Introduction

We began this book noting that, even before the pandemic, a series of long-standing problems confronted cultural policy and the cultural sector in the UK. Within national policy, there has been a consistently low level of understanding about how differently individual parts of what are understood as ‘creative industries’ operate (House of Lords, 2023). This problem is accentuated in the case of the arts and culture; there is a distance between the policy rhetoric about the sector’s economic and cultural importance and the reality of precarious workers and undervalued, precarious organisations (Banks and O’Connor, 2017; Comunian and England, 2020).

Audience development and widening participation have equally long-standing issues. Government data shows static levels of engagement with the arts over almost two decades, irrespective of government policy (DCMS, 2020). Academic analysis, of both survey and ticketing data, demonstrates that although there are high levels of engagement and participation in ‘everyday’ cultural activities (Miles and Gibson, 2016, Taylor, 2016; Gilmore, 2017; Belfiore and Gibson, 2019), audiences for more formal types of culture were both a minority, and unrepresentative, of the wider population (Hanquinet, O’Brien and Taylor, 2019; Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020).

These findings indicate that the conditions for cultural and creative production and consumption can be characterised by structural continuity rather than rupture or shift. This is a theme we have stressed throughout this book, and the overarching and dominant theme has been continuity. Of course, the pandemic was hugely disruptive and we hope our book has also clearly demonstrated that impact. Yet throughout the range of case studies, national and regional analysis, sub-sectoral and artform-specific discussions, and various methodological approaches, we have consistently foregrounded the ongoing impact of inequalities in the cultural sector. Rather than being products or consequences of 2020, these trends and structures were exacerbated, rather than created, by the pandemic.

Our concluding chapter develops this theme. At the same time, we are also keen to reflect on the impact of our findings for cultural policy researchers. Most notably, we conclude with reflections not only considering the impact of the pandemic on future research subjects, but also on the conditions for cultural policy knowledge production and research itself.

Understanding the pandemic in a global context

There is a clear consensus within research, irrespective of the national context, of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on creative and cultural production and consumption. The sudden halt to almost all activities, whether international touring or local participation, meant the arts, cultural and creative industries were among the worst-affected sectors. The 2022 UNESCO report on Culture in times of COVID-19 finds that the global cultural sector’s Gross Value Added fell by 25 per cent in 2020. This fall was accompanied by widespread job losses estimated at 10 million, comparable in its severity to sectors such as accommodation and catering (UNESCO, 2022).

The impact of COVID-19 on cultural workers, particularly the freelance and self-employed, cannot be understated. Many saw their income sources disappear rapidly and struggled to access often ill-targeted public wage compensation (Dümcke, 2021; Joffe, 2020; Johnson, 2020; Pacella, Luckman and O’Connor, 2021; Wright, 2020). However, the effects of the pandemic were unevenly distributed. The narrative of absolute market failure does not capture the nuances of impacts that were differentiated by sector, occupational status and socio-economic group (as is discussed in Chapter 2 in this volume with respect to the UK). While some sub-sectors were more exposed than others, they also appear to have received more public support. The sub-sectors of film and television, museums and galleries, performing arts and music appear to have been most targeted by policy interventions both globally and in the UK specifically (IDEA Consult et al., 2021; Siepel et al., 2021).

The state support offered during the crisis, through national and regional policy responses, did protect the cultural and creative sectors. Potentially huge levels of business failure were halted and the capacity for some to continue to invest and employ during the pandemic was protected. The OECD (2022) describes state policy interventions as a ‘lifeline’ for the sector, with over 85 per cent of creative businesses in the UK receiving governmental support. Globally, most countries offered some measure of intervention for cultural and creative industries, with financial support being the most prevalent form: 82 per cent of all targeted arts and cultural policies were economic (IDEA Consult et al., 2021). The most common among these were emergency relief grants and loans targeting cultural organisations and workers.

The dominance of an economic response, the speed and quantity of funding distributed, and the rhetoric accompanying these rescue packages gives some indication that economic impacts are still a dominant way that policy thinks about the sector. Indeed, a European Commission report recommended that the learning from the pandemic for cultural policy should include the introduction of more non-economic measures to balance out the dominance of economic frameworks (IDEA Consult et al., 2021, p.5).

