Infrastructure or industry: Re-performing cultural statistics and the foundational economy

Abstract

For the arts and culture to be regarded as components of overlooked, everyday and providential foundational economy, we need to address the obstacle of how they are currently seen by policy. This article explores how evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) uses statistical data analysis to articulate the value of cultural activity and appraise the policy interventions designed to enhance this value to society and to economy. Within dominant UK and Australian policy discourse, data are privileged where they can provide evidence of agglomeration of arts and cultural activities, taken as an indication of the benefits for their localities, known as ‘spillovers’ and ‘positive externalities’, and accompanied by metrics for economic output and productivity. Such measures comply with government frameworks for understanding the returns of public investment; however, we argue that the prioritisation of transactional and extractive properties of economies undermines understanding art and culture as a form of infrastructure which is generative and foundational to everyday life and wellbeing. To test this and explore the possibilities for more ‘infrastructural thinking’ about culture, we use the idea of re-performance and perform a re-analysis of existing employment data organised by standard industrial classifications to look under the bonnet of these statistical lenses. The article examines the implications of this exercise for creating heuristic empirics that move away from the constraints of orthodox economics which currently dominate cultural policy towards the progressive approaches positioning culture as central to foundational economy and liveability.

Introduction

Responding to the recent call for arts and culture to be considered as a component of the foundational economy (O’Connor, 2022, 2024), this article considers some of the practical, philosophical and analytical obstacles which lie in the way of cultural policymakers adopting such an approach. It focuses on the use of statistical data that inform evidence relied on within policymaking to underwrite the case for public investment and advocate for government support in two comparable national policy cases, the United Kingdom and Australia. These data are employed within analyses to demonstrate the extrinsic value of arts and cultural activities to society and economy, or, in the language of economics, the ‘positive externalities’ which are caused by both the production and consumption of culture as a form of good (Bille, 2024). The methods for generating evidence, often carried out through the work of external commissioned research consultancies, both communicate and legitimise value between the different constituents of policy assemblages (Prince, 2014, 2015) and have over time become enshrined in policy frameworks and national datasets (Oman and Taylor, 2017). In the case of the United Kingdom, the Magenta Book and Green Book of His Majesty’s Treasury act as guidance manuals for evaluation and policy appraisal, respectively, proscribing ‘approved thinking models and methods’ (HMT, 2022: 1). to help policymakers appraise and account for the costs, benefits and risks and value for money when managing the public purse. In Australia, while not as strongly coded as the Green Book, federal policy heuristics are similarly neoclassical in their genealogy, and policy development is guided by a formal ‘new policy proposal’ process managed by the federal Cabinet that stresses ‘robust supporting evidence, or previous evaluation findings’ (Australian Government, 2023a, 2025).

The article argues that to change the way we think about arts and culture as economic activities we need to examine how such ‘thinking models and methods’ influence analysis and shape the data through which both policy advocacy and outcomes are evidenced. Its objective is to explore whether it is possible to develop data frameworks for understanding arts and culture as part of the so-called foundational economy (FEC, 2022), by using the same national statistical data currently used, as O’Brien (2010) suggests in his overview of cultural econometrics, to ‘narrate culture’s value’ (p. 13). Rather than attempt to (re)calculate the value of arts and culture, or their associated economic outputs, we critically explore such analytical methods for evidence of the social life (Law et al., 2011) of the data they use and politics of methods (Bunting et al., 2019) and expertise (Oman and Taylor, 2017) they reveal. We seek to establish whether, as O’Connor (2022) argues, methods rooted in market-first economic rationalism inevitably overlook the contribution of arts and cultural goods and services to the foundations of democratic citizenship and the social and cultural infrastructures of place.

To do so, we adopt a re-performance methodology (Oman, 2020; Oman and Taylor, 2017) to explore whether established methods for analysis of official statistical data can service the emerging conceptualisations of the foundational economy (FEC, 2022) and social infrastructure (Kelsey and Kenney, 2021) and evidence such a contribution. We deploy analysis of labour market data that identifies proportions of employment in policy-defined sectors in the arts and culture in the United Kingdom and Australia at a granular level, applying the classificatory frameworks for ‘culture and creative industries’ currently used within the two nations’ policy assemblages to provide comparative analysis. ¹ We use a foundational economy approach using decomposed Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) employment data to construct a ‘foundational’ aggregate of employment (Sissons and Green, 2025) and attempt to construct a similar model of employment within social and cultural infrastructure. This approach both problematises existing policy conceptualisations and heuristics while acknowledging there is validity to measuring cultural employment as both evidence of the existence of cultural economy and as a thing in itself, for the value to the workers who derive an income and the communities that cultural workers live in, and that benefit from access to local cultural infrastructure. Through this re-performance, the article examines the feasibility of applying new conceptualisations of economic activities associated with arts and culture to existing data, to see whether such an exercise might confirm, dispel or re-perform policy discourses, or, alternatively, prompt alternative means through which to articulate arts and culture within economic foundations.

