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Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture,

Creativity and Government in the BBC
Georgina Born
Published online: 09 Nov 2010.
To cite this article: Georgina Born (2002) Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture, Creativity and
Government in the BBC, Cultural Values, 6:1-2, 65-90, DOI: 10.1080/1362517022019000
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Cultural Values, Vol. 6, Nos. 1 & 2, 2002, 65± 90
Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture,

Creativity and Government in the BBC
Georgina Born
Abstract
The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the
Downloaded by [The UC Irvine Libraries] at 02:09 17 October 2014
neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of
a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, efficiency, accountability
and audit were translated into the public sector. The focus of this paper is an analysis,
based on ethnographic research, of the BBC’s culture of markets, accountability and audit
in the mid to late nineties. Indebted in part to the Foucauldian concern with the relations
between forms of political rationality and specific technologies of government, the paper
charts the substance and the anti-creative effects of these techniques. But it stresses also
their contestability and negotiability, how they evoke ambivalance and coexist with diverse
forms of resistance. In particular, through the case of the BBC, the paper sketches the
contours of a sociology of reflexivity based on a more differentiated account of reflexivity
than is found in the speculative, often normatively-directed writings of Beck, Giddens and
Lash. It points to the layering of reflexivities in and around the contemporary BBC, and
to the competing and antagonistic reflexivities that may inhabit any social space.
Government of Culture, Culture of Government

In the weeks leading up to the 1997 General Election I am watching some
Newsnight 1 producers prepare the lead item on poverty in Britain for that evening’s
program. The idea originates in the 10.30 a.m. editorial meeting: ª What about this
new C. of E. poverty initiative? Neither of the fÐ Ð g parties do anything about
povertyÐ Labour totally ignore it now.º Jeremy Paxman2 says the figures show
that 30 per cent of Britons are currently living in poverty equal to or greater than the
poverty indices from any time this century. He suggests interviews with poor
people speaking about their experience. Someone else chips in, ª You want
something on how the two political traditions that used to care about povertyÐ
one-nation Tory paternalism and Labour radicalismÐ are both in declineº . There’s
discussion of going to a city outside London to film poverty: Sheffield? Darlington?
Liverpool? Collectively, they try out various angles. The meeting ends: poverty will
be the main story. A producer and reporter are dispatched to Coventry to film. The
day editor and three others are ª castingº a discussion on poverty. The first idea is to
use representatives from the three parties. There is great reluctance; it will be
mortally boring. Or, to use an ex-Labour MP, a Militant sympathizer, now a
member of Scargill’s party, who is involved in direct action on poverty? He’s
known to be passionate, lively. They plan the graphics: ª Serious stuff, with plenty
of hard figures to bring edge and facticityº , while the film will be ª fly-on-the-wall-
ishº . They laugh a little at the crudity of having film of kids with rickets or TB. The
ISSN 1362-5179 Print/ISSN 1467-8713 online/02/010065-26 © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/136251702201900 0
66 G. Born
angle is decided: ª The politicians on both sides have forgotten the poorº and the
aim is to pin them down.
A couple of hours in: the day editor asks the poverty team how the discussion
is going. A producer replies they’ve activated all their networks, but the problem
is that organizations working with the poor tend to be very suspicious of the
media. By 4 p.m., the view is that they will have the three politicians and two
others: a senior churchman involved in the Church pressure group on poverty,
who will chastize the parties for their inaction, and a representative of the poor,
preferably a woman to balance the genders.
5.10 p.m. The poverty team still hasn’t managed to come up with a ª 30 per-
centerº , as they call the representative of the poor, to come on tonight’s program.
Nervously, they joke about finding a ª 45 per-centerº instead, a woman who’s
articulate and sympathetic but comes from middle England. I ask what the
problem is finding someone poor. One replies, ª It’s always extremely difficult to
get hold of a member of the deprived classesÐ they’re often extremely reluctant
to speak to the mediaº . Another jokes, ª They’re so deprived they can’t string two
sentences together!º He continues, aghast, that in the country he comes from,
ª They simply abolished the welfare state at one stroke!º to which a producer who
seems to be Newsnight’s token right-winger adds sotto voce, ª Only way to do itº .
I suggest they try a group representing the unemployed. Tom says, ª The
Claimants’ Union! That’s an ideaº . He explains what the CU is to a team member
who has never heard of it. She is unenthusiastic.
6 p.m. Time is getting short. The program is on air at 10.30 p.m., and they still
haven’t found a poor person to appear. Now they’re down to trying personal
contacts and friends.
7 p.m. At last, haphazardl y, Tania has found a woman for the ª discoº . She’s
a divorced, disabled single-parent mother of four who says she knows all about
living near the breadline. On the phone to her, Tania gushes, ª Oh, I wish you’d
come on the program and say all this. Someone needs to! Jeremy Paxman is
lovely, he’ll be gentle with you. We’ ll send a car to collect you and you’ll get
£50 for coming alongº . The woman agrees. Paxman comes out of his room; the
producers say ª We’ ve found you a wonderful woman for the poverty debateº .
Paxman, with heavy irony: ª Oh great! Is she disabled, with a snotty child with
running sores?º Tania, ignoring the irony: ª Yes, she’s in a wheelchair, very
articulateÐ sounds rather middle class actually. And she’s bringing along a
child for us to look afterÐ can’t afford the childcare!º . They all rather smirk as
it’s so perfectly to formulaÐ which is how they seem to experience the process,
as ª castº according to their needs for the debate. They continue with a heavily
ambiguous and self-parodic banter: ª We’ve had a poor person on before,
haven’t we?º ª Are you sure we haven’t had this woman before? She sounds
vaguely familiar . . .’ 3
BBC: Twelve Promises:

. . . We promise to refine the mainstream music policy on Radio 1 to ensure it
appeals as strongly to young women as to young men . . .
We promise to devise programmes which respond to devolution and political
change in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland . . .
We promise to focus on our obligation to represent all groups in society accurately
and to avoid reinforcing prejudice in our programmes . . .
We promise to report our performance against all the specific promises,
continuing commitments and standards set out in the BBC’s Statements of
Promises.
(BBC 1998)
Creativity and Government in the BBC 67
Our Performance Against Promises for 1998 ± 99:

Standards were high overall, and the BBC met its specific promise to: represent all
groups in society accurately and avoid reinforcing prejudice in our programmes.
Positive action to broaden the range of programme contributors included the
introduction of the BBC’s Diversity Database, giving programmes access to over
2,000 individuals and organisations representing minority interests and
backgrounds.
(BBC 1999)
Every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise
the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level.
(Gramsci 1971: 258)
One of the most animated debates in social theory in the 1990s concerned the
notion of reflexivity. Between Beck (1992), Giddens (1991) and Lash and Urry
(1994), a large conceptual space was opened out under the sign of ª reflexivityº ,
each writer marrying a micro-sociology of agency, variously conceived, with a
distinct account of modernization and modernity. Yet with hindsight the
differences between their positions, given the tying of each writer’s idea of
reflexivity to a distinct macro-sociology, and despite the attempt to confront those
differences (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994), has risked rendering the concept
incoherent. One aim of this paper is to restore to the concept some analytical
power and to lay some groundwork for a sociology of reflexivity, via a detour
through empirical complexity. The empirical complexity of things makes it
possible to develop a more differentiated understanding of reflexivity than is
found in the speculative, often normatively-directed accounts of the social
theorists. The need is for greater conceptual acuity, an acuity derived from
attending empirically to the sociological objectÐ here a significant institution, the
BBC, its milieu and its population. In arguing this I add voice to a recent call for
a ª creative empiricismº (Osborne 1998: 164± 5). At the outset I offer a working
definition of reflexivity: I take it to refer to the phenomenon of increased and
increasingly systematized self-monitoring and self-reflection that is held to be
characteristic of the modern era. Such monitoring and reflection can be properties
of collectivities and institutions as well as individuals. Reflexivity can take more
and less systematized and voluntarist forms; it can be both structural and exist as
a dimension of agency. A first move must be to distinguish between its forms of
existence and to conceive of it plurally.
The BBC has always been subject to political controls and political reflexivities.
Throughout its history there is evidence of the uneasy dialogue with government
that inevitably characterizes a national institution dealing in the mediation of
information, collective imaginaries and identities, an institution inhabiting that
critical liminal space between public and private powers, state and people,
propaganda and knowledge. Combining since its inception the ethical and
cultural project of modern government, the BBC has seen as its task to engage in
the projective construction of a national culture. It is an institution shot through
with contradictions: between centralism and decentralization, authority and
fragility, durability and vulnerability, arrogance and a sense of guilty
inadequacy.
From the early years, alongside its distributed and dialogical meta-reflexivity Ð
BBC on the one side, government on the otherÐ there has existed a parallel,
68 G. Born
internal sphere of professional reflection and debate concerned with discerning