There were however important distinctions, signalling different ideological approaches and policy attachments to culture, and confirming the sense that the COVID-19 crisis illuminates how culture is thought about, valued and advocated for, as well as the grounds on which governments and policy actors are prepared to offer support (Banks and O’Connor, 2021; Comunian and England, 2021). For example, in Germany, the arts, creative and cultural industries were offered immediate and sector-specific support, being publicly described as ‘indispensable’ and ‘fundamental’ to democratic societies (Dümcke, 2021, p.20). Argentinian policy addressed culture through notions of care, as ‘a caring agent in the midst of a crisis, not just as a sector of the economy or as entertainment’ (Serafini and Novosel, 2021, p.60). By contrast, the notion of culture as ‘just … entertainment’ seemed prevalent in African countries such as Uganda and Kenya, resulting in an imbalance of attention towards the commercial cultural and creative industries (TV, film, advertising, music and fashion) (Joffe, 2020, p.31). Meanwhile, in Australia, sector lobbyists framed arts and culture primarily in economic terms, as an industry requiring investment, an approach that nonetheless ‘failed to cut through to the government’ when the need was greatest (Pacella, Luckman and O’Connor, 2021, p.42). The early international policy review from this project (Johnson, 2020) similarly uncovered different approaches for compensating artists. These included the application of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and social welfare models that support a need to revisit the UNESCO Recommendation on the Status of the Artist (UNESCO, 2022).

Across the globe, culture’s position oscillated between economic and social good during the pandemic. These twin rationalities shaped state policy responses. Arts and culture were helping individuals and communities adapt to public health measures such as lockdowns at the same time as states addressed creative and cultural organisations as businesses.

According to an economic rationalist framing of culture, commonplace in cultural policy discourse but enhanced during the pandemic, we can see four types of relationship. These fit the four types first identified by Potts and Cunningham (2008): welfare, competition, growth and innovation. The first, welfare, assumes these sectors consume more economic resources than they produce and so need subsidy to be properly maintained, justified by the policy rationale of their utility to the welfare of society. The second, the competition model, assumes no cultural exceptionalism for the creative economy and that creative and cultural sectors are like all others. Thus, they require no special policy treatment and must jostle for resources with other activities. In this scenario, we would expect there to be no culture-specific recovery strategies: if the sector shrinks or changes as a result then this is for the market to decide.

The third model sees cultural and creative industries as drivers of growth across the broader economy, stimulating new ideas and growth to other sectors, a spillover of value that also rationalises culture’s place in recovery plans and regeneration programmes. The final, innovation, pitches creative and cultural industries at the heart of industrial strategy. This idea is often used in advocacy for the sector’s inclusion in economic policy, for example in the 2017 Independent Sector Review of the Creative Industries and their significance to the UK Industrial Strategy (Gilmore and Bulaitis, 2023). Given the halting of economies-as-usual during the pandemic, it is unsurprising that this final assumption informed few state policy responses to the pandemic.

The exceptionalism of culture and its welfare utility were important tools for advocacy within policy discourses. As is articulated above in the empirical chapters of this book, evidence of this utility was increasingly articulated within communities in lockdown, exemplified by small and large organisations through their increased civic missions, and drawn into local government recovery plans and third sector activities.

The welfare utility aspirations of the devolved nations in the UK, such as the Future Wellbeing Commission of Wales, reflects those of supranational bodies like UNESCO and OECD which similarly aspire to protect sectors under threat of exploitation and automation and recognise their social and cultural value (OECD, 2022). However, as a policy instrument for responding to the pandemic, the jury is still out on the value of UBI approaches, both in general and when exceptionally applied for creatives.

Looking at the introduction of UBI in Ireland, Hayes (2022) argues that this approach neglects the endemic precarity and gig economies within the sector, serving instead ‘a neoliberal register’ (Hayes, 2022, p.14). This obscures the reasons why these inequalities exist in the first place, while emphasising the potential for economic exploitation of cultural production as a sole reason to support it. Likewise, O’Connor (2022) rails against such economic rationalism, which reduces the role of arts and culture only to utility and suggests Covid as the primary lever for state support for the arts. Rather, for O’Connor (2022) it is the precarious and irregular nature of creative work which is the salient fact that needs to be addressed by policy interventions. He warns against the danger that UBI offers a solution of small statism, prompting further reduction in investment more broadly in welfare infrastructure (O’Connor, 2022).

Economic rationality for cultural sector support also fails to provide suitable explanations for distinctions founded in political geography. As this brief review, and previous chapters of the book, make clear, policy responses at national and local levels were distinct and distinctive. Differing types of response reflect nation-states with discrete socio-cultural histories and identities, power relations and discursive practices, which shape the epistemic communities (Haas, 1992) who make decisions about cultural investment and policies.

