Kate Oakley
Biographic Data
| ID | 175393 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kate Oakley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kate |
| FAMILY NAME | Oakley |
| SIGNATURE | OAKLEY K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5225-0410 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 240 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Culture as foundational
This introductory overview outlines the conceptual and contextual basis for the Special Issue “Culture as Foundational”. It first locates the need for a new, more radical approach to cultural policy, noting how the economic imaginary of neoliberalism is currently being generally contested, but that culture is barely included in these endeavours. The article then outlines the work around foundational liveability and suggests ways in which cultural…
A 90-minute space in the week that was truly theirs: English football fans and the European Super League
The phrase ‘created by the poor, stolen by the rich’, could be used about many aspects of capitalism, but in summer 2020, it featured heavily on the banners held up by UK football fans protesting the creation of a European Super League. The nature of this (at least temporarily) successful popular uprising has not been given its full political due. Perhaps because whether elite football teams play in a nationally organised, highly commodified glob…
Sportswork – Towards a Notion of Good Work for Athletes
This paper explores the idea of professional sport as a form of labour. While research on everything from performance statistics to sports rights and technology had proliferated, what players think about sport as work deserves greater attention. The inequalities and exclusion of sports are evident and we need to understand the drivers of this, but we also need to understand why working in these industries matters to people, how they experience it…
Cakes and ale: The role of culture in the new municipalism
The rise of 'new municipalism' -imaginative and renascent projects of local organization and government -has been occasioned by resourceful efforts on the part of local states and civil societies, responding to the intensified pressures of austerity, the global pandemic and a crisis of public value.Yet, despite the expansion internationally of an array of municipal initiatives, there appears (as yet) no significant role for culture and the cultur…
The pandemic politics of cultural work: Collective responses to the Covid-19 crisis
The scope, unevenness, and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on cultural work has been widely acknowledged. This article turns to how sections of the cultural industries responded to the onset of this crisis. Our account is based on document research completed during the first wave of the pandemic. We gathered news reports, impact survey results, policy recommendations, open letters, event announcements, and other grey literature generat…
Pandemic cultural policy. A comparative perspective on Covid-19 measures and their effect on cultural policies in Europe
To what extent did the Covid-19 pandemic affect the tools, priorities and organisation of cultural policies? And did the pandemic enhance the digital aspect of these policies? This paper compares pandemic cultural policy measures in seven European countries to answer these questions. The countries all installed a plurality of mitigating measures, combining grants and subsidies, compensation of lost income, income support and financial flexibility…
Obituary
Creative Economy, Critical Perspectives
From the late 1980s the creative economy became paradigmatic in cultural policy, achieving the status of a powerful global discourse across a range of domains (e.g. Duxbury et al. 2016; UNESCO 2013
The art of the good life: Culture and sustainable prosperity
The creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and re-thought, but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in pa…
Engaging the Imagination: New Nature Writing’, Collective Politics and the Environmental Crisis
This paper 1 explores the potential of ‘new nature writing’ – a literary genre currently popular in the UK – as a kind of arts activism, in particular in terms of how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics. We note the limitations of the genre, notably the reproduction of class, gender and ethnic hierarchies, the emphasis on nostalgia and loss, and the stress on individual responses rather than col…
Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, and London's Impact on Cultural Labor Markets
This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom's. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London's cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an "en…
Learning to labour unequally: Understanding the Relationship Between Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption and Inequality
Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched.The article considers inequalit…
Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour
It has been claimed that there was a 'golden age' in the UK for the arts and culture from 1997 to 2010, under the leadership of the New Labour government. Culture, Economy, and Politics examines and evaluates the party's approach to cultural policy and brings together social and political theory to provide a detailed account of how policy was constructed and shaped. Who were the key decision makers? What were their relations to each other? What i…
The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries
The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)
The dance goes on forever? Art schools, class and UK higher education
For most of the twentieth century, the UK ‘art school’ was widely seen as an accessible alternative to University. In Art into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne revealed how this state-funded art and design training, linked to manufacturing industries and backed by relatively low or informal entry requirements, offered the prospect of social and economic uplift for hitherto marginalised working-class youth. More recently, however, while enrolment…
Cultural Policy
David Bell and Kate Oakley survey the major debates emerging in cultural policy research, adopting an approach based on spatial scale to explore cultural policy in cities, nations and internationally. They contextualise these discussions with an exploration of what both 'culture' and 'policy' mean when they are joined together as cultural policy. Drawing on topical examples and contemporary research, as well as their own experience in both academ…
The national trust for talent? Nesta and New Labour’s cultural policy
Were New Labour’s cultural policies neo-liberal
This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a s…
