CULTURAL VALUE NETWORKSAHRC Connected Communities

Professor Jon DoveyDr Goetz Bachman

Dr Jeanette MonacoBill Sharpe

Preliminary findings

Aims

The research aims to produce the first iteration of a multi-criteria method for articulating cultural value which other cultural organisations could use to assess the value of their work.

This evaluative methodology aims to support cultural organisations in providing better value for money by having better ways to understand the value they produce.

This was a production study; producers not consumers

Background Ideas-

The Cultural Value debate (O’Brien, Bakshi, Throsby)

The new dynamics of Participatory Culture (Leadbeater, Shirkey, Hartley)

Ethnography (Randall Collins & Nina Wakeford) The problem of Measurement (Espeland &

Stevens) Ecology (Bill Sharp Patterns of Health & Wealth) Economies of Contribution (Stiegler)

Value & Creative Networks

Value is created through relationships between living things.

Different agents within any ecoystem will experience value differently, your nutrition might be my poison.

This understanding of value is derived from the perspective of a life in the patterns of life in which it takes part. (Sharpe)

Value & Creative Networks

Lives are part of multiple economies, each defining a distinctive shared quality of value where we understand an economy as a pattern of shared valuing, with its own way of maintaining integrity of that process and organising itself.

‘Value’ is enacted by agents in an economy This process can be identified as ‘valuing

practices’ .

Value Constellations

The extended network of co-production around a focal organisation

Focus on the intentional role of the focal organisation in designing, and enacting the way the participants interact – the active producing role

The focal organisation creates offerings that link the participants into co-productive relationships

Research SiteThe Pervasive Media Studio

A creative technologies collaboration between Watershed Media Centre, University of the West of England and University of Bristol.

Multiple public funding sources, from arts, education, tech innovation.

A multi-disciplinary lab exploring and producing pervasive media content, applications and services.

Artists, designers, engineers, academics, programmers, producers, ‘creative technologists’.

The Pervasive Media Studio

A city centre dock side space with 40 desk spaces, meeting and teaching spaces.

Long term residents often tech based. Short term residents on a project by

project basis. FREE desk space for everyone. A curated network, an ecosystem Key roles of producers to connect and

support.

Enacting Value

a complex set of valuing practices in action, driven by the relational patterns of :-

trust making, conflict negotiation, participation, affect, personal development. collaboration know how exchange, learning,

resident residents

producer

resident residents -> £1m

producer

Funders£150k

How ?

The research adapted the principles of Social Network Analysis to map a value producing network .

The project employed an ethnographic fieldworker, Research Associate Jeanette Monaco, who acted part-time as participant-observer in the studio from July-December 2011.

Five months of fieldwork observation. A total of thirteen semi-structured interviews were also conducted for the data sample. Analysis using key terms and key codes using Atlas Ti software.

 

Interview Structures

Four questions provided a general framework for mapping valuing practices in their creative networks.

Who do you turn to for strategy? Who do you get trust and support from? Who do you turn to for creative excitement? Who do you turn to for ‘Know-how’ about

certain things?

Classifying Data

The Meta Codes   1 Interpersonal relations 2 Collaborations 3 Shared values

Discussion

Money is not the only form of measuring value, and measuring not the only form of articulating value.

Absence of measurement does not produce absence of articulation of value, but will allow other forms of articulation to flourish – often qualitative ones eg stories, narrative.

Value Constellation

The overall value constellation of the Pervasive Media Studio is a form of an “economy of contribution”

Different forms of value are circulating, often only vaguely articulated, inside the studio

Other forms of contribution take the more complex form of gifts; giving and receiving are often temporally de-coupled, and gift exchange remains deeply embedded in social relations.

Giving and receiving Value in the Pervasive Media Studio

Residents are gifted four forms of value: workspace, social work environment, external prestige, Access to a Producer.

Giving and receiving Value in the Pervasive Media Studio

Residents return gifts to the studio in the form of success stories .

Producers are professional collectors of success stories.

A rich field of horizontal gift exchange between residents and producers a double gift.

studio creates an additional form of value, a form of ‘qualitative surplus’.

Giving and receiving Value in the Pervasive Media Studio

Producers get get funds in exchange for stories, which enables the collaborative working environment.

Inside this working environment, the extra value of a double gift - to the other residents and to the studio itself – enables generosity and provides extra motivation.

This, in turns, provides an extra incentive for a thriving collective work environment, which then can be ‘sold’ back though the funders as stories about processes of creating value and products of extraordinarily high quality

resident residents

producer

funder

PM Studio Audience/Market

Funder

State

Cultural sector

Other sectors

State

STUDIO

FUNDERS

SOCIETY

CULTURAL VALUE CONSTELLATION

CREATIVE ECONOMY

MULTI-ECONOMY

Future Research

•Test Research with other participants eg Battersea Arts Centre, National Theatre of Wales,Bristol Old Vic and the Arnolfini Gallery•Do more work on how enacting value inside organisations nets out as market value downstream•Do more work on how quant and qual can be folded into an understanding of network effects

This Study Online @

http://www.dcrc.org.uk/publications/cultural-value-networks-research-findings

Bakhshi, H. and Throsby, D. (2010) ‘Culture of Innovation: An economic analysis of innovation in arts and cultural organisations’ London: NESTA

Collins, R. (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Espeland, W.N., Stevens, M.L. (2008) ‘A Sociology of Quantification’, European Journal of Sociology, 49 (3) 401-436.

O’Brien, D. (2010) ‘Measuring the value of culture: a report to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’, London: DCMS.

Sharpe B Economies of Health & Wealth Triarchy Press 2010