Introduction
In this volume, we are concerned with answering the question of what is the public value of arts and humanities research? If we take a look around the world, then it is easy to jump to the conclusion that such a question is irrelevant precisely because its public value (or at least that of the underlying arts and humanities) is so self-evident. If we browse a newspaper on the internet, if we take a walk in public spaces, or visit museums, galleries or popular public art spaces then we are continually confronted with artefacts, with designs, with discourses, statues, memorials, where the knowledge generated by arts and humanities research has become encoded into the fabric of everyday life. Indeed, researchers from the arts and humanities are themselves highly visible in the media, providing interpretative commentary to help make sense of the world. So it might seem strange to be asking that question given the relative and increasing ubiquity of that knowledge in contemporary society.
But if your starting point is to attempt as an outsider (even as a scholar) to penetrate that research, to read a humanities article or monograph, then the question acquires another, quite contradictory answer. One is immediately confronted with an apparently impenetrable collage of unfamiliar and often foreign vocabulary, or of familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. There may be no apparent scientific method, no robust empirical evidence, just a melange of thought experiments, suppositions and dubious contentions. Those talking heads we see in the media are only rarely reporting âseriousâ peer-reviewed research, but all too often only appear to be using their ill-defined and broad âexpertiseâ as the basis to make a guess on a contemporary theme, perhaps slightly better informed than the average lay-person, but a guess and an expensive one at that. The self-evident answer to our overarching question is then diametrically opposed to our first observational answer: how can it ever be that such unintelligible gibberish can have a value to the public? In the words of one of our interviewees, âwhat factories are made to smoke through all this humanities research?â Indeed, as we were finalising the manuscript for this volume the American Presidential Primaries paused to take a swipe at arts and humanities research as being frivolous and having no wider value for society (Cohen 2016).
Of course, there is no necessary reason why those two standpoints are incompatible. It could be that through their mysterious workings, the arts and humanities research community nevertheless manage to create knowledge that becomes woven into the fabric of contemporary society. The corollary of that seems to be that we should just let these researchers go their way unfettered, secure in the knowledge of the later benefits that they will bring. At the same time, this sounds like a rather standard case of special interest pleading, to except arts and humanities researchers from the accountability requirements that are now standard across all areas of public funding, particular to but not restricted to the academy (Kickert 1995). Claims for the intrinsic value or the higher worth of arts and humanities research seems like a very convenient way of providing a subsidy to a lucky few who make their livings thinking about arts and culture.
There is certainly thus a very vibrant debate around these issues, about the value that investing in (or subsidising) these researchers has for publics that are at the same time finding the public services that they previously took for granted being cut in some cases to the bone by austerity. But at the same time we note that voices on all sides of the debate are screaming not only that they are right, either that there is a fundamental impossibility that excellent arts and humanities research could ever be what society needs; nor that asking arts and humanities research to state clearly what they do for society could ever be done in ways that do not needlessly overburden and exhaust those researchers. And there are some high stakesâeven the right to existâthat are being attached to the outcomes of these debates. We see Japan, the USA and Canada in recent years take various kinds of steps to place limits on the public subsidy for arts and humanities research and to tie it more closely to the service of particular political agendas. We see the European Commission provide basic research funding for a series of research projects seeking to address the basic question of how can social sciences, arts and humanities contribute to society given the extreme reductionism in the way they were included in the EUâs latest research funding programme (see Chap. 2, but also note that this existential angst is not restricted exclusively to the humanities, although they are an area particularly suffering from its worst excesses).
And it is this dissonance in the societal debate about public value that provides us with our starting point in this volume. The positions are so deeply dug in and the stakes are so high that there is much less reflection of the question which for us is more important: why has the debate become so febrile, why have positions become so entrenched, that it is almost impossible to consider the possibility that there may be systematic and structural ways that arts and humanities research contributes to societal improvement and welfare. We also note that there is a common-sense discourse around investments in science, technical, engineering and mathematics research that is happy to digest the assumption that such investments are synonymous with investing in progress and building a better future. So why have arts and the humanities become singled out as being deemed unworthy in ways that not only disadvantage the arts and humanities, but also researchers in other disciplines who create value for societies in ways that do not neatly conform with these common-sense models of how research creates public value?
In this book, we are ultimately concerned with the ways in which knowledge creation benefits society, and in particular the growing dissonance between the reality of many different kinds of impacts, and a common-sense perspective of a biotech researcher creating a new spin-off company that discovers a new cure for a disease. These common-sense models have become so prevalent in the public discourse and so widely internalised by policy-makers that we believe these assumptions need testing. If the trend in the last ten years to align public research efforts behind immediately realisable benefits is in any way misguided, then there has been a huge policy failure. This is far more so the case for the hard sciences than for the arts and humanities and thus we seek to explore this issue by looking at the area where the dissonance seems the greatest, in arts and humanities research. We are neither advocates for the public value of arts and humanities research, nor its criticsâbefore undertaking the research behind this book we were completely neutral, although the empirical examples we have found do persuade us that it does have many kinds of public value. Our aim in tracing the models by which it creates public value, and the conditions under which that value can be maximised is not just part of a debate about public research funding for the arts and humanities. Rather we seek to answer a wider question about how far the impact agenda should be allowed to develop, and how far it must be insisted that all researchers should plan to make their research solve problems, with funding given to those showing the most immediate promise.