Regional creative industries policy-making under New Labour
This article analyses creative industries policy in the English regions under New Labour (1997–2010). It examines the ideas behind regional creative industries policies (RCIPs) and their implementation. Focusing on the activities of the English regional development agencies, the primary bodies responsible for the implementation of creative industries policy in the British regions, the article places regional cultural policy during the New Labour …
Making Workers: Higher Education and the Cultural Industries Workplace
The last 30 years or so have seen a rapid evolution in the relationship between higher education (HE) and the cultural industries. While HE has always been vital to the production of fine artists, designers and musicians, among others, the links between HE and the cultural workplace have often been as much social as vocational. As Frith and Horne (1987) pointed out and many studies have testified since, the experience of going away to college, fu…
The public gets what the public wants’? The uses and abuses of ‘public value’ in contemporary British cultural policy
The aim of this article is to examine the adoption and use of the term ‘public value’ in both the broadcasting and the wider cultural arena. It examines the ideas, tensions and contradictions that exist in such a notion, asking whether it is simply empty rhetoric, or whether it tells us something more. It argues that the term stands as an example of a failed approach to policy‐making, being neither successfully technocratic, offering a clear meth…
In its own image: New Labour and the cultural workforce
The argument of this paper is that one way to examine the legacy of New Labour's cultural policies, including its development of the creative industries, is through an account of the cultural workforce it has created. The idea of “creative industries” embodied a set of assumptions about the changing nature of work which had been central to New Labour's reinvention during its years in the wilderness under Margaret Thatcher. Dubbed “post-Fordist so…
Getting Out of Place: The Mobile Creative Class Takes on the Local. A UK Perspective on the Creative Class
The disappearing arts: Creativity and innovation after the creative industries
Since the birth of the ‘creative industries’ a decade ago, there has been a series of attempts to link the cultural sectors with innovation policy and to downplay the connection between them and traditional arts or cultural policy. The theory appears to be that innovation is where the big money is, and that the cultural sectors can only benefit by being rescued from the ‘ghetto’ of arts funding. This paper seeks to query this notion and to draw a…
The politics of cultural work
No abstract available
Include Us Out-Economic Development and Social Policy in the Creative Industries
While Government claims about the UK as a 'global creative hub' continue to be made (Purnell, 2005), the contradictions and tensions in New Labour's policy in the creative industries have become more apparent. These include the tensions between a set of policies for global media businesses versus the support for small firms in local economic development (Gilmore, 2004; Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005), and the tension between citizens and consumers in…
Not So Cool Britannia: The Role of the Creative Industries in Economic Development
This article provides a brief overview of current UK policy and practice in the area of the creative industries and economic development and aims to raise concerns about what I see as the problems arising in the implementation of these policies. It argues that the desire to use ‘creative industries’ as a single weapon with which to turn around economically depressed regions risks creating polarized and unsustainable economic development. Creative…
The disappearing arts: Creativity and innovation after the creative industries
Since the birth of the ‘creative industries’ a decade ago, there has been a series of attempts to link the cultural sectors with innovation policy and to downplay the connection between them and traditional arts or cultural policy. The theory appears to be that innovation is where the big money is, and that the cultural sectors can only benefit by being rescued from the ‘ghetto’ of arts funding. This paper seeks to query this notion and to draw a…
From Bohemia to Britart – art students over 50 years
In the mid-1980s, Frith and Horne (1987) were describing the experience of British arts schools as, “an anachronism, with students desperately clinging on to attitudes to work and play, which had otherwise vanished” (p. 12). Among these attitudes were the importance of freedom and experimentation in one's work, the status of the artist as an outsider, and the superiority of art over other forms of activity, such as design. Despite huge social cha…
Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, and London's Impact on Cultural Labor Markets
This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom's. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London's cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an "en…
The public gets what the public wants’? The uses and abuses of ‘public value’ in contemporary British cultural policy
The aim of this article is to examine the adoption and use of the term ‘public value’ in both the broadcasting and the wider cultural arena. It examines the ideas, tensions and contradictions that exist in such a notion, asking whether it is simply empty rhetoric, or whether it tells us something more. It argues that the term stands as an example of a failed approach to policy‐making, being neither successfully technocratic, offering a clear meth…
Learning to labour unequally: Understanding the Relationship Between Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption and Inequality
Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched.The article considers inequalit…
The art of the good life: Culture and sustainable prosperity
The creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and re-thought, but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in pa…
Were New Labour’s cultural policies neo-liberal
This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a s…
The dance goes on forever? Art schools, class and UK higher education
For most of the twentieth century, the UK ‘art school’ was widely seen as an accessible alternative to University. In Art into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne revealed how this state-funded art and design training, linked to manufacturing industries and backed by relatively low or informal entry requirements, offered the prospect of social and economic uplift for hitherto marginalised working-class youth. More recently, however, while enrolment…
The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries
The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)
In its own image: New Labour and the cultural workforce
The argument of this paper is that one way to examine the legacy of New Labour's cultural policies, including its development of the creative industries, is through an account of the cultural workforce it has created. The idea of “creative industries” embodied a set of assumptions about the changing nature of work which had been central to New Labour's reinvention during its years in the wilderness under Margaret Thatcher. Dubbed “post-Fordist so…
The pandemic politics of cultural work: Collective responses to the Covid-19 crisis
The scope, unevenness, and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on cultural work has been widely acknowledged. This article turns to how sections of the cultural industries responded to the onset of this crisis. Our account is based on document research completed during the first wave of the pandemic. We gathered news reports, impact survey results, policy recommendations, open letters, event announcements, and other grey literature generat…
Regional creative industries policy-making under New Labour
This article analyses creative industries policy in the English regions under New Labour (1997–2010). It examines the ideas behind regional creative industries policies (RCIPs) and their implementation. Focusing on the activities of the English regional development agencies, the primary bodies responsible for the implementation of creative industries policy in the British regions, the article places regional cultural policy during the New Labour …
Cakes and ale: The role of culture in the new municipalism
The rise of 'new municipalism' -imaginative and renascent projects of local organization and government -has been occasioned by resourceful efforts on the part of local states and civil societies, responding to the intensified pressures of austerity, the global pandemic and a crisis of public value.Yet, despite the expansion internationally of an array of municipal initiatives, there appears (as yet) no significant role for culture and the cultur…
Engaging the Imagination: New Nature Writing’, Collective Politics and the Environmental Crisis
This paper 1 explores the potential of ‘new nature writing’ – a literary genre currently popular in the UK – as a kind of arts activism, in particular in terms of how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics. We note the limitations of the genre, notably the reproduction of class, gender and ethnic hierarchies, the emphasis on nostalgia and loss, and the stress on individual responses rather than col…
Pandemic cultural policy. A comparative perspective on Covid-19 measures and their effect on cultural policies in Europe
To what extent did the Covid-19 pandemic affect the tools, priorities and organisation of cultural policies? And did the pandemic enhance the digital aspect of these policies? This paper compares pandemic cultural policy measures in seven European countries to answer these questions. The countries all installed a plurality of mitigating measures, combining grants and subsidies, compensation of lost income, income support and financial flexibility…
Creative Economy, Critical Perspectives
From the late 1980s the creative economy became paradigmatic in cultural policy, achieving the status of a powerful global discourse across a range of domains (e.g. Duxbury et al. 2016; UNESCO 2013
The national trust for talent? Nesta and New Labour’s cultural policy
The politics of cultural work
No abstract available
Professionals and the new knowledge workers: The case of management consultancy
Management consultants can be seen as typical of a new breed of 'knowledge worker', other examples being workers in public relations, advertising, marketing and some financial services. Such occupations have commonly adopted the model of professional practice as their organisational form, but few are regulated in the way that traditional professions are. The new knowledge industries may in some senses be 'professionalised'; but are they professio…
Professionals and the new knowledge workers: The case of management consultancy
Management consultants can be seen as typical of a new breed of 'knowledge worker', other examples being workers in public relations, advertising, marketing and some financial services. Such occupations have commonly adopted the model of professional practice as their organisational form, but few are regulated in the way that traditional professions are. The new knowledge industries may in some senses be 'professionalised'; but are they professio…
Not So Cool Britannia: The Role of the Creative Industries in Economic Development
This article provides a brief overview of current UK policy and practice in the area of the creative industries and economic development and aims to raise concerns about what I see as the problems arising in the implementation of these policies. It argues that the desire to use ‘creative industries’ as a single weapon with which to turn around economically depressed regions risks creating polarized and unsustainable economic development. Creative…
Include Us Out-Economic Development and Social Policy in the Creative Industries
While Government claims about the UK as a 'global creative hub' continue to be made (Purnell, 2005), the contradictions and tensions in New Labour's policy in the creative industries have become more apparent. These include the tensions between a set of policies for global media businesses versus the support for small firms in local economic development (Gilmore, 2004; Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005), and the tension between citizens and consumers in…
The Art of Education: New Competencies for the Creative Workforce
This article is a summary of a longer study entitled Educating for the Creative Workforce: Rethinking Arts and Education, commissioned by the Australia Council as part of its research partnership with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation. That study analyses the claims for the role of the arts in education, concentrating on empirical research studies that looked at arts education programs and sought to explore whether, and how, th…
Getting Out of Place: The Mobile Creative Class Takes on the Local. A UK Perspective on the Creative Class
The disappearing arts: Creativity and innovation after the creative industries
Since the birth of the ‘creative industries’ a decade ago, there has been a series of attempts to link the cultural sectors with innovation policy and to downplay the connection between them and traditional arts or cultural policy. The theory appears to be that innovation is where the big money is, and that the cultural sectors can only benefit by being rescued from the ‘ghetto’ of arts funding. This paper seeks to query this notion and to draw a…
