Cultural value in Edinburgh: how the city’s cultural sector communicates its value and values

Abstract

This research explores concepts and negotiations of cultural value in the City of Edinburgh’s cultural sector, examining its status as a cultural destination and ‘Festival City’. Using practice-led approaches and action research methodologies, it centres on the study of communications about culture and its value.

The thesis demonstrates how the practices and outputs of communications work act as a productive lens for exploring the circumstances and values of cultural work and creative justice (Banks, 2017). Communications are defined in the context of the practice of marketing cultural events, but also more broadly in terms of the ways in which places, organisations, artists and audiences convey their perceptions of culture and cultural value.

A distinction is explored between ideas of cultural ‘value’ in the singular as a state of being or a quality that culture holds, and cultural ‘values’, defined as the principles and beliefs that underpin the rationale for what cultural products are delivered, how, and to whom. In examining these ideas with cultural sector practitioners and the communications they produce; the research approaches the value and valuing of culture as a practice that is negotiated and fluid. It shows how the practice of bringing together sometimes conflicting notions of cultural value and values through a lens of creative justice might be operationalised to contribute to exposing and addressing inequalities in cultural audiences and workforces.

During the research, case studies were conducted with two of the eleven festivals which collectively form the Festivals Edinburgh “strategic umbrella organisation” . These include quantitative and qualitative computational analysis of datasets collected from Twitter and from these organisations’ websites, alongside semi-structured interviews with members of each one’s marketing and communications teams. Findings from these case studies, further computational content analysis of festivals communications, and the literature review, informed the programming of a hybrid in-person and online symposium on the future of culture in Edinburgh in September 2021, built around an action research methodology.

The use of participatory research through the lens of the cultural work of communications reveals interoperating situations of value and valuation in cultural policies and practice. Economic and political imaginaries relating to ideas of creative cities, creative classes, creative industries, and creative destinations are interrogated through the framing of an ‘Edinburgh Imaginary’, in which the city acts as a physical and digital landscape with attributes that are both unique to Edinburgh, and act as examples of the challenges associated with the logics of creative and cultural destination economies.

In addition, the focus on communications practice allows not only for the study of the digital and social media platforms through which cultural organisations attempt to reach and talk to their audiences – and which were also suddenly central to delivery of cultural events during the COVID-19 pandemic – but also of the way these platforms are used and the challenges they present to practitioners. Again, this research demonstrates a negotiated and fluid practice of communicating cultural value and values through the inherently imbalanced logics and power asymmetries of platforms and their economies. It considers similarities between inequalities of access to culture in digital spaces and physical ones. Finally, the thesis proposes that the further study of communications work in the cultural sector would support more detailed interrogation of the valuation and evaluation towards developing actions and practices towards creative justice.