Things, practices & policies: relationality and the early stages of the international promotion of Dutch design, 1920s–1970s

This article takes a practice theory approach to explore the little-known history of the Dutch government practices that, between the early 1920s and mid 1970s, preceded explicit Dutch international cultural policy in organizing the promotion of the Dutch arts abroad. Advancing from an understanding of international cultural policy as a ‘hybrid’ (socio-material) practice of meaning production, it examines how those government agencies defined ‘Dutchness’ and ‘design’, and how the specificities of the things being promoted influenced those definitions. From this detailed empirical study, I propose a theorization of the relationship between policy, practices, and things as relational, meaning the understanding of things and policy as both shaping – and being shaped by – practices of international promotion. This theorization has broader relevance to cultural policy research since it suggests that policies and practices promoting different domains of culture may develop differently depending on the specificities of the artefacts that they seek to disseminate, and vice-versa.