Culture and the Public Sphere (Hardcover)

This study addresses cultural policy from a critical and multi-dimensional perspective. It is informed by some of the most advanced ideas in contemporary social theory, drawing particularly upon the work of Pierre Bourdiew, Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. The book challenges the commonly accepted instrumentalist agenda for "cultural policy studies" and proposes an alternative view of cultural policy as a matter for the widest possible critical and cultural debate. Illustrating his case with examples from recent cultural policy initiatives in Britain, the United States and Australia, McGuigan considers a range of topics which include: the American "culture ware"; the flattening of cultural hierarchies and the blurring of cultural boundaries according to a postmodernist and petit-burgeois imaginary; the rise of managerialist and market reasoning in public arts administration and broadcasting; the "post-Fordist" restructuring of the cultural industries; urban regeneration strategies under conditions of de-industrialization and worsening social exclusion; and national culture, museums, themeparks and the global phenomenon of heritage tourism.