Tartan and tantrums: critical reflections on the Creative Scotland “stooshie”

Abstract

On the 1 July 2010 a new cultural development body for Scotland was established. However, by 2013 the organisation was embroiled in a public dispute with a number of the individuals and organisations it was established to support. This short paper considers this "crisis" as a discursive event [Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. 2009. Methods of critical discourse analysis. London: SAGE], and informed by a discourse analysis of various texts, it identifies the core narrative as being one in which a distiguishable body of "artists" and their supporters are resisting a dangerous ideological power-grab by "non-artist" bureaucrats. It proposes that this relies upon the well-worn discursive knot of the instrumental versus the intrinsic, which facilitates a continuing obscuration of the prevailing power relationships within the network of publicly subsidised culture in Scotland. In its discursive focus on the relationship between an imagined egalitarian "cultural community" and Creative Scotland (CS), the narrative of the dispute overlooks the extent to which both CS and the majority of organisations it funds are primarily tools of governance by which the Scottish Government seeks to strategically shape the production and dissemination of culture in Scotland. It concludes that many of those individual artists arguing for various degrees of change were thus unwittingly complicit in supporting a status quo that makes the change they desire unlikely while simultaneously limiting public input into what sort of culture merits subsidy.

Arts councils, policy-making and “the local”

“…Places are encouraged to adopt specific politically and economically located identities and develop recognisable organisational structures with which institutions such as arts councils are able to interact, and fundamentally to trust. Trust is essential for cooperative behaviour and for the legitimacy of governance networks, the likes of which arts councils increasingly rely on to deliver their objectives (Stevenson, 2014). As such, securing national support for "local" activity becomes as much (if not more) about places creating a vehicle by which they can exhibit organisational and administrative competence as it is about the creative and cultural practices that the people of those places wish to pursue.…”

“…However, recent work shows the importance of looking at specific policy areas within the different devolved regions. While they may share common cultural and state-based logics, amidst the backdrop of changing socio-economic and political conditions they diverge, reflecting different values and practices in relation to, and of, "the local" (MacKinnon, 2015;Stevenson, 2014). Yet, there has been little research to establish the patterns and effects of national and local cultural policies in action, and their relationships to these dominant discourses.…”

The Failures of Policy

“…3-6), thus placing the onus on funded organisations to change rather than changing what they choose to fund. In Scotland, the leadership of Creative Scotland attempted to redistribute funds but failed to deliver real change in the face of opposition from those already funded, who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo (Stevenson, 2014). Some of those we interviewed from local authorities also claimed that it is difficult to reallocate funds to support people's participation in their own cultural practices within a context where officers are fighting to safeguard any funding for culture, and where any suggestion of change is more likely to see reductions in funding rather than reallocation.…”

Purpose, place, people, and passion

“…Stakeholder relationships Bauman (2004) has argued that artists and managers are "sibling rivals" who, although disagreeing about the methods, are both agreed that society needs to change.Others argue that the two fields of practice are so "grounded in historically contradictory, not to say conflicting, values" (Daigle & Rouleau, 2010, p.13) that ideological tensions are an inherent part of all professional arts organisations (Maitlis & Lawrence, 2003;Chiapello, 1998). It would appear that for many of those working in not-for-profit arts organisations "management" is perceived as one of the primary methods of coercive and normative isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) by which an overbearing state seeks to homogenise and control artistic practice for instrumental ends (Stevenson, 2014;Orr, 2008;Belfiore, 2002). However, there are others who argue that those running arts organisations are not so passive in their adoption of managerial discourses and practices.…”