5
Filling gaps
Two related political catchwords, ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’, are the theme of this chapter. Both have been strongly associated with the ‘new normal’ following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, as outlined in Chapter 2. Here they are considered in terms of usage within narrower domains.
The term ‘austerity’ has featured in Chapters 2 and 3 already, but mainly as referring to certain economic policy measures rather than as a catchword itself. The relationship between concepts and catchphrases/words is germane to this study, exemplified earlier by considering the concept of normality in terms of the catchphrase ‘new normal’. ‘Austerity’ offers another instance of such a relationship. At the same time, closer attention to ‘austerity’ as a catchword complicates the picture of the 2007–2008 financial crisis woven through the ‘new normal’. That is to say, both the analysis of catchphrases and the contemporary historical narrative of that juncture gain in depth. The previous chapters have dwelt somewhat single-mindedly on a single catchphrase, but such catchphrases obviously work concurrently with, alongside and through other catchphrases/words. The adaptations and slippages in contextual usage are both concentrated in specific catchphrases/words and distributed over a network of catchphrases/words bearing variously upon each other. The catchword-character of ‘austerity’ thus adds a further dimension to the catchphrase-character of the ‘new normal’ and indeed to other catchphrases/words at the time. Moreover, whereas in Chapter 2 I gave a sketchy overview of various areas dubbed the ‘new normal’ over a protracted period, my observations in this chapter on ‘austerity’ focus on a limited domain: British political discourse in, mainly, 2008–2010. This presents, so to speak, a focal point within the larger sweep of the account in Chapter 2.
The term ‘resilience’ is considered after ‘austerity’ in the following, mainly for the period 2010–2017, but within an even more limited domain of usage: anchored to a specific British policy-setting body, the Arts Council England. The somewhat different purchases of the two catchwords guide my choice of appropriate domains to focus upon. In fact, as terms redolent of economic policy measures following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’ had linked but, in some respects, contrary resonances. They have seemed obviously linked—‘austerity’ measures test the ‘resilience’ of organizations—and yet, in terms of usage, they resisted each other. ‘Austerity’ mainly came to be associated with critical perspectives of the measures in question, used by those who were troubled by them. For a brief period, 2008–2010, it appeared in uncharacteristically positive tones in Britain and elsewhere, and that is therefore the period of particular interest in this chapter. But even as such, it was rarely adopted within policy speak. No significant policy measure was officially promoted as an ‘austerity’ measure, actually using the term, by legislators and managers. In fact, ‘austerity’ became a catchword—whether with positive or negative cadences—in media, academic and activist documents, and further afield. However, over the same period and subsequently, ‘resilience’ was principally a catchword within policymaking, at home in legislative and management circles. Outside that domain its resonances were weak. ‘Resilience’ is a useful example of a policy catchword which is best traced through governmental documents and official records.
Words and phrases usually call for somewhat distinct methods in discourse analysis, which is evident in some of the observations later in the chapter. However, I do not make a strong conceptual distinction between the catchiness of the words and of the phrases examined here. My approach to the ‘catchwordness’ of ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’ in this chapter is aligned with my approach to the ‘catchphraseness’ of the ‘new normal’ in the previous chapters. Their catchiness has to do with the intensity and extensiveness of repeated usage, adaptations, and recontextualizations in diverse settings, shifting and accruing nuances, and their becoming grounded amidst and serving to ground current or emerging practices. On a related note, both ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’ have occasionally been dissected as ‘keywords’ in the sense popularized by Raymond Williams (1983). It seems to me that in many respects keywords and catchwords are indistinguishable, but equally, in some important ways, calling a term a ‘keyword’ or a ‘catchword’ announces different analytical approaches. In the final chapter, I give more detailed consideration to the concept of catchphrases, and there the distinctions between catchwords and keywords are also addressed.
‘Austerity’
That ‘austerity’ had become a catchword very soon after the 2007–2008 financial crisis is indicated by the analytical attention subsequently devoted to the policies it designated. Such attention has largely ranged from sceptical to hostile towards those policies. Insofar as the term’s catchiness goes, how the relationship between the concept of austerity (realized in policy) and the word ‘austerity’ was understood is significant. Economist Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013) has proved to be a useful, indeed obvious, source in this regard, and his succinct definition oft cited:
Austerity is a form of voluntary deflation in which the economy adjusts through the reduction of wages, prices, and public spending to restore competitiveness, which is (supposedly) best achieved by cutting the state’s budget, debts, and deficits. Doing so, its advocates believe, will inspire ‘business confidence’ since the government will neither be ‘crowding-out’ the market for investment by sucking up all the available capital through the issuance of debt, nor adding to the nation’s already ‘too big’ debt. (2)
Blyth’s history of this concept appeared while such policies were being enacted on large scale in response to the financial crisis, particularly in the UK and other EU member states. It was written to highlight the contradictions in, and inadequacies of the concept and the policies entailed, both in terms of economic reasoning and of past experience of implementing such policies. Importantly, Blyth argued, as an economic concept it misrepresented where responsibility for the deficit lay—principally the private sector—and consequently penalized those who were not responsible for it—the public sector and therefore the public at large, especially the less affluent and precariously employed. The attractiveness of the concept, Blyth observed, was engrained in the development of liberal political economy from the eighteenth century onwards (he started with John Locke), with its determination to limit state powers while preserving market freedoms, often more as a matter of conviction than logic. Blyth’s criticism of austerity as a concept was especially meaningful when the book appeared. Other economists with notable public voices—such as Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, and Tony Atkinson—were making substantially similar arguments at the time (more on this in the next chapter). However, just a bit earlier, as the financial crisis broke over 2007–2010, the concept had enjoyed a not insignificant degree of popular support, especially in Britain. This is a curious circumstance which possibly contributed to ‘austerity’ becoming a catchword. I turn to that soon, but let me stay with analytical retrospection on the financial-crisis concept and word a bit longer.
Blyth did not consider why the particular word ‘austerity’ was being used thus, when it had started being used, and with what connotations. He took it for granted that ‘austerity’ simply stands for such economic policies, defined the term accordingly, and reconfirmed its usage as such by using it. His history therefore traced those policies and the concept back to contexts when the word was not used thus, though the word itself was in use. Effectively, Blyth’s history of austerity fixed the word to the idea as if that was necessarily received usage, as indeed it had become. In fact, economists at the time very seldom paused on the aptness of the term for the idea, or the rhetorical appeal it carried. Even those who found that the term was misunderstood or understood in contradictory ways, tended to sharpen the economic idea rather than meddle with the use of the term (Anderson and Minnerman 2014 a case in point). Naturally, scholars employing quantitative methods to gauge the currency and implications of ‘austerity’ over the financial-crisis period, mainly media and discourse analysts, paid more attention to the word itself than Blyth and other economists—and with the same political thrust. This was a methodological matter. Quantitative methods to gauge political or cultural tendencies often depend upon tracking the frequency and contexts of usage for specific words, where contexts are demarcated by time periods and categories of source documents (of different genres, with analysis ranging from lexical and syntactical to various post-sentential levels). Thus, to examine the idea of austerity through a corpus of political documents produced by British thinktanks in 2003–2013, Nick Anstead (2018) coded his corpus according to the incidence of the word ‘austerity’. The word then became the key anchor for the idea, which was understood as both ‘technical and normative’ (289–90). Similarly, to study the ‘the process by which a term [“austerity”] turns into a catchword that becomes used in ever-new contexts, reframing and reorganizing political discourses and actual policies’, Laia Ferrer and Pertti Alasuutari (2019: 1041) focused on the incidence of the word ‘austerity’ in Spanish and Portuguese parliamentary papers. Reiner Grundman et al. (2018) took a more complex path to analyse the idea of austerity as featured in a corpus of British mainstream news texts in 2007–2015. They decided not to take the word as the sole anchor for the idea, but to devise a ‘parsing routine that includes articles about austerity (even if the word does not appear) and to exclude articles that are not about austerity (even if the word appears)’ (100). This involved associating the idea with a cluster of connected words rather than singularly with ‘austerity’. Interestingly, where Blyth and other economists tacitly fixed the word (‘austerity’) to the idea (deficit-reduction policies) by using it without reflecting on its received usage, these quantitative discourse analysts did much the same by negotiating laboriously with the word itself in their research methods. Therefore, in such quantitative analyses, between the period limitations of the corpora and the methodological attention to words, the economic concept of austerity seemed to get fixed to the term ‘austerity’ again, much as in Blyth’s book. As little careful attention was given to the history of the word’s usage across contexts, its varied connotations and accruing resonances. While such quantitative analyses made for valuable assessments of how the term was used in this period, they did not explain why ‘austerity’, particularly, became a catchword and how and why catchwords catch.
Rather more helpful for the latter purpose were studies which delved into the longer history and wider resonances of the term. While economists and reporters were using and settling the term prolifically to refer to deficit-reduction policies, it took a while for broader reflections on the term itself to emerge after the 2007–2008 financial crisis. I mean, reflections which were not simply about checking incidence of usage and fixing the term to the idea, but exploring why this particular term was being used and catching on at this time. These recalled the ethical and religious connotations of the term, of considerably older provenance, and pondered their bearing on current usage. An intriguing article on the idea of and the term ‘austerity’ in eighteenth- century Georgian England by Helen Berry (2014) wondered whether the present conception of austerity throws any light on that history, which also meant, of course, that the history could throw light on the present. Placing the eighteenth-century idea amidst an emerging culture of bourgeois consumption and denominational Christian principles, Berry noted several nuances. For elite men, austerity was a kind of ethical self-denial; for women, it was considered laudable domestic economy; immoderate self-denial was regarded with suspicion, as misanthropic or extremist; and in moderation it was taken as a sign of piety, where the denial of consuming pleasures was also an indulgence of the ‘pleasures of conspicuous abstention’ (276). That ‘austerity’ suggested a complex set of religious and ethical associations, veering between genteel piety and rigid extremism, moderation and immoderation, pleasant male self-denial and laudable female thrift, could well have been a dimension of the term’s catchiness after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, for deficit-reduction by cutting public spending—and indeed earlier. That argument was made forcefully by Martijn Konings (in his 2015 book and 2016 paper). Konings argued that despite appearances, economic concepts (such as the idea of money) have evolved with and continue to be infused with religious and emotional significances, which play their part in how economic terms—and the policies couched in them—are received. Insofar as ‘austerity’ goes, I had noted Blyth’s complaint that austerity policies penalize the public for the culpability of the private sector. Konings observed that this unreasonable thrust is precisely what the term ‘austerity’ presents as a positive nuance, given its erstwhile religious and moral associations:
Neoliberal capitalism’s ethos facilitates disavowal of our complicity in the production of suffering, while allowing us to claim responsibility for our fortune; it urges us to feel responsible for things that we have little influence on while letting us off the hook when it comes to things we are responsible for. […] The subject assumes responsibility for its own powerlessness and is assured that it is doing the right thing in exercising power. Any guilt we might feel should quickly be converted into the outwardly directed aggression that secures our wealth, and not to do so would jeopardize our self-realization. Neoliberal austerity is redemptive, holding out the promise of limitless wealth and assuaging the anxiety we might feel about the disagreeable alliances we have to forge in our pursuit of money. Any reluctance to own our desire for money and any hesitations we might experience in wielding our powers jeopardize our future salvation. (111)
Arguably, both the infrequent approbatory usage and the frequent denunciative usage of the term ‘austerity’ to refer to economic policy after the financial crisis—contributing to its spread as a catchword—were grounded in the accrual and juxtaposition of nuances over its long career.
With these retrospective analyses of the rise of ‘austerity’ as a catchword after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, I turn to some notes on its career in Britain as such.
In 2010 ‘austerity’ was already firmly a catchword, not just in Anglophone circuits but well beyond, especially in EU member states. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary named ‘austerity’ its Word of the Year in December 2010, that is, the most searched term on its digital platform (Sanburn 2010). That year in Britain the Conservatives won the general election with a promise of stiff austerity measures to reduce the ‘sovereign debt’, formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, and duly began implementing them. The severity of those measures became evident within the year. And yet, in that year particularly, the balance of attitudes to the term was ambiguous. Anstead’s (2018) survey of usage of the term in British think-tank documents 2003–2013, divided them into left-leaning (critical of austerity) and right-leaning (supportive of austerity) and found that such usage had gone up steadily year-by-year from 2008 onwards, pre-dominantly driven by left-leaning think tanks. However:
Only in 2010, the year of a general election, did references to austerity come close to parity (1.595 mentions per 100k words on the left, 1.209 on the right). This might suggest that, at that point in our sample period at least, discussion of austerity was seen to serve some useful purposes for the political right, particularly to claim that the incumbent Labour government had engaged in excessive spending. In contrast, in the years after the election, discussion of austerity on the political left increases much more rapidly. (294–95)
In fact, the unusually high approbatory support that ‘austerity’ had in 2010 briefly gave it an ambiguous cast as a catchword, but that did not last beyond the year. Thereafter, it became ever more firmly weighed with negative normative associations and has remained so. How this brief flash of positive normativity appeared is of interest in these notes. Possibly, it is that, more than the negative associations which propelled the term into catchword status, which was thereafter capitalized on by the disapproving voices.
Though the popularity of the term and concept of ‘austerity’ is associated with the Conservative campaign and victory in 2010, and the advent of David Cameron as prime minister and George Osborne as chancellor of the exchequer, the background tells another story. That Cameron and the Tories became the flagbearers of tough austerity from 2009 onwards was somewhat ironic. As Blyth (2013) observed:
Britain’s [Labour] prime minister, Gordon Brown, who as chancellor of the exchequer presided over the biggest boom and bust in British history while promising financial ‘prudence for a purpose’, spent, lent, or otherwise guaranteed about 40 percent of British GDP to save the banks and even more to stimulate the economy. When the Brown government lost the election to Conservative David Cameron in May 2010, Cameron’s party had spent the last two years trying to convince voters that it would not slash social spending and would actually be better than New Labour at providing public services. These were, as the Chinese proverb has it, interesting times. Given this odd mixture of political positions and ideological priors, spring 2010 produced the curious spectacle of the Americans arguing for global Keynesianism while the Germans, cheered on by the new British Conservative government under David Cameron, demanded regional austerity. (59)
In fact, the vogue for ‘austerity’ as a potential catchword appeared under the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Through the period 2003–2010 the term rarely appeared in UK government policy documents, and then mainly to refer to economic measures in other countries or to look back to post-World War II austerity in the 1940s. However, the term did appear intermittently in newspapers in relation to the Labour government’s economic policies and budgeting. The think-tank usage tracked by Anstead (2018), cited earlier, showed that though not of catchword scale, a steady drip of usage appeared before 2008, and in this drip both left-leaning and right-leaning sources had a more or less equal part. Over that period it is not at all obvious that right-leaning and left-leaning usage mapped straightforwardly to being, respectively, supportive and critical of austerity. In fact, particularly in Britain prior to 2009, ‘austerity’ as a word and concept tended to be associated strongly with the post-World War II Labour government’s economic policies, which were seen as both necessary and successful, and had not a little of the ethical and religious senses of self-denial and moderation imbued in it. To trace how ‘austerity’ became set to be a catchword after the 2007–2008 financial crisis in Britain, its earlier career and its intermittent place in Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s New Labour governments need to be factored in. That necessarily takes us back to the memory of the patriotic self-denial and success that was wartime and post-war austerity in Britain.