the proper cultural, journalistic and ethical stance to inform the BBC’s
broadcasting practices. The Reithian ethic was a continuous thread informing
these reflexivities, mutating and modernizing through the decades. The BBC’s
founder, John Reith, institutionalized a vision of the BBC as an instrument for
social integration, for enhancing democratic functioning and raising cultural and
educational standards. Through the trinity of information, education and
entertainment, Reith and his peers aimed to foster ª happier homes, broader
culture and truer citizenship’.4 It was an ethic drawn on by producers to highly
productive effect, as shown by the variety of cultural ambitions and successes of
the BBC, as well as its characteristic blindspots and weaknesses. The Reithian
ethic was also drawn on publicly by management for routine practices of
legitimation, through rhetorical displays of a sanctimonious soft nationalism, a
nationalism which, especially in times of national crisis and celebration, the BBC
claimed as its special territory.5
The BBC is therefore an exemplary institution in the government of culture. But
in the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental
site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of
markets, efficiency, accountability and audit were translated into the public sector.
The focus of this paper is an analysis of the BBC’s culture of markets, audit and
accountability in the mid-to-late± 1990s. The paper is indebted in part to the
Foucauldian concept of governmentality and its focus on the relations between
forms of political rationality and specific technologies of government. But it
expands upon this argument in four ways.
First, the literature on governmentality and the literature on reflexive
modernization have bracketed the contestability and negotiability of these
processes. Some social researchers have viewed techniques such as audit purely
as instruments of coercion (e.g., Shore and Wright 2000). But they serve equally to
open up new sites and objects of reflection and political negotiation. Moreover, an
analysis of such technologies must be alert to the complexity of the political
situation of which they are a part. In the case of the BBC, I show how the organs
of central government, parliament and, increasingly, European government play
a central role in framing this political situation, that government pressures and
directives largely determined the forms of rationality and the techniques
deployed. I use the term `framing’ in a way analogous to that suggested by Callon
(1998) in his account of the framing of economic markets. Framing can thus
productively be rethought for the analysis of political processes (Barry 2002).
Second, I use ethnographic material to examine the substance and the effects of
the various techniques of government, how they operate and how they may
displace other ways of thinking and acting.6 Like other critics of audit, I stress the
anti-creative effects of the numerous rationalizations to which the BBC has been
subject. But dwelling on such effects fails adequately to convey the complexity of
this institutional space. I analyze the way such techniques coexist with diverse
forms of resistance, other forms of rationality and ethics, in particular the way the
institution continues to support both an evolving Reithianism and a range of
specific journalistic, aesthetic and ethical discourses that constitute the broad-
casting field.
Third, the character of the BBC raises the question of how ethical principles can
take institutional as well as individual form, and how changing ethical
engagement can be revealed as much in dissensus and contestation as in

consensual codes. While some writers, following Weber and Foucault, have been
concerned with the ethical formation of the modern bureaucrat (Osborne 1994; du
Gay 2000), the question of how ethical principles are displayed and worked
through, however imperfectly, in particular conditions is rarely addressed. Just as
anthropologists of science have demonstrated the situated practice of science
(e.g., Latour and Woolgar 1979), this paper calls for an anthropology of situated
ethics, here in relation to cultural production.
Fourth, and on the basis of these analyses, as mentioned, the paper contributes
to the sociology of reflexivity. It points to the layering of reflexivities exhibited in
and around the contemporary BBC, and more generally to the simultaneous,
competing and antagonistic reflexivities that may inhabit any social space. It
charts the existence of disciplinary and institutionalized forms of reflexivity that
have little to do with a reflexivity of increasing self-knowledge or of voluntary

ethical engagement. Modes of ethical engagement survived within the BBC
through the 1990s and still animate the practices of production departments and
some of those concerned with imagining a new role for the BBC in the digital era,
an era characterized by multiple uncertaintiesÐ technological, economic, reg-
ulatory, cultural, and of career and life history. Yet in the 1990s, the BBC was a
regime that instituted a schizophrenia for its subjects by combining a cynical
public performance of self-regulation on the one hand, with a reflexive ethical
engagement with problems of public service and creativity in conditions of
extreme uncertainty on the other.
What follows focuses on the tensions between reflexivities, political imper-
atives and new technologies of government. Rather than imagine that ethics,
political reason and technical instruments exist as pure and separable entities, I
draw attention to their messy interrelation. The paper is concerned not with an
institution that embodies a solution to the ª government of cultureº , but one in
which the problem of how creatively to govern culture is in process.7
Sovereign and Recursive Powers

The rise of the new managerialism in the BBC followed in the wake of a series
of forces which, in the 1980s and early 1990s, caused a crisis in the legitimation
and the funding of the Corporation. They include the extreme hostility of the
Conservative governments to the BBC and the ascendance of neo-liberal values in
public life, as well as intensifying competition and the commercialization and
globalization of broadcasting with the growth of satellite, cable and digital
technologies. For almost two decades the value of the licence fee which funds the
BBC was held level or fell in real terms. There were other causes of an ebbing of
the BBC’s legitimacy in this period. Like all public sector organizations in the
1980s and 1990s, the BBC became subject to numerous criticisms. Public sector
organizations were seen as unaccountable, inefficient, incompetent, self-serving
and secretive. They were charged with failing to offer consumer choice and of
being unresponsive to consumers and clients, and soÐ given the neo-liberal
equation of markets with democracyÐ of being undemocratic.
Such criticisms fell on fertile ground in relation to the BBC for two reasons.
First, its governance arrangements had come to seem questionable and outdated.
The BBC is regulated by a Board of Governors, trustees of the public interest, who
70 G. Born
monitor its commitment to the obligations contained in its Royal Charter and any
additional ministerial agreements. But during the Thatcher years the nakedly
political nature of appointments to the Governors, as well as collusion and a lack
of effective separation between the Governors and senior management, seriously
discredited the structure of self-regulation. In view of the latter problem,
governments felt increasingly justified in intervening directly to monitor the
BBC’s operations. In addition, throughout its existence the BBC has been charged
with being culturally eÂ litist and centralist. In this context a discourse of consumer
sovereignty and increasing choice in broadcasting was deployed by commenta-
tors to powerful effect from the later 1980s to legitimize the rise of new
commercial broadcasters and multichannel platforms. The call here was that the
BBC should be more publicly ª accountableº regarding its output. During the
1990s both arguments were taken up by the Culture Select Committee which,
under its Labour chairman, became a source of growing criticism of the BBC. By
the late 1990s the broadcasting industry, with the exception of the BBC, had
reached consensus: to achieve greater accountability there must be separation
between the BBC’s regulator and its executive. However the political balance
remains suspended. Despite the proposal for a new single media regulator in
Labour’s Communications White Paper (DCMS 2000), as yet the BBC’s structure
of self-regulation has been left largely intact.
Further difficulties beset the BBC in the 1990s, amounting to a curious set of
recursive forces. In 1994 the Conservative government published a White Paper
that required the BBC to expand into new media and to become more
commercial, in order both to make up its financial shortfalls and to forge a
bridgehead for British media into global markets. The BBC had already begun
to move in this direction. These developments generated a furious reaction from
the BBC’s commercial competitors who, citing competition law and fair trading
rules, criticized the corporation for abusing its privileged position and distort-
ing the markets in which it operates. Henceforth a discourse of unfair trading
became focal for those attacking the legitimacy of the BBC; BBC Online, BBC
News 24, the BBC’s plans for digital television, the move of the main evening
news from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m.Ð all became the target of such accusations by
commercial rivals, and some of the complaints were pursued legally through
the British and European courts. In turn, these conflicts caused the Labour
governments to engage in an escalating series of interventions requiring the
BBC to justify publicly its commercial and public service expansions. The
interventions included calls for repeated public consultations, external auditing
arrangements and assessments of the BBC’s compliance with competition rules;
while internally, the BBC set up its own fair trading guidelines.8 In sum,
political instructions dictated institutional policies which provoked competitors’
hostility, which in turn elicited political sanctions.
The reign of John Birt, Director-General of the BBC from 1993 to 2000, took the
full weight of these various pressures. In response, encouraged by wider
management trends and government directives, Birt championed policies focused
on accountability and auditing, the pursuit of markets, efficiency drives and the
stoking of competition processes. As they took hold, they instituted within the
BBC new forms of disciplinary reflexivity with both external and internal forms.
They were beamed outwards in public statements, a kind of political marketing
aimed at convincing government and the public of radical changes within the
BBC; and they circulated in internal statements and became dispersed among the
micro-practices of managers, accountants, strategists and consultants.9 Strikingly,
the importation of new auditing and accountancy practices derived from the
commercial sector were associated in the minds of senior management with
accountability per se. Tighter financial probity was posited as the cutting edge of
a broader cultural change within the organization, one that would instal greater
discipline in relation to the BBC’s obligations to its licence fee payers. Financial
discipline took on the cast of a new corporate morality and rationality.
Birt’s policies were successful as a solution to political hostility, and it is
arguable that he saved the BBC from privatization. By the mid± 1990s the political
climate thawed, and in 1996 the BBC began the process of sensitizing public
opinion to the need for a rise in the licence fee, a process that culminated in 2000
in the award of an extra £200 million per year over seven years to fund the
Corporation’s new digital services.10 Yet the quid pro quo for these settlements is
a continuing defensiveness on accountability. The new BBC Chairman, Gavyn
Davies, took office in September 2001 announcing that he would maintain the
BBC’s structure of self-regulation while making it ª more directly accountable to
the public than ever before’.11
The Laws of the Ersatz Market

