1. CULTURAL VALUE NETWORKS
AHRC Connected Communities
Professor Jon Dovey
Dr Goetz Bachman
Dr Jeanette Monaco
Bill Sharpe
Preliminary findings

2. Aims
 The research aims to produce the first iteration of a
multi-criteria method for articulating cultural value
which other cultural organisations could use to
assess the value of their work.
 This evaluative methodology aims to support cultural
organisations in providing better value for money by
having better ways to understand the value they
produce.
 This was a production study; producers not
consumers

3. Background Ideas-
 The Cultural Value debate (O‟Brien, Bakshi,
Throsby)
 The new dynamics of Participatory Culture
(Leadbeater, Shirkey, Hartley)
 Ethnography (Randall Collins & Nina Wakeford)
 The problem of Measurement (Espeland & Stevens)
 Ecology (Bill Sharp Patterns of Health & Wealth)
 Economies of Contribution (Stiegler)

4. Value & Creative Networks
 Value is created through relationships between
living things.
 Different agents within any ecoystem will
experience value differently, your nutrition might
be my poison.
 This understanding of value is derived from the
perspective of a life in the patterns of life in
which it takes part. (Sharpe)

5. Value & Creative Networks
 Lives are part of multiple economies, each
defining a distinctive shared quality of value
where we understand an economy as a pattern
of shared valuing, with its own way of
maintaining integrity of that process and
organising itself.
 „Value‟ is enacted by agents in an economy
 This process can be identified as „valuing
practices‟ .

6. Value Constellations
 The extended network of co-production around a
focal organisation
 Focus on the intentional role of the focal
organisation in designing, and enacting the way
the participants interact – the active producing
role
 The focal organisation creates offerings that link
the participants into co-productive relationships

7. Research Site
The Pervasive Media Studio
 A creative technologies collaboration between
Watershed Media Centre, University of the West of
England and University of Bristol.
 Multiple public funding sources, from arts,
education, tech innovation.
 A multi-disciplinary lab exploring and producing
pervasive media content, applications and services.
 Artists, designers, engineers, academics,
programmers, producers, „creative technologists‟.

8. The Pervasive Media Studio
 A city centre dock side space with 40 desk
spaces, meeting and teaching spaces.
 Long term residents often tech based.
 Short term residents on a project by project
basis.
 FREE desk space for everyone.
 A curated network, an ecosystem
 Key roles of producers to connect and support.

9. Enacting Value
 a complex set of valuing practices in action, driven
by the relational patterns of :-
 trust making,
 conflict negotiation,
 participation,
 affect,
 personal development.
 collaboration
 know how exchange,
 learning,

10. resident residents
producer

11. resident residents -> £1m
producer
Funders
£150k

12. How ?
 The research adapted the principles of Social Network
Analysis to map a value producing network .
 The project employed an ethnographic fieldworker, Research
Associate Jeanette Monaco, who acted part-time as
participant-observer in the studio from July-December 2011.
 Five months of fieldwork observation. A total of thirteen semi-
structured interviews were also conducted for the data
sample. Analysis using key terms and key codes using Atlas
Ti software.

13. Interview Structures
 Four questions provided a general framework for
mapping valuing practices in their creative networks.
 Who do you turn to for strategy?
 Who do you get trust and support from?
 Who do you turn to for creative excitement?
 Who do you turn to for „Know-how‟ about certain
things?

14. Classifying Data
 The Meta Codes
 1 Interpersonal relations
 2 Collaborations
 3 Shared values

15. Discussion
 Money is not the only form of measuring value,
and measuring not the only form of articulating
value.
 Absence of measurement does not produce
absence of articulation of value, but will allow
other forms of articulation to flourish – often
qualitative ones eg stories, narrative.

16. Value Constellation
 The overall value constellation of the Pervasive
Media Studio is a form of an “economy of
contribution”
 Different forms of value are circulating, often
only vaguely articulated, inside the studio
 Other forms of contribution take the more
complex form of gifts; giving and receiving are
often temporally de-coupled, and gift exchange
remains deeply embedded in social relations.

17. Giving and receiving Value in the
Pervasive Media Studio
 Residents are gifted four forms of value:
 workspace,
 social work environment,
 external prestige,
 Access to a Producer.

18. Giving and receiving Value in the
Pervasive Media Studio
 Residents return gifts to the studio in the form of
success stories .
 Producers are professional collectors of success
stories.
 A rich field of horizontal gift exchange between
residents and producers a double gift.
 studio creates an additional form of value, a form
of „qualitative surplus‟.

19. Giving and receiving Value in the
Pervasive Media Studio
 Producers get get funds in exchange for stories, which
enables the collaborative working environment.
 Inside this working environment, the extra value of a
double gift - to the other residents and to the studio itself
– enables generosity and provides extra motivation.
 This, in turns, provides an extra incentive for a thriving
collective work environment, which then can be „sold‟
back though the funders as stories about processes of
creating value and products of extraordinarily high
quality

20. resident residents
producer
funder

21. PM Studio Audience/Ma
rket
Funder
State

22. Cultural
sector
Other sectors
State

23. STUDIO
FUNDERS
SOCIETY
CULTURAL VALUE
CONSTELLATION
CREATIVE
ECONOMY
MULTI-ECONOMY

24. Future Research
•Test Research with other participants eg Battersea Arts Centre,
National Theatre of Wales,Bristol Old Vic and the Arnolfini Gallery
•Do more work on how enacting value inside organisations nets out
as market value downstream
•Do more work on how quant and qual can be folded into an
understanding of network effects

25. This Study Online @
 http://www.dcrc.org.uk/publications/cultural-value-networks-
research-findings
 Bakhshi, H. and Throsby, D. (2010) „Culture of Innovation: An
economic analysis of innovation in arts and cultural organisations‟
London: NESTA
 Collins, R. (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press.
 Espeland, W.N., Stevens, M.L. (2008) „A Sociology of
Quantification‟, European Journal of Sociology, 49 (3) 401-436.
 O‟Brien, D. (2010) „Measuring the value of culture: a report to the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport‟, London: DCMS.
 Sharpe B Economies of Health & Wealth Triarchy Press 2010