The structure of the article is as follows. First, we outline the principles and key concepts of the foundational economy and its relevance to the potential re-narration of value for cultural policy from the work of the Foundational Economy Collective, henceforth FEC (Calafati et al., 2022; Froud et al., 2018), and its application to arts and culture (O’Connor, 2024). Next, we consider the characteristics of government policy and the terms through which it understands arts and culture and appraises cultural policy with a focus on the United Kingdom and Australia, two nations with a shared history of knowledge exchange and cultural policy transfer (Holden, 2012), not least in the area of metrics for cultural employment (Pratt, 2009). We examine the predominant approaches to analysing statistical data, which rationalise investment from the public purse into activities defined as ‘culture and creative industries’ and consider how these activities are imagined through central government guidance in the Green Book. A prioritisation of measures for economic output, we argue, has led to a dereliction of attention on the contribution of arts and culture to liveability through what the FEC call ‘mundane’ and ‘overlooked economies’, as part of everyday life. We then consider how a re-performance methodology (Oman, 2020, 2021); not only illustrates gaps in data, but illuminates their performativity. Importantly, rather than making the case for a non-economic valuation of culture or attempting to ‘monetise’ non-economic outputs as a rebuttal of economic rationalism, the re-performance considers economic activities, proxied by employment data, as means to illustrate and acknowledge cultural contributions to liveability as part of the foundational economy. The article finishes with a discussion of the findings of this experiment and their implications for further work.

Foundational economics

A basic premise of the FEC argument is that policy frequently looks at the wrong things in the wrong way within economic, infrastructure and industrial strategies (Froud et al., 2018). This is most emphatically demonstrated by the predominant approach to measuring economic returns on public policy investments as gross domestic product (GDP): this casts these activities as ‘a singular economy: the metric brackets heterogeneous parts of economic life as, alike, on the basis that they all create market income which can be added up by economists’ (p. 12). As a consequence, policy neglects the areas of the economy essential in providing services and goods for collective human need. A foundational approach disaggregates the economy into zones, characterised as ‘tradeable’ or ‘transactional’, ‘overlooked’, ‘providential’, and ‘material’, each with diverse organisational logics, business and revenue models (Earle et al., 2018). The latter three zones are foundational but often misunderstood in policy; these are ‘the mundane goods and services necessary to everyday life: pipe and cable utilities, transport networks, supermarket retail and food processing, community-based health, education and welfare’ (Leaver and Williams, 2014: 220). The economies within these zones also have corresponding infrastructures that enable these goods and services and are neither fixed nor innocent but shifting, relational and contingent with political contestations (Riepl et al., 2025).

In response to this neglect, FEC proponents call for a ‘policy reset’ to address the ‘quagmire’ of UK economic policy (Calafati et al., 2022: 645). They argue that the policy imperative to break stagnant wages, low growth and underfunded public services spans political divides; however, ideological approaches are split between techno-centrist policies to increase productivity through ‘factorial inputs’ (Calafati and Froud, 2023: 7), such as skills development, R&D investment and improvement of transport infrastructure, or free market liberalism that cuts taxes and red tape to deregulate enterprise. Indeed, both approaches can be seen within what we are calling ‘culture-as-industry’ policy approaches in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, whether as tax relief for creative and cultural enterprises or investment in skills and clusters, discussed below.

To break this faith in growth-oriented strategy, the FEC present a ‘new lens’ which shifts attention away from individual outputs and per capita measures of GDP and GVA, to the idea of household liveability and its contingency with three foundational pillars: disposable and residual household income; available essential foundational services; and social infrastructure (Calafati and Froud, 2023). The delineation of these pillars, which are financially and physically interconnected, is the first step proposed in the establishment of a ‘foundational liveability framework’ (p. 3). The second step is to gather empirical accounts which identify where there are systemic failures which weaken these foundations, and the third is to find ways to rebuild these pillars, through a political practice of adaptive re-use that should aim for meaningful improvement, and which may entail ‘workarounds, including handing the initiative to actors who can do what the central state cannot’ (Calafati and Froud, 2023: 5).