World War II rationing and budgeting were where the term ‘austerity’ made a step towards the transition from its dominantly religious and moral connotations, as traced from the eighteenth century by Berry (2014), to the economic sense taken for granted by Blyth (2013). In fact, wartime austerity was not so much a transition as a sliding of the moral and religious connotations into the economic policy needs; the latter were equally a matter of economic pragmatism and patriotic fortitude and moral fibre. It was even a clarion-call for attack in the war effort: a light war locomotive designed by British and American engineers in 1943 was aggressively named Austerity. Post-war austerity gave the word its squarely economic sense, but still with those positive norms attached. The word was already being used as such by Maynard Keynes and his followers during the war, and when the post-war economic recovery was planned, ‘austerity’ was firmly pegged as an economic term. So, somewhat after the Beveridge Report of 1942 (regarded as the foundational document of the British welfare state), and shortly after the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944 (establishing the post-war international economic order), at a Chatham House lecture in October 1944, A.R. Guinness had full command of this sense of the word:
I suggest that this period [a three- or four-year period of implementing the monetary plan in Britain discussed at Bretton Woods] should definitely be looked upon as one of austerity, when we shall have to do without many of the things we were accustomed to before the war, and conform to a much stricter regime. We shall have to continue eating Woolton Pie and ration our expenditure both internally and externally. Only in this way shall we be able to regain our economic position and make up part of what we have lost, but if we set a limit to this period and have the clear goal of freedom before us and a better standard of living, our people will agree to this self-discipline and our foreign friends will put up with the inconveniences.
(Guinness 1944: 497)
With the formation of the Labour government in 1945, under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, post-war austerity policies were gradually implemented. In particular, Stafford Cripps, first as president of the Board of Trade and then chancellor of the exchequer, came to embody the spirit of austerity with religious and ethical senses tacked on—puritanical, vegetarian (no doubt well-acquainted with Woolton Pie), and socialist. Keynesians wondered at times whether continuing austerity was necessary: Roy Harrod (1947) wrote a passionate diatribe against it. However, post-war austerity was always meant to be temporary and did end by 1951. Under the Labour government from 1945, it meant the consolidation of the modern welfare state in Britain, a series of Acts ensuring social protections and workers’ rights, the formation of the National Health Service, and the nationalization of major industries and public utilities. After post-war austerity, the economic sense of the word dominated, but the positive normative inflection remained and became firmly associated with the economic sense in Britain. Austerity had been a good and necessary phase, a morally justified economic transition.
So, it is ironic that after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, especially as a catchword from 2010 and onwards, ‘austerity’ has come to stand for exactly the opposite of what it meant for post-war Britain. ‘Austerity’ now seemed a permanent rather than temporary condition. It represented a taking down of, rather than the settling of the welfare state: cuts from and privatizations of public services, dismantling of welfare mechanisms, and minimizing government in favour of business. Or perhaps it is not ironic: perhaps it was not fortuitous but more or less by design. In the first instance, ‘austerity’ reappeared as a kind of political and media strategy to extrapolate the righteous necessity of wartime and post-war ‘austerity’ and associate it with economic policies which were their opposite so as to sell them. Perhaps the use of ‘austerity’, especially from the 2007–2008 financial crisis onwards, was designed to fool everyone by suggesting a salutary continuity with post-war austerity, whereas this ‘austerity’ actually represented a determined drive to do away with what was achieved through post-war austerity. But that association helped the term ‘austerity’ to catch on, first with vaguely welcoming confusion which was then propelled into more verbose irony and bitterness.
When I say the misleading transfer of ‘austerity’ from the post-war regime to the present-day regime happened by design, I do not mean politicians and financial pundits called a boardroom meeting and decided to make it happen. It happened rather through a series of opportunistic linkages made by persons with an interest in courting the public eye, through the news media. Occasionally, the term ‘austerity’ was associated with Gordon Brown in news reports, through his career as Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Blair government (1997–2007) and then as prime minister (2007–2010) with Alistair Darling as Chancellor. As Chancellor, Brown’s budgetary decisions after the dot-com crash in 2002, to counter slowing growth and plummeting stocks in 2003, were pegged as being ‘austerity’ measures in financial columns (e.g. Stewart 2003; Hawkins 2003). In subsequent phases of recoveries and downturns, further balances of ‘austerity’ cuts and targeted investments in budget statements were periodically reported (e.g. Elliot and Seager 2005; White 2006). These mentions often came with a nod towards post-war Labour austerity years, and, more interestingly, seemed to become attached to Brown’s own austere character, comparable to Stafford Cripps’s. One report observed, ‘the Calvinistic implication behind his austerity of tone (common to most Brown speeches)’ (White 2006). When he became prime minister in 2007, ‘austerity’ was associated with Brown’s own record as Chancellor and the tradition of Labour post-war austerity, and, at the same time, as a feature of his personality, rather like post-war Chancellor Cripps—often in a sarcastic vein:
I want to write this week about Mr Brown and the cult of austerity. Austere people, which I thought I believed Mr Brown was, tend not to go in much for smiling. This might, of course, be for dental reasons. The only picture I have ever seen of the godfather of 1940s Labour austerity, Sir Stafford Cripps, smiling reveals a set of gnashers that the Almighty appears to have allocated almost at random.
(Heffer 2007)
With the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the bank bailouts by Brown and Darling, he was more frequently pegged as the ‘austerity PM’ in news media: ‘The austerity Prime Minister endorsed closing curtains at dusk, turning down thermostats, switching off lights and blocking draughts’ (Murphy and Waugh 2008). Through 2008, even as Cameron started his campaign for the 2010 elections, those associations of ‘austerity’ seemed mostly up Brown’s street: ‘[T]he current austerity suits Labour. Cameron and his colleagues may accuse Brown and his ministers of being reckless, profligate, high-rollers. The trouble is, they seem so ordinary, dour, normal and unreckless as people’ (Ashley 2008). In fact, as far as news media went, it was Labour economic policies and Brown’s personality that got pegged as an ‘austerity’-led response to the 2007–2008 financial crisis, with the upbeat memory of post-war Labour-led austerity ever in the background. Indeed, and this is the juncture of interest, ‘austerity’ had quite a lot of good press through 2008.
Popular historians played their part in invoking post-war austerity amidst the financial crisis. In 2007, David Kynaston’s history of post-war austerity in Britain appeared to the general approval of reviewers. So, when it became apparent that cutbacks would follow the bank bailouts from 2008, Kynaston allowed himself to be called upon as an austerity guru and remind the public that this was no bad thing, quite the contrary—remember post-war austerity. Kynaston did his bit in an introduction for The Independent’s special November 2008 ‘Austerity Issue’, sub-headed thus:
Amid the bewildering complexities of the global financial crisis, one simple fact stands out: the little we have left needs to go a lot further. Fear not! We’ll show you how to endure the forthcoming recession with a bit of grit, some nous and the wise advice of our post-war forebears.
(Kynaston 2008)
Similarly, and also in 2007, broadcaster Andrew Marr had presented a BBC2 series A History of Modern Britain (the first part of which was devoted to post-war austerity), attended by the publication of a book. Marr did his bit too as an austerity guru, in a Christmas Daily Mail feature, entitled ‘Austerity be damned! We’re all cutting back, but Andrew Marr says that’s the reason to make this Christmas special.’ As an expert, Marr marked out a series of parallels between post-war austerity and present-day austerity: ‘No historical era can really be revisited. But […] I’ve found it intriguing to spot the parallels between then and now’ (Marr 2008). In fact, in 2008 others courting the public eye also got in on the act, making virtuous-sounding comparisons between austerity then and now, evoking a bit of wartime and post-war patriotism and backbone. Various public health gurus, including celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, called for a return to wartime cooking (Wickham and Winterman 2008). Designer Stephen Bayley was quoted as observing:
‘Recession could be healthy, interesting’, he says. ‘Austerity is a good thing – an inspiration, not an impediment to genius. It forces more expressiveness and more interesting choices. The tighter the discipline, the more creativity flourishes. I adore Norman Lewis’s observation on encountering some Spanish village in the Alpujarras that beauty is best maintained under a reign of poverty. Now the same village would have an EU grant and they’d all have 4x4s and satellite dishes. Restraints – economic, philosophical or religious – tend to ensure beauty. When anything goes, nothing does.’
(Betts 2008)
So far then, the term was mostly with Labour and Brown, gradually becoming popularized as a tough but necessary matter, with post-war austerity and moral and ethical nuances in mind.
These opportunistic links between post-war and present-day ‘austerity’ in 2008 were curiously colonized by David Cameron and the Conservatives. Brown’s whimper was stolen and turned into Cameron’s thunder, famously in his speech of 26 April 2009 at the Conservative Party Conference in the run-up to the 2010 general election:
There are deep, dark clouds over our economy, our society, and our whole political system. Steering our country through this storm; reaching the sunshine on the far side cannot mean sticking to the same, wrong course. We need a complete change of direction. I’m not just talking about changing one group of Ministers for another. Or one set of policies, plans and proposals for another. I’m talking about a whole new, never-been-done-before approach to the way this country is run. Why? Because the world has completely changed. In this new world comes the reckoning for Labour’s economic incompetence. The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.
First, ‘the age of austerity’ demands responsible politics. Over the next few years, we will have to take some incredibly tough decisions on taxation, spending, borrowing—things that really affect people’s lives. Getting through those difficult decisions will mean sticking together as a country—government and people. That relationship, just as any other, is strengthened by honesty; undermined by dishonesty. […] Does the age of austerity force us to abandon our ambitions? No. We are not here just to balance the books. There’s more to our mission than coming in like a bunch of flint-faced accountants and sorting out the finances. […] The question is: how does government help achieve these wider aims in the age of austerity? And the answer is: by delivering more for less. (Cameron 2009)
To some degree, this was a rhetorical matter: where ‘austerity’ chimed as moderate and careful from Brown and New Labour, it rang as radical and brash from Cameron and the Conservatives. In fact, for a brief period after that, Cameron’s speech produced a catchphrase: ‘age of austerity’. There was no beating about the bush there: an ‘age of austerity’ was announced, not three or four years of post-war-like austerity but an ‘age’, without war and yet without closure. A careful line-by-line analysis of Cameron’s speech by Matthew Evans and Brian Walker (2020) noted that he used the word without qualification, as if ‘the meaning of austerity is transparent: it is taken for granted that readers and listeners will know what the word means when used in this context’ (175). That lack of definition allowed Cameron to give the term an implicitly but emphatically positive turn, as the opposite of the ‘age of irresponsibility’. By the end of 2009, Brown had little choice but to protest against this new forceful occupation of the term ‘austerity’: ‘The biggest risk for Britain is a decade of austerity—of limited growth, limited employment and limited opportunity’ (Brown 2009).
After winning the elections and forming the government with the Liberal Democrats in May 2010, Cameron and his chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, got down to implementing their promised radical austerity measures. The harsh reality of those measures left very little space for any upbeat note, redolent of religious self-denial, ethical moderation, and post-war success, and indeed Cameron’s administration had little use for those associations or the term ‘austerity’ itself thereafter. In the course of 2010, in fact, whatever of those resonances remained were gradually shed from the term and it became principally a catchword for opposition to those policies, with growing bitterness. If not enunciated with bitterness, disapprobation, or irony, it remained for the following two or three years a neutral designative term: ‘in this age of austerity’; ‘in this time of austerity’. Otherwise, talking of ‘austerity’ became coterminous with assuming an ‘anti-austerity’ stance; ‘anti-austerity’ itself became a catchword in activist and academic circles. Bitterness in ‘austerity’ was possibly all the more sharp because its usage had to emphatically extirpate the erstwhile moral and religious associations, the pride in post-war austerity, from the term. Arguably, its burgeoning, catchphrase character after 2010 in Britain was, to some degree, a frequent and loud dispelling of those erstwhile associations to repossess the term as representing deleterious economic consequences despite—indeed directly against—those done-with associations.
From Cameron’s April 2009 speech, ‘doing more with less’ remained firmly in governmental policy vocabulary after May 2010, but ‘austerity’ more or less disappeared, except as an occasional designative term. The more policies and directives for cutting public spending and deficit reduction were promulgated, the less ‘austerity’ appeared within their statements and guidance. Apart from Cameron, chancellor-to-be George Osborne used the term a few times in 2009, but not once he took office and began to enact those deficit-cutting measures (see Grundman et al. 2018: 116–17). As a catchword, ‘austerity’ did not make it to any significant extent within legislative and bureaucratic circuits, but its usage grew and grew among the critics and opponents of policies referred to by the term.
‘Resilience’ (co-authored with Ayan-Yue Gupta)
While ‘austerity’ as a catchword came into its own outside legislative and management circles to refer critically to deficit-reduction policies, ‘resilience’ became a catchword within legislative and management circles to undergird those policies.
The earliest usages of the term ‘resilience’ cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), from the early to mid-nineteenth century, either have it as equivalent to ‘elasticity’ in scientific usage (in studying materials, in physics), or, more pertinently here, as an individual or collective (national or communal) character trait—in the sense of ‘the quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc.; robustness; adaptability’. In the 1980s, ‘resilience’ became, alongside and often interchangeably with ‘sustainability’ (another catchword), a standard academic term in ecological studies (Holling 1973 is credited with introducing it), a field with which it has been strongly associated. Ecology is the pathway through which ‘resilience’ entered sociology and thereby the domain of policy. For the latter, more nuanced histories of the term have been offered by those who were interrogative or critical of its policy implications, as for ‘austerity’. Such historicist accounts cited consecutive definitions from representative scholarly publications, according to discipline, and tried to discern their ideological import (in this vein Adger 2000: 349–52 was mildly interrogative; Walker and Cooper 2011, and MacKinnon and Derickson 2012: 255–58 straightforwardly critical—the latter offered a table of definitions, 256). Through this career, ‘resilience’ evidently moved from being a definable quality of materials (in scientific usage) and a normative quality of character (in ordinary language) via ecological studies to becoming a dislocated normative qualifier for almost any ‘system’ (an overarching catchword). As such, the term was variously defined by area (such as environmental, social, political, economic, cultural) or according to social formation (such as governmental or non-governmental, business, academic, community, charitable, local, and global).
Two connections between ‘resilience’ and other catchwords made in the previous paragraph are worth pausing on to sharpen its nuances. ‘Systems’ is so much a grounding catchword in policy discourse, so continuously taken for granted to describe various other terms, that it is difficult to discuss as one itself. It is now used as such in specialist and particularly policy circles in more or less well-defined ways, frequently in terms of ‘systems theory’ or ‘systems thinking’ (Jervis 1997: 5–10, tried tackling this head on; Siskin 2016 in an ongoing and detailed way). The other term mentioned earlier is ‘sustainability’, in fact established earlier as a policy catchword (see Palmer et al. 1997; Scoones 2010), and now often used alongside and interchangeably with ‘resilience’. This term appears to have made its way from legal usage (in relation to arguments) into economics (in relation to financial health) and then to ecology, with which it has been as strongly associated as ‘resilience’. Lee Talbot (1980: 260–61) influentially introduced ‘sustainability’ into ecology, though he was more focused on ‘conservation’. There are ordinary language nuances to the three terms—‘conservation’, ‘sustainability’, ‘resilience’—which arguably bear upon their distinct purchases in policy usage. In brief, ordinarily, ‘conservation’ is coterminous with preservation and suggests maintaining something in a stable state; ‘sustainability’ suggests giving something (like nourishment) to that which is to be kept alive or active; and ‘resilience’ suggests an endemic quality of withstanding deterioration or erosion. Put otherwise, ‘conservation’ and ‘sustainability’ gesture toward active principles, and involve doing something in an ongoing way; ‘resilience’ suggests a passive and lasting condition, an inbuilt or constitutive strength.
The driver for ‘resilience’ as a policy catchword was more at the behest of institutional interests than well-defined conceptual usage or ordinary language adaptation from an early stage. The catchy possibilities of the term were opened by the establishment of ‘ecological economics’ as a discipline (the ground set in Constanza, ed. 1991 and Constanza et al., eds. 1992). Ecological economics centred on the management of natural resources, from where it was a short step to ‘resilience management’ for any social formation and therefore of ‘resilience’ as a cornerstone of policymaking in general. Usefully, ‘resilience’ seemed umbilically connected to ecology and yet releasable into all areas of social action irrespective of a direct ecological investment. In fact, the term ‘ecology’ itself was loosened from its scientific moorings and started being used as a catchy metaphor for all kinds of social systems (more on this later). The potential of ‘resilience’ as a policy catchword was pushed from the institutional contexts where the discipline of ecological economics initially settled. That was, first, particularly in the restructured Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in 1991 (established in 1977), with funding from the Beijer Foundation and under the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; and, second, by the establishment of the Resilience Alliance in 1999, with an interdisciplinary and international academic membership, supported by various scientific bodies and drawing upon a range of funding sources, particularly foundations. The linkages between social and ecological systems, and thereby of policy overlaps foregrounding ‘resilience’ emerged from a series of publications through these bodies. Notably, a Beijer Discussion Paper by Berkes and Folke (1994) outlined a project for ‘linking social and ecological systems for resilience and sustainability’, which led eventually to publications arising from conferences held at the Beijer Institute and supported by the Resilience Alliance (Berkes and Folke, eds. 1998; Berkes et al., eds. 2003). The massaging of ‘resilience’ into a general policy term originated here.
In brief, at this juncture, ‘resilience’ became a notable word at precisely the intersection of ecological economics—ecology and economics: connoting, on the one hand, the powerful moral impetus of ecological concern (saving nature/life/the world itself) and denoting, on the other, the conviction that this could be done by ‘management’, ergo social policymaking rationalized by economic accounting. Tacitly, the passive sense of ‘resilience’ noted earlier (as against ‘conserving’ or ‘sustaining’) meant that the onus of responsibility for policy seemed removed from the managers and put on the subjects or objects of management. The latter had to be ‘resilient’, though only the former could determine whether they were so. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it has proved so catchy in policy circles. Another oft-noted reason is that the term, in ordinary language, suggested withstanding some threat (withstanding or recovering from some ‘misfortune, shock, illness, etc.’, according to the OED definition). The recourse to ‘resilience’ in ecological studies in the 1980s was due to a sense of growing environmental crisis; the generalization of ‘resilience’ as a policy term extended that into the growing ambit of crises in the 2000s: a security crisis and terrorist threat after 9/11, overlaid by the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and later a perceived ‘migration crisis’ from 2014 onwards, and then the 2020 Covid-19 crisis, alongside unfolding crises of democracy and of climate change. ‘Crisis’ became another overarching catchword, like ‘systems’, with its meaning regarded as self-evident and its relevance increasingly ubiquitous in media and especially policy circles. As Janet Roitman (2014: 39) observed: ‘[C]risis is not a condition to be observed (loss of meaning, alienation, faulty knowledge); it is an observation that produces meaning.’ Critical disentangling of the economic rationale from the ecological norm of ‘resilience’ understandably came as its significance grew in the late noughties. An extensive debate on this unfolded within the circles of ecological ethics (a brief critical piece in Nature, McCauley 2006, marked an impetus); a broader political critique of ‘resilience’ as coeval with neoliberal management developed alongside critiques of ‘austerity’ (e.g. Walker and Cooper 2011; MacKinnon and Derickson 2012).
In British government circles there was a marked rise of ‘resilience’ discourse after 2001 (following 9/11) and then a veritable explosion of usage after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, particularly 2010 onwards, when the Conservatives under David Cameron took over and started implementing stringent ‘austerity’ measures. Since, over this period, ‘resilience’ became a catchword principally within institutional spaces, in legislative and management circles, the rest of this section focuses on a particular area of British policymaking and a key policy-determining body: art and culture policy and the Arts Council England (ACE). Sources from the latter are examined as a case study of how the catchword worked within institutional contexts, mainly after 2010. It worked similarly in numerous other sectors. In a speech in November 2011, Alan Davey, chief executive of the ACE, gave an account of the dramatic policy changes in the arts and culture sector that an ‘instant austerity budget’ had necessitated (Davey 2012: 16). Tracking the career of ‘resilience’ in ACE policy speak gives a reasonable sense of what those changes were and how they were managed.
Before proceeding with this, a brief note on the status and function of ACE is expedient. ACE is a non-departmental government body at ‘arm’s length’, by its own description, from the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sports, or, from 2017, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS). This means ACE is entitled to make decisions independently of DCMS but is ultimately accountable to the DCMS. ACE receives much of its funding from DCMS (in 2015–18, that was £1.1 billion), with additional funds coming from the National Lottery (in 2015–18, £700 million) and private donations (DCMS 2017: 15–6). The UK Lottery is operated by the Camelot Group with a franchise from the government. ACE’s budget is spent on National Portfolio Organizations (NPOs), Major Partner Museums (MPMs) and Grants for the Arts and Strategic Funding. NPOs and MPMs concern large-scale museums, galleries, theatres, and so on; other grants are directed to smaller-scale organizations, and individual and group projects. The regions covered are London, Midlands, North, South East, and South West. The governance structure is complex, hierarchical, and generally representative of all regions and sub-sectors—further detail is irrelevant here. Insofar as funding is directed towards the ‘arts’, the remit is evident in thematic categorizations of recipients: dance, literature, music, theatre, visual arts, combined arts (which includes arts festivals and centres), museums, and libraries. In disbursing funding, the ACE follows certain principles of ‘public value’—another policy catchword which was subject to consultation and debate in 2006 (see Bunting 2006, and for a critical assessment Gray 2008). For the period in question here, the ACE was much in the news for being subject to stringent budget cuts. From 2010 the government grant to ACE was cut by 30 per cent in real terms over four years, and further, all culture bodies were asked to reduce administration costs by 50 per cent (Davey 2012: 16). After a sharp funding dip, in 2015–16 it was reported that the government’s grant had decreased by −1.5 per cent and real-terms arts expenditure by −3.6 per cent compared to 2010–11 (Dempsey 2016). The immediate effects on arts institutions and projects were severe. This then was the ‘austerity’ context in which the term ‘resilience’ found its policy purchase.
A year-by-year keyword search of ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ in the National Archives for UK government records from 2002–2017 tells the story of these catchwords effectively. Table 5.1 gives the results of items (webpages and publications) from the general government domain and the ACE domain and needs little commentary:
Table 5.1 Usage of ‘resilience’ in British governmental and ACE documents
|
Year |
Items in domain nationalarchives.gov.uk |
Items in domain artscouncil.org.uk |
||
|
‘resilience’ |
‘sustainability’ |
‘resilience’ |
‘sustainability’ |
|
|
2002 |
84 |
1143 |
||
|
2003 |
2120 |
14501 |
||
|
2004 |
68741 |
29278 |
||
|
2005 |
262446 |
29893 |
||
|
2006 |
478499 |
43377 |
1 |
|
|
2007 |
110637 |
20349 |
||
|
2008 |
75051 |
142863 |
9 |
225 |
|
2009 |
2970406 |
870398 |
18 |
539 |
|
2010 |
3444020 |
2267314 |
33 |
544 |
|
2011 |
517818 |
1023278 |
29 |
25720 |
|
2012 |
249677 |
1245310 |
127 |
279 |
|
2013 |
101682 |
796041 |
2927 |
940 |
|
2014 |
168690 |
618145 |
3709 |
9873 |
|
2015 |
375390 |
815488 |
268 |
303 |
|
2016 |
173356 |
1124975 |
233 |
210 |
|
2017 |
188108 |
1182979 |
5744 |
5493 |
Evidently, ‘sustainability’ has been the more common and older term in British policy circuits, and ‘resilience’ a relatively late entry. However, ‘resilience’ had caught on and at times overtaken the other term with extraordinary expedition, especially in the ACE. The points at which the usage of either term peaked before tapering may be points at which policy drives were afoot. For reasons discussed later, ‘resilience’ can be considered the more weighty policy catchword, especially in ACE’s remit—partly because of the speed with which it was foregrounded, and more because of the distinctive ways in which it was deployed.
