field speak to the important place citizenship and social identities have played in the last decades (Mulcahy 2006).

However, beyond this level of analysis, the relationships between cultural policy and identities have seldom been a matter of central concern for researchers in public policy, and even for researchers from our field. It is as if questions of identities were reserved to issues of class and space. Through the lenses of Policy Studies, cultural policy is seen as a sub-field, as a policy sub-sector, and issues of formulation, implementation and evaluation of policies are themes that serve to frame the major questions that researchers will raise in the course of their work. To be fair, identity is not the major object studied in policy studies; but still, identity is, infrequently, referred to in some explanatory models. Identity, for instance, can help to make sense of how an advocacy coalition was successful in the formulation of a cultural policy, or how it has limited the possibility of cooperation between a number of advocacy groups. That being said, identity remains a peripheral explanatory device (or layer of analysis) in most policy models.

Conversely, but from an entirely different side of things, cultural policies are rarely referred to and rarely theorized when studying professional identities. While the notion of professional identities has been most important in sociology, the place that it provides cultural workers/professionals and cultural organizations in its research and literature has been relatively slim. There are obvious reasons for this slight, which will be explained just shortly to make sense of it. In cultural policy (and cognate fields i.e. arts management, heritage studies, museum studies, etc.), research on professional groups, cultural workers and cultural occupations share in common an inclination for the study of professionalism, or what I like to label the ‘implicit theory of professional identity’.

The main objective of this collected edition is to illustrate how the interdisciplinary project of bringing together cultural policy and professional identity represents a rich and very potent research agenda for our field. By ‘our field’, I should make it clear that I have a rather ‘federative’ conception of the field, and that it is intended to refer to the constellation of disciplines, new disciplines or sub-disciplines, and research programmes often referred to as cultural policy studies, heritage studies, arts management, museum studies, cultural studies and communications – in sum, any cognate field that shares, to a certain degree, an interest for cultural institutions, cultural practices and cultural policy. The interdisciplinary nature of this project permits, here, to gloss over some of the subtleties that could be established between these (different but complementary) disciplines – or these areas of study, as some might prefer to refer to them.

In short, this collected edition aims at provoking a theoretical encounter between cultural policy and professional identities, research objects that evolved in many different directions over the years – and the different chapters of this collected edition are all individually a testimony to the theoretical and methodological potential that lies in this encounter. Primarily, we want to interrogate the incidences and influences of cultural policy in shaping professional identity from different angles and perspectives. The rationale of this collected edition revolves around the role of cultural policy in creating, shaping and renegotiating professional identities (subjectivities) in the cultural sector, as well as the use of cultural policy as a material for professional identification, as a normative anchor. Understanding professional identities from this viewpoint represents an interesting opportunity to renew our understanding of how cultural professions are created and transformed, as much as it is an opportunity to assess and question anew how our occupations and professions operate, and to deepen our understanding of the core normative and social-cognitive processes at stake in professional life.

This introductory chapter serves two purposes. Of course, it aims at presenting and introducing the chapters of this collected edition in their own contexts, and also in the context of this book. That is to say that I want to point out their rich diversity as well as their unity towards this project, and explain how they contribute to this research programme in their own ways. But because this collected edition mainly deals with the notion of professional identity in a specific context (cultural policy), I want to take this opportunity to make some clarifications, and to define and perhaps chart, a little bit, the interdisciplinary scholarship that has dealt with this subject. While professional identity has been defined more explicitly in some academic traditions, like sociology, for instance, in other disciplines and areas of study, professional identity has been reserved a much more subtle treatment, as is the case in Policy Studies. This chapter should provide a good idea of the different traditions that encompass the notion of professional identity.

Before going any further, however, it might be useful here to understand that the notion of profession and professional are subject to a very liberal use in this collected edition. In fact, by professional identity, we refer to most work-based subjectivities and make no discrimination between professional identity and occupational or work-identity. This very broad use of the notion of professional identity is probably not problematic for scholars in the field of cultural policy, but it would certainly be problematic in light of a strictly orthodox conception of the notion of profession, as the one entertained by some American sociologists of labour, for example. With, perhaps, fewer complexes, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1998) once expressed in footnotes, but in very significant ones, how caution must be exercised when using academic notions as some may vary in meaning and boundaries from one academic tradition to another. What they meant in this article was that some terms, even academic ones, were imbued with a false sense of technicality, an expression of what they saw as the ‘imperialist reason’. Building on this word of caution, we refer to profession here in the sense of professional groups, occupational groups, and any other type of work-based form of agency (Evetts 2011). While in the most orthodox conception, profession refers strictly to a group that has successfully gained the monopoly over a practice, with warranty and recognition of this monopoly by the state; for the purpose of this collected edition, throughout the pages of the book, we will be using the notion of profession in a much more inclusive sense.

The following sections try to establish, try to chart, the scholarship on professional identity. These sections aim at providing a panorama of the main research programmes and the theoretical landscape of research on professional identities. They provide us with a good sense of how different disciplines and research areas have dealt with the question of professional identity; they also inform us of the type of questions and insights that the study of professional identity may bring into our field. But, more importantly, this survey of the main theoretical approaches (theoretical traditions) of professional identity is also essential for this book since the different chapters vary in theoretical traditions and often build, implicitly or explicitly, on one (or many) of these theories.

The Sociological Traditions of Professional Identity

Professional identity has been conventionally regarded as a sociological object. As such, the sociological perspectives are, in most cases, the roots to any further development or interdisciplinary ramifications on the subject of professional identity. Below are outlined many different variations on this theme, and, as such, it would be difficult to establish that sociology, itself, possesses a single dominant point of view or definition of professional identity. In fact, the sociological approaches speak to a rather fractured treatment of the object of study, representing perhaps a number of different ‘theoretical continents’ with a great variety of outlooks on the matter.

Professional Archetypes and the Functionalist Tradition

For functionalists, only a very limited number of groups may be labelled and identified as professional groups, per se. By definition, professions are limited to a very crucial number of characteristics. In a now famous article, Wilensky wanted to make clear, once and for all, that ‘very few occupations will achieve the authority of the established professions’ (1964: 137), a comment that pointed to the orthodoxy of the functionalist definition of professions. According to functionalists, like Wilensky, professional groups are distinct from occupations as they possess: a) a distinct body of technical knowledge; b) a certain level of commitment, from the part of their members, to the professional norms of practice; c) an association or peer group that aims at regulating the entry into the practice, and controls the professional practice and its transformation; d) monopoly of the practice – that is to say, that the group has successfully acquired or secured its dominance over its respective practice, thus suppressing any competition and acquiring full authority over the practice. This monopoly (Paradeise 1988) is, in fact, confirmed by the state, who supports and secures this monopoly by law. This final dimension is perhaps the most limiting of all, but is quite telling of the functionalist conception of profession, where the medical and legal professions are the two most cited cases for the tenets of this approach to profession. In fact, one might very well think that the social histories of medicine and the legal profession have profoundly influenced the ways in which the functionalists have conceived of professions in such a narrow and limited way. Both legal and medical professions have become, over time, the archetypes and most salient expressions of professions and professionalism, and a dominant example that has left its mark on the sociology of labour.

The functionalist’s distinctive understanding of professions also informs their conception of professional identity. For functionalists like Parsons, the evolution of the technical and social division of labour has made it so that professional groups have come to be recognized as the socially legitimate experts of a specific area, or as Parsons puts it, ‘A professional man is to be held “an authority” only in his own field’ (1939: 460). And for Parsons, professional groups are crucial to social structure as ‘[t]he professional type [professionals] is the institutional framework in which many of our most important social functions are carried on, […]’ (467). Furthermore, according to Parsons, through their noble and disinterested practice, professionals carry essential duties in our society in a way that is distant from the commercial values of liberalism (465–466). Of course, this perspective conveys a conception of professional identity, defined mostly as a social identity, where professionals are defined as social elites. The professional identity described by Parsons reminds us of aristocratic values (i.e. disinterestedness) and of elitism.

In the functionalist conception of professional identity, the identity anchors of a profession are mostly defined as socially-defined qualities and attributes; they are conceived in terms of social prestige (Merton 1958; Parsons 1963). This certainly is echoed in Wilensky’s conception, as he once asserted: ‘Many occupations engage in heroic struggles for professional identification; few make the grade’ (1964: 137). Therefore, acquiring professional status is a collective achievement that is also well reflected upon the social prestige of the profession. Similarly, Merton suggests that inter-professional struggles, in some institutions, are largely associated with a ‘need for status’ and the quest for the social prestige of professionals (Merton 1962: 70). In sum, functionalists view professional identity as a function of prestige for social identities. While this understanding is far from being entirely erroneous, and while we may agree with this conception to a certain extent, it is a very limited one as is focuses solely on the prestige that society attributes to professions and professionalism.