This article explores the second step of this proposition, with a focus on one of the pillars of liveability, that of social infrastructure, and arts and culture’s place within it. Social infrastructure is central to liveability through the value creation it affords: it is non-rivalrous in consumption, influencing social demand and offering positive externalities (Frischmann, 2012). This is also the case for culture when understood as infrastructural:

Society as a whole, including so-called ‘non-users’, is affected when other people participate in culture (be it attending a festival or playing music, going to an exhibition or drawing) . . . A different way to put this point is that cultural engagement – in addition to being an end in itself – makes other things possible; in the language of inclusive/comprehensive wealth it ‘enables’ other goods and services to ensue, and not just to the users but to society at large. (Kaszynska, 2024)

The enabling and generative properties of infrastructure are, therefore, seen as fundamental rather than standalone; they provide the foundations for liveability and require empirical understanding to identify where there are systemic failures.

The FEC argue that the foundational approach requires ‘heuristic empirics’ (Calafati and Froud, 2023: 4) that move beyond the construction of indicators and dashboards to reframe problems for policy and leverage meaningful outcomes. Translating these ambitions to cultural policy, we consider whether the focus of policy attention requires redirection, from the assumption that ‘creative spillovers’ are indicated by the presence of arts and cultural enterprises, to consideration of how (and which) economies shore up societal foundations and make places more liveable.

However, the epistemological lenses through which policy chooses to view culture are insufficient: they undermine and overlook the ways that cultural consumption and production offer material, providential and symbolic resources that contribute to social infrastructure as part of everyday life. They need reconnecting to infrastructure.

One way to do this is by examining how culture sits within the different zones of foundational economy. O’Connor (2024) argues this can be realised by

[b]roadly aligning culture with public services – health, education, social welfare, basic infrastructure – rather than some knowledge-economy growth sector, [which] moves us away from a ‘market citizenship’ agenda of GDP and productivity-driven wage growth, educational meritocracy, and privatised consumption. (p. 139)

O’Connor’s (2024) approach is to re-classify culture as not-an-industry. Instead, art and cultural activities comprise economies that are found across the zones identified by the FEC, including the transactional but importantly also the providential and everyday. Seeing cultural economies through a zonal lens helps connect up their systemic and integrated worth in a way that encompasses material infrastructure, built assets, education, participatory and community-based activities and commercial activities (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Art and culture in the zonal economy (adapted from O’Connor, 2024).

This is a potential new classificatory framework that might help us in ‘stepping away from the “creativity bundle”’ (O’Connor, 2024: 159), and the misplaced policy contingency of culture-as-industry in which UK and Australian cultural policy has been steeped since the 1990s. It provides us with the bones of an infrastructural approach to arts and culture, whereby we might re-appraise the relationships between different forms of artistic labour, creative expression and cultural provision, circulation and consumption, reconceptualising them as contingent and multivalent, and moreover delivering services essential to everyday life. It is our intention, therefore, to explore how such a framework might work in practice when codified through available data, and to consider the obstacles that lie in the way of its adoption within the machinery of government.

To do so, the next section examines what frameworks and methodologies currently inform the way the government sees and does cultural policy.

How government sees cultural policy: the Green Book

In policy studies, an increase in technocratic accountability frameworks is seen to typify New Public Management, demanding more and better indicators that can be used to produce evidence that measures the performance of culture alongside other sectors such as health, transport and the environment (Hood, 1995; O’Brien, 2013; Phiddian et al., 2017) in what is effectively a zero-sum game of competition for public funds (Wallis and Mckinney, 2013). As O’Brien (2013) points out, in the United Kingdom, these frameworks were synergistic with the expansion of Treasury power under the New Labour government that continued into the following Coalition government, ensuring a culture of audit and performance measurement that made ‘some form of positivist economics inevitable for Whitehall decisions’ (p. 70). These ‘positivist economics’ are enshrined in the guidance for policy options appraisal in the Treasury’s Green Book. However, Green Book guidance is not static; it is serially updated as new configurations of economic theory provide more sophisticated tools. For example, in 2018, the incorporation of natural capital approaches for evaluating environmental benefits along with measures for wellbeing, and the current version (HMT, 2022) makes room for guidance on place-based analysis. However, critical review finds a continued mishandling of social impact analysis ‘beyond basic socio-economic distributional consequences’ and a ‘tendency to still believe that valuation techniques leading to monetised costs and benefits addresses all needs’ (Hurst, 2019: 101–102).

New public management has also been highly influential in Australia (Carroll and Steane, 2005; Pusey, 1991). Australia’s policy development process is corralled and centralised by a cabinet process which vests most of the power in the so-called three ‘central’ departments of state – Prime Minister & Cabinet, Treasury and Finance. New policies headed to Australia’s federal Cabinet for political approval must first be submitted to Finance for vetting via a New Policy Proposal (NPP), which requires policymakers to provide evidence for the proposal and abide by Budget Process Operational Rules. The rules emphasise the need to account for the fiscal impact of policies, as well as anticipated staffing needs, legal liability, requirement for legislative change, and impact on trade agreements. NPPs are also required to comply with the Commonwealth Evaluation Framework, run by the Treasury. The Treasury has recently established a sub-department for evaluation called the Australian Centre for Evaluation, which provides templates and handbooks for bureaucrats developing policy. The Commonwealth Evaluation Toolkit emphasises technocratic heuristics such as ‘clearly articulated and measurable objectives and outcomes’ and ‘robust performance monitoring to support future evaluations’ (Australian Government, 2023a). The desire for greater evaluative rigour is in part a response to recent administrative scandals in Australia such as the ‘Robodebt’ affair, in which welfare recipients were charged with fictitious welfare debts by an unlawful social security algorithm (Holmes, 2023). In practice, policy evaluation in Australian is also undertaken by the Productivity Commission, a quasi-independent government agency that remains dominated by neoclassical analytical frameworks (Meyrick et al., 2019).

In both Australia and Britain, the over-emphasis on quantification and monetisation has shaped policy development along certain lines. In the United Kingdom, for example, Green Book appraisals require evidence of existing positive ‘Net Present Value’ (Hurst, 2019). This means some projects are disadvantaged by their socio-economic contexts, for example, those in places with low land value where the viability for return on investment is compromised; here, Hurst argues, the choice between them is then a matter of politics rather than methodical options appraisal. The approach promoted by the Green Book has also led to a disconnect between policy choices and societal acceptance of those choices, since representation of community interests takes place post-policy: the ‘choice of project is “decided” and only then is planning approval sought and local communities consulted’ (Hurst, 2019: 102). Green Book epistemology has been identified as a factor in the reproduction of regional inequalities, as projects in areas with weaker economies and lower tax bases are unable to meet Green Book thresholds in their case for infrastructure investment, as noted by the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities in a submission to a government committee on rail infrastructure (SIGOMA, 2018) and by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham who calls for a fairer distributive mechanism for public investment under a Basic Law (Burnham and Rotherham, 2024: 21). Similarly, in Australia, technocratic metrics often masquerade as neutral scoreboards when they represent value-laden policy interventions in their own right. Examples include the cost-benefit analysis methodology utilised by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which imposes a present value monetisation on benefit calculations (Australian Government, 2023a), and Australia’s federal environmental protection and conservation regulatory framework, which allows ‘offsets’ for environmental destruction (May et al., 2017) and has recently created a new ‘nature repair market’ that will issue tradeable ‘biodiversity certificates’ to be bought and sold by firms (Australian Government, 2023b).

How policy narrates arts and culture

Cost-benefit and impact analysis exercises such as those required by the Green Book and Australia’s Evaluation Toolkit do not concern themselves with the macroeconomic effects of government spending; rather, their focus is on individual welfare and wellbeing at a micro level (HMT, 2022). In doing so, they follow wider policymaking assumptions that social welfare can be calculated by aggregating individual satisfaction and using cost-benefit analysis to assess the business cases for policy options against their opportunity costs and potential for returns (O’Brien, 2013). Such measurement requires methods that fit ‘the prevailing language of policy appraisal’ (O’Brien, 2010: 4) and ‘narrate culture’s value’ (p. 13) for individual benefit. In the United Kingdom, such assumptions have resulted in methodological innovation such as the commissioning of new measures for Subjective Wellbeing (Fujiwara et al., 2014) and the development of the Culture and Heritage Capital Framework that advocate methods such as contingent valuation and stated preference techniques of behavioural economics. This exercise, co-commissioned by the government and research council and involving hybrid teams of academics and civil service analysts, aims to create an objective basis for cultural and heritage accounting. The framework has entailed fine-grain attempts to assign value to the many components of social and cultural infrastructure, from arts programming and participation to cultural institutions and industrial heritage, defined as stocks of assets and flows of services. In this way, economics methods such as contingency valuation and natural capital approaches are used to communicate their value as capitals in a language shared with Treasury, also known as ‘monetisation’ (Sagger et al., 2021).

However, to make the case for their value to society, arts and cultural activities are also routinely subject to macroeconomic analysis such as the calculation of estimates of Gross Value Added (GVA) attributed to sector activities (DCMS, 2024a). Statistical codes for industry and occupation of employment (SIC and SOC codes) provide standardised measures for identifying the employment footprint of sectors and, importantly, to track changes over time, for example when specific sectors and jobs are disappearing, even when they ‘bake in’ assumptions about supply and commodification. There has been protracted debate on selection of SIC and SOC codes for ‘creative industries’, whether for the inclusion of seemingly non-creative activities such as IT, or non-economic activities such as culture, or the exclusion of creative activities that take place in non-creative sectors of everyday activities (Campbell et al., 2019; Eltham and O’Connor, 2024). As feminist economics has long recognised, a look inside the black box reveals intriguing inconsistencies: gaping lacunae in non-priced (and therefore unmeasured) economic activity, fuzzy boundaries across various definitions of occupation and industry and incommensurability between the various micro-level measurements used to construct input-out tables for national accounts (Waring, 2003). At a minimum, it is clear that there are overlapping and excluded subsets of cultural and creative activity that are not visible within the data, even at a national level (Lyons and Connolly, 2024).

