Blockchain Papers

George Robert Barker

No abstract is available for this record.

O. V. Eleskina

The present work analyses the reforms of cultural institutions financing system in Russia from the mid 1980s to the present time. A short review of the government’s activities is given in respect of transition from purely state financing to multichannel system of forming cultural institutions’ budgets, changing their legal nature, and developing their commercial activities. Processes of management decentralization and reallocation of financing onto budgets of various levels are considered. Special attention is paid to introduction of market mechanisms into activities of such institutions, problems connected with their application are touched as well. Both positive and negative consequences of the policy pursued by the government in matters of financing the culture at different stages of the reforms are investigated. The analysis result indicates that preservative tendencies prevail in the government’s activity in the cultural sphere, and budgetary funds still make the basis of the budget in the most part of cultural institutions, conservatism and inertness in their activities remain.

Michal Plaček, František Ochrana, Milan Jan Půček, Milan Křápek

Abstract This study tests whether decentralized leadership influences the efficiency of running selected cultural institutions, specifically museums in the Czech Republic. For the analysis, data from 2015 from 187 museums spread around the whole Czech Republic are used. The method for the evaluation of efficiency is data envelope analysis, and for identifying the influence of decentralized leadership, a regression analysis is used. Museums established by municipalities reach higher efficiency than museums established by regions and central government. The causes may be found in the ability to better estimate the local demand as well as in the rational behavior of municipalities that prefer a cost-minimization strategy. The benefits of decentralization cannot be seen only in the field of finance but also in reinforcing local traditions, trust and the effects of social capital that is generated by a strong regional cultural identity.

Adam Mateusz Suchecki

Following the completion of the process of decentralization of the public administration in Poland in 2003, a number of tasks implemented so far by the state authorities were transferred to the local level. One of the most significant changes in the methods of financing and management of the local authorities was the transfer of culture and national heritage-related tasks to a group of the own tasks implemented by local governments. As a result of the decentralization process, the local government units in Poland were given a significant autonomy in determining the purposes of their budgetary expenditure on culture. At the same time they were obliged to cover these expenses from their own revenue. This paper focuses on the analysis of expenditure on culture covered by the provincial budgets, taking into consideration the structure of cultural institutions by their types in the years 2003, 2006, 2010 and 2012. To illustrate the diversity of the expenditure on culture by the type of the institutions in particular provinces, one applied the location quotient (LQ), which reflects a spatial distribution of expenditure on culture in relation to reference expenses incurred by the cultural institutions in Poland.

Gérard Régimbeau

Introduction au numéro de COMMUNICATION & MANAGEMENT faisant suite au colloque de novembre 2013 du Lerass-Ceric, à Montpellier 3, intitulé : « La culture en projets, service et/ou industrie : d’Adorno au Web3 ». Le texte situe la question théorique des industries culturelles et aborde des aspects problématisés des nouvelles conditions de présence et de développement de la création, notamment en arts plastiques, dans une période qui sollicite autrement les acteurs des industries créatives.

Lingyue Li

Fordism-Keynesianism gradually transited to neoliberalism during 1970s economic recession in capitalist society, shifting urban governance from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. At the same time, China’s 1978 political-economic reform has led to a rapid development and a profound urban transformation characterized by globalization, neo-liberal decentralization and marketization over the past thirty years. To sustain the development and further promote the transformation, mega-events as one of those entrepreneurial policy programs are increasingly favored and widely used by city policy makers. Adopting urban entrepreneurialism as the theoretical perspective, this research explores mega-events, aiming to resolve two debates concerning urban entrepreneurialism and mega-events in the context of China: whether mega-events are effective and sustainable ways for China’s urban development in entrepreneurial city discourses and whether Chinese cities and their local states are entrepreneurial in nature in mega-events? It then takes Shanghai Expo 2010 as the case, focusing on how the Expo as entrepreneurial city action impacts on Shanghai’s urban transformation and how different stakeholders behave in the Expo development. Analysis of the case provides some findings resolving the debates. \n \nFirst, through landscape reconfiguration, spatial restructuring and new sources provision, Expo 2010 effectively transforms Shanghai city within a short time, showing entrepreneurial city qualities in diminutive spatial scale. However, it fails to improve social life except those who under high media exposure and is powerless to impress the world as China has little voice in the Western mainstream media. Moreover, while Expo 2010 generally benefits sustainable development by using energy saving technologies in Expo Park, by creating “Shanghai Mode” rehabilitation for affected communities and by preserving industrial and cultural heritage for future creative industry development, it still negatively impacts general urban living and causes exorbitant investment. \n \nThen, entrepreneurial governance is manifested in Expo operation as municipal government unites various stakeholders to ensure the smooth progress of the event, a process explicable by both urban regime and growth machine models. The private sectors are encouraged by municipal government to join Expo market as sponsors or developers and are mobilized interests triggered by Expo opportunities. Civil communities play auxiliary roles that must be united by government to achieve long-term growth. Urban planners are important inter-mediators among stakeholders in Expo, serving municipal government for urban growth. Although “Local Developmental State” model exhibits at municipal level as “development” represents the primary legitimizing principle of the state above those of individuals and the plan-rationality suppresses the market rationality, the “Entrepreneurial State” model can better interpret the nature of government in terms of coordination and partnership in Expo 2010. The government start-ups commercially operate in financing, investment attraction and land development, actively cooperating with private, foreign capitals and other social forces. \n \nThese findings imply that the event-led restructuring is overall effective for the transformation of urban order from traditional industries to flexible leisure consumption, from monocentric city to polycentric mega-city region, consistent with the tide of postmodern city. They also imply that the operation of Expo by municipal government is entrepreneurial in nature, corresponding to the emerging neo-liberalization with Chinese characteristics.

Pierre‐Michel Menger

Cultural policy in Europe is deeply rooted in the Welfare State doctrine that has been prevailing during the last half century. Its implementation has gone along with the invention and rise of educational policy, social policy and health policy. This paper sketches its evolution as a four phase move towards what has been emerging as the central dual content of the current public cultural policy: preserving and promoting