ª You see it all the time; you keep coming upon it in editorial boards where the
frustration with the BBC and its initiatives and visions and strategies is so huge
. . . Duke Hussey rang me last night to say he was sorry I was going, and could
I tell him anything about why? And I said one of the major reasons is that I’m fed
up to the back teeth with the constant streams of visions and initiatives and
restructurings and performance reviews which come out of the BBC’s Corporate
Centre and are imposed downwards from it in a centralist way. [Impersonating
Duke Hussey:] `Yes I quite agree, so am I’. I thought, `Christ, Duke, you are the
Chairman, and if you feel that then why does it keep happening?’ It feels
regularly like we are living in a ludicrous crucible of management theory here, as
kind of specimens. Somebody will come up with another management theory
which will be the BBC favourite in three months’ time, and lo and behold a whole
set of rules will be passed down to implement it. It shouldn’t be half my job to
keep my own department safe from these initiatives, yet it appears to be. If
Network TV [resisted] as a whole, we might be able to defeat the BBC’s worst
corporatist tendencies. [We should say] Ènough of this madness. If we get it
wrong change it. If we’re getting it right leave us alone’. Why would anybody do
otherwise than trust the people they’d employed in a senior job to get on and do
that job?º
(Interview with senior executive, BBC Drama Group, spring 1996)12
ª There is a central flaw in the whole idea of Producer Choice, apart from the fact
that it has created a new bureaucracy to service itself: it has not created a real
internal market. It’s created a false market because we’re not free to do exactly as
we like, we’re not free to go outside and buy services. So it’s an ersatz market,
which skews the ideals of market orientation that were attempted to be
introduced. Anybody who examined it would say, and it’s certainly something
the Department of Heritage is saying, `How much is this vaunted business
efficiency a reality, or how much is it just aping the language of the market to keep
one’s previous political masters happy?’ And they draw the analogy with the
72 G. Born
NHS, a similar big public body that is borrowing the language of the market, but
what is it in fact doing? We’re in the dark about that.º
(Interview with BBC current affairs producer, May 1997)
During the 1990s, the new managerial policiesÐ the introduction of, on the one
hand, quasi-markets and a new entrepreneurialism, and on the other, systematic
auditing and accountability processesÐ had enormous repercussions for those
engaged in the core activity of the BBC, program-making. While both sets of
policies purported to be concerned with improving the conditions for the BBC
to fulfil its central aimsÐ the provision of high quality programs and servicesÐ
in different ways they significantly worsened those conditions. Throughout the
1990s there appeared to be a recognition among senior executives of a need to
reconceive the character of BBC programing for contemporary conditions, and
a series of high-level visions was published.13 But in reality, inside the BBC such
thinking was marginalized in favor of the overwhelming attention given by
senior management, under external political pressure, to the nexus of new
managerial imperatives. Governors and management became preoccupied with
implementing these policies, while tasks of ameliorating program quality and
of renewing the BBC’s cultural remit were displaced from their thinking. The
net effect of this displacement and of the working through of the new policies
was an erosion of the creative capacity and well-being of the production
departments of the BBC.
The BBC’s marketization had two wings: the internal quasi-markets intro-
duced by the policy of Producer Choice, and the external market in program
supply resulting from the 1990 Broadcasting Act’s imposition of a 25 per cent
quota for independent production. Producer Choice was rationalized by Birt as
an answer to the BBC’s former existence as a ª vast command economyº in
which ª nothing was transparentº , initiative was stifled and ª creative freedom
was frustrated’.14 It brought in new accounting systems and quasi-monetary
values for internal transactions and reorganized the BBC as a series of business
centres, each of which was to engage in ª market testingº to cut inefficiencies
and ensure value for money. The two wings met in the largest-ever restructur-
ing of the BBC in 1996, which divided the Corporation horizontally and created
a quasi-market between BBC Production, the production departments, and BBC
Broadcast, the radio and television networks. Henceforth Production was to
compete with outside independent companies, apparently on a ª level playing
fieldº , to sell programs to Broadcast.
While Producer Choice brought greater cost-consciousness to the BBC, a
number of problematic effects ensued, many of them contradicting its free-market
rationale. Tiers of bureaucracy grew to oversee the new market systems. As the
external market expanded, a belief solidified on the part of BBC Broadcast
executives that independents were the main source of innovation and talent, and
in some genres independents became the preferred source of programing. This
fuelled a self-fulfilling cycle: an outflow of BBC creative personnel in a number of
key genres (Drama, Entertainment, Documentaries) given their belief, confirmed
by commissioning practice, that talent was valued more highly when outside the
BBC. Ex-BBC producers now operating as independents were offered more
generous returns than had they remained in-house, raising program costs. In
some genres the 25 %per cent quota was much exceeded, weakening the BBC’s
production base in these genres. Since, under market conditions, in-house

production departments had to win commissions to justify staffing and resources,
lack of commissions led to the loss and casualization of creative staff, stoking
pervasive insecurity and demoralization.
In the independent production sector, increased competition led to concentra-
tion, with a few powerful companies, usually based on the control of ª talentº (star
writers, actors, comedians), gaining the majority of commissions and able to
dictate terms to BBC Broadcast. Market conditions fuelled massive inflation in the
value of talent-led genres, and program costs in popular genres soared, while in
other genres in-house production was often cheaper than that of the indepen-
dents. To police independents’ compliance with financial, legal and editorial
standards, more BBC administration was necessary. As recent fakery scandals in
factual television suggest, enforcing standards in a fragmented industry is no easy
matter.15 In the prior, vertically-integrated British system, the reproduction of

common professional ethics and standards was supported by common institu-
tional cultures, internal training and limited competitionÐ conditions that were
swept away by neo-liberal deregulation.16
The 1996 restructuring greatly disempowered BBC Production vis a vis BBC
Broadcast by creating an unequal market. Independents were free to sell
programs to any broadcaster, and BBC Broadcast to buy from any producer. BBC
Production could sell only to BBC Broadcast. If free trading principles were
followed externally, they did not apply within the BBCÐ evidence of the arbitrary
limits to market operations.17 Relations between Production and Broadcast
became troubled. Broadcast began to offer budgets for expensive commissions,
such as high-cost dramas, that were lower than their actual cost to in-house
production departments, forcing them (against the BBC’s own commercial policy)
to seek co-production funds themselves from foreign broadcasters, in turn
diluting their commitment to creative risk. The restructuring led also to greater
centralization and rationalization in the commissioning of programs and less
creative autonomy for production departments. Rather than each production
department having a role in decisions about what would get made, now the
channel Controllers, supported by teams of market analysts, schedulers and
audience researchers, issued commissioning booklets to in-house and independ-
ent producers containing strict templates for each schedule slot that set out
precisely what was required in terms of genre, ª feelº , budget, target demographic
and rating. Producers henceforth pitched competitively to gain commissions for
each centrally defined slot.
Despite Producer Choice, BBC production departments continued to carry high
corporate overheads, higher than the equivalent for independents, so favoring
independents in competitive program areas. Under the restructuring Broadcast
received the bulk of licence fee income. With little independent income,
production departments could only reproduce themselves on the basis of winning
commissions in a skewed market. This caused production departments to
develop intensely entrepreneurial cultures, resulting in pronounced self-competi-
tion within the BBC, a drive among in-house producers to find sure ratings
winners, and a shift to the proven center-ground of programing. In these many
ways, then, marketization eroded in significant ways the BBC’s ª efficiencyº , the
strength and autonomy of its production base, its quality standards and public
service orientation.
74 G. Born
The Politics of Audit

MN [Head of BBC Drama Group, calling the Drama Editorial Board meeting to
order]: ÒK, let’s discuss RAP [a new financial audit]: how many people are aware
of the detail of all this? Could any regional Drama Head say how they think their
region intends to take submissions to RAP? Are they going to RAP on a
straightforward electronic link, or are they coming via London here, or have you
no idea how the bloody thing works?’
BB [A regional BBC Drama Head]: ª I think that’s a fairly fair assessment.º
Laughter in the roomÐ throughout this discussion, a crazed hilarity prevails.
XZ: ª I see, you have no idea and don’t want to know. Has anybody heard of RAP?’
CC: ª A large bunch of papers arrived on my desk on Monday, but I haven’t read
it yet.º
DD: ª We had that presentation, didn’t we?’
MN: ª We did.º [Patiently, starting from scratch]: ª RAP is `Recourse Analysis

Project’; the idea is that in future we will be expected to offer for our projects
electronically against a matrix of in-house cost drivers.º
More helpless laughter.
DD: ª I’ve heard it so many times before . . .º
EE: ª What the hell does it mean?º
MN: ª The idea is that we, at the point of delivery, record the actuals against those
drivers . . .º
EE: ª Isn’t this basically what we normally do with cost reports, except we’ll have
do it electronically? . . .º
DD: ª . . . and it will go direct to Finance Planning . . .º
MN: ª . . . and Finance Planning will get inside the whole process and try to
become pseudo-producers themselves. It is agreed that it’s going to happen; I’ve
got a really ratty note from Will saying `For God’s sake stop obfuscating, get on
and cooperate’.º
FF: ª Wasn’t there some debate about the system that should be used, because
most of our outside folks use Movie Magic,18 and there’s a BBC-type system we’re
using, and now it’s going to be a third system that has to be used . . .?º
MN [With understated irony]: ª Yes, there’s going to be a huge increase in work!º
FF: ª . . . and they’re trying to make it . . . homogenized. Because every time you
bring in a freelance producer or production manager who wants to use Magic,
you get confused because they’re used to keeping track of their own costs on their
own system. If you then have to translate it either they lose track of the real costs,
or you have to employ a third person to type all this stuff in.º
MN: ª All that is true and we’re going to do that.º
CC: ª We’re going to employ third people? It’s a job creation scheme!º
BB: ª This is a parallel system to what already exists . . .º
DD: ª The idea is they will have complete access to our actuals to inform
negotiations for the future; so if they see on the system that we’re spending £550
thousand on a project, they will begin negotiations using that as a base. It doesn’t
necessarily mean you’ll get £550 thousand; it means they’ll say `Why did it cost
£550 thousand this time round?’ and `Let’s look at how you can reduce that for the
future’.º [Sceptically]: ª The idea is they’ll be in a better position to make cases to
Corporate Finance for additional funding.º
EE: ª Why don’t they just ask us what it cost afterwards?º
BB: ª Eddy, you’re such an innocent . . .º [laughter]
AA: ª It wouldn’t cost enough money to do that!º [laughter]
MN: ª It wouldn’t employ enough people . . .º
FF: ª What’s tragic is there isn’t a process described which shows how it will be
used; so you have this enormous amount of data being fed into this huge machine
[which will need] lots of people at the other end to understand it. But there’s no
description of what process it will go through at that end . . .º [laughter]
EE [Spinning out of control]: ª So if you feed enough information into the machine
someone somewhere will make sense of it, but there isn’t anybody anywhere!º
DD: ª The idea is they’ll have this mass of data; they will then be able to tell you
what an average cost is of a type of program.º
MN: ª I really didn’t want to open this up too much.º [laughter] ª What you’re
trying to do in the regions . . . well, I’m rather cheered by the fact that you don’t
appear to know that you’re doing it.º
BB: ª Well, I think until we get the commissions we won’t.º
MN: ª No, this is program offers, Bob, it has nothing to do with commissions. Every
single offer has to be submitted like this, and then reported in the same format.º
DD [Near-hysterically]: ª Yes, all ’97, ’98 offers have to be submitted in the RAP
form, otherwise they’re not, they’re not . . .º [speechless]
FF [Defiantly]: ª Well, we won’t submit EastEnders in the RAP form.º

