The Trojan Horse: The Growth of Commercial Sponsorship

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.

Deborah Philips is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the University of Brighton, UK. Garry Whannel is Professor of Media Cultures, and Director of RIMAP: the Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance, at the University of Bedfordshire, UK.

Deborah Philips and Garry Whannel have given us a great gift--a book that manages to transcend its times, even as it captures them. They analyze the ruins of neoliberalism's baleful influence on British life, from culture to sport to health. Blending political economy with cultural studies, The Trojan Horse expertly describes thirty years of struggle and mystification. -- Toby Miller, Professor of Cultural Industries, City University London, UK and author of Makeover Nation Commercial sponsorship now pervades our lives, intruding private interests into the management of our public and collective affairs at great social cost and with few economic benefits as the weaknesses and failures of free-market economics become increasingly manifest. By demonstrating this in convincing detail, Deborah Philips and Garry Whannel's broad-ranging and incisive study provides an invaluable service in re-asserting the principles of publicness that need to be defended against the Trojan Horse of privatisation. An important and timely book. -- Tony Bennett, Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory, University of Western Sydney, Australia From art and sport to education and health, the authors describe how seemingly benevolent sponsorship is the Trojan Horse that has facilitated a creeping erosion of corporate interests into the public sector. In a devastating critique of the demise of the welfare state, Philips and Whannel document the colonisation of public space by commercial priorities that enables private enterprise to set the agendas of our schools, hospitals, care homes and surgeries with deleterious consequences. Wide-ranging, insightful and shocking to boot, this is a "must read" for anyone interested in the nature of public value and the hidden power of corporations. -- Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK