Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.

本文以英国慈善部门对公共关系的案例研究为依据，认为文化中介研究迫切需要更加持久地关注政治以及被理解为权力关系，政党政治和政治项目（例如市场化和新自由主义）的政治。尽管广泛的研究分析了文化中介机构如何调解文化与经济之间的关系，但这是以对政治的深入分析为代价的。以案例研究为提示，我们强调了政治影响文化中介工作以及文化中介工作可能影响政治的方式的多样性。我们揭示了文化，经济和政治之间相互作用所产生的支撑实践的张力，