CC: ª Couldn’t we all just work on Movie Magic?º
DD: ª . . . It’s loony, it’s loony . . .º
MN: ª OK, we’re the first production area testing this out. I was on the Steering
Group and argued against it passionately, and I ended up with another of those
corporate reports saying `We have consulted widely, people are generally in
agreement’, and here we go.º [Resigned laughter].
(Discussion at BBC Drama Group Editorial Board, spring 1996)
SC: ª I think the question is fundamentally: where does the trust lie? In Drama’s
terms, it’s the question of whether the people we employ in Drama are trusted,
with their specialist knowledge, to advise the generalists. At the moment
initiatives are bumping into each other because they’ve come down from the
Controllers’ offices and they haven’t been thought through; and it’s a lot to do
with this inability to trust groups to manage their own affairs. There are too many
people built in to the decision process, and this doesn’t allow Drama heads to look
at the drama situation and make decisions. It was easier when there wasn’t a huge
edificeÐ finance, planning and so onÐ over there in Network Television. So on
the one hand you’ve got the Drama specialists, and on the other, you’ve got a
second layer of the kitchen cabinet.º
GB: ª When you say `kitchen cabinet’, isn’t it the case that the DG has set up a
Planning and Policy unit around him, a supervisory body over the different
directorates?º
SC: ª Oh, if you go back to the DG you’ve got a bigger problem because [sketching
a diagram] you’ve got the Board of Management there, which includes Policy and
Planning . . . [and] you’ve also got the Director of Finance and IT, Rodney Baker
Bates, and he’s got a huge edifice of corporate finance people with analysts and
strategists and god knows what. So you’ve got strategists and analysts there
[pointing to Policy and Planning], and you’ve got strategists and analysts there
[pointing to Finance and IT]. And when you come into Network Television, we’ve
got the channel Controllers, and they are supported by this huge planning,
strategy and scheduling outfit. And then you’ve got Drama Group, which again
has oceans of people who are cost controllingÐ and so it goes on.º
GB: ª So there seems to be three levels of duplicationÐ inside Corporate Centre,
Network Television and Drama Group?º
SC: ª Well yes; and as far as strategy and financial planning people [are
concerned], we in Drama Group are second best. They’re crawling over budgets
with everybody elseÐ with cost controllers, and chief assistants, and executive
producers and producers and production staff. There are more and more people
76 G. Born
analysing and cost controlling and telling the channel Controllers what they
should pay. But they are also making judgments Ð which they are probably least
able to make. What on earth have you got all these people for?º
(Interview with senior assistant from Drama Group)
Following the unleashing of the drive for auditing and accountability in the early
1990s, these practices became ubiquitous within the BBC. Writing of the ª audit
explosionº , Power notes that ª audits become needed when accountability can no
longer be sustained by informal relations of trust alone but must be formalizedº
(Power 1994: 11). The BBC’s accountability practices subsume self-regulation, in
turn containing both externally oriented and internally oriented practices, and
formal, external regulation: the various governmental, parliamentary and legal
powers that oversee the BBC’s operations beyond the Board of Governors. The
latter are themselves extensive and, as mentioned, have mushroomed in recent

years. They include ministerial appointment of the Governors, the setting of the
BBC’s budget by government (via the level of the licence fee), presentation of the
BBC’s Annual Reports to ministers and parliament, regular scrutiny of the BBC
Chairman and senior executives by the Culture Select Committee and by
ministers for compliance with the BBC’s Charter and any current agreement,
review of the BBC by the National Broadcasting and Advisory Councils, scrutiny
of output and handling of complaints by the Broadcasting Standards Commission
and the BBC’s Programme Complaints Unit (the judgments of which are
published), annual auditing (currently by KPMG), and potential appeal to the
Office of Fair Trading and to European law on competition issues. Coming into
view are additional forces, among them tighter scrutiny of public appointments
after the Nolan Committee,19 post-devolutionary interest from the Scottish
parliament and its equivalents in Wales and Northern Ireland, and the impact of
the 2000 Human Rights Act. To describe this armoury of formal regulatory
arrangements is not to endorse their efficacy. Despite their variety and complexity,
recent years confirm a lack of effective oversight of the way that managerial
policies have weakened the BBC’s creative bases.
Externally-oriented self-regulation processes, most of them dating from the
mid± 1990s, also form a complex and layered texture under the rubric ª Listening
to the Publicº . In addition to the Programme Complaints Unit, they include ª The
BBC Listensº , a Governors’ initiative from the mid± 1990s which reviews, ª from
the point of view of the audienceº , all services on a rolling basis every four years,
using research and advice from specialist advice panels. The process, it is claimed,
ª ensures that the Governors are fully aware of public opinions and concernsº 20
Specific public consultations are staged in relation to all major changes to
programs or services.21 The BBC publishes an annual Statement of Promises,
posted to all licence fee payers, which ª challenges the BBC to do betterº ; it lists a
number of strategic promises to the audience and reports back on last year’s
performance. BBC Online offers information and requests public comments in
relation to the Annual Report and other statements. Finally, several Governors’
Seminars are held each year, consultations on topical issues such as ª The Digital
Futureº , ª Taste and Decencyº , and ª The BBC and Childrenº . The audience for the
seminars ª is chosen to best represent the interests of the publicÐ i.e. the
Consumers Association, RNIB, educational bodiesº . In reality the Seminars are
closed affairs peopled by invitees conforming to the reigning corporate concept of
opinion formers and the ª great and the goodº . A number of these initiatives have
a surreal quality; they are placatory rather than genuinely self-questioning,
simulations of open self-assessment. In combination, the various processes
amount to a frenetic and highly visible performance of self-regulatory activity.
It was the internally-oriented practices of accountability, particularly the new
auditing and audience research activities, that impacted most onerously on BBC
creative staff. By the late 1990s there was a dense, continuous, overlapping and
cyclical series of auditing processes at every level of the Corporation. They
included periodic Programme Strategy Reviews throughout the Corporation,
lasting a year or more (one involved workshops for all 20,000 staff); Annual
Performance Reviews (APRs) for all departments which took several months and
required the production of exhaustive documentation which was then pro-
gressively reduced and passed up the hierarchy, culminating in a meeting with the
Director-General; monthly and quarterly statements of purpose and account by

each program editor; millions of pounds a year spent on external management
consultants, 22 with an office for the leading consultancy firm McKinseys inside
Broadcasting House, and Birt’s hiring of a new internal layer of consultants as BBC
strategists; and ever-tighter financial calculation and management (in the case of
the Drama Group involving the superimposition of an entire new accounting
system and new personnel to work in parallel with the existing ones).
In these practices, as in its marketization, the BBC self-consciously constructed
itself as a showcase of excellence in managerial and business practice. Auditing
was not just performed; it was zealously experimented with, enhanced and
expanded. As a form of disciplinary reflexivity, auditing is supposed to be
progressively internalized and ª ownedº by auditees. At the BBC, no sooner had
one audit process been completed than, eliciting feedback from auditees, another
cycle began.
GB: ª You mentioned the aim of making the Annual Performance Review process
come closer to the needs of each specific unit within the BBC. How are you going
to find out how to design [the APR] differently?º
MM: ª Well, at the moment we’re information gathering, having a post-mortem
stroke ideas session with each of the Directorates to say `What do you think are
the problems with Annual Performance Review? How would you like it to be
different?’ Or `Tell us what you’re doing to redesign it yourself?’ We will then,
depending on what state the Directorate is in, work more or less closely with
them. Broadcast have gone a long way, so now we’re putting them to one side.
The idea is to work closely with each Directorate and department to try and get
them thinking, if they’re not already, about what strategic objectives they want to
map out, and to use Andersons on some of the legwork in terms of designing
templates or whatever.º
GB: ª Getting them to set their own forms and goals for Performance Review?º
MM: ª That’s right, but then commenting on it and checking that it’s going to fit
the BBC’s needs, and asking `Does this tell us what we want?’. At the same time
we’re developing, again with Anderson’s help, a corporate framework where
we’re saying, `What are the BBC’s aims, and how do they break down?’, and
we’re just at the stage of thinking how might we measure them. This is about
things like: we must protect the brand, we must serve all licence-payers, we must
make sure we’re balanced regionally, all those sorts of things. We’re thinking
about measures, and most of those would be things we’d expect to be owned by
a Directorate somewhere or other. So there’ll be a sort of extraction of their own
78 G. Born
goals. At the moment we have a monthly meeting with each Directorate to see
what they’re up to and comment on what they’re doing, and to try and agree a
format.º
(Interview with senior internal BBC auditor, summer 1997)
As Power argues, auditing embraces a number of paradoxes, amply illustrated