Deciding what to measure, and what is in or out of specific sectors, is fraught with definitional niggles that can misdirect and obfuscate. Indeed, even a DCMS GVA report notes that the true value of ‘creativity’ may be underestimated, since the estimates do not include creative occupations embedded within other sectors. While the ‘Cultural Sector’ forms a small part of an industry classification, ‘Heritage’ has difficulty even showing up in SIC codes, leading to a re-classification as ‘Operation for historical sites and similar visitor attractions’ (DCMS, 2024b). Street-level culture like busking or street art tends not to show up in government surveys, while some dimensions of cultural activity such as learning a musical instrument or making crafts in the home simply cannot be measured as economic activities. Where culture has no price, or cannot be aligned with or understood in industrial form, it cannot be seen.

Despite these caveats, such macroeconomic data are frequently used in policy advocacy. They demonstrate the power of classifications in shaping and hiding culture within industrial forms and also the problem of commensurability (Belfiore, 2022) and the potential jeopardy of comparison. For example, the claim that UK Creative Industries GVA is higher than the combined value of the aerospace, automotive, life sciences and oil and gas sectors (BPI, 2023) might serve in bullish sector lobbying, but invites questions of comparable efficacy: why invest in art if investing in, say, advanced manufacturing or hospitality might bring more bang-for-buck? Even the proponents of contingent valuation methods accept that it only provides a partial picture, which struggles to capture culture’s cumulative and social dimensions (Throsby, 2003). These slippery components, sometimes labelled ‘intrinsic values’ – ostensibly positioned against instrumentalism, and recognised by their refusal to conform to simple quantification – have led to protracted debate, not to mention numerous attempts by consultants to find ways to tot up their worth (e.g. Bakhshi et al., 2009; Carnwaith and Brown, 2014; Chappell and Knell, 2012) and extensive academic enquiry (e.g. Crossick and Kaszynska, 2016; Meyrick et al., 2018; Meyrick et al., 2019). At a more political level, questions remain whether the effort devoted to quantification is worth it. As Phiddian et al. (2017) report in the Australian context, ‘hard-headed economic rationales for cultural subsidy offered no protection whatsoever when a Minister’s personal sense of value asserted itself’ (p. 178).

Arts and culture as industrial strategy

Notwithstanding the evident problems and technical caveats, being seen or not seen as industrial is important for case-making by policymakers. As Belfiore (2022) identifies, government departments with responsibility for culture and the arts are increasingly ‘hostage to instrumental concerns that [they have] limited control over’ (p. 296). In recent decades, ministers and policymakers have responded to the prevailing policy environment of neoliberalism and new public management by stating the economic case for culture industry as the stimulant for: faster growth, more jobs or greater monetisable returns. Examples abound in both the United Kingdom and Australia, from the Independent Sector Review, part of the UK Industrial Strategy (HM Government, 2017) and its follow-up Creative Industries Sector vision and plan (DCMS, 2023; UK Government, 2025), to the various ‘creative industries’ policies of Australian provincial and federal governments of the 2000s, exemplified by the state of Queensland’s 2003 Richard Florida-inspired policy entitled ‘Creativity is big business’. Furthermore, the rationales for supporting ‘creative industries’ are rolled over to adjunct policy areas normally justified solely by welfare utility and/or market failure. Artist studio spaces and cultural hubs are positioned as ‘R&D labs’ for experimentation and innovation, boosting commercial return (Arts Council England, 2020: 8). Even post-pandemic, the same aspirations for cluster-based economic development have been integrated within plans for place-based recovery, such as the creation of Investment Zones (DLUHC, 2023), Creative Improvement Districts and Creative Enterprise Zones (Culture Commons, 2022). The elision of arts and culture and ‘creative industries’ has become entrenched within regeneration discourse, such that, for some, ‘creativity’, creative production and consumption have become so figuratively and politically corrupted as to be emptied of meaning (Mould, 2018; Whiting et al., 2022).