The politics of cultural work
No abstract available
From Bohemia to Britart – art students over 50 years
In the mid-1980s, Frith and Horne (1987) were describing the experience of British arts schools as, “an anachronism, with students desperately clinging on to attitudes to work and play, which had otherwise vanished” (p. 12). Among these attitudes were the importance of freedom and experimentation in one's work, the status of the artist as an outsider, and the superiority of art over other forms of activity, such as design. Despite huge social cha…
The public gets what the public wants’? The uses and abuses of ‘public value’ in contemporary British cultural policy
The aim of this article is to examine the adoption and use of the term ‘public value’ in both the broadcasting and the wider cultural arena. It examines the ideas, tensions and contradictions that exist in such a notion, asking whether it is simply empty rhetoric, or whether it tells us something more. It argues that the term stands as an example of a failed approach to policy‐making, being neither successfully technocratic, offering a clear meth…
In its own image: New Labour and the cultural workforce
The argument of this paper is that one way to examine the legacy of New Labour's cultural policies, including its development of the creative industries, is through an account of the cultural workforce it has created. The idea of “creative industries” embodied a set of assumptions about the changing nature of work which had been central to New Labour's reinvention during its years in the wilderness under Margaret Thatcher. Dubbed “post-Fordist so…
Making Workers: Higher Education and the Cultural Industries Workplace
The last 30 years or so have seen a rapid evolution in the relationship between higher education (HE) and the cultural industries. While HE has always been vital to the production of fine artists, designers and musicians, among others, the links between HE and the cultural workplace have often been as much social as vocational. As Frith and Horne (1987) pointed out and many studies have testified since, the experience of going away to college, fu…
Cultural Policy
David Bell and Kate Oakley survey the major debates emerging in cultural policy research, adopting an approach based on spatial scale to explore cultural policy in cities, nations and internationally. They contextualise these discussions with an exploration of what both 'culture' and 'policy' mean when they are joined together as cultural policy. Drawing on topical examples and contemporary research, as well as their own experience in both academ…
The national trust for talent? Nesta and New Labour’s cultural policy
Were New Labour’s cultural policies neo-liberal
This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a s…
Regional creative industries policy-making under New Labour
This article analyses creative industries policy in the English regions under New Labour (1997–2010). It examines the ideas behind regional creative industries policies (RCIPs) and their implementation. Focusing on the activities of the English regional development agencies, the primary bodies responsible for the implementation of creative industries policy in the British regions, the article places regional cultural policy during the New Labour …
Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour
It has been claimed that there was a 'golden age' in the UK for the arts and culture from 1997 to 2010, under the leadership of the New Labour government. Culture, Economy, and Politics examines and evaluates the party's approach to cultural policy and brings together social and political theory to provide a detailed account of how policy was constructed and shaped. Who were the key decision makers? What were their relations to each other? What i…
The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries
The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , The Routledge companion to the cultural industries / , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)
The dance goes on forever? Art schools, class and UK higher education
For most of the twentieth century, the UK ‘art school’ was widely seen as an accessible alternative to University. In Art into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne revealed how this state-funded art and design training, linked to manufacturing industries and backed by relatively low or informal entry requirements, offered the prospect of social and economic uplift for hitherto marginalised working-class youth. More recently, however, while enrolment…
Learning to labour unequally: Understanding the Relationship Between Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption and Inequality
Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched.The article considers inequalit…
Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, and London's Impact on Cultural Labor Markets
This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom's. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London's cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an "en…
Creative Economy, Critical Perspectives
From the late 1980s the creative economy became paradigmatic in cultural policy, achieving the status of a powerful global discourse across a range of domains (e.g. Duxbury et al. 2016; UNESCO 2013
The art of the good life: Culture and sustainable prosperity
The creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and re-thought, but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in pa…
Engaging the Imagination: New Nature Writing’, Collective Politics and the Environmental Crisis
This paper 1 explores the potential of ‘new nature writing’ – a literary genre currently popular in the UK – as a kind of arts activism, in particular in terms of how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics. We note the limitations of the genre, notably the reproduction of class, gender and ethnic hierarchies, the emphasis on nostalgia and loss, and the stress on individual responses rather than col…
Obituary
The pandemic politics of cultural work: Collective responses to the Covid-19 crisis
The scope, unevenness, and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on cultural work has been widely acknowledged. This article turns to how sections of the cultural industries responded to the onset of this crisis. Our account is based on document research completed during the first wave of the pandemic. We gathered news reports, impact survey results, policy recommendations, open letters, event announcements, and other grey literature generat…
Cultural Industries and Urban Development (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Creative industries (9 works) · Cultural policy (9 works) · Economic growth (9 works)