Understanding the Changing Cultural Value of the BBC World Service and British Council

The BBC World Service (WS) and the British Council (BC) are the UK's largest international cultural organisations: key national-to-global institutions charged with representing British identities and interests. Very well known and respected abroad, 'at home' in the UK awareness of their activities is low. Little academic research has been done into the cultural value they channel and produce. Our project is ambitious in aiming to produce an analytical and methodological framework adequate to understanding, evidencing and explaining the role of WS and BC and their users in curating, creating and translating cultural value abroad and at home.
The project is timely as the future of both organisations is uncertain. Changes to funding and remit make this a vital moment to engage with them in re-assessing their roles. Uses of digital media provide an apt methodological as well as substantive point of entry. Both organisations are investing digitally with the aim of engaging new audiences. For the World Service, internet is as important as radio or television in key markets, and the aim is to curate online audiences in a 'global conversation'. The British Council increasingly uses the internet to share the UK's 'great cultural assets' and so 'build trust' worldwide. Real-time quantitative or 'big' data' on user activities presents real opportunities as well as challenges. In order to understand the quality of individual cultural experiences and how such experiences are valued, we use an innovative methodological approach that builds bridges across social sciences and digital humanities.
WS and BC are often conceived of in terms of their functions for British 'soft power', 'public' or 'cultural' diplomacy and 'nation branding', or in terms of vague notions of intercultural communication, cultural exchange imbued with cosmopolitan values and aspirations. These perspectives rely on assumptions about the intrinsic value of the cultural experiences these institutions offer. We will test prevalent assumptions about cultural value, drawing on an extensive historical and digital archive created during a recently concluded 5-year AHRC-funded set of projects on interculturality at the WS, and extensive work evaluating BC projects. We will also evaluate several new digital projects carefully selected for locating and analysing their significance for reflective individuals and engaged citizens.
Understanding the changing cultural value of the WS and BC through the lens of digital interactions is valuable because they can be tracked and analysed, offering unprecedented insights into users' cultural experiences. Our work will shed light on whether the intercultural dialogue opened up around visual media can be regarded as evidence of trust, a crucial value for both organisations.
Arguably digital media change the nature of trust in/resulting from cultural organisations as they no longer exercise the same levels of control over narratives or audiences. Culture and geography are unbound in the digital domain which makes communication across cultural boundaries and 'soft power' influence more complex to assess. New digital projects also involve trade-offs between fundamental organisational values. Peer-to-peer communication relies on recommendation, openness, transparency and engaging the individual in immersive and atmospheric experiences, or as current WS editorial strategy puts it, 'Living the Story'. Traditional organisational values of impartiality and objectivity are being challenged and even rejected as colonial vestiges. So how do notions of trust and transparency fit in with notions of cultural value? The project will break new ground in understanding and researching cultural value in international organisations bringing the bird's eye view into dialogue with the snail's eye view or in Weber's terms, arriving at verstehen (understanding) by begreiffen (grasping the bigger picture).

Our main impact will be to provide a culturally sensitive framework for understanding and assessing cultural value from a multi-dimensional perspective that will have high transferability to a variety of cultural organisations, projects and users. It will benefit those who study and assess the arts and culture industries, and the organisations and media that channel, broker and support their representation - those working in conventional places and spaces where culture is valued (museums, galleries, formal face-to-face contexts) and those engaged in virtual contact zones. We hope to support best practice and inspire alternative ways of conceiving and researching cultural value. Putting a financial value on cultural activity is important for these organisations and their funders. They want to see a return on their investment (inward foreign investment, travel and tourism) and be able to measure intangible values such as trust and influence. Sample survey and interview methods are mainly used for such purposes. While useful, alternative concepts and methods are required to open up more nuanced understandings of value.
The initial main beneficiaries will be the organisations themselves and their stakeholders (funders, donors, business and policy-makers). Their triple public-charitable-commercial status means that assumptions about subsidised versus commercial cultural activities need to be challenged. The mutual interdependence of cultural industries and WS and BC needs to be better understood as does the value of the work of cultural brokers and intermediaries. The Foreign and Commonwealth only partly funds WS and BC as public diplomacy partners. Our work will be of particular benefit to FCO's public and digital diplomacy teams, headed by Stephen Townsend with whom we have already established relations as well as to the BBC Trust in disentangling cultural, public, economic and political value. FCO tends to conceive of cultural value in diplomatic or 'soft power' but these concepts require urgent critical scrutiny and ways of developing Diplomacy 2.0 based on dialogue rather than monologic messaging. DFID will also be interested and will benefit. The FCO's diminishing contribution to BC and WS is ring fenced strictly for development purposes. Diplomacy and development goals are being aligned as soft power tactics in come to the fore as major budget cuts bite and hard power operations flounder. Our work will feed into current developments in security and cultural relations in conflict zones at Chatham House with whom the PI has ongoing connections. BC is largest charity in UK and the WS' Media Action operates as a charity. Our work will feed into their evaluative research strategies (as did our prior 'drama for development' projects). Stakeholders of cultural value will be enabled to develop the required skills to assess their current methods, evidence and forms of evaluation, enabling them to reflect on their own experience through this. Our framework will provide a powerful tool for wide-scale application to other projects which require grounded and evidence-based means to establish a workable hypothesis of cultural value. A wide range of assumptions prevail about how culture is valued and how the digital age can act as archive and agency for the promulgation of such value. The framework will increase the effectiveness of evaluation projects and provide a means whereby cultural producers can test the value of their work and evaluators can deepen the skill sets. International professional associations of audience and market researchers (we have close ties with: http://www.cibar.org/) will also benefit. By these means we hope to achieve impact by enhancing the knowledge economy and providing international advancement in knowledge by addressing this issue of global importance. Our main impact would be to enhance individual cultural enrichment through better modes of evaluating cultural experiences.