2 ESTADO, INDÍGENAS Y POSTNEOLIBERALISMO EN AMÉRICA LATINA

As I discussed in the review of literature (Chapter 2), commercial and academic research has very little interaction and there is limited awareness of the

contributions of the sectors on either side. When I arrived at the CBSO, I had very little knowledge of the extensive body of audience research conducted within the industry. I spent much of the first six months familiarising myself with commercial research reports and the CBSO’s own back-catalogue of audience studies. Similarly, marketing staff at the CBSO were not aware of the recent surge of audience research within academic musicology. Many of the difficulties faced in the early stages of this project came from a conflict in research ideologies and assumptions in academic research and commercial market research. My understanding of these difficulties was crystallised through reading Williamson, Cloonan and Frith’s (2011) article on Knowledge Resistance. I have since published my experiences as a ‘commissioned’ article in Participations journal (see Price, 2015).

A qualitative project of this depth and scope would have been beyond the resources of the orchestra without this collaboration. Indeed, this was an important factor in the rationale for conducting in-depth qualitative research; not only was I confident that it could provide a new means of understanding the value of core and populist concerts, but I also believed it was one of the most useful things I could offer as an academic in terms of addressing the gaps in the CBSO’s knowledge.

Given the time constraints of the CBSO, I quickly realised that the best way to make this research happen was to ‘piggy-back’ on areas they were planning to study. I therefore designed the data collection as a two-step approach, first sending a post-

concert survey out to audiences, and then using this to recruit participants for the semi-structured interviews. The survey was built around pressing questions in the marketing team, such as how audiences found out about concerts, who they attended with and whether they enjoyed the performance. In addressing more urgent research questions in the marketing team, the surveys raised the priority of my research in the allocation of resources. ‘Piggy-backing’ on the marketing team’s research needs therefore gave me the access to their audiences that I needed in order to be able to explore engagement holistically and investigate ideas of cultural hierarchy. After respondents had volunteered their contact details in the survey, I was able to contact them as an academic researcher, detaching myself somewhat from the orchestra. In doing so, I could establish some critical distance from the organisation throughout the series of interviews which gave me the freedom to explore topics away from the pressures of business decisions. I devised the interview questions around my research questions, prompted by reviewing previous literature and understanding the CBSO’s working practice, and was also free to mould the interviews around what was distinct, interesting and unusual in participants’ accounts of concert-going using grounded theory ‘lite’ (discussed below, Braun & Clarke, 2006; Charmaz, 2004; Starks & Trinidad, 2007; Strauss & Corbin, 2008). Combining surveys with interviews therefore created a two-stage project, the first of which focussed on the organisation’s aims, the second focussed on building new means of understanding audiences for academic and commercial researchers alike. Designing the research as a combination of surveys and interviews therefore fulfilled the dual purpose of this project by providing actionable information to the CBSO and contributing new knowledge to the understanding of audiences. The surveys provided immediate findings for the marketing team, meanwhile the interviews produced results over a much longer time-span. I was keen, however, that the interviews would not confirm the idea that academics are only interested in deep thinking and not researching in this ‘real world’. As I conducted the interviews, I therefore discussed findings informally with marketing staff, wrote emergent

themes into actionable research reports, and, in March of this year, reported back to the staff as a whole. I was keen to show that the philosophical debate of audiences has real-life implications for the ideology and working practice of the organisation. The two-stage research process of surveys and interviews was key to negotiating confidentiality and dissemination of knowledge from this project. At the start of this project, I had difficulty negotiating the dissemination of findings because of

Because market research is designed to make businesses more competitive, its value lies partly in its confidentiality (Williamson, Cloonan & Frith, 2011, p.461). Thus, the vast majority of the body of commercial research is not available to the public. Indeed, there is information at the CBSO that I have had access to as a collaborative researcher that I otherwise would not have seen. This is at odds with academic expectations of transparency and the dissemination of knowledge.

Data arising from the survey has different pressures of confidentiality than data arising from the interviews. Survey questions such as ‘how did you find out about this concert?’ are of limited relevance to the study, but are crucial for marketing strategy, and therefore the responses are commercially sensitive information. The survey data is consequently only included in this thesis where it is of relevance to the argument, with the majority of the findings remaining confidential to the CBSO. The same is true of my analyses of the CBSO ticket data, which I conducted in order to gain a better understanding of the organisation and therefore inform my research questions. Some data from this cannot be shared; the orchestra’s sales reports, for example, must remain confidential. However, I have been able to use some statistics from these analyses when they are relevant to the argument. I have been able to judge which findings it would be inappropriate to report due to the long-term collaboration which has not only given me a good level of understanding about what is ethically appropriate to share, but has also meant that the marketing team are able to trust me to make the right decision.

In addition, I am using the survey data very little in this thesis because the data was compromised in collection. The surveys were primarily designed to provide

immediate feedback to the CBSO and to recruit for the qualitative stage of the project. Each survey was based on a questionnaire template which I developed for the CBSO to use beyond the life of this project (included as Appendix 4). It was designed to be adaptable for future use, and each time the survey was sent out, it was tailored to their priorities for that concert to ensure the questionnaire did not become too long and that irrelevant question options were removed. These changes were made to try and prevent fatigue or annoyance from respondents which may have led to ill will towards the orchestra. In addition, making the survey as easy to complete as possible maximised the response rate; it was crucial that as many respondents as possible completed the survey because the invitation to volunteer for interviews was the final question.

The problem with having adapted the survey for each concert is that data is not comparable between all respondents; some questions were not asked of all respondents and some had different options to choose from in answering the

question. This has meant that I am not able to use data from certain questions in the survey, notably, the questions on the decision to attend. Only questions which were asked of all respondents with identical question options are used in the thesis, where they contextualise the findings from the qualitative interviews (these questions are marked with an asterisk in Appendix 4). The survey is an example of how tailoring a research project to be useful for arts organisations can involve making compromises to the integrity of an academic study. Nevertheless, I was able to retain full control of the interview series, which is far more valuable in expanding understanding of audiences today.

I saw my role as an academic researcher as being not only to fill in gaps in

knowledge at the CBSO, but to provide a critical distance on their practice. They had carried out many audience research projects before I arrived and had a nuanced conception of their audiences. I used my growing understanding of the ideology of the organisation in combination with a large-scale review of literature on audiences, to devise research questions that would challenge inherited ideas of cultural

hierarchy at academic, commercial and organisational levels. Indeed, the research question arose precisely because I was embedding into the organisation and

reviewing previous literature simultaneously, and it struck me that both researchers and organisation alike were grappling with the ambiguous role of populism.

Carrying out an in-depth qualitative project brought a new means of understanding the core/populist debate that could be of use to both practitioners and researchers alike.