In 1999 Larry Rothfield published a paper whose title needs to be spoken aloud rather than read. ‘Cultural policy studies?’ he asked, repeating the question three times, each time with a different word emphasised. Can there be policy studies about culture? Can studies of culture have any relevance to policy? And finally, accepting that there is such an animal as cultural policy, what is there about it that can be studied? The last of these questions is the relevant one for our purposes here. That cultural policy exists is clear enough; we defined its scope and coverage in Chapter 1. But how the analysis of cultural policy is to be approached, and what sort of advice for policy-makers might flow from cultural policy studies, remains a contested issue.

If ‘cultural policy studies’ exists at all as an identifiable area for scholarly research and empirical analysis, one of its principal points of origin can be traced to the cultural studies discipline, a loose assembly of scholars and writers concerned with the fundamental nature of culture and how it evolves as a sphere of influence for the state.