Plural Values of Culture in Europe
Nancy Duxbury editor Gábor Sonkoly editor Antonella Fresa editor Arturo Rodríguez Morató editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:23rd Dec '25
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In recent years, the plurality of values of culture has been increasingly recognized in practical, academic, and policymaking contexts. Beyond its traditional intrinsic values—linked to aesthetics, authenticity, and excellence—its capacity to contribute to well-being, to promote identity and belonging and tolerance and inclusiveness, to stimulate creativity, and to foster innovation are ever more acknowledged by a great variety of social actors. However, an economy- and market-oriented perspective has come to dominate the administrative and managerial discourse on cultural valuation for a few decades. This has resulted in a predominance of an approach to valuing culture that is expressed exclusively in terms of its economic impact, obscuring other values of culture. The European research project UNCHARTED has tried to counteract this predominance by providing a broader vision of the societal value of culture in the European context and by applying this alternative view to some of the most relevant areas in which cultural valuation impinges on cultural management and cultural policy today. This book presents its main results.
Based on a pragmatist perspective, we have carried out an extensive multiple case study (65 cases in seven countries) that considers the multiplicity of agents who participate in cultural valuation processes (citizens, professionals of creation and preservation, experts, and politicians) and the diversity of evaluative practices in which they engage within three main areas: the field of cultural participation, the field of cultural production and heritage, and the field of cultural administration. The book shows the irreducible plurality of the values of culture, the characteristic complexity of the dynamics of valuation and evaluation in the cultural sphere, and the current shortcomings and possible improvements in institutional processes of cultural evaluation. It is essential reading for cultural professionals, policymakers, and scholars of culture.
Bringing together diverse perspectives, this book seeks to delineate a systematic research agenda and, more challengingly, to imagine future methodologies and approaches to decision-making that do not sweep the irreducible plurality under an economistic carpet. This is essential reading for anyone interested in value-based approaches to art and culture and in less reductive – and more democratic – forms of valuation.
Patrycja Kaszynska, Cultural Value Expert, Senior Research Fellow, University of the Arts London, UK.
Plural Values of Culture in Europe is an exceptionally ambitious and rare achievement. Bringing together the often disparate worlds of cultural production, consumption, and administration, it offers an analytically rigorous, empirically rich, and theoretically sophisticated account of cultural valuation -- one that is as policy-relevant as it is intellectually pathbreaking.
Vanina Leschziner, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Canada.
Plural Values of Culture in Europe situates values within more formalised regimes of valuation and evaluation whose inner complexities it explores by examining, inter alia, the grammars and methodologies governing their formation; and by examining the operation of these regimes across the relations between different actors in the processes through which cultural policies are formed and put into effect (constituency advocates and lobbyists, cultural sector professionals, politicians and bureaucrats). A landmark text, then, offering a rigorous counter to narrow economistic framings of the value issues that cultural policies need to engage with.
Tony Bennett, Emeritus Professor in Social and Cultural Theory, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. Honorary Professor, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Australia.
"All too often the value of culture is primarily seen in economic terms, as illustrated by concepts like creative economy or cultural industries. Detailed studies from several countries demonstrate a far greater and nuanced richness of cultural values while suggesting how the potential of culture for society could be enhanced". Helmut K. Anheier,Senior Professor of Sociology, past President, Hertie School, Germany.
ISBN: 9781032816067
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 720g
284 pages