The politics of cultural measurement are at play both in debates about cultural value, and in attempts to measure the performance and impacts of arts and cultural organisations and policies. The first part of this book outlines some of the key political and historical drivers of the current interest in cultural value and the intensification of forms of measurement. With particular attention to the economistic logic of indicators, six authors from different disciplines introduce the historical context of cultural measurement, from the magic of medieval accounting, through sociological surveys of cultural practices, to the spread of neoclassical economics. Together, these chapters highlight the culturally and historically specific nature of debates on cultural value, drawing the reader’s attention to the values, theories and power structures embedded in contemporary regimes of measurement.

The topic of cultural measurement often evokes the quotation, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ Although commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, there is no evidence that Einstein actually wrote this, as the legend goes, on the blackboard in his office at Princeton University. Based on an older expression, the phrase should probably instead be attributed to sociologist William Bruce Cameron (1963, 13), who writes:

Regardless of who said it first, this tension between the measurable and the immeasurable remains at the heart of debates on cultural indicators.

Over time, this scientific rationality has given rise to what British cultural policy scholars Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett (2007a, 137) call the ‘cult of the measurable’. It underpins the emphasis on corporate plans, strategic outcomes, accountability and evidence-based policy-making throughout the business, non-profit and public sectors.

Around the world, government agencies have demonstrated an increasing interest in cultural indicators since the late twentieth century. At the forefront of international efforts is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2013), with its measures of cultural rights, cultural industries and cultural indicators for development, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2014), which has developed statistics to measure the cultural sector of its member countries. UNESCO’s Framework for Cultural Statistics was first proposed in the late 1970s and eventually established in 2007 (Gouiedo 1993; Pessoa et al. 2009). Its long gestation is indicative of the difficulty in developing cultural indicator frameworks, especially for measuring intangible phenomena across different communities and countries.

By tracing the genealogy of cultural indicators, we arrive at the emergence of social statistics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In his theory of governmentality, Michel Foucault (1994) argues that statistics, as a ‘science of the state’, allowed phenomena related to the population to be quantified. This enabled governments to monitor and manage populations, with the aim of increasing their health, wealth and longevity. Population statistics have been used for more nefarious purposes, too. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social indicators were used in theories of eugenics and to justify racial superiority (Dean 1999, 138–143; Cobb and Rixford 2005, 54–57). These historical insights highlight the particular values and ideologies that have underpinned the emergence and application of social and cultural indicators. This reminds us that they are not a neutral form of knowledge. Such a historical approach can also shed light on why policy practitioners struggle to develop and apply certain measurement frameworks today.