ABSTRACT
Institutional and professional reputations become key ways in which the time extracted from individuals is transformed into a value that is managed as part of the enterprise's assets going forward'. Staying with this theme of reputational capital then, the transfer of the operational culture from commercial business worlds often means that the logic of publicity and marketing reduces the publicness of educational and cultural institutions to the terms of public address', and from there very quickly it is further reduced to forms of publicity predicated on the techniques of mass media advertisement, social networking and promotional culture. The informal educational sector models range from the therapeutic to the political; from consciousness-raising to activist self-organisation; and from co-opting public resources for ostensibly counter-cultural practices to self-institutions outside the terms of state provision, public funding and existing institutional legitimation. Accompanying these developments, there has been an intensification of debate and reflection on the role of informal cultural education provided by cultural institutions.
