Field Description in Arts and Culture

The objective of this research is to elaborate a field description on social innovation in the nine ITSSOIN countries (i.e. Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom), with specific respect to arts and culture. Due to the vast array of social phenomena encompassed by this definition, the report prominently focuses on non-industrial sectors, which represent the very core of cultural occurrences –according to the definition proposed by KEA (2006). Four major forces and trends have affected arts and culture in such countries during the last 10 years. These include the (generally diminished) public funding, the recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), the organisational restructuring experienced by several cultural institutions and –most notably –the increase in social participation. Major attention is paid to the last trend, which indeed represents the specific focus of this work. Social participation consists in the engagement of multiple stakeholders in funding, delivering and also creating arts and cultural products/projects. For this reason, it is particularly interesting to investigate social participation as a particular form of social innovation