Recent policy development in the United Kingdom has led to research on the role of culture in creating economic clusters, with concomitant hopes for jobs and investment, and their potential to alleviate regional disadvantage (e.g. Gutierrez Posada et al., 2021; Siepel et al., 2020). An example of this is the work by Tether (2022) on Greater Manchester. Through analysis of NOMIS business survey data classified by DCMS creative industries definitions, he found clusters of activity where enterprises were predominantly small in size, and based in areas of relative affluence. Tether was not looking for ‘spillovers’ per se, and the analysis does not presume causal impact on local environments or economies. Rather, his interpretation was that these data tell us something about where creative businesses are able to survive or might want to settle: not in the areas with higher indices of deprivation. One would hope such analysis might inform cultural policy that addresses these spatial inequalities. However, as Tether concludes, creative industries policies rely on agglomeration effects and therefore are more likely to boost existing clusters than create new ones (Tether, 2022: 29–30).

By its nature, creative cluster strategy depends on concentration, and on the mobility of capital away from one place to another (Bowman et al., 2014). Moreover, this prevailing understanding of creative jobs or clusters promotes analysis of ‘point value’ which identifies value extraction from single nodes of provision as opposed to building ‘chain value’ across the systemic provision of a service or good (Hall and Schafran, 2017). The components of clusters – the artists, practitioners, enterprises, organisations, buildings and other assets that are co-present – are framed as single point sources of value, not as systemic components of cultural infrastructure or service providers of public good. A generation since Richard Florida (2002) first argued that ‘cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’ dominant policy frames still view the creative industries through the lens of regional economic development, rather than the flourishing of citizens or residents (Dellisanti, 2023; O’Connor, 2024).

As this short review suggests, viewing culture as an industry is an epistemological strategy which turns attention away from the pillars of foundational liveability (disposable and residual household income, essential services, social infrastructure), articulating culture’s values through methodological individualism and gross value addition. Our concern here is to examine the current ‘thinking models and methods’, and the data they generate, for their potential to refocus attention back to this agenda as evidence of arts and culture’s place within the foundational economic zones and as part of social infrastructure.

We turn next to the methodological experiment which was stimulated by this ambition.

Listening to data through re-performance

This article comments on research evidence that is reliant on data generated by an enduring commitment to dashboards, indicators, logic models and theories of change, designed to serve policy appraisal and guided by the frameworks and language recognised by those in control of the public purse. Within this epistemology, economic output measures still have primacy, even where the policies being proposed and the impacts evaluated are social or cultural. We wanted to explore how such evidence works in practice within the distinctive framing of foundational economy, and the kinds of agency these methods and these data may reveal (Law et al., 2011)

This involved the ‘art of listening’ (Xu, 2022) by bringing together data, the definitions and methodologies that define them and examining how they are social and discursive. To begin ‘listening’, we used a methodology of re-performance (Oman, 2021). Oman (2021) devised re-performance as way to interrogate wellbeing metrics in the context of evidence-based policy making as a cultural practice; for her, re-performance methodology is one that recognises the complexity of incorporating the social practices of everyday knowledge within a framework for looking at policy in which ‘the focus on data-in-research as performative reveals the effects in and on the cultures they describe’ (p. 291). Its usefulness lies in the way it unsettles and interrogates not only data and descriptors, but ‘the practices that generate and use them and therefore to interrogate not only the gap between different types of knowledge, but also the performativity of, and within, this gap’ (p. 292).

This methodological framing is ideal for an intentionally naïve, heuristic and exploratory attempt, to actively listen and watch for absences, anomalies and omissions, to problematise data and descriptors and identify their social practices. The section below briefly describes how we undertook a form of ‘re-performance’ and the assumptions behind the various analyses that were produced (or ‘re-performed’) through using culture-as-industry statistical data in the public domain.

First, we took employment data as a proxy for economic activity related to culture rather than a means to identify potential economic output (as measured by GVA). We then explored the relationship of this activity with all employment identified within different zones of the foundational economy. As a reminder, these are the zones of economic activities understood as overlooked, providential and material: the employment data maps cultural workers alongside overlooked but everyday industrial activities such as furniture manufacturing, food production, providential services such as education, health and social care, and in the latter category of material, the provision of ‘hard infrastructure’ such as utilities, transport and construction. This was not to ignore cultural activities that generate trade and profit, but as the FEC argue, the focus on ‘tradeable’ sectors as those with most to offer economic development takes attention away from the other 60 percent of activities that make up these zones (FEC, 2022). The cultural employment data we used include such tradeable activities, commonly defined as creative industries and equated with their potential for economic outputs and chained value addition, rather than their importance within the foundations of liveability as activities that promote sociality, connection, human expression and quality of life.

