Against a backdrop of growing interest in localised cultural policy, this inquiry locates Oldham, an ‘overshadowed’ town (Pike et al., 2016), on the edge of Manchester (UK) as a case study to explore how a range of non-economic capitals are gained, utilised, and understood in the arts field. Locating this study in a town on the outskirts of a metropolitan area, this inquiry engages with both ‘formal’ professional (Gilmore, 2013) cultural offerings as well as voluntary-amateur organisations to explore field understandings amongst arts and cultural organisations.
Drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1990, 1991, 1992; Bourdieu and Johnson1993) and from organisational theory (Thornton et al., 2012), the inquiry adopts a relational approach to explore the ways in which organisations within the field understand their operating environment and how they access and maximise non-economic capitals to exert organisational agency. Using a mixture of data collection methods including ‘go-alongs’ (Kuesenbach 2003), utilising Dickinson and Aiello’s (2016) scholarship on movement and materiality, participant-produced network maps, and the analysis of documents, this research contributes new methodological approaches to researching the arts and cultural field.
Whilst there is strong evidence of the policy rhetoric of inclusion and participation as well as evidence of continued efforts to democratise the arts and cultural sector, the field is highly institutionalised, hierarchical, and increasingly professionalised. Although cultural policy endeavours to use local arts infrastructure to build local capacity, this thesis points to a situation in which those organisations in towns at the edge of a metropolitan city remain unable to gain the status enjoyed by their metropolitan counterparts. Organisations in satellite towns are heavily reliant on harnessing the support of elite individuals and dominant, established organisations which lie beyond their immediate local context to secure legitimacy for themselves and their activities.
This thesis furthers scholarly understanding of inter-organisational and institutional relationships within the arts and cultural field. Future avenues for research include developing understandings of voluntary-amateur organisational structures to combat institutional blindness. It also suggests arts and cultural policy discourse should shift emphasis from positioning policy instruments as imposed, towards a more nuanced understanding of policy instruments, which recognises that field conditions, including policy instruments, become institutionalised and thus may be readily exploited to benefit some organisations within the field.
