Performing Public Policy - An Institutional Ethnography of the Relationship Between Nova Scotia’s Provincial Government and the Professional Theatre Sector

Abstract

The Government of Nova Scotia invests in the province’s professional theatre sector through the provision of public support. The administrative processes which implement this public support organise how theatre professionals understand and engage in their work. This thesis explores how the provision and administration of Government of Nova Scotia public support coordinates and structures the work of theatre professionals within the province. This institutional ethnography opens the field of public administration to investigate the relationship between Nova Scotia’s professional theatre sector and the provincial government. It introduces a critical analysis of public policy administration and the consequences of this organization for how theatre professionals know and do their work. The data was collected through narrative interviews with Nova Scotian theatre professionals and public servants, observations of theatre sector activities, and review of public policy and administration, theatre companies, and public documents. This study found the institutional relationship suffers from an insufficiency (limitation) of language which hinders theatre professionals from communicating their lived experiences including how they engage and understand their work. This finding is important, because the study also uncovered the administrative processes which organize Nova Scotia’s provincial public support attribute as recognizing value in certain professional theatre work areas while making other work invisible. This organization of value contributes tensions between theatre professionals and the governing bodies. Theatre professionals experience an institutionalized distrust of and reliance on government support. Policy processes reward recognizable-company structures while taking for granted administrative work. Nonetheless, such work is essential to the sector’s activities. The result is that Nova Scotia’s professional theatre sector increasingly relies on invisible but necessary and unpaid work to sustain itself. This work is the consequence of participating in, seeking, receiving, and accounting for public funding. This work and the associated tensions between Nova Scotia’s professional theatre sector and the provincial government remain unaddressed due, in part, to the administrative practices which keep them outside of and therefore blind to the governing discourse.