Interactionism

The interactionist movement in sociology has had a profound influence on the American and French sociology of Labour. While interactionism’s contribution is not limited to the sociology of work – much of their contribution to the social sciences are evidenced in many areas such as urban sociology, the sociology of social deviance, and, to a great extent, in the sociology of social institutions – their contribution to the sociology of work brought the cultural dimension and the inner life of professional groups back into the sociological analysis. This distinctive approach of the interactionists to the sociology of labour is particularly well illustrated in a piece entitled Men and their work (Hughes 1958), where interactionist researcher E. C. Hughes approaches work as a cultural experience defined as a social trajectory, punctuated by many different turning points – a social time and space where the individual’s work identity is expected to change. These turning points in work experience represent a socially, culturally, and organizationally defined time and space. Identity construction at work is conceived of as both a social and individual trajectory. These trajectories are, of course, in the interactionist perspective, contingent on the different social worlds people dwell in. In other words, the individual’s experience of work and identity construction is tied to the subtleties of a specific field, meaning that social trajectories in the medical sectors – to take this well-acknowledged example and researched area – vary greatly from the ones experienced by jazz musicians. Understandably, because of the importance that trajectories play in the interactionist’s theoretical apparatus, the notion of career is also very central to their approach (Becker and Strauss 1956). For interactionists, professions are not defined as rigidly as they are from a functionalist point of view. Professions are broadly understood as ritualized social behaviour, or as stabilized social practices consistent with the pressures of a given social world. As evidenced in Outsiders, even the notion of career is so broad as to encompass (deviant) social practices such as marijuana use (Becker 1963).

Professional identity is, therefore, a result of the individual’s negotiation between the social contingencies of the social world of work he or she evolves in. How people negotiate their place and how they construct their path (trajectory) informs us on how people respond to social demands, expectations and challenges imposed by society’s institutions. As such, the interactionist approach to professional identity informs us about the cultural characteristics of work as well as about the socialization processes that shape these work related subjectivities. How does the individual deal with the social institutions of work? What does it mean to become a professional athlete, a lawyer or school teacher? How do individuals reconstruct their professional identities in mid-career, through abrupt or forced career changes? Such are the simple, yet very topical questions raised by interactionists.

Noticeably, interactionists have developed an interest for the sociology of arts and cultural work. Becker’s famous Art Worlds (1982) delves directly in to the matter, and renders explicit the multiplicity of and great variety of experiences in the practice of the arts. This contribution illustrated, among many things, how the artistic process was also subject to social conventions and social codes, and that the creative process was, in fact, distilled in a series of operations and transacted through a number of workers that made art possible – thus contrasting with the myth of the solitary genius (Becker 1982: 14). Also in this work, Becker suggests that states influence arts, creativity and the arts world by means of influence through public support, or by means of repression through censorship (182–185), thus opening a number of questions that we wish to address ourselves, to a certain extent, in this collected edition. However, it is perhaps in Outsiders (Becker 1963), a book meant as a sociology of ‘social deviance’, that the richness of the interactionist contribution to the sociology of cultural work is more perceptible. The case study on jazz musicians in Outsiders brings forward the importance of the musicians’ conception of the public, with its different segments and expectations. It reveals how colle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theories of Professional Identity: Bringing Cultural Policy in Perspective
• 2 Cultural Policy and the Promotion of World War I Heritage Sites in France: Emerging Professions and Hybrid Practices
• 3 Cultural Democracy and the Creation of New Professional Subjectivities: The Case of Cultural Mediation
• 4 Technology, Cultural Policy and the Public Service Broadcasting Tradition: Professional Practices at BBC News in the Social Media Era
• 5 Curators and the State, a Question of Interdependencies: The Case of France
• 6 Policy Rationale and Agency: The Notion of Civil Society Organizations in Swedish Cultural Policy
• 7 Museum Volunteers: Between Precarious Labour and Democratic Knowledge Community
• 8 The Transcendental Fan: Navigating the Producer-Consumer Dichotomy and Cultural Policy in the Digital Age
• 9 American Cultural Policy and the Rise of Arts Management Programs: The Creation of a New Professional Identity
• 10 Becoming a Cultural Entrepreneur: Creative Industries, Culture-led Regeneration and Identity
• 11 Cultural Policy and Agency in a Cultural Minority Context: Artistic Creation and Cultural Management in Northern Ontario
• 12 Being Part of the ‘Supercreative Core’: Arts, Artists and the Experience of Local Policy in the Creative City Era
• Index