by the BBC. Auditing, in the drive for efficiency, requires a second-order
professionalism: a parallel hierarchy of managers, strategists and analysts whose
function is to monitor the activities of the broadcast professionals and to fulfil the
substantial documentary and accounting demands of audit. The logic of audit
means that auditing itself comes to be audited; the phenomenon is recursive and
self-reinforcing. The only thing that cannot be queried is the rationality of audit
itself. Auditing claims to deliver an ideal of transparency in organizations; yet the
audit process itself is opaque, closed to scrutiny.23 While auditing promises

particular solutions to particular organizational and sectoral problems, it deals in
standardized methods and the reduction of complexity and specificity. Internal
BBC auditors themselves complained of a paradox in relation to an international
management consultancy brought in to create a computerized audit system for
BBC Broadcast: that the consultants were completely unaccountable. Alone of all
the BBC’s contractors, they neither worked to a fixed contract and budget, nor
were their objectives set out in advance so that the results could be evaluated.
Rather than a transfer of skills, they argued, an open-ended dependence on
consultancy had developed.
The culture of audit had both external and internal functions within the BBC.
Externally, in the face of continuing questioning of the BBC’s self-regulation, audit
was intended to pre-empt further government intervention by depicting the BBC as
an irreproachable organization, one engaged in doing the utmost to subject itself to
continuous monitoring of its efficiency and rectitude. Apparently intended for
internal eyes, audit amounted to a defensive bulwark against critics that charged
the BBC with being inefficient and poorly managed, unresponsive to audiences,
and illegitimate in its trading. It operated publicly as a sign of corporate morality.
Internally, audit aimed to change the culture of the organization and the behavior of
individuals. It attempted to cultivate in individuals and groups a new disciplinary
reflexivity concerned with transparency, calculability and targets. The substance of
audit provided the legitimation for painful managerial decisions: job losses,
departmental cuts and closures. But on several counts, the practice of audit failed to
carry its intended subjects with it. For many production staff the ª moralityº of
audit was a managerial discourse that rationalized cuts in production while
bloating unproductive management. Moreover, audit operated at bewildering
distance from the texture of collective experience; it wrought a dislocation between
experience and its managerial representation, between the values of audit and the
practical values of working life. From this vantage point audit was palpably
political, an extravagant performance for legitimation purposes, and destructive in
effect. This bred collective anger and resistance; audit performances were complied
with, but with little commitment.
A Drama Board Meeting: we are discussing the several-hundred-page document,

drawn up by a managerial sub-group, presenting the Drama Group’s self-audit
results for the first round of the 1995 ± 6 Annual Performance Review. The Head of
Drama Group is trying to run the meeting soberly, but the atmosphere in the room
is one of total alienation and disinterest. The creative heads probe the language of
audit with anarchic humor. The head of serials, a leading dissident, laughs at a
bullet point which claims that they have ª enhanced the quality of contemporary
serials on BBC2º : ª I remember how that happened! Michael Jackson commis-
sioned Our Friends in the North, and the next week he was able to add that
phrase!º Ð implying that it is ludicrous, since everyone in the meeting knows he
had fought for years to get that serial produced. The Drama Head consoles,
calling the APR just ª a ritual danceº , and reads another bullet point: ª `We have
improved the quality control of BBC Drama’ Ð what the hell does `quality control’
mean in terms of drama?º he asks. Hilarity, and no one bothers to reply. Another
head points wildly to the smiley faces covering the pages of assessment: ª Who
did all this? The whole of BBC management is now assessed by smiley faces!º and
the room collapses in powerless mirth. The Head of Single Plays (who would
leave in months to set up his own independent company) notes that the document
boasts of a new ª accelerated training plan for producers who could hold their
own in an independent environmentº . He comments sardonically that ª this
amounts to training BBC producers to go out and work as independents! º ,
alluding to the increasing outflow of producers nurtured by the BBC. The Drama
Head says ª John Birt wants Drama to pilot an independent advice panel as part
of Performance Reviewº ; he mentions the three names he has proposed, adding
that he knows them all ª quite wellº . The Singles Head comments mildly on one
of them, playwright David Hare, ª I wonder what he’ll have to say about his own
play, which went out last year!º Ð raising whether there just might be a conflict of
interest in a BBC writer being used to review BBC Drama Group . . .24
Performing Measurement
The discursive displacement characteristic of the BBC’s managerial culture in
the Birt years is evident in documents from the later 1990s that attest to the
wholesale adoption by senior executives of the lexicon and conceptual framework
of business management. Such documents, written by the new layer of strategists
drawn from management consultancy and business economics, show how a
concern with the quality of output and related questions such as the conditions
for creativity have been marginalized. The term ª businessº becomes ubiquitous
as the standard short-hand for the Corporation. An exemplary paper by the
leading strategist in Corporate Centre, written to explain the BBC’s processes to
others in the strategy field, centers on ª Measuring the BBC’s Performanceº
through identifying three overall objectivesÐ ª Managing the Business, Driving
Strategy, and Accountabilityº Ð which are then assessed against Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs). The language has become indistinguishable from commercial
management, and there is pride in this accomplishment:
There’s a real need for KPIs or performance measurement statistics, and the real
test for most managers is, does this help you in running the business? Across the
BBC there is a huge amount of interest in very detailed performance indicators
collected quite often on a daily basis. For instance, the overnight ratings which are
sent round electronically every morning, tell us how well the previous evening’s
television schedule has done, how we’ve done in audience share terms compared
with our main competitors, and increasingly we’re looking at particular target
audience groups as well as the total audience. We also have some continuing
80 G. Born
financial performance indicators and some operational indicators which man-

agers need just to run the business.25
This summarizing document, dwelling on the challenge of identifying perform-

ance measures for an organization such as the BBC, eventually alights on four sets
of KPIs which are then treated to the ª balanced scorecard approachº . The four are:
Customer/Audience Relations, Business Effectiveness, Learning and Growth,
and Finance. Of these, just oneÐ Learning and Growth Ð subsumes, it is
mentioned en passant, issues of ª innovative programming, cultural patronage and
so onº (page 12 of 32), and later again, ª innovation, creativity, distinctiveness, and
[the BBC’s] educational roleº (page 25 of 32). No expansion is given. Over-
whelmed by the document’s persistent focus on the challenge of developing
measurable indicators and robust management techniques, these issues are
conceptually residual: emptied of substance, emptied also of managerial

attention. In this vision of the BBC, its cultural and public service purposes and
the problem of how better to fulfil them are placed beyond the frame.
The displacement is there in a telling discussion in the same paper of the
benefits of the BBC’s adoption of a ª more strategic approachº to Radio 1: 26
If we had decided for one of our radio stations to focus on a particular audience
group, which for Radio 1 would be the 15± 24 year olds, it is that group we are
interesting in focusing on as far as performance [measurement] is concerned. We are
not interested in . . . the overall [audience] share and reach across everybody. We’ ve
identified a real strategic target, [and] that’s what we now want to measure.27
What is striking in this account of the reorientation of Radio 1 is the complete

absence of attention to the decisive animating factor in the changes: the invention
of a new public service rationale for the station centered on a new aesthetic mix.
This rationale, known as ª New Music Firstº , allowed Radio 1 to shed its dated
and indistinct persona as a top± 40 network and to become a station oriented to
new kinds of popular music, by seeking to break unknown bands and giving slots
to dance, post-hiphop and techno genres that had previously not been aired.28
The difficulty of configuring the BBC to fit the topoi of contemporary business
management is revealed in the reflections of strategy managers distributed
around the BBC directorates. They spoke in retrospect of what they saw as the ill
fit between the ª intangibleº , nebulous nature of the BBC’s purposes as a public
service organization and the standard terms used to identify strategic targets and
assess outcomes in business. In their account the BBC is necessarily conceived
negatively; it is not an ª ordinary businessº :
The BBC, like all public service organizations, has a difficult job, trying to deliver
things that are slightly intangible. Some of them you can measure, some of them
you can’t, and there is a very large number of objectives to juggle and it’s difficult
to make priorities between them, so it’s a difficult management task.
The performance review process never worked. It never got embedded in the
business. It was clearly painful . . . just an onerous thing you did at the end of the
year, rather than being part of a business cycle. In any ordinary business you’ve
got a financial year-end and you weigh things up. [APR] was an attempt to do it,
but the reason I think it foundered was partly because of John [Birt]’s fondness for
mindboggling detail, partly because of the difficultyÐ and this is still true for the
BBCÐ of defining objectives and measuring performance, because of the BBC’s

