No abstract

No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many countries to close their borders to travellers, in an attempt to contain the spread of the virus. Given the initially indiscriminate travel restrictions adopted in March 2020, many seafarers have been stranded on their ships, well beyond their initial labour contracts. Notwithstanding repeated calls by the United Nations, the shipping industry, and maritime unions to designate seafarers as “key workers” in all jurisdictions, many countries still do not allow crew change. While crew change is however generally possible in many ports, the number of people stranded at sea remains unacceptably high, which signals wide-spread breaches of the United Nations 2006 Maritime Labour Convention (MLC, 2006). This humanitarian crisis needs to be resolved soon, as its continuation risks eroding the hard-won Maritime Labour Convention.

Cultural policy: management, value and modernity in the creative industries, by Dave O'Brien, Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, 166 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-81759-2 Cultural policy is often seen as peripheral to overall debates in public policy, particularly relative to health, defence, or education (p. 1). O'Brien sets out to show how cultural policy is, in fact, an important part of general public policy (p. 130). In order to do so, he engages with disciplinary links between cultural policy studies and political science. Cultural policy studies grew out of cultural studies -in order to make critical engagement with culture in society more useful and thus applied. In spite of the strongly interdisciplinary nature of this field of research, the debate has largely remained in this sphere.O'Brien rightly argues that cultural policy is a field where the tensions between aesthetics, markets, and bureaucracy are well understood. Nonetheless, "thinking through a defence of the bureaucratic, alongside the limits of the market, whilst recognising the role of aesthetic judgement, is a complex task" (p. 140). The pursuit of this challenge has been the raison d'être of cultural policy research all along; it is a field that can contribute to understanding "how society might rediscover the appropriate limits of the market paradigm for decision-making that uses economics as its chief social science" (p. 140). Surely, cultural policy research does not have the answers -at least not all of them. But over the past 20 years, the increasingly active debate has provided insights that have evolved in tandem with society.In order to engage with this overarching question, the book builds on three core concepts to help locating cultural policy in society: modernity, government, and the social life of methods. These notions are introduced in the second chapter, which sets the theoretical context of cultural policy, and they are drawn upon throughout the remainder of the book. Modernity is associated with a secular, science-based scientific logic geared towards a society of individuals (p. 17). Government is, building on the work of Rod Rhodes, approached as a tension: "government is best understood as the decision-making by top-down hierarchical forms of control […] whereas governance involves the sharing of resources in decision-making by a disparate group of actors drawn from various settings" (p. 27, original emphasis). This contrast is later linked to the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, which provides a framework to critically engage with the complexity of governance under modernity (p. 29ff). Yet the guiding foundation of the work is the social life of methods -building on the idea that the methods of social science exist in a thoroughly hermeneutic relationship with the social processes they intends to understand and influence. This is particularly important for cultural policy, since this field of inquiry aims to understand the conflicting interests of stakeholder groups (audience, the arts and culture sector, ...

No abstract