ABSTRACT
Cultural Trends grew out of the work of the culture program of the Policy Studies Institute (PSI). When the Rowntree Trust finally withdrew its core funding of the PSI, PSI was forced to subsist entirely on commissioned research, which was not sufficient to pay for overhead and maintain its core services. PSI was then purchased by the University of Westminster as a way of establishing research credibility for the university, even though PSFs work was reduced in scope. Cultural Trends represents a different take on the interpretation and distribution of cultural policy-relevant data. Cultural Trends is a model of how to occupy the middle ground, and it is worth monitoring to see how stable it can become in its new form. In the end, it does rely on the assumption that others will commission or support the basic research that it will then report and comment upon; it cannot function outside of a collaborative ecology of research on cultural policy.