nature as a PSB rather than a profit-maximizing entity. It’s always going to be
complex, but you ought to be able to be clear about all your objectives. It’s just
that your ability to quantify, as opposed to characterize editorially, performance
on a number of those dimensions is limited.
(Both interviews with BBC strategists, spring 2001)
Audit had a multiple existence within the BBC, as morality, legitimation and
ª useful managementº . In its ubiquity and power, the logic of audit seemed to
subordinate all other logics; it became the rationality that framed, monitored and
measured other values. Power (1997: 145) reserves the term ª reflexivityº for that
genuine evaluation of auditing that, he argues, would be required to stem audit’s
expansive logic of self-reproduction. I would stress instead that audit and
accountability processes together amount to an institutionalized reflexivity. Within

the BBC this was a reflexivity experienced by program-makers and some
executives as unproductive and disciplinary, as a managerial machinery that
constructed a false shell of consensus and displaced attention from internal
problems that did not fit the audit template. It was a reflexivity that was complied
with cynically and antagonistically rather than being felt to respond to and
represent the real interests, values and reflections of BBC staff. The concept of
institutionalized reflexivity developed here must be distinguished from the
ª institutional reflexivityº discussed by Giddens (1994) and Lash (1994). For both
writers it is a normative term. For Giddens it refers to the potential ª replacing of
bureaucratic hierarchies by more flexible and decentralized systems of authorityº
through democratizing processes (193). For Lash it encompasses not only ª the
democratic contestation of the ideas of experts in a mini-public sphereº but ª the
way in which institutions reflect upon, contest and construct the very `semantic
horizon’ on which they are basedº (208). Both accounts are surely idealized and
speculative; they fail to probe how, in the present, expert and managerial
reflexivities commonly operate as forms of anti-democratic discipline and as
means of systematic discursive and practical displacement within institutional
contexts, as demonstrated by the BBC.
Ethical Reinvention: A Reactived Reithianism

The managerial culture of audit did not fill the BBC. It existed in parallel with
voluntary, informal reflexivitiesÐ driven by professional ethos, by ethical,
aesthetic and political concerns. If informal, such concerns carried enormous
commitment. But they took a subordinate place in the discursive hierarchy of the
Birtist BBC. In particular, the audit culture coexisted with contemporary, still vital
enunciations of the Reithian discourse of serving the public, universality,
justifying the licence fee, and quality and integrity of output.29 This Reithian
discourse continued to express for many staff the core of the BBC’s public service
ethos, its sense of its distinctive and sacred duty. The reactivated Reithian
morality in fact had two articulations. It circulated still as an official managerial
rhetoric in internal and external documents, a Reithian icing on the new
managerial cake.30 But it was also spoken informally with commitment and
emotion by many individuals at all levels of the institution, and often in the
context of their angry denunciations of Birtist managementÐ for destructive cuts
and casualization, excessive bureaucracy, destroying the BBC’s creative base,
82 G. Born
shifting the output in a crude commercial direction, being flaccidly middle-brow,

neglecting popular tastes, not delivering on cultural diversity, or indeed for
failing effectively to reform the BBC’s finances and for being profligate with the
licence fee. In this counter-discourse, it was senior management and its
proselytizing initiatives that were perceived as having undermined the Corpora-
tion’s capacity to fulfil its central purposes and democratic ideals. Reithianism
thus bore both official and informal, oppositional inflection; it existed both as
institutionalized reflexivity and as critical, reflexive counter-discourse.
Ambivalence was woven through the counter-discourse, whether in impatient
acknowledgements of the failings of the BBC’s past, or in its idealization.
Commonly, Reithian principles were articulated through a sense of their being
under threat orÐ in trenchant criticisms of the Birtist BBCÐ their betrayal. These
varied informal articulations amounted to a continual, if ambivalent, reinvention
of the Reithian ethos for contemporary conditions, in reaction to what was

perceived as its current managerial debasement. A first object for such
reinvention was the institutional sphere itself, taking in such questions as
employment conditions, money management, internal cynicism and division, and
the BBC’s overall values:
DP: ª That’s incredibly sad about the BBC now: the fact that everything has
become completely èxpense account’, without any of us being able to chart the
moment. I remember [Betty Wingale], who produced Tender is the Night, which
was a mega-American coproduction, and she used to get the bus! And we could
never take people out to lunch unless we’d cleared it for more than five pounds.
So you could buy a writer a sandwich and a beer in the Bush and that was it. And
suddenly, in the last three years, the spend has rocketed on non-program stuff. It’s
absolutely shameful, the level of expense accounts, taxis, and so on [that we all
use]. You know, Paul Williams, who’s a producer, and I had a day trip to Cannes
with Nick Elliot: that kind of behavior, it’s all being paid for by the licence fee . . .
[Another] microcosm of the whole thing was when I was talking about both TT
and myself having vested financial interests in our own editorial decisionsÐ once
the BBC goes down that route, it’s a catastrophe.º
GB: ª It’s completely in contradiction with greater financial probity, isn’t it?º
DP: ª I could cite example after example . . .º
(Interview with BBC drama executive, January 1996)
TN: ª It’s really easy to get sucked into the BBC culture of constant complaint, of
thinking that public service is not an inspiring set of values. It’s incredibly easy to
become middle-aged. One of my constant worries is, have all my edges been
polished off, so there’s nothing spiky about what I’m commissioning. It’s odd
because the values of public service are things like honesty and trust and freedom.
Public service in broadcasting should stand for freedom from commercial
constraints, relative freedom from ratings constraints; it should stand for honesty
and integrity, for cutting edge and promoting culture for its own sake rather than
because of the dictates of an advertising agency. Those are quite exciting things
that lots of under± 35s, which is the area I’m supposed to specialize in, absolutely
engage with. But as soon as you put them in a BBC context, for some reason they
develop added values that are corrupting, like `heritage’, and `past’, and
`gravitas’, and àffection’.º
GB: ª What do you mean by àffection’?º
TN: ª There’s this constant idea that people need to feel àffection’ for the BBC . . .
This idea of having affection for an institution is an approach that most under± 35s
these days can’t relate to. I certainly can’t.º
GB: ª I see, and the earlier words you usedÐ gravitas, solemnity . . .Ð you didn’ t
mention nationalism, but that soft cultural nationalism . . .?º
TN: ª It’s really odd, isn’t it. If I was black I would be so angry with the BBC. Why
the hell should I pay a licence fee? The Sky licence fee is £320 a year, triple the
BBC, and you don’t get the five radio stations and the five TV channels and the
two internet sites. You just get Sky One for that. Yet I would still relate more to Sky
One than the BBC if I was a young black kid, because [the BBC] doesn’t speak in
the way I speak, it doesn’t have the music I listen to . . . The most dangerous
cultural thing in the BBC for me is when people start to reject something on the
grounds of taste or style. They’ll say, Ì’m sorry, it’s just not stylish’ or Ìt’s not
tasteful’. Of all the things that are difficult to argue against, it’s impossible to
argue that something is stylish when your boss feels it’s unstylish. And for a West
Indian community, what they believe is stylish is often seen as tacky by a white
middle-class community, and the type of jokes they listen to or the comedians
they like. Lots of parts of West Indian culture a white middle-class culture would
find `styleless’. Similarly, that glitzy working-class Asian culture that seems to be
obsessed with gold and necklaces, and I suppose a stereotypical Jewish culture:
they seem `styleless’. And when you remove things because they’re `styleless’ ,
you’re effectively removing a whole set of cultural values that a non-white
audience could absolutely relate to. Do you know what I mean?º
(Interview with BBC youth channel controller, July 2001)
Situated Aesthetics and Ethics

Such informal, sometimes critical reformulations of the Reithian ethos were
most prevalent and most multivocal in relation to the BBC’s central practices: the
production of programs and the development of services. The reference was often
implicit. Components of the Reithianian ethic form part of the collective historical
expertise of British broadcasting. They take a different inflection in relation to
each kind of programing. Television drama, light entertainment, comedy, sports,
current affairs, news, documentary, history, arts, science, access programming:
each has an autonomous historical trajectory characterized by particular
aesthetics and ethics, themselves subject to collective reflection, to reproduction
and reinvention. The BBC’s production departments and their output form part of
these generic trajectories, trajectories that connect each department with a broader
professional world beyond the BBC and to common, genre-specific discourses. A
continually modulating Reithianism, implicit and explicit, animated the BBC’s
differentiated production cultures, both linking them to and distinguishing them
from rival producers and the commercial sector.
These reflexivities of genre, forging links between generic pasts and the
imagination of generic futures, paralleled the BBC’s new managerialism; indeed,
for BBC producers they were the primary mode of professional engagement.
Here, pride in achieving quality in a certain genre, or a concern to innovate in the
aesthetics and ethics of a particular genre, or criticism of others for failing to
deliver a necessary BBC commitment to popularity, distinctiveness, democracy,
impartiality or integrity: all speak of how, among producers and those developing
services, the task of reinventing the Reithian ethos was necessarily inflected
through a concern with the nuances of particular genres. Such a stance was often
articulated through criticism of others both within and without the BBC;
84 G. Born
reflection was as much a property of collective debate and disagreementÐ in

editorial meetings, or the BBC’s weekly internal review of output, the Programme
Review BoardÐ as of consensus. The state of current affairs, documentaries,
popular or historical drama, interactive television and so on: all were subject to
individual and collective reflection.
FI: ª Newsnight’s breaking of the Tory Eurosceptic debate would not constitute
investigative journalism. It’s a good story; it means Newsnight are leading the
news agenda for the press and other news programs. But I don’t think they have
the resources to put into real long-term investigations. Investigations are very
expensive in manpower, time, resources, andÐ outside reasons of political
expediencyÐ there’s a bias against them for that reason as much as anything
else.º
UT: ª Especially in the new BBC.º