It might seem perverse to use the existing lenses of policy – data defined by selections of industrial classifications which are already acknowledged as problematic – as suitable proxies, but this was precisely the point. The analysis of employment data mapped against other indicators and bounded geographies allowed us to consider the presence of all cultural jobs distinct from the ‘tradeable’ zones which are the focus when measuring the value of DCMS Creative Industries sectors. Cultural employment contributes to local economies through wages, household income and indirect spend and indicates cultural production and consumption (but not its output value per se). As the total number of jobs in geographies such as local authority districts varies widely, we examined the share of employment (both cultural and foundational) as a proportion of the total labour force to provide a clearer indication (than absolute numbers) of the strength and presence of activity.

We did this in two national contexts, the United Kingdom and Australia which use comparable industrial classification. We used analysis to consider the relationship between the DCMS-defined sectors of culture and creative industries, and a bespoke occupational definition of foundational economy employment (FEC, 2018). ²

Scatter plot analysis provides a ‘dumb regression’ of two variables: the proportions of cultural employment and those of foundational employment (in any sector) by local authority districts (LADs) in both countries (see Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2.

Scatterplot showing UK Local authorities: percentage of foundational economy against percentage of DCMS cultural and creative industries (5 digit BRES 2021; SIC 2007).

Figure 3.

Scatterplot showing Australian local authorities: percentage of foundational economy against percentage of ABS cultural industries (6-digit ANZSIC 2006 rev2, ABS Census Microdata, 2021).

As can be seen, both reveal a weak negative correlation, meaning that in places where there are higher levels of cultural employment, broadly defined (and dominated by ‘Creative Industries’), there is a likelihood of lower levels of (all) foundational employment.

The LAD scatter plots (Figures 2 and 3) highlight anomalies, identifiable visually as the places (dots) that are scattered away from the line of correlation. While certain boroughs in world cities such as London, Sydney and Melbourne are where you might expect them to be, some places ping off the correlation, with higher percentages of both cultural and foundational jobs: the Scilly Isles off the tip of the Southwest coast of England, or the APY Lands in remote central Australia. These outliers can be explained by understanding more about both the issues with data classifications, the ‘place effects’ of topography and demography, industrial history and composition. For example, the Scilly Isles anomaly is likely to be a SIC definition effect, where the inclusion of tourism and its infrastructure weighs highly in a tiny population dependent on visitor economies. APY Lands is a remote local government area in South Australia, renowned for its Indigenous art and artist development by the APY Art Centre Collective, which has galleries in Sydney and Adelaide. Likewise, the City of London tells interesting stories: the lack of residential population might explain the low number of foundational economy jobs, but there is still quite a high percentage of cultural jobs, despite the main economy being financial services, raising questions of co-location with the wealth of the financial district.

Second, we explored how patterns of deprivation correlated with foundational economy employment by Local Authority District. This revealed a positive correlation indicating that we should broadly expect higher foundational employment where there are higher mean levels of deprivation (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Employment in foundational economy versus levels of multiple deprivation by local authority district, England (Source: ONS, BRES 2021).

Foundational employment is negatively correlated with wealth. Areas with higher take-up of health, social services, and government services undoubtedly related to their high deprivation contrast with the wealthier areas that have employment in non-FE employment categories like finance, marketing and real estate. Similarly, a comparison of proportions of foundational and cultural employment mapped onto the city-region of Greater Manchester (see Figures 5 and 6 revealed the same spatialised patterns as those proposed by Tether (2022), suggesting areas with less wealth and more deprivation were less likely to have high proportions of cultural employment.

Figure 5.

Foundational employment as share of all employment, Greater Manchester mid-level super output areas.

Figure 6.

Cultural employment as share of all employment, Greater Manchester mid-level super output areas.

These correlations are also found when taking an infrastructural lens: Riepl et al. (2025) found areas with higher socio-economic status had higher levels of accessibility to foundational infrastructure in their Vienna-based study. Their research investigates access to providential and overlooked ‘foundational infrastructures’ for healthcare, care, education, culture and nature through a new measure, the Foundational Accessibility Indicator, a potential incumbent for the FEC ‘heuristic empirics’ toolkit. As the authors admit, however, such measures need further augmentation with understanding of qualitative place factors, such as attractiveness, comfort and safety that prohibit and permit access.

Moving from industry to infrastructure

So what do our ‘dumb’ regressions and clumsy employment maps mean, and how might this inform heuristic empirics?

This experiment was the first stage, with the intention of revealing the gaps and anomalies within the social practice of identifying cultural goods and services, and their infrastructure through employment data. It provided a stress test for the agency of sector definitions and industrial classifications, taking as a starting point the widest set of culture-as-industry data. The intention for the next stage is to examine whether individual sectors can be reclassified within the zones of foundational economy in ways that are meaningful, robust and heuristic.

