Culture in the competition state

Firstly, the history of the cultural policy development supports the suggestion that the competition state has not been a total and sudden reversal of the welfare state. Cultural policies have in a way always been instrumental, including the use of culture as means for economic gains (Vestheim, 2008). In Denmark, this goes back to the beginning of the 1970s due to a mix between global trends and local developments (Bayliss, 2004, pp. 10–

11; cf. C. Gray, 2007). On the local level, Denmark underwent a structural reform in 1970 which reduced the number of municipalities from 1388 to 277 and led to rise in public financed cultural projects (Skot-Hansen, 1998; B. Sørensen, 1998). Later, in the 1990s, followed a general shift from economies based on industry to knowledge in Scandinavia and elsewhere in much of the Western world, which pushed cultural policy development in a more market orientated direction (Power, 2009, pp. 450–451). This inspired business theories like the “experience economy”, which became subject to considerable policy making in a Scandinavian context (T. Bille, 2012; Henningsen et al., 2017, pp. 367–368;

cf. Pine & Gilmore, 1999/2011). A focal point in these policies would be the coupling of the existing idea of cultural initiatives as economic potentials with culture as a tool for regional development inter alia through events. The result was that unusual temporary

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experiences became a particularly popular aim for cultural policies. This trend is still pre-sent. For instance, recent Norwegian research links new financing schemes with a focus on local events and culture centres as a way of increasing the attractiveness of towns or cities (Henningsen et al., 2017; Mangset & Hylland, 2017). Furthermore, in Denmark a study has shown a widespread use of place branding often linked by the municipalities (O. H. Jørgensen, 2016). I have not come across deliberate discussions on the relation between cultural policy development and the competition state, but there are clearly overlapping trends.

The rise of the “experience economy” also spurned a research project on the role of events and sport under the auspices of the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) (2005-2008). The study by Nielsen (2008) to which I have referred extensively in the section of the spectacular event was one of its outcomes (the project also included sport, Storm &

Brandt, 2008). Seen from a 2020 perspective the CBS project described the experience economy at its beginning and simultaneously with various reforms and initiates; the out-comes of this study are broadly followed up on in the thesis. The project was for instance contemporary to the adoption of the first national sport event policy in Denmark and a new structural reform, which reduced the number of municipalities from 271 to 98. Re-garding sport events, the study found sport events to be an increasing relevant area but there have never been any broad studies following up on this conclusion.

Therefore, in order to give an impression of the conditions for sport events in the com-petition state, I turn to the research in events in general. In this field, especially due to the research of the Danish economist Trine Bille, there is a general perspective on cultural policies and the rationale behind them. Based on a model by the sociologist Dorte Skot-Hansen depicting the rationales of a cultural policy (see Figure 6), Bille suggests two pri-mary rationales for cultural policies: market and non-market orientated. Drawing on the works of Niklas Luhmann, Bille explains the current dominance of the market orientation with reference to the claim that as a system culture does not have a single “truth” and therefore it must “parasitic”, meaning it adopts the truth of another system (T. Bille et al., 2016). Because of the New Public Management regime and neoliberalism, culture has

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adopted the economic rationale of pay/does not pay and begun to consider “ways in which arts and culture can create market economic value and growth” (T. Bille et al., 2016, p. 240). Public authorities’ use of cultural policies to shape cities and nation states for the global competition is one option. Another is to let culture support specific sectors (e.g. creative industries, tourism or sport) or simply provide an influx of creativity in soci-ety (T. Bille et al., 2016, pp. 253–254). Sport events could be subject to similar lines of reasoning, although my previous emphasis on the potential spectacular and speculative elements in an event suggest that the non-market and market orientated rationales are closely related.

I previously pointed out how one should not regard the competition state as a break with the welfare state. Nevertheless, it is possible to criticise the development, for example as Bille does when suggesting that stakeholders should regard the economic impact as infe-rior to culture’s empowering potential (T. Bille, 2016). The British cultural policy re-searcher Eleonora Belfiore has extended this point by adding that economic impacts could not only take away focus from other outcomes but lead to negative impacts such

Figure 6: The four rationales of a cultural policy and their two groups: the market orientated (right-bottom) and the non-market orientated (left- top).

Source: Skot-Hansen, 2005, p. 33 in T. Bille, 2016, p. 7.

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as the neglect of human rights (2018). Another examples is a recent paper on the Danish conditions for culture which argues that the cultural field runs the risk of losing its auton-omy because of its low visibility coupled with a decrease in governmental funding and a change to a rhetoric based on “economic reasoning” (Rasmussen, 2018, p. 242). In con-trast to sport event research, the cultural policy field has an ongoing and highly relevant principal discussion of the economic impact as a valid aim for cultural policies. As demon-strated earlier, sport event research is also critical; however, this criticism focuses on the plausibility of the impacts and it does not question whether, for example, economic im-pacts can be legitimate justifications for sport events at all. On the one hand, Bille and Belfiore’s critiques would suggest this is not the case. On the other hand, this criticism might not be relevant for sport events which are the outcome of a commercialised inter-national elite sport made into a global cultural product rarely seen in the cultural field (C.

Gray, 2007, pp. 210–211). The Nordic Cultural Model for funding has for instance begun to focus on connecting art, businesses and sponsoring (Duelund, 2008, p. 17; Mangset et al., 2008). At the same time it is worth noting that research on Norwegian development in particular has concluded that the autonomy of the cultural branch is “very resilient”, despite a closer relation between arts and economics (Mangset & Hylland, 2017, p. 64;

cf. Duelund, 2008; Tjora, 2013, p. 23).

In summary, recent developments in public policy development have produced struc-tures which have potentially both eased and hindered the efforts of sport event stake-holders in Denmark and Norway. On the one hand, an association with the Danish/Nor-wegian welfare state would make an event legitimate both on a national and interna-tional scale. On the other hand, the welfare state is exposed to the logic of the competi-tive state in the public decision processes. Although the competicompeti-tive state sets new ac-cents in the discourse which could support commercial sport events, research on the re-lated cultural policy development field warns that these accents might lead to a loss of autonomy for the cultural field. Depending on how much their autonomy is based on a non-commercial mode of operation, the market discourse could put the stakeholders in a dilemma. I will consider this in greater detail for sport in the next section.

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