Executive Summary

Taking the Measure of Culture:
A Meeting at Princeton University, June 7– June 8, 2002

Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and hosted by the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies

“Taking the Measure of Culture,” sponsored by the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, took place at Princeton University on June 7-8, 2002. The purpose of the meeting was to explore new ways of learning how, if at all, arts activities make communities better places, whether by building social capital, enhancing the lives of individuals in ways that strengthen the community as a whole, or enhancing economic development. A secondary focus was on understanding what makes communities artistically and culturally strong, with respect to quality, diversity, and support for creativity and innovation.

The method was to bring together cultural policy researchers, arts and cultural funders and policy makers, and researchers from fields outside arts and culture, so that the former could learn from the experience of those who, for example, have studied technology, community and social capital, stress and mental health, and political change. Meta-questions framing the discussion included the following: “What is reasonable to expect of the arts as a source of community stability and growth – or of any relatively small intervention into a relatively large and complex system?” “What causal processes link specific interventions to system effects?” “What methods can we use to identify subtle but important effects that conventional research methods may render invisible?”

Speakers shared their research with the group. Presentations were followed by discussions, which were initiated by “provocateurs,” whose job it was to describe the implications of the presentations for arts and cultural policy and raise additional questions. Presentations ranged widely both in topic and in direct relevance to the arts. Ellen Winner and Bruce Seaman began the meeting with discussions of their work, respectively, on the effects of arts education on learning and of arts spending on local communities. Each cautioned policy makers and advocates not to promise more than relatively small interventions can possibly deliver. In the next session Mario Small described his ethnographic research on the role of the arts in a low-income community of people born in Puerto Rico; and Claude Fischer shared some lessons from research on the ways in which new technologies shape community life. Both speakers demonstrated that initiatives (whether cultural or technological) often have effects that no one anticipates. Fischer noted that people tend to integrate new technologies into their lives in ways that enhance ongoing patterns and relationships rather than create distinctly new ones. Finally, the first day’s presentations concluded with a talk by population biologist and artist Henry Horn, who described puzzles that face biologists concerned with community ecology – especially how to define and understand the importance of diversity; and how to model complex interactions among different biological populations – and noted important parallels between the cultural environment and the natural environment.

The second day began with presentations by Blair Wheaton on lessons from the history of research on stress and by Bruce Western on the Bayesian approach to understanding social processes. Wheaton explained how what had been a disorganized and contentious field developed into a successful research tradition, and gave examples of how researchers in that field have learned to identify subtle but important factors that influence people’s mental health. He emphasized that progress in the field depended on shared definitions and taxonomies. He also noted the importance of exploring nonlinear effects (e.g., of a person’s adversity in childhood on their resilience as an adult) and interaction effects (e.g., the way in which people respond to divorce is conditional upon the perceived quality of their marriage before divorce). Western built on Wheaton’s remarks by introducing Bayesian statistics, a method that enables one to use theory and experience to leverage weak data, and to employ data and outside knowledge to make progress when one has weak theory.

The final presentation was by Ann Swidler, who discussed what we know about robustness in communities – that is the satisfactory functioning of institutions and families in ways that lead to economic growth and personal development over long periods of time. She called attention to the importance of fit between cultural myths and narratives and governance institutions, and noted the value of the arts as a source of identity and meaning. She discussed the power of culture to challenge existing hierarchies of prestige and status, and noted how interventions into markets can strengthen the hand of innovative and diverse sets of creators. Finally, she called for a greater appreciation of the intrinsic value of art, in addition to its value for instrumental purposes.

A number of lessons emerged from the discussions.

1. It is important to be clear in identifying and measuring both artistic “inputs” and community-level or individual-level outcomes, for overly broad categories will obscure real effects that may exist. In particular, studies of the impact of the arts on communities should be based on intuitions about the actual processes by which the arts influence communities and the people in them --- and measurement should be geared specifically to our understanding of those processes.

2. Communities are complex systems. Complex systems are characterized by relationships among their parts that are (a) nonlinear and (b) complexly interactive. What this means is that the relationship between the amount of some kind of arts activity, on the one hand, and some kind of valued community outcome on the other may change direction (so that a little may be good but a lot may actually be bad or vice versa) or may only be detectable within a relatively narrow range (so that artistic activity enhances social outcomes only after one reaches some threshold of the former). The observation about complex interactions means that artistic activities may be tied to valued community outcomes only under particular conditions, so that attempts to generalize across a wide range of communities may fail to recognize strong effects that are peculiar only to some communities.

3. Without the right theoretical insights, important effects will remain invisible. There are strong complementarities between statistical methods that enable us to model effects properly, and ethnographic and other qualitative studies that enable us to understand the actual processes that lead to valued outcomes.

4. Students of cultural policy should take advantage of a full range of analytic tools – not just ordinary linear regression, but also hierarchical models, demographic models, and network models – to articulate and test for the impact of the arts on communities.

5. Arts policy makers, funders, and advocates sometimes have unrealistic expectations about what we can expect arts programs to achieve, and therefore unwittingly stoke unrealistic standards against which to evaluate the success of such programs. Policy analysts in any field rarely – if ever – find strong, across-the-board effects of small interventions on large and complex systems. One is doing well to achieve incremental positive effects on those persons or communities who are equipped to benefit. Research should aim at identifying such effects rather than finding huge impacts that are unlikely to occur. Advocates should learn how to articulate the importance of such incremental and targeted impacts, and policy makers should use research to identify ways of replicating such impacts across communities. Moreover, many participants emphasized the intrinsic value of artistic and cultural development even when it is not linked to instrumental outcomes.

6. Research fields emerge when there are one or two exemplary studies that focus attention and attract resources. The study of the impact of the arts on communities needs such studies – work comparable to Robert Putnam’s first study of declining social capital, which galvanized a research field -- to demonstrate its value and encourage further development of usable knowledge.