‘Resilience’ entered into ACE’s policy circuit emphatically in 2010, with a strategic focus and definition. The term was more circumstantially used earlier: for instance, in a report on how the arts may benefit young offenders (Hughes 2008) ‘resilience’ appeared principally in its received sense, as a desirable (individual) character trait. In the main, ‘sustainability’/‘sustainable’ was used circumstantially throughout in ACE documents, premised on its received meanings, though with increased frequency as austerity measures bit; its strategic focus came as related to ‘resilience’ in 2010.
‘Resilience’ appeared alongside ‘sustainability’ as a key policy thrust in a ten-year strategic plan released by ACE in November 2010, Great Art for Everyone (ACE 2010). This announced five ‘long-term goals’ (the quotation below gives only the headlines):
Goal 1: Talent and artistic excellence are thriving and celebrated
Goal 2: More people experience and are inspired by the arts
Goal 3: The arts are sustainable, resilient, and innovative
Goal 4: The arts leadership and workforce are diverse and highly skilled
Goal 5: Every child and young person has the opportunity to experience the richness of the arts. (11, italics in original)
The headlines in themselves wove a net of policy catchwords (‘excellence’, ‘leadership’, ‘opportunity’, ‘innovative’) which could be usefully analysed, but that is not to the purpose here. Also notably, the glue for such policy statements was a superlatively upbeat register: ‘excellence’ itself is a normative extreme; it is not enough to be ‘skilled’ but to be ‘highly skilled’; one does not merely ‘experience’ art but such that art is inspiring and rich and excellent. Such hyperboles (a classical rhetorical trope) commonly characterize or qualify policy catchwords, obviously geared for public persuasion or advocacy. Goal 3 is to the theme here. ‘Resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ were not quite defined but elaborated thus in the strategic statement:
It is clear that the future resilience of the UK arts sector is dependent on a sustainable mixed economy of increasingly varied income sources. However a model that relies on public subsidy as a catalyst for securing self-generated and private sector income may come under considerable strain in the short term. The need to reduce the UK public spending deficit over the lifetime of our strategic framework will have a major impact on the arts economy as a whole. (18)
And further:
Why this Goal [3]? […] With public investment in the arts reducing, it is also about developing resilience, as arts organisations extend their roles and responsibilities within the wider cultural landscape and civil and national life, including how they adapt and respond to climate change.
What will we do?
Instead of a definition, then, this significant ACE policy document introduced ‘resilience’ (alongside ‘sustainability’) as a policy issue with two associations, precisely at the juncture of ‘ecological economics’. On one hand, ‘resilience’ proposed an austerity-driven financial management policy: using ‘public subsidy as a catalyst for securing self-generated and private sector income’. Interestingly, the proposal was not simply pushing to replace reduced public funding by increased private funding, but to exhort the sector to actively use reduced public funding itself as a means of raising more private funding. In a way then, the public funding was made conditional on private enterprise, for which responsibility was passed on to arts organizations (and artists). The latter had to demonstrate their ‘resilience’ and thereby remain ‘sustainable’. The ‘we’ that is ACE adopted a financial middleman position: ‘encouraging’, ‘brokering’, ‘enabling’, and in the metaphor of working as ‘catalyst’. On the other hand, the moral impetus of ‘resilience’ was pushed by maintaining an association with its ecological provenance: directly, by enjoining attention to ‘climate change’ on arts organizations, and indirectly, by using ecology as a metaphor for arts organizations themselves—the ‘arts ecology’ and ‘cultural landscape’. It is unlikely that many would have regarded ‘climate change’ as a particular concern of arts organizations at this juncture, to be singled out from the many social concerns that such organizations might address. By simply naming it particularly, the received moral weight of ‘resilience’ as pinned on ecological ethics was given full rein.
This significant ACE document then mined the possibilities of the term ‘resilience’ by using rhetorical ploys (in the sense most carefully unpacked in McCloskey 1998 [1985]): locating it within a hyperbolic register, fitting it into an existing network of catchwords, making associations rather than defining, by selective exemplification (e.g. ‘climate change’), by using loaded metaphors (e.g. ‘arts ecology’, ‘catalyst’). These had the effect of massaging a direction out of the ambiguity of ‘resilience’ while shrouding the intent it signalled insofar as that might be resisted—a characteristic feature of policy catchwords. Once the direction was set and connected to the word, the word was set to catch on. It could then be reiterated ad nauseam in further policy documents which concern implementation on the ground, region-by-region, subsector-by-subsector, institution-by-institution, area-by-area. The nuances of ‘resilience’ negotiated through those rhetorical ploys settled and became habitual as the ACE (2010) strategy passed into practice across the arts sector. However, for that to happen, definition is usually considered more effective than loose associations; definitions massage a direction as catchwords are repeated, adapted, and grounded within organizations. In policy discourse, definitions appear to bring clarity amidst ambiguity without quite dispelling the opportune manipulation of ambiguity. Defining ‘resilience’ for the purposes of ACE policy posed some distinctive challenges, of particular interest here.
Though it was not evident in the November 2010 strategy paper, ACE had already commissioned a report, released four months earlier (Robinson 2010, July), proposing a relevant definition of ‘resilience’. This was by Mark Robinson, executive director of ACE from 2005 to April 2010 and thereafter director of a private consultancy, Thinking Practice. This had offered a definition and recommendations for the ACE (2010) strategy statement. Neither were substantively adopted, possibly because some points in it caused some unease. Its definition and discussion of ‘resilience’ revealed potential tensions for the arts field, though it fleshed out the associations of ‘resilience’ with financial management and scientific ecology sufficiently to underpin the strategy statement.
For this sector, meaningful definition of ‘resilience’, with its passive sense and grounding in systems theory, tends to go against the grain of received conceptions of ‘the arts’. The relevant understanding of the noun ‘art’ here is as in the OED (sense 8a under definition I, ‘skill; its display, application, or expression’): ‘The expression or application of creative skill and imagination’. It is powerfully associated with norms of artistic independence and freedom, popularly regarded as best pursued without being constrained by convention, censorship, or other extrinsic control (e.g. political, commercial). These norms are often personified in ‘the artist’: an embodiment of creativity, originality, genius, and so on. Placing the arts, with these connotations, within systems (social, not to speak of institutional, economic, or ecological) perceptually undermines its received value, which liberal policy discourse can scarcely promote without causing unease. (Luhmann’s 2004 attempt carefully put art as an autopoietic system, and not wholly successfully at that). Robinson (2010), therefore, had a challenging job, and his efforts were as revealing of the difficulty as of his determination to overcome it by various subterfuges.
Insofar as a definition went, Robinson chose a qualifier to go with ‘resilience’ by way of fitting it to arts policy: ‘adaptive resilience’. His own definition went thus: ‘Adaptive resilience is the capacity to remain productive and true to core purpose and identity whilst absorbing disturbance and adapting with integrity in response to changing circumstances’ (p. 14). This emphasis was borrowed from ecological economic studies, and could be traced back to Berkes et al., eds (2003, cited earlier). In their concluding synthesis of the contributions to this volume, the editors decided that:
The focus of the volume is the study of the adaptability of social-ecological systems to meet change and novel challenges in navigating ecosystem dynamics without compromising long-term sustainability. Throughout this volume, we argue that resilience is a key property of sustainability; that loss of resilience leads to reduced capacity to deal with change.
(Folke et al. 2003: 354).
It also offered some prescriptions, usefully summarized in a table, for ‘Building resilience and adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems’ (355). Robinson found his way to ‘adaptive resilience’ in precisely this register and echoing the prescriptions (principally via Walker and Salt 2008, with no reference to the just-quoted volume), but with some important nudges in keeping with its arts focus. The definition elided any reference to what such ‘adaptive resilience’ applies to, making no mention of social-ecological systems or even systems as such; it seemed a generalization which could apply anywhere. Instead of gesturing towards a referent, the definition threw in three abstract nouns which were likely to resonate in arts circles: ‘core purpose’, ‘identity’, ‘integrity’. Thus, the management of ‘adaptive resilience’ in ‘changing circumstances’, it was suggested, would not disturb that which makes the arts such. The question, however, remained: what would this definition apply to? To answer it, Robinson resorted to fleshing out what the phrase ‘arts ecology’ might mean (in a tentative section entitled ‘Towards an Art Ecology?’, Robinson 2010: 23–6):
The term ‘arts ecology’ has been heard much more frequently in recent years. In part, this may be down to fashion: an awareness of climate change, systems thinking and the interrelatedness of things. It has, to a certain extent, replaced the phrase ‘arts economy’, which has fallen into some ill-defined ill repute, particularly since Sir Brian McMaster’s report on excellence placed greater emphasis on the intrinsic values of the arts, and on innovation, diversity and access whilst urging avoidance of top-down targets. (23)
McMaster’s (2008) report notwithstanding, Robinson ploughed on to give some flesh to the notion of an ‘arts ecology’, principally through a figurative representation: a series of concentric circles with ‘individual artists’ in the centre’, ‘arts organization’ and ‘arts institution’ in the two rungs immediately surrounding it, and then across several further rungs up to ‘economy’ and finally ‘society’ containing all the others (25). Having done this, however, Robinson paused on the core of this schema, that embodiment of independence, creativity, originality, etc.—the artist:
the centre of this schematic version of an arts ecology is the individual, in particular the artist. Without that centre system – what artists are doing, how they are innovating and evolving – little change will occur elsewhere. Without either romanticising or patronising individual artists, it is important that policies to increase organisational resilience do not marginalise the creativity at the heart of the arts ecology. (The place of artists is interesting when considered through the frontline/back office lens: how do we properly acknowledge the roles of a playwright and a literary manager within most drama, for instance? Is either frontline?) (24–5)
There is an obvious double-take here. Seemingly, this suggested that ‘adaptive resilience’ can be managed into this entirety of the ‘arts ecology’ without significantly affecting the core, ‘how artists are innovating and evolving’, without ‘marginalising the creativity at the heart of the arts ecology’. Then, in a parenthetical volte-face, Robinson appeared to make out that the artist (synecdoche ‘playwright’) is perhaps not all that central to the ‘arts ecology’ after all, no more at any rate than ‘resilience’ managers (synecdoche ‘literary manager’). Effectively, patronizing lip service was paid to the romanticized artist while parenthetically undermining the artist’s centrality to the ‘arts ecology’.
Robinson’s (2010) definition of ‘adaptive resilience’, while solidly to the purpose of ‘austerity’ cuts with ecologically inspired moral verve, was also uncomfortably placed in the arts. Instead of going with the qualified phrase ‘adaptive resilience’ or the definition, in a modified version of the strategy statement, Great Art and Culture for Everyone (ACE 2013), a definition appeared, different from and yet echoing something of Robinson’s:
By resilience we mean the vision and capacity of organisations to anticipate and adapt to economic, environmental and social change by seizing opportunities, identifying and mitigating risks, and deploying resources effectively in order to continue delivering quality work in line with their mission. (31)
This maintained the generalizing register of Robinson’s definition but gave it a referent—‘organisations’—which effectively removed the complexity of ‘arts ecology’ and the ‘individual artist’). The definition seemingly qualified the kind of change which ‘resilience’ would denote (and there was no arts focus here, simply ‘economic, environmental and social’), and did not court an arts vocabulary at all (leaving that to the vague ‘quality work in line with their mission’). This was the definition that then became set for policy purposes: ‘resilience’ became the ACE policy catchword with this definition reiterated at every sub-sector level. It appeared numerously in further sub-sector strategy statements, project guidelines, minutes, and records.
The ACE (2013) strategy statement also rephrased Goal 3: whereas in ACE (2010) that read, ‘The arts are sustainable, resilient, innovative’, in ACE (2013) it read, ‘The arts, museums and libraries are resilient and environmentally sustainable’. In contrast to the four bullet points under ‘What will we do?’ re Goal 3 in ACE (2010), the same section in ACE (2013) had thirteen bulleted action points (51–2) with quite specific directions. These adjustments concretized the implementation of Goal 3 as being unambiguously about actively using and reducing public funding to increase private and non-governmental funding, with a special focus on ‘environmental sustainability’. Six of the thirteen points concerned financing, including: ‘encourage and enable more private giving’; ‘incentivise organisations to reduce costs’, ‘build new markets and explore new sources of income’, ‘explore alternative sources of non-grant income’, ‘development of new and emerging business models for library services’, and ‘develop new markets through international touring’. Five points put performance targets on arts organizations to undergird the funding considerations, and to ensure that responsibility for ‘resilience’ will always rest with the organizations which would need to demonstrate that they are resilient. One point addressed direct public funding, ‘invest in the arts sector’s buildings and infrastructure through capital investment’; and one the environmental aspect of the goal, ‘support arts and cultural organisations to understand and reduce their environmental impact’. By the last point, the unnamed ‘arts ecology’ was no longer a metaphor but a field for actual environmental activism through arts institutions, though the metaphoric use was to resurface later. That the environmental concern occupied but one of thirteen points showed that it was mainly there to continue to associate ‘resilience’ with ecological ethics. By ACE (2013), ‘resilience’ explicitly signalled an agenda of withdrawing public funding and thereby privatizing the arts. The career of definitions of ‘resilience’ had massaged that agenda into increasing degrees of clarity and pinned down its policy-catchword thrust.
Between ACE (2010) and ACE (2013), in fact, an implementation process had taken place across the arts sector, accounting for modifications made in the latter. According to the table above, 2012–2014 showed particularly intensive use of the term ‘resilience’ in the ACE circuit. Through this period, another characteristic feature of policy catchwords came into play: it became a word for naming and branding. This circumstance in fact differentiated ‘resilience’ as the weightier policy term compared to the more widely used ‘sustainability’. There is a thin line between naming and branding: here, we take naming as simply a consensual and succinct way of referring to something (a person, product, project, organization, etc.), and branding as a succinct way of referring to something to promote or market it. Naming may or may not lead into branding. In both cases, the word assigned to refer to something (name or brand) is to some degree dislocated from its intrinsic meaning. The assigned word seemingly comes to be possessed by that which is named/branded, either relevantly (which a brand aspires to) or irrespective of such relevance (as in simple naming). Thus, a person who is named ‘resilient’ will be referred as such irrespective of the meaning of ‘resilient’; and a product being branded ‘resilient’ would be expected to have some particular or aspirational association with the meaning of ‘resilient’.
