The Digital and Cultural Economy SAHA Working Group exists to foreground research which covers the creative, performing and digital arts and the cultural economy more generally. These can cover not only music, dance, theatre and film, but also museum studies, history, art history, copyright law and tourism, as well as the economic value of literary and cultural figures and festivals. As the erosion of job security in the Arts and Humanities bites deeper into the sector it becomes increasingly important to broaden the range of arguments deployed to defend the Humanities, as the AHRC has been doing for at least fifteen years. This is especially relevant since-as AHRC Executive Chair Christopher Smith noted at the RSE at the joint AHRC-SAHA event of 26 June 2026- the Creative Economy is growing six times as fast as the broader economy of the UK. This is the language through which to engage government.
It is very clearly no longer enough to protest in favour of intrinsic or disciplinary value or a presumed shared set of Humanities values, but to speak in a language funders understand, and to demonstrate the effectiveness of that language. This is what the Digital and Cultural Economy does: ‘Claims for the arts based on flawed understandings of economic value will fall increasingly on deaf ears when competing with other equally credible claims on public resources’ (Bakshi, Freeman and Hitchen (2018), 4, 7, 8).
To take only one example, in 2015 as part of the AHRC Cultural Value project, work by Hasan Bakshi and others demonstrated that significant monetary value could be ascribed to the activities and facilities of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London and Tate Liverpool (TL): indeed there was some indication that higher values were ascribed in Liverpool (where TL came in over 60% higher than NHM). V & A Dundee seems to have had a similarly disproportionate impact achieved through institutional devolution. The 2020 Economic Impact Assessment (EIA) indicated that the V & A in Dundee had a Gross Value Added of £21M to Dundee (£75M in Scotland as a whole) and supported 696 FTE jobs in the city (2143 in Scotland) in its first year of operation (Ekosgen V & A Dundee Economic Impact Assessment (2020)), and this without considering the wider brand value of the development to the city. The substantial and intriguing evidence here suggests that regional growth strategies may benefit from devolving some major UK international brands, and the economic case for this is both as stronger or stronger than other modes of civic devolution and worth exploring further. There is a case for valuing our culture and institutions, not to diminish them or reduce them to solely monetary terms, but to make wider audience understand how valuable they are, as with the Deloitte study of Sydney Opera House’s social and brand value. The challenge for the Arts and Humanities is to show why we are important in a language that does not come naturally to us: it is a new-but highly relevant, indeed almost existential-form of communication.
Professor Murray Pittock
PI, AHRC/UKRI World Class Labs, The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Economic Impact Assessment, 2026-27
Co-I, Innovate UK Museums in the Metaverse, 2023-26
PI, Barclays Bank Placemaking, International Financial Services District, Glasgow, 2021
PI, Robert Burns and the Scottish Economy (Scottish Government), 2018-20
PI, EPSRC/AHRC Scottish Heritage Partnership, 2018-19