GB: ª . . . when they may not, in the end, achieve results or get on screen. OK,
consumer programs like Watchdog investigate the commercial sector, in a soft
way; but where does that happen on big political issues?º
UT: ª It should happen on Panorama. That’s its job. But all the big investigative
stories of the last two years have been broken by Westminster newspaper
correspondents, The Guardian particularly. For the BBC, you now have a huge
operation out of BBC Millbank at WestminsterÐ 300 people it employsÐ yet at no
stage in the last two years did they ever break a big political story.º
FI: ª . . . like the Scott Report, Al Fayed, Hamilton, sleaze, anything like that.º
GB: ª Why? You now have this outfit, BBC Millbank, dedicated to politics and
Westminster, and yet you’re saying that it doesn’t have this functionÐ so what is
its role?º
FI: ª Oh it’s a terrible place. It’s like a gentleman’s club. Guys walk around with
their arms around the politicians. They’ve come from the same universities, the
same social background; there is no standing back, no objective role there. It is a
cosy working relationship, even criticisms are couched in such a way as to be
deferential. It’s completely undemocratic.º
(Discussion with two BBC current affairs producers, May 1997)
GB: ª What projects are you currently working on?º

SC: ª I’m working on a six-part serial which I very much hope I’ll get to make, a
bodice ripper by Philippa Gregory called A Respectable Trade. She’s a feminist,
socialist historian who writes romantic novels, and this is the best book she’s
written. It’s a story set in the late eigtheenth century about an impoverished
governess whose last chance is to marry a Bristol trader. He turns out to be a slave
trader, which is fine by her, and he marries her so she can train his slaves, so he
can sell them for more money. And through that the whole British slave trade is
explored, the extraordinary scale of it, which is little known. She falls in love with
one of the slaves, of course, so you have that power relation played out. And I’m
also preparing a drama documentary, something I came across through A
Respectable Trade, because I’ve been reading to try and find modern equivalents,
because it’s so hard to imagine. I came across the story of this Pakistani boy who
was in bonded labor and was promised a law scholarship to university; and all
this happened and then he was shot dead, in Pakistan, killed. I want to make a
film about his life to get to the whole issue of child slavery. The story was in the
papers last year and I’m going to Pakistan in February. The writer has done a very
good treatment, we did research all last year. [He’s] an American called Geoffrey
Lewis; he wrote and Exec’ed most of Hill Street Blues . . .º
(Interview with BBC drama producer, June 1996)
GB: ª You have a problem with Alan’s [Controller of BBC1] editorial tastes: in
what way?º
NT: ª I think that what Alan believes is popular TV is The Sun on TV. I think the
more you make stupid product, the more you create the audience; the more you
pander to unsophisticated taste, the more that taste becomes unsophisticated.
And I don’t believe that popular TV should be allowed to become stupid. It
doesn’t need to be Pets Win Prizes or Noel’s House Party. I’m not a snob. I think
good drama, good light entertainment have a massive place in popular culture.
But it’s insulting the stuff he puts money into and that he defendsÐ it’s not even
as if 25 million people were watching! So there’s no justification. And that’s the
frustration I have with Drama, too. I mean, I’m a great admirer of Andy [Head of
Single Drama] on many levels; but I work with two men who at the end of the day
wouldn’t know a popular drama if it was thrown in their face. They never watch
popular drama; they don’t like it. They think soap opera is a waste of space. They
don’t know who the popular stars are. I said to Andy, Ì think we should get Tony
Warren to write us a Screen One’ and he said Òoh, he invented EastEnders didn’ t
he?’, and I said, `No, Andy, he created Coronation Street’. Now this is your Head
of Single Drama, and he hasn’t got the faintest idea who one of the most
important writers, creatorsÐ in terms of cultural change in this countryÐ is, and
it’s terrifying!º
GB: ª Is the defense that they aren’t here to do that? But on Screen One [the single
drama strand on the main mass channel] they are here to do that, aren’t they?º
NT: ª I wouldn’t care if they didn’t claim to be popular. I said to Ross once, `We’ve
been offered this great idea for a Screen Two about Blur’. Now I’m way past Top
of the Pops, but I know how important musically, and in terms of youth culture,
this group is. And he went, Òh no, they’re not popular. We want Robson Green
. . .’, and I went, `Ross, no, no’. What makes my head swivel about the people I
work to is that they don’t watch TV! The amount of TV that Andy, Ross and Sally
watch: nothing. You know, I sit up until three in the morning if I have to, to watch
Peak Practice, to watch Casualty, to watch stuff I hate; but if you don’t watch it how
the hell do you know what your audience likes and why? If they admitted they
didn’t know what popular taste was, and they like gritty social realism and that’s
what they want to make, it would be fine. But they’re frightened to admit it. So
instead you have endless discussions about `What is popular drama?’ TV is the
most important medium in the world, and if you don’t give it the respect it’s due
then you’re a fool. I believe in the craft and I respect the popular audience, and
the problem is that so many people who work in TV don’t respect the audience.
What they care about [is] numbers and èxcellence’ Ð you know, `critical
excellence’.º
(Interview with BBC drama script editor, March 1996)
To affirm the existence of diverse and reflexive ethical stances in cultural-

producer discourses is not to argue that the practices they endorse are blameless
or exemplary. Subjectivity is not that self-transparent; nor were the conditions
within which such ethical subjectivities operated conducive to their realization, as
so often they are not. Moreover, it is plain from these interviews that some of the
BBC’s central historical weaknessesÐ the problem of sustaining critical distance
from Westminster, and of creatively intervening in popular cultureÐ continue to
pose serious challenges to the Corporation. The layering of reflexivities, some of
them incommensurable; the pervasive reach of disciplinary reflexivities such as
auditÐ these make the lived ethical condition a far more complicated experience
than can be conveyed by any pure account.31
86 G. Born
Similarly, while autonomous aesthetic reflexivities are inherent in particular

discourses of genreÐ the specificity and productivity of which have generally
been overlooked by the sociology of art and culture, and delegated to disciplines
such as film studies, literary and art historyÐ the existence of such reflexivities
does not guarantee aesthetic invention. Aesthetic reflexivity variably results in the
creation of the new; there are eras of more and less aesthetic invention in any
cultural sphere. To exemplify, in British television of the last decade documentary
has seen a rapid proliferation of subgenres, some of themÐ under the influence of
the BBC and Channel 4Ð highly inventive, others increasingly formulaic; while
television drama, despite fragmentary instances of invention, has been closely
allied throughout its history to a social realist aesthetic which has reached an
impasse and seems to inhibit any larger generic reconstruction. Yet without the
motor of the interweaving, linked aesthetic and ethical reflexivities described,
some oriented to the institutional status of the BBC, others concerned with the
contours of specific genres, British television, and the BBC’s output, would not
have the character that it does. The ethical stance is potentially productive; it may
have effects in practice.32 The concept of aesthetic reflexivity offered here is
clearly distinct from Lash’s notion, which he derives partly from artistic
modernism but forcefully decouples from any ª production aestheticº (Beck,
Giddens and Lash 1994: 137) and even from judgment (Lash and Urry 1994: 5).
Instead, Lash sees it as a means to access self-interpretation and the workings of
ª cultural communities, the cultural `we’, [as] collectivities of shared background
practicesº (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994: 147). Lash’s account is predicated on a
binary, the cognitive versus the aesthetic; aesthetics becomes the ª otherº of
cognition. My own concept determinedly reverses his move in order to
interrogate the particular role of aesthetic reflexivity within production discourses
and indeed producer judgments, with the aim of incorporating the trajectory of
the aesthetic into the analysis of cultural production.33
Creatively Governing Culture?

The most powerful legacy of the BBC’s marketization and of the casualization
of creative staff has been a libidinalization of entrepreneurialism across the
Corporation. If audit failed to transform subjectivities, these processes have
inculcated competitive subjectivities concerned more with achieving visible
personal success (in ratings, critical acclaim or notoriety) in the industry, with an
eye to promotion or future work for the BBC’s competitors, than with the
ª autonomousº cultivation of creative generic possibilities or the enhancement of
creative directions. More than before, BBC producers, commissioners and
schedulers are seduced into a mimetic competitive dynamic with their commer-
cial rivals. And more than before, with intensified competition and declining
revenue bases, Britain’s broadcasting ecology has tipped in the direction of
extremes of low-budget populism and sensationalism and a crowding in the
center ground of programing, across all commercial channels including Channel
4. The BBC inevitably appears increasingly exceptionalist in this ecology, engaged
in its double act of following popular tastes as they are cumulatively conditioned
by the populist ecology, while attempting to do things differently, cover minority
spaces and innovate. But the fracturing of the institutional solidity and security of
the BBC has eroded its capacity for difference.
If a concern with creativity should characterize any analysis of cultural

production, if aesthetic and ethical reflexivities are central to creativity, and if the
conditions for creativity bear on their possibility, then an anthropology of situated
ethics in cultural production must concern itself with the conditions for aesthetic
and ethical vitality, including the practices of government discussed in this paper.
In principle, such a concern must evaluate the differential outcome of different
practices; the government of culture will continue to be reformed and to innovate in
its techniques. Under the BBC’s current Director-General, Greg Dyke, the excesses
of internal auditing have been moderated, while the external performance of
accountability remains a preoccupation under continuing pressure of legitimation
from government and the BBC’s competitors. Dyke has announced a commitment
to strengthening the BBC’s in-house production, and the expansion of production
for the coming digital channels shows a new corporate confidence. Yet many of the
conditions that conspired to undermine the well-being of BBC production remain,

