Cultural Value in a Time of Crisis: Public Debates and Governmental Discourses in the G7 Nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to creative workforces, organisations and their audiences, and the structures underpinning the performing arts in each of the G7 countries our research compared. It investigates how these developments were shaped by and contributed to shaping debates regarding ‘cultural value’: the contribution culture is argued to make to the economy, society, democracy, national or regional identity at home, political ‘soft power’ abroad, and population well-being. How these debates differed between countries reflects their respective historical understanding of the role of culture and the creative workforce in their national life.We examine the impact of public and policy discourse in relation to the ‘essential’ nature of culture for national identity, social cohesion, and well-being; how the pandemic catalysed questions regarding the ‘viability’ of creative jobs; the importance of cultural heritage in regard to tourism and ‘soft power’; and the ways in which German arguments about the seminal role of culture and freedom of expression as tools for democratic engagement at times of crisis were echoed in other countries. Our comparative analysis reveals how in the English-speaking countries (United Kingdom, Canada, USA), those debates were enmeshed in the struggle for social justice that was fuelled by the dual forces of the pandemic, with its disproportionately negative impact on minoritised communities, and the murder of George Floyd. The comparison also reveals how overall, arguments for the intrinsic value of culture during COVID-19 made way for instrumentalist arguments that foregrounded the contribution of the creative industries to the economy and society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.081 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".