Call for Paper: Arts, Culture and Public Sphere Venice (Italy), November 4-8, 2008
The FDA Faculty of Design and Arts, together with DADI - Department of Arts and Industrial Design of the University IUAV in Venice, in cooperation with the Research Network for the Sociology of Culture and the Research Network for the Sociology of the Arts of the ESA - European Sociological Association are organizing the conference Arts, Culture and Public Sphere. Expressive and Instrumental Values in Economic and Sociological Perspectives. The conference also represents the 5th ESA Sociology of the Arts Research Network mid-term conference and the 2nd ESA Sociology of Culture Research Network midterm conference, and it will be the first opportunity to have three European networks the two Research Networks of the European Sociological Association, 'Sociology of Arts' and 'Sociology of Culture', and the network 'Economics and Planning of Arts and Culture' meeting around a common theme in Venice from 4 to 8 November 2008. Conference Research Framework Arts and culture can no longer be considered uncritically as vehicles merely related to a civilizing mission or to economic development. In the beginning, Social Sciences and Economic Studies identified the social context of the realms of art and culture, measured their impact and evaluated their management. Later, processes of expanding democratization exposed these realms to the criticism of the public sphere. Consequently, arts and culture became fields of social and economic contestation. Beneath the increasing examination of these realms rests the growing international and trans-national circulation of people, capital, and culture different forces that have inspired individuals and groups to challenge well-established authorities, mentalities and semantic codes and socio-economic development models. These processes turned the artistic and cultural fields in a lively crossroads for transdisciplinary research, spanning areas of inquiry once viewed as unrelated. Following the main theme of the conference, we will investigate how arts and culture became contested grounds involving multiple social and economic dimensions of contemporary societies. Theoretical Background In studying social action, the distinction between instrumental and expressive values is an analytic one. The two sets of values are related, but distinct. The relation of instrumental to expressive values marks both the juncture and disjuncture of economics and sociology. Both disciplines study values of both types, but conceived according to different postulates about phenomenological reality: economists from the perspective of methodological individualism, sociologists from that of methodological holism. Economists tend to consider expressive values as individual preferences, which pursue through the operation of a bracketed utilitarian calculus; sociologists tend to conceive those values as embodiments of collective meaning-making that the very terms of such a calculus. Economists expand the reach of their discipline by exploring how expressive values themselves serve larger instrumental purposes, such as the role cultural and artistic activities play in improving the level of social and human capital, as well as general well being. Meanwhile, sociologists expand the reach of theirs by exploring the variation and interdependence of instrumental and expressive values. In the terms of the communitarian organizational sociologist Philip Selznick, economists tend to study the efficiency of organizations, formal systems employing instrumental rationality in pursuit of delimited goals; sociologists tend to study institutions, which are infused with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand. Institutions and individuals are valued according to their positions in the larger community. Arts and culture are forms of economic activity, whose instrumental values can be measured in relation to the productive and local development processes. Hence, economists investigate not only the impact that cultural activities have intrinsically as productive sectors themselves, but also how they contribute to economic growth and urban development by feeding into innovative and productive processes. Arts and culture are also autonomous forms of action, whose aesthetic values can be judged by the expressivity and human-centeredness of their symbolic forms. Ultimately, judgments about how fully persons, institutions, or communities are realizing their identities is an aesthetic one as are judgments about the health of the public sphere. Given the previous premises, we therefore encourage strongly interdisciplinary. To build a special platform for interdisciplinary exchange and debate, in particular between economic and sociological perspectives, we propose a focus on expressive and instrumental values. The conference will be aimed at cross-fertilizing research using mixed research fields in all the areas. Details: http://www.artculturevenice2008.org sursa:artsmanagement -- Moldova Young Artists Association "Oberliht" http://www.oberliht.org.md . . . . . . . . . . . http://idash.org/mailman/listinfo/oberlist portal informational pentru arta si cultura din Moldova information gateway for arts and culture from Moldova _______________________________________________ oberlist mailing list [email protected] http://idash.org/mailman/listinfo/oberlist