From 2011 onwards, ‘resilience’ was used as the name and/or brand at numerous levels within the remit of ACE. This occurred in two ways: either by simply giving certain initiatives and schemes names with the word ‘resilience’ in them, or by associating ‘resilience’ as a descriptor for existing brands. ‘Resilience’ was used thus principally for ACE’s funding initiatives, and in every case it served to use (reduced) public funding as a springboard for private or non-governmental funding. So, ACE’s Building Resilience funding programme for organizations began from 2012, on themes anchored to ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘philanthropy’, ‘change management’, and ‘intellectual property’ (ACE 2016a). The Museum Resilience Fund was launched in 2015, for activity ‘demonstrably linked to increased resilience and/or diversity’ (ACE 2016b). A series of Catalyst funding programmes from 2014 were all anchored to the ‘resilience’ goal of the ACE (2013) strategy. Catalyst Arts funding from 2012 to 2015 was in synch with the Building Resilience scheme (ACE 2015: 1); Catalyst: Evolve from 2014 was to enable organizations to ‘attract more private giving’; Catalyst Small Grants ‘to build fundraising capacity and encourage more private giving to arts and culture resulting in improved financial resilience support’ (ACE 2017a); and Catalyst: Evolve grants ‘offering match funding to incentivise new philanthropic giving’ (ACE 2016c). Under this rubric, organizations with a diversity agenda were offered Elevate grants to help them ‘increase levels of contributed and earned income’ (ACE 2016d). Projects foregrounding—and grounding—‘resilience’ across the arts sector were thus funded by ACE, such as: the Retail Resilience project through the Association of Cultural Enterprises, 2015–2016; and the Boosting Resilience: Survival Skills for the New Normal project led by City University London, 2016–2018. The ACE also launched its own programmes, notably the Developing Cultural Sector Resilience (DCSR) programme, 2014–15 (CidaCo 2015); and Museums and Resilient Leadership (MRL) programme from 2015. Further, the ACE commissioned reports to examine the case for ‘resilience’ funding subsector-by-subsector, such as: for local authority museums (TBR 2015); on the UK museum workforce (BOP Consulting 2016); on libraries (in phases from 2012, reports at ACE website, Envisioning the Library of the Future); on theatre funding (Hetherington 2015); and on the livelihoods of writers of literary fiction (see ACE website ‘Artist Resilience’). Each of these involved the appointment of managers bearing ‘resilience’ in their formal affiliations, beginning with ACE’s Director of Resilience appointed in 2013.
In the course of these policy implementations of the ACE (2013) strategy statement under ‘resilience and sustainability’ (Goal 3), the term ‘resilience’ seemed to gradually drift predominantly into financial management, while ‘sustainability’ became more the preserve of environmental action without losing touch with ‘resilience’. Under the latter, ACE mandated all its funded organizations to do environmental reporting for their programmes, and partnered with the non-profit organization Julie’s Bicycle to support arts organizations in reducing their ‘carbon footprint’. Accordingly, a report for the period 2012–2015 (Julie’s Bicycle 2015) gave measurements of the carbon footprint of ACE funded organizations in a section on ‘Building Resilience’ (23–4), and observed that energy savings could both achieve lower detrimental environmental impact and cost savings (25–7). Thus the ‘austerity’ financial rationale of ‘resilience’ neatly dovetailed into the ecological ethics of ‘resilience’. A couple of years later, ACE (2017b) was able to give a figure for financial savings from environmental initiatives in its sphere of funding, announcing: ‘The sector is more resilient: The reporting portfolio has managed to save £11 million since the beginning of the programme’ (6). The figure was obtained by supposing what the greater costs might have been had energy-saving measures not been taken.
In stock-taking exercises of ACE’s ‘resilience’ policies through this period, the associations made with the word in strategy statements (ACE 2010 and 2013) were variously and continuously evoked. It became a catchword for disinvestment and privatization moves, with a virtuous echo of ecological concern. Thus, a stock-taking 2014 report was entitled: This England: how Arts Council England uses its investment to shape a national cultural ecology (ACE 2014). This self-consciously used ‘ecology’ as a metaphor was to make its case for using reduced public funding to stimulate more private income for the sector: ‘To return to that metaphor of the ecology, we must invest carefully, ensuring that this investment has a beneficial effect across the whole ecology, in ways that will be experienced by the public’ (33). The implementation of this strategy was accounted in a section on ‘resilience’ (24–8). Another stock-taking exercise came in 2017, in DCMS’s Tailored Review of Arts Council England (2017). The emphasis here was strongly on ‘financial resilience’ (to which a section was devoted, 29–31), with ‘environmental sustainability’ (31–2) being kept somewhat apart. Of the twenty-five times that the term ‘resilience’ appeared in the review, it was as ‘financial resilience’ sixteen times, as naming a ‘resilience’ programme four times, and in ‘resilience and sustainability’ twice. Building or supporting ‘-resilience’ had become a kind of euphemistic management term for imposing and dealing with the consequence of ‘austerity’ policies.
Wider contexts
This account of the political catchwords ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’ gives only a very partial account of their reach and penetration. The focus on the British context, and that too within specific junctures and domains, conveys little of catchwords that are current in numerous countries. In each country ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’ ring with somewhat different nuances, inflected by other languages and histories, while carrying a set of like connotations. Conceptually too, the account leaves out much. The scope of the catchwords has occasionally been sharpened or given new turns with qualifiers. In Britain, before the December 2019 general election both Labour and Conservatives removed their deficit-reduction goals from manifestos and promised higher public spending along with secession from the European Union (Brexit). These moves were received as harbinger of a ‘post-austerity’ period (Eaton 2019; Islam 2019). The end of ‘austerity’ policies was declared in various countries according to political expediency, though with little discernible effect. A growing body of research papers and reports have therefore contemplated ‘post-austerity’ policies, especially after the Covid-19 outbreak, usually in future-gazing and aspirational tones. In the contrary direction, Vivien Lowndes and Alison Gardner (2016) coined the term ‘super-austerity’ as a further step over the hefty austerity measures adopted at national level in Britain from 2010 onwards. Their paper analysed regional and city-level devolution of budgetary responsibilities after centralized austerity measures were implemented. Through devolution, they argued, austerity was decentralized and grounded at local or ground level, while seemingly allowing for greater degrees of local autonomy—pushing towards pervasive ‘super-austerity’ .
Having settled firmly as a policy catchword, ‘resilience’ is now used with distinctive nuances in diverse knowledge areas for numerous pressing social issues. Official and institutional sanction is useful for perpetuating a catchword: ‘resilience’ studies centres have cropped up around the world, several journals entitled with the term are out there, and numerous publications try to substantiate its possibilities. Amidst the Covid-19 outbreak, as noted in Chapter 3, ‘resilience’ was particularly foregrounded in almost all economic policy reports, whether commercial or governmental. It was underlined as the essential quality needed for businesses to survive in the ‘new normal’ or recuperate in the ‘next normal’. At the same time, the catchword ‘resilience’, like ‘austerity’, has not infrequently been received with disquiet and disapprobation in academic and activist usage. As already noted, it has played an important part in the language which promotes deleterious ‘austerity’ policies and neoliberal governance. Some researchers have consequently tried to rescue the term from neoliberal, austerity-promoting clutches. ‘Critical resilience’ has appeared as a kind of academic counter-catchword in that spirit, arguing that at ground level (e.g. in community action and volunteering) an emancipatory or at least bottom-up ‘resilience’ may be bolstered by being interrogative and developing resistance to top-down austerity and neoliberal governance (DeVerteuil and Golubchikov 2016; Grove 2018: especially Chapter 8; Monforte 2020; Smirnova et al. 2020; Olsson 2020). ‘Disruptive resilience’ is another phrase which may come to have a larger purchase (Bahadur and Dodman 2020). With the constantly growing incidence of social and natural disruptions, this phrase suggests the need for more responsive and adaptable planning for and management of ‘resilience’ than is available. In other words, the currently instituted structures for instilling ‘resilience’ themselves need to be disrupted to deal effectively with disruptions.
So far, this study has explored contemporary political catchphrases/words which evoke, in the main, establishment strategies and policies. They have at times been turned against the latter, but usually after appearing as such. In the next chapter I turn to a political catchphrase which caught on from, and remains associated with anti-establishment advocacy, usually enunciated in a spirit of registering protest.