This point is manifest in the emergence of new networks and partnerships during the crisis, another consistent theme throughout the book. These new allegiances promoted sharing of value frameworks which move beyond economic rationalism and create spaces for new policy formulation that are collaborative and experimental, in the face of adversity and crisis. Thus, we see a story of divergence from the common economic rationales for intervening and supporting the creative industries during the pandemic towards more generative and equitable value creation and exchange.

Divergence and convergence across the cultural sector

The distinctions and commonalities at the international level of policy responses (and the justifications underpinning them) were mirrored also across the UK. Our case studies note the nuances across the constituent nations of the UK, not only in terms of economic rationality but also in terms of longer-standing cultural policy distinctiveness and variation. This divergence and convergence can be explored by thinking critically about the cultural and creative industries paradigm (Casey and O’Brien, 2020) and its attendant flaws and misconceptions as a framework for research in this area. Writing at the end of a hugely successful decade for the UK’s creative sector, McRobbie (2011) speculates as to the usefulness of the creative industries concept and its ballooning significance in the New Labour era. Her analysis calls for a ‘re-differentiated’ (2016, p. 937) understanding of specific cultural and creative sectors and sub-sectors.

Our analysis has followed, and reinforced, this theoretical starting point. Siepel et al.’s (2021) study of creative businesses in the UK suggests fewer firms than expected stopped trading between 2020 and 2021, and many were actually able to increase investment in research and development (66 per cent) and hire more employees (18 per cent) (Siepel et al., 2021, p.4). Yet this overall analysis also recognises considerable sub-sectoral distinctiveness. We knew from the outset of the research project that the performing arts, for example, would be impacted in a fundamentally different way from museums and galleries; that festivals would have to pivot in a very different way from the screen industries; that freelancers working across different sub-sectors would have markedly different experiences in each one and possibly need to migrate from one to the other. Indeed, we saw these themes richly illustrated in the divergent findings across Chapters 5 to 9. While the screen industries bounced back very quickly, indeed within several months, theatre and the wider performing arts sector struggled to recover its production rhythms and audiences well into 2022. Performing arts were then hit with the cost-of-living crisis, as well as the ongoing complications of the Conservative Government’s approach to leaving the European Union (particularly for touring performers).

Inevitably, this divergent impact culminated in a significant number of freelance technical and production workers migrating from the performing arts to TV and film, leading to desperate outcries from theatre leaders such as Rufus Norris at the National Theatre who warned of a ‘huge craft drain’ in the sector (Hemley, 2022). The apparent ‘boom’ in the film and TV sector was not only in contrast to the struggles of performing arts; it also had direct consequences for the accelerating problems in the latter’s labour market. For festivals, museums and galleries our analysis has discussed rapidly developing hybrid models that often led to slower modes of production and distribution; to ‘glocal’ models of audience development; and to deeper and even more activist modes of engagement. As we reflect back on these times, there is evidence of a divergence between differing parts of the cultural and creative sector. As many festivals, museums, galleries and libraries seek to embed hybrid modes of production into their long-term planning and business models, performing arts and media companies resolutely continue their struggle to re-establish the pre-pandemic status quo, particularly in terms of relationships with audiences and, in person, modes of consumption. The ‘re-differentiation’ discussed by McRobbie (2016) is not only an issue for analysis: it has consequences for the politics of the arts and cultural policy itself.

Alongside this divergence, there were a number of further trends across the sector. The most notable of these was a renewed sense of collegiality and collaboration. This is twofold. In the first instance were the practices of collaboration between freelancers and organisations, between organisations themselves (both on a regional and artform level), between cultural leaders, between cultural funders, and between policy-makers and academics. The examples here are best illustrated by the early weeks of the pandemic, where a palpable sense of collective endeavour and of collegial care and support drove much of the rhetoric and some of the activities constituting the sector’s response to the impact of lockdowns.

Secondly, we have charted the recognition of collegiality and collaboration as vital to the sector. This recognition in some ways reflects failures of those early responses, as freelance workers were marginalised and smaller organisations struggled with both new business models, appeals for funding and state support schemes such as furlough. Much of our fieldwork, conducted in 2020–2021, showed evidence of the high prominence given to the need for future collaborative practice. However, by 2023, there were more signs of ‘business as usual’ in the arts, exacerbated by the increased competition for more sustained resources, such as the membership of the national Arts Council England portfolio. This quest for a return to pre-pandemic norms represents a missed opportunity to establish a healthier ecology based on mutual support, fair pay, more regenerative modes of production engagement and greater diversity of cultural workers and audiences.

