Music, School of Humanities University of Southampton
ACE/AHRC Fellowship in Impact Assessment
Project Summary March 2008
IMPASSE (January 2005 - October 2007) was an interdisciplinary investigation aiming to develop new socio-economic impact assessment techniques which
- are relevant to policymakers;
- are realistically usable for self-assessment by artists, arts researchers, arts and arts research organisations (this rules out survey approaches of such scale and sophistication that only very well resourced organisations can afford them);
- use objective value indicators as far as possible: the money spent on arts and arts research activity, and in particular the time committed to arts and arts research consumption by people to whom the arts and arts research appeal;
- can be used consistently, to assess all forms of impact plausibly attributable to arts and/or arts research activity; take practical account of modern sociological and psychological thinking;
- have a strong political-economic orientation building on the work of heterodox cultural economists such as Bruno Frey and Arjo Klamer;
- try to improve the explanatory and predictive performance of familiar impact assessment techniques with the help of modifications suggested by interdisciplinary contributors to the impact assessment debate.
A number of impact assessment experiments were carried out, using data supplied by Southampton-based music organisations.
Published papers arising from IMPASSE have addressed a range of policy topics, including public value creation, rent-seeking behaviour in the art world and social capital theory. Publications includes:
'Public value or intrinsic value? The arts-economic consequences of Mr Keynes'. Public Money & Management, 26 (2006), 173-9.
'The Gramppian Hills: an empirical test for rent-seeking behaviour in the arts'. Cultural Trends 16 (2007), 277-294. [Paper awarded a 2007 CUDASSH prize for interdisciplinary research achievement.].
'The infrastructural aspect of social capital: suggestions for a bridge between concept and policy'. Public Money & Management 27 (2007), 345-9.
Follow-up research is giving further consideration to the practical application of cultural economic theory, and to the wider economic implications of time scarcity as a factor influencing consumer behavior via processes of taste formation time-consuming in themselves.
Professor David Nicholls managed the IMPASSE project. Professor Nicholls' musical research specialisms include American music of the last 100 years, and British rock and pop music of the 1960s and 70s.
Research Fellow Andrew Pinnock (Lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at the University of Southampton from October 2007) has a long-standing research interest in C17 English music. He is Hon. Secretary to the Purcell Society and an active Purcell opera editor. He worked in the Arts Council's Music Department for 13 years (as Head of Music in the Council's London office from 2000 to 2004), giving him extensive experience of high-level cultural policymaking in its highly politicised environment.
For further information, please contact Andrew Pinnock by email ajp@soton.ac.uk
For IMPASSE publications, see http://www.soton.ac.uk/music/staff/Personal/APinnock.html