as does the gap between the BBC’s ritual performance of accountability and a
genuine critical reflection by government on those conditions. Where it has been
routine in dominant intellectual discourses, including neo-liberal and Third Way
thinking and some traditions of critical sociology, to posit an opposition between
public institutions and the very possibility of creativity, this account argues the
obverse: that statist institutions and structures can provide and promote the
conditions for creativity, with effects beyond those institutions.34 But they continue
to do so, and to occupy their liminal space, only by withstanding the aggressive and
coordinated depredations of government and commerce.
Notes
1. Newsnight is BBC television’s leading late-night news and analysis program, screened
each weekday.
2. Jeremy Paxman, one of Newsnight’s three core presenters, is probably Britain’s best-
known serious television journalist, notorious for his aggressive interviews with
politicians of all parties.
3. Fieldwork diary, March 1997.
4. Reith (1949: 136), quoted in Donald (1992: 76).
5. On the social history of the BBC, its internal ethical and cultural debates, see Briggs
(1961 ± 95); and for a superior analysis of the first decades, Scannell and Cardiff (1982).
On the BBC’s role in the formation of a national culture, see Scannell and Cardiff, op.
cit. ch. 13, and Donald (1992).
6. The empirical basis of this paper is an ethnographic study of the BBC carried out in
1996 ± 98 and 2001. Fieldwork ranged across the BBC, focusing on several areas of BBC
television. The Drama Group was one key locus: the largest and most costly
production sector in the BBC, it produces the full range of televisionÐ from the most
popular to the most high cultural. All major changes impacted significantly there. The
research, Redefining Public Service Broadcasting: An Ethnography of the BBC, was
supported by ESRC award no. L126251041. In quotations and descriptions, initials and
names have been changed where possible.
7. My own research is of course situated in that process. Having engaged with the BBC
I have felt impelled to write on policy matters in relation to it.
8. For a critical account of these processes, see Born and Prosser (2001).
9. For an account of the BBC under Birt until 1994, see Barnett and Curry (1994). On
broadcasting policies under the Conservative governments of 1979 ± 97, see Goodwin
(1998).
88 G. Born
10. The settlement followed the report of the government-appointed Davies Committee,
July 2000. In September 2001 the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell,
announced the government’s approval of the BBC’s plans for digital services, centred
on four new digital television networks and five new digital radio stations.
11. Interview with Gavyn Davies, Broadcast, 28 September 2001.
12. Quotations from interviews have often been edited for coherence and brevity. Names
have often been changed.
13. See, inter alia, BBC (1992), BBC (1995) and BBC (1996).
14. J. Birt, Fleming Lecture, March 1993, quoted in Barnett and Curry op. cit.: 194.
15. The fakery scandals broke in 1998 and 1999 and caused the most serious crisis in British
broadcasting in recent decades. They included revelations of staging in the doc-
umentary The Connection, which led to the ITV company Carlton being fined £2 million
by the regulator, the ITC; and charges of defrauding by the BBC1 talk show, Vanessa,
and the ITV talk show, Tricia.
16. On the effects of deregulation see Ursell (1998) and British Film Institute (1999).
17. A concession was eventually made: by the end of the 1990s BBC Production had been
assured a minimum output guarantee of 60 per cent of all commissions issued by BBC
Broadcast, although this never became official policy.
18. Movie Magic was an online accounting system widely used in the television
production community outside the BBC.
19. The Nolan Committee was the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Cm 2850-I 1995.
Its first report recommended major changes to public appointments to improve
transparency, including open competition and selection on merit. For details see http:
//www.ocpa.gov.uk/ index.htm.
20. All information in this section taken from BBC Press Service statement ª Listening to
the Publicº , 1998.
21. With occasional exceptions: the current Director General, Greg Dyke’s decision to
move the BBC’s 9 O’Clock News to 10 p.m. was not put to public consultation. In
response Chris Smith, the then Minister, publicly rebuked the move as ill-judged and
illegitimateÐ and has subsequently been proved wrong.
22. One internal manager listed five international consultancies that ª have done a lot of
work [in recent years] for the BBCº [170YP1: 32].
23. The BBC’s spend on management consultancies was for some years obscured. ª In July
1994, Birt revealed that £6 million had been spent on consultancies in the previous
eight months, and that the Corporation could not estimate how much had been spent
in the last few yearsº (Barnett and Curry op. cit.: 209).
24. Fieldwork diary, March 1996.
25. From ª Measuring the BBC’s Performanceº , written by Robin Foster, Director, Strategy
and Channel Management, 1998, p. 3.
26. Radio 1 is the BBC’s main youth popular music station.
27. Foster op. cit.:15.
28. On the reorientation of Radio 1, the new musical philosophy and its impact on the
output, see Hendry (2000).
29. For a fuller analysis of the components of the Reithian ethic in broadcasting, and of
how they might be updated and redefined for contemporary conditions, see Born and
Prosser (2001): 670 ± 82.
30. See, for an example of Reithian management discourse in this period, Birt (1999).
31. Cf Osborne’s discussion of the ª intrinsically ethicalº principles of the aesthetic
sphere: the ª production of autonomyº , and the creation of ª what is newº (Osborne
1998: 123). Two problems arise when we do as Osborne himself suggests, ie attend
closely to the empirical. First, while his abstract view of art as ethically exemplary
may have some cogency, we need to attend to the different ethical stances that
characterize particular forms of cultural production. Second, aesthetic autonomy is
inevitably compromisedÐ or mediatedÐ in practice; and while we may not, as he

says, be content to reduce art or cultural production to its conditions, we should
adopt an enquiring attitude towards how those complex conditions foster or inhibit
the production of autonomy and the creation of the new. If we do not, we resurrect
just those conceptual boundaries between philosophy and sociology that he is
concerned to moderate.
32. On the relation between producers’ ethical stances and the conditions bearing on the
BBC’s production cultures, see Born and Prosser op. cit.: 679± 80.
33. For one example of such an analysis, see Born (1995).
34. For more on the relation between public cultural institutions and the support of
creativity, see Born (1993).
References
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Digital Age, New Statesman Media Lecture, 6 July.
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Bennett et al. (eds) Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, London:
Routledge.
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Musical Avant-Garde, Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Born, Georgina and Prosser, Tony (2001) ª Culture, Citizenship and Consumerism: The
BBC’s Fair Trading Obligations and Public Service Broadcastingº , The Modern Law
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Briggs, Asa (1961 ± 95) The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vols. I± V, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
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Centre for Audience and Industry Research (May).
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Verso.
du Gay, Paul (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization and Ethics, London:
Sage.
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Giddens, A. and Lash, S., Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge: Polity.
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1990sº , Media, Culture and Society, 22(6).
90 G. Born
Lash, Scott (1994) ª Replies and Critiques: Expert Systems or Situated Interpretation?
Culture and Institutions in Disorganized Capitalismº in Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash,
S., Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge: Polity.
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Georgina Born lectures in the sociology of media and culture in the Faculty of
Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of
Emmanuel College Cambridge. In 1997± 98 she was Senior Research Fellow at
King’s College, Cambridge, and from 1996 ± 97 Visiting Professor in the Institute of
Musicology, Aarhus University. She has published Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM,
Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde; and Western Music and
Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (ed. with D.
Hesmondhalgh). In progress is a book based on an ethnography of the BBC.

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On: 17 October 2014, At: 02:09

Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture,

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1362517022019000

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Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture,

Government of Culture, Culture of Government

BBC: Twelve Promises:

Our Performance Against Promises for 1998 ± 99:

internal sphere of professional reflection and debate concerned with discerning

engagement can be revealed as much in dissensus and contestation as in

have little to do with a reflexivity of increasing self-knowledge or of voluntary

Sovereign and Recursive Powers

The Laws of the Ersatz Market

production base in these genres. Since, under market conditions, in-house

matter.15 In the prior, vertically-integrated British system, the reproduction of

The Politics of Audit

MN: ª We did.º [Patiently, starting from scratch]: ª RAP is `Recourse Analysis

FF [Defiantly]: ª Well, we won’t submit EastEnders in the RAP form.º

latter are themselves extensive and, as mentioned, have mushroomed in recent

Director-General; monthly and quarterly statements of purpose and account by

As Power argues, auditing embraces a number of paradoxes, amply illustrated

audit process itself is opaque, closed to scrutiny.23 While auditing promises

A Drama Board Meeting: we are discussing the several-hundred-page document,

financial performance indicators and some operational indicators which man-

This summarizing document, dwelling on the challenge of identifying perform-

conceptually residual: emptied of substance, emptied also of managerial

What is striking in this account of the reorientation of Radio 1 is the complete

BBCÐ of defining objectives and measuring performance, because of the BBC’s

accountability processes together amount to an institutionalized reflexivity. Within

Ethical Reinvention: A Reactived Reithianism

shifting the output in a crude commercial direction, being flaccidly middle-brow,

of the Reithian ethos for contemporary conditions, in reaction to what was

Situated Aesthetics and Ethics

reflection was as much a property of collective debate and disagreementÐ in

UT: ª Especially in the new BBC.º

GB: ª What projects are you currently working on?º

To affirm the existence of diverse and reflexive ethical stances in cultural-

Similarly, while autonomous aesthetic reflexivities are inherent in particular

Creatively Governing Culture?

If a concern with creativity should characterize any analysis of cultural

conditions that conspired to undermine the well-being of BBC production remain,

inevitably compromisedÐ or mediatedÐ in practice; and while we may not, as he

Higher Educationº in Strathern, M. (ed.) Audit Cultures, London: Routledge.

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