The pivot to civic and the need for leadership

Regarding this last point, we have repeatedly discussed in this book what we’ve called the ‘pivot to civic’. This has been another point of convergence across the sector. Although the civic role of arts organisations had been a subject for cultural policy before the pandemic (e.g. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2017), 2020 brought it to the centre of thinking. Recognition and reinforcement of culture as a social good; the responsibilities of publicly funded institutions; and the need for organisations to be relevant to their local, regional, national and even international communities (e.g. Lane, 2022) were all part of this discursive and practical shift.

These organisational realisations were perhaps long overdue, providing a wake-up call for radical change and for many in the sector, including academics and boards of trustees, to reconceptualise their notions of resilience, which our study reveals became associated more with collaborative networks than to the diversification of income streams. This in turn led many to question (or re-question) the growing future directions for the sector and the increasingly tense interrelationship between the arts and the wider cultural and creative industries.

Yet despite these moments of rethinking, our analysis has shown the wickedness of the problems facing culture in the UK. Here, even with the examples of new forms of best practice, the sector still needed, and continues to need, leaders willing not only to share and collaborate but to make substantive changes. Commentators have been mulling over the apparent crisis in cultural leadership since the beginning of the century (Hewison, 2004), acknowledging skills gaps and structural barriers to entry and progression, which combined with the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements highlighted a prevalence of white, male and all too often abusive leadership in the sector. Progress remains slow and cultural leadership and governance remains alarmingly ‘male, pale and stale’ (Clare, 2009, p.34).

Cultural leadership is too often overlooked in analysis of organisational success. It remains a topic that, given its significance to the strategic development of the sector and its research prevalence in other sectors, remains woefully under-explored and under-theorised for culture. Although many scholars have justifiably argued that we need to move beyond the sector’s quasi cultish romanticisation of charismatic leaders and shift our focus from leaders to leadership, leaders themselves are still key agents or blockers of change (Walmsley, 2019b). If the positive changes that the pandemic inspired, required and/or foreshadowed are to endure or be adequately addressed, then capable, strategic and representative leaders will be vital.

Collaborative models of leadership emerged to be particularly effective in a time of crisis. This was set against a more general context of calls for a shift away from charismatic and transformational leadership towards a more distributed and relational approach (Jancovich, 2015; Nisbett and Walmsley, 2016). Chapter 6 offers excellent examples, where collaborative models drove change in Northern Ireland’s cultural sector at an unprecedented pace. The learning from the Northern Irish case is that change needs principles of mutual support, transparency and trust. These values are difficult to nurture and sustain in the much more demanding context for workers and audiences that the analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 has demonstrated.

Future audiences

The findings regarding audiences are especially crucial. Prior to the pandemic audience researchers had been calling for a more sustained focus on processes of audience engagement (Walmsley, 2019a) and for greater understanding of marginalised audience groups, such as working-class audiences (Barrett, 2022), d/Deaf, blind and neurodiverse audiences (Hadley, 2022) and audiences of colour (Conner, 2022; Novak-Leonard, 2022). The physical disappearance of audiences from arts and cultural venues during the pandemic focused minds and forced producers and organisations to radically rethink their relationships with audiences. As questions of relevance and community or civic engagement rose to the fore, processes of participation, co-production and co-creation were actively realised and pernicious barriers to access (especially for disabled audiences) were temporarily removed as production shifted online.

As we emerge from the pandemic, and as highlighted in Chapter 3, we are possibly witnessing a radical shift in audience behaviour and demographics. Families and younger audiences appear keen to attend cultural venues and older audiences remain more hesitant. This inevitably begs questions about cultural programming (and the poor theorisation of such) and about the sustainability of art forms such as classical ballet and opera that have long relied on older audiences.

Thanks to insights provided from our Cultural Participation Monitor, the pandemic taught us that audiences equate arts and culture with solace and wellbeing – especially outdoor arts and heritage activities. The Monitor also highlighted positive public perceptions about public funding for arts and culture and a growing propensity to donate. These findings have three important implications.

Firstly, they suggest that cultural policy and funding should prioritise investment in outdoor arts and heritage, especially since previous research has demonstrated that more representative audiences are attracted to these activities. This could offer a much-needed breakthrough for the apparent deadlock in the flagging audience development project that has failed to diversify UK audiences for over fifty years.

Secondly, our findings signal the need for cultural venues, producers and marketers to engage with audiences as artistic partners rather than transactional ticket-buyers. Audiences are hungry for high-quality cultural content and we would all benefit from them having a much greater voice and stake in our public cultural institutions. This observation has implications not only for cultural policy but also, and more urgently perhaps, for arts management and marketing.

Thirdly, the nuanced, timely and representative insights offered by a regular population survey proved the benefits of empirical audience research conducted by a team of specialists and integrated into a comprehensive mixed-methods analysis of the cultural sector. As we witness our national audience data being tendered out to commercial management consultants (Puffett, 2022), the urgency of open-source cultural sector data has never been more acute. This should serve as a rallying call to cultural funders and policy-makers as well as to the sector itself.

Where next for cultural policy scholarship?

The writing of history, and arguably all social science and humanities, has been one of debate on the explanations and the tools and epistemologies that provide them: what causes change, what mitigates it? In the context of crisis, this is even more fundamental but complicated by an urgent need for speedy answers to provide the rationale for mitigation. In our study, we have identified various longer-term trends that help to explain the severity of the impact of the pandemic on specific parts of the cultural sector and its workers. However, we leave open the exact balance between the specific decisions of individuals and organisations and longer-term structural trends.

To give a clear example, we know that inequalities in the workforce were present for decades before the pandemic (Brook et al., 2023). We also know that audiences for state-funded art forms and institutions are drawn disproportionately from the older, professional middle-class segments of society (Bennett et al., 2009; Hanquinet, O’Brien and Taylor, 2019). These structural characteristics of the arts workforce and of audiences were also identifiable in the demographics of those more likely to leave cultural jobs and more likely to be cautious about returning to in-person performances. In turn, these impacts of the pandemic have knock-on effects for a further lack of diversity for the arts and cultural workforce and question the sustainability of revenues generated from ticket sales and related conceptions of organisational resilience.

Teasing out the degree of impact to offer precise causal explanations is complex; this may be a key challenge for further cultural policy studies. What we can say with certainty is that the structural problems confronting arts and cultural organisations have certainly not been ameliorated by the pandemic, nor have any of the supposed new ways of working and innovative forms of delivery adopted during 2020 been particularly effective in addressing these wicked problems (Feder et al., 2022), with the notable exception of greater accessibility offered by digital performances for disabled audiences.

This question of challenges for cultural policy leads to the concluding discussion of this collection and our research project. It is not, of course, the conclusion of research on the impact of the pandemic. COVID-19, as of 2023, has become endemic across the world. At the risk of an insensitive analogy, the issues our analysis has highlighted are seemingly endemic to the cultural sector.

Where does this leave cultural policy research? This question is twofold. In the first instance there is the question of academic labour and the sorts of partnerships needed to conduct responsive research at speed. In the UK, as universities face funding constraints and academics face worsening labour conditions, particularly at the early-career and entry stages to the profession, there are acute challenges for undertaking the sorts of cultural policy research discussed in this book. As academic workers are made more precarious, the sorts of skills and rich subject and field-specific knowledges required are increasingly under threat. Reinforcing capacity is a crucial task for both institutions and those who set the policy framework under which they work.

The question of the future for academics and their institutions is mirrored when we think of partnerships with organisations and practitioners in the cultural sector. A significant part of the success of our project, and the breadth of research approaches and perspectives in this book, was the positive and productive working relationships with the cultural sector. This included sector organisations, practitioners and consultants who act as researchers themselves. The impact of the pandemic will not only impact the sector’s ability to deliver on its aims; it will also constrain the sector’s capacity to know itself, and thus be responsive to long-term trends and immediate shocks. Research capacity here is essential, not only for the sorts of R&D required to deliver successful ‘hits’ (House of Lords, 2023) but also for the longer-term strategies of the organisations, practitioners and policy-makers complicit in such an exercise.

Secondly, there are the specific questions for cultural policy researchers. There are many obvious ones: international comparisons are crucial to thinking through the social, economic and cultural impacts of the pandemic on local, national and international cultural policies, as are mixed-methods and interdisciplinary approaches providing conceptual challenge to questions of rationalism, evidence and care. We have referenced some of the initial work here already in this conclusion. More generally, there is the problem of innovation in cultural policy research. As the question of explanations that opened this conclusion illustrates, cultural policy research may be trapped in a too-narrow focus on identifying the pandemic’s role in changes to longer-term inequalities. Rather, the challenge for cultural policy research is to connect the pandemic to more existential questions, such as the role of policy in supporting the rights for all to access culture and creativity for a fairer and more just cultural sector, and indeed a better global society.