From a Debate to Be Judged to a Debate to Be Interpreted
If our starting point is the current belief that research should be useful, one might regard the humanitiesâ own take on thisâas embodied through historians of scienceâis that such Whiggish interpretations hide a more convoluted truth. From that perspective, the relationship of science and progress is much more contingent and partial. The contemporary policy discourse appears to make rather heroic claims masked behind an anachronistic language that imputes intentionalities and causalities almost certainly not borne out by the historical record (cf. Wakefield 2014; Weber 2012). The view that science drives progress is clearly a view that has powerful backers, and powerful enthusiasts for the extensive public investments that it brings, and in the post-war period, those backers included the American military-industrial complex. It is often forgotten that Vannevar Bush argued that humanities research was important for Americaâs place in the world, and that the choice for Federal funding for technological research was seen as being something politically expedient and a step to a wider justification for research that would make a National Humanities Foundation possible.
At the same time, the contemporary impact discourse appears to have been purged of any sense that funding arts and humanities researchâinvestments in creating humanities knowledgeâgives us, as society, novel capacities by giving us knowledge about who we are, the kinds of societies we have, and our potential to shape where we go as societies. Is it just thatâas David Looseley (2011) has arguedâthat humanities are too modest and self-effacing to ever be able to stand behind such self-aggrandising narratives of progress, even to be able to accept that without those narratives, then humanities is doomed to be overshadowed by its more apparently useful colleagues?
Our concern is not so much the reality of how arts and humanities research benefits society, although that is something that we do cover in our empirics. There are others that have done that in far more comprehensive, convincing and systematic ways than we can manage on the basis of our own reflections (cf. Belfiore and Bennett 2008; Bate 2011; Belfiore and Upchurch 2013; more examples are given in Chap. 2). What we want to do is understand the political-economic processes by which a whole set of assumptions have emerged in which arts and humanities research is not seen as self-evidently useful, in contrast to the way that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research has (as charted for example by Popp Berman 2011). These assumptions have penetrated to the very heart of the political decision-making process, with a parallel assumption that arts and humanities research is somehow, in the words of Nussbaum (2010) âuseless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global marketâ (see the section, âThree Responses Within the Communityâ of Chap. 2 for a longer version of that quotation).
In order to understand that process, we seek to âopen the black boxâ of science policy and public discourse and examine the dynamics of the representation of the public value of arts and humanities research within that discourse. Through a series of national case studies we aim to understand the ways in which a set of assumptions have become embedded and the ways in which they have been resisted and rejected because of the simplistic and obviously damaging prescriptions they bring in practice, and indeed to trace the outline of how science policy, and public policy, more generally can start to better understand the public value of arts and humanities research. On this basis, we seek therefore to stimulate a more general discussion about the rationality of science policy and its justifications in terms of research creating public value. Our hope is to contribute to policy approaches more rooted in rationality and less in a series of opportunistic policy reactions informed by simplistic versions of state-driven technological modernisation.
In this chapter, we foreground some of the key issues and debates with which we are concerned in the volume, to place the remainder of the volume in a wider context. In Chap. 2, we then reflect on the specifics of the situation in Europe, and we start to decompose the negative emotions which have permeated a supposedly rational policy debate. It is these negative policy emotions which in turn are the wider context which we explore in Part II, offering three national policy debates about the public value of arts and humanities research. In all three cases, we see that the stereotypical positions set out aboveâwhich have formed high level policy narrativesâare misleading as descriptions of what actors want to achieve. There is a realisation of the public value of a wide range of practices in arts and humanities research and of the damaging effects of assuming an immediate commercial agenda. But these national debates have yet to transform into the same kind of Vannevar Bush âEndless Frontierâ investment rationale (in the language of Benneworth 2014) for arts and humanities research.
In Part III, we pull these ideas together into a policy analysis, focusing on the extent to which arts and humanities research contributes to various kinds of societal innovation processes. We firstly discuss the appropriate model for innovation in arts and humanities research and build on Gulbranden and Aastad (2015) to argue that a better understanding of innovation and societal progress is required, a debate which will enrich STEM as well as arts and humanities research. We then reflect on the policy implications raised by this new model of innovation, and argue that arts and humanities research has the best opportunity to contribute when impact becomes a norm in both scientific and policy communities, and this requires a broad, diverse approach to successfully deliver this. Finally, we set out a manifesto for the public value of arts and humanities resear...