[Oberlist] IT* CfP: Arts, Culture and Public Sphere Venice, November 4-8, 2008

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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
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http://www.oberliht.org.md
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