Theme 3: Culture, Governance and Citizenship: the Formation and Transformations of Liberal Government
Theme Convenor: Tony Bennett (T.Bennett@open.ac.uk)
Theme Researcher: Francis Dodsworth (F.M.Dodsworth@open.ac.uk)
Introduction
This theme examines the role that culture has played in social change through its connections with practices of governance. It brings a particular historical focus to these concerns by taking its bearings from the changing articulations of the relations between culture, governance and citizenship that have characterised the development of liberal forms of rule over the period from the late eighteenth century to current forms of neo-liberal government.
The distinctiveness of liberal government for the purposes of these inquiries consists in the varying degrees of freedom and autonomy which it grants to citizens. This gives liberal government a number of distinctive features: a significant emphasis on the development of techniques of self regulation through which individuals reflexively monitor and govern their own conduct; the development of systems and relations which work through the connections they establish between individuals, and which are, in turn, operated by those individuals; and new forms of organisation of social space allowing for the circulation and free flow of bodies, things and signs.
What we have done so far
Theme 3 has addressed three main questions concerning (i) how the changing roles of culture within the governance of modern societies have connected to the material practices of states, cities and markets (ii) the relations between individual self-governance and governance through communities in contemporary and historical practices of cultural governance and (iii) the ways in which questions of cultural diversity are best pursued, and the role played by cultural knowledge in the practices of cultural institutions. Our work proposes a distinctive account of how liberal practices of government and self-government have been organised, and of the mechanisms through which they are transformed. These include the role of materialities of various kinds in the organisation of modern infrastructures of government.
In relation to the first question we have probed the role of changing material infrastructures (such as postal systems, and architectures of public administration) and the new forms of governance emerging from the reorganisation of territorial boundaries between states. We have also shown the significance of religious-cum-cultural boundaries in the organisation of city geographies, and of local markets to the urban organisation of social and cultural differences. Work on the second question has examined the development of new forms of self-governance and training associated with the development, for example, of modern practices of insurance; and more communal forms of governance and training associated, for example, with the development of censuses. The third question has been pursued via the comparative examination of the operation of cultural diversity policies at the national level, as well as in relation to the operations of specific cultural institutions across diverse cultural sectors.