We make two claims based on this initial re-performance.

First, the experiment troubles the assumption that employment data can stand in for the presence of cultural infrastructure within locality.

The patchy maps and the correlations, or more accurately their outliers, underscore the leakiness of industrial classifications, and their agency in re-classifying cultural and civil activities (or obscuring them completely). What these caveats tell us is that data frameworks do not capture all economic activities; they act to represent economic activities affectively, as part of industry rather than infrastructure. The place-blindness of such frameworks leave places under-contextualised and at the mercy of shallow metrics, and the relationships between different zones of foundational economy remain hidden. To narrativize and explain the relationships that plotting and mapping might reveal, we need other modalities that encompass the contingency and distinct trajectories of both places and economies. This is not simply a matter of better measurement, but involves ‘thinking infrastructurally’ (Kaszynska, 2024) to see how physical and intangible dimensions within economic geographies are organised. As with Riepl et al.’s (2025) indicator, more qualitative understanding is required, especially if we dispel the idea of infrastructure as purely material and include the relational aspects of culture-as-infrastructure and the ‘soft’ infrastructure of programming and cultural education.

For example, the exercise allowed us nominally to compare three places: the City of London, Manchester and Blackpool. The City of London’s (2024) local government area is a corporate financial district with a small population (8600) compared to its 614,500 workers and millions of visitors. Our mapping revealed very low levels of foundational employment and low levels of deprivation, but around the same share of cultural employment as Blackpool at around 18 percent, reflecting presumably a lack of residential need for foundational goods and services but some evidence of night-time and visitor economies. By contrast, Manchester is high on deprivation overall and has pockets of high share of cultural employment, most notably in the city centre where the MSOA share is 45 percent. Manchester’s city centre co-locates important cultural institutions, private corporations and growing numbers of dwellings, but without corresponding social infrastructure of schools, communal spaces and health services. These are symptoms of rampant inner city urban development that might explain why Manchester does not have a higher proportion of foundational economy employment. By contrast, the nearby coastal resort of Blackpool, a recognised ‘left behind’ place (Fiorentino et al., 2024) with entrenched deprivation, fragile population and precarious employment reliant on fading tourism and leisure economies, has a high share of foundational employment. However, the presence or absence of sector employment data is insufficient to see how culture contributes to liveability in places like Blackpool, Manchester or London, or indeed remote central Australia. Instead, we need to see how culture operates across zonal economies to act infrastructurally, connecting livelihoods and generating resources. For this we need different approaches, not just more data or better definitions.

Second, and contrastingly, we argue that there is a validity in using employment data that speak to a deeper understanding of cultural work as work, rather than as an economic activity or the labour input to production. Making art is held by both policymakers and artists themselves to involve the creation of value, even if such value creation does not always show up in systems of national accounts. On a basic level, even when low-paid and precarious, cultural work generates income for cultural workers and their families, contributing to household and community liveability. Leaving aside considerations of economic valuation, cultural work has a non-economic dimension of ethical life choice and personal fulfilment (Banks, 2017) that the persistent focus on the properties and logics of the tradeable economy zone denies, but which can be highlighted with attention to foundational economy and social and cultural infrastructure.

Conclusion

This article offers an introductory contribution to the call to action by the FEC, acknowledging their three pillars of liveability (household income, essential services and social infrastructure) and looking at the ‘thinking models and methods’ within empirics of cultural policy accounting to see what might be salvaged and re-used productively in their favour.

This is not simply a technical exercise, but a political practice that aims for ‘meaningful improvement’ (Calafati and Froud, 2023: 5) while revealing the social practices that underlie research evidence and data used in policymaking. Using employment data to show how economic activities contribute to liveability and the foundation of everyday life is currently anathema for both British and Australian cultural policy, not just because the data are somehow out of scope, but because neoclassical policy frameworks have no interest in more heterodox methods, not least since they would trouble fundamental ideological convictions.

Our experiment to see how we might build heuristic empirics and illustrate systems of value through re-performance is not quite a failure, but an intentionally naïve way of listening and seeing. It highlights the need to fundamentally shift the terms under which we understand and ‘narrate culture’s value’ within policy thinking.

The re-performance exercise we undertook sketched a framework for mapping the foundational economies of art and culture that remains woefully inadequate. But it did show how distorting culture-as-industry is as a lens, either splitting off art and culture as non-market activities which have utility only as agents of welfare, or naming them as stimulants for ‘creative industries’, allowing their part in foundational economies to be misrecognised and hidden. Instead, we argue that understanding the relational and enabling properties of ‘culture-as-infrastructure’ deserves greater attention if evidence of the contribution of art and culture as a central pillar to liveability is required.