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best thought of as 'a
historically specific set of institutionally embedded relations of government in
which the forms of thought and conduct of extknded populations are targeted
for transformation - in part via the extension through the social body of the
forms, techniques, and regilireils of aesthetic and intellectual culture'. For
Bennett, this approach linked contemporary cultural policy advocacy to
historical analyses of cultural formations in modern societies, by seeing the
'governmentalization' of culture as part of a broader trend towards the use of
specific forms of knowledge as technologies for the management of populat
ion~B. ennett saw the implications of such a revised analytical framework for
the study of cultural institlitions as four-fold. First, it would shift the empha-
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Theories of Global Media 49
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institutions was understood by cultural critics, towards a more fine-grained
institutional analysis of the administrative goals, objectives and outcomes of
the organizations themselves (cf. Hunter, 1988). Second, Bennett saw cultural
policy, not as an optional add-on to cultuml studies, but as rather being
'central to the definition and constiti~tiono f culture' (Bennett, 1992b, p. 397).
Third, it pointed to cultural studies developing perspectives that would be
'conducted in a manner such that, both in its substance and style, it can be
calculated to influence or service the conduct of identifiable agents within the
region of culture concerned' (Bennett, 1992a, p. 23). Fourth, this clearly
entailed establishing an ongoing dialogue between cultural theorists and what
Bennett has termed 'cultural technicians', or cultural policy-makers and
administrators (Bennett, 1992b, p. 397). The forms that this would take
would vary according to the priorities of the institutions being engaged with
and the issues in question, but it clearly meant talking to state agencies and
institutions, rather than writing them off in advance as ideological state apparatuses,
and then 'in a self-fulfilling prophecy' identifying their policy failures
(Bennett, 1992a, p. 32).
Bennett's work, and that of related authors within the emerging field of
Australian cultural policy studies (Cunningham, 1992; Hunter, 1994; Mercer,
1994; Bennett, 1995; Meredyth, 1997), has drawn a diverse range of
responses. Lewis and Miller (2003) have argued that it is an approach to
cultural policy stiidies that makes more sense in countries such as Britain and
Australia, where there is a history of critical intellectuals and local authorities
pursuing collaborative projects, than in the United States2 In the US, cultural
policy studies has emerged out of fields such as cultural economics, which
have had a relatively strong and direct connection to questions surrounding
the public funding of the arts and cultural institutions (Di Maggio, 1983;
Lewis and Miller, 2003). Some writers have endorsed the general aspirations
of developing cultural studies