The National Institutes for Culture have not attracted much scholarly attention examining their managerial practices. The aim of this article is to explore how the state expresses its agency over the Cultural Institutes of six European countries, namely the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and Greece. Agency presents varying modalities making instrumentalism more multifaceted than it has been implied so far. The authors are introducing here a framework of 5 'touchpoints' to capture and analyse instrumentalism in cultural diplomacy. Funding, agenda setting, evaluation, hierarchy and appointment power constitute the typical system of interactions between the Cultural Institutes and their reporting authorities.
Summary
To date, the role of cultural attachés in foreign policy has not been the subject of scholarly research, despite the sharp rise in interest in the field of cultural diplomacy. The present study is a comparative analysis seeking to map the ecosystem in which cultural attachés are embedded with the aim to develop a first-time narrative about their role. Interviews with practitioners from Italy, The Netherlands and Sweden indicate that the post of the cultural attaché is a field of responsibility primarily for two state actors. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture both have a vested interest in the work of these cultural operators. The findings suggest that there are two distinct organisational models in how Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Ministries of Culture co-exist and interact.
The cultural policy agenda has traditionally centered around the arts, heritage and crafts, however, since the 1990s public perceptions about what could be defined as culture started changing. The author uses Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome as a metaphor to describe the new model of cultural governance. The article argues that cultural policy is becoming increasingly rhizomatic branching out to other policy areas adding more items to its core agenda. The interaction between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the UK is examined as an exploratory case to illustrate the argument.
Scientific interviews provide a useful resource for qualitative researchers studying people’s perceptions on contemporary phenomena. This article contributes to the large body of literature on qualitative interviews by investigating a rather common but under-reported pattern in interviews, that of resistance. Resistance is a form of power that the participant maintains and can exercise at any moment. The phenomenon knows various expressions from a refusal on the side of the participant to sign the consent form to question dodging or embellished accounts. Two case studies are used to underpin the basic argument that resistance in interviews may be a valuable finding in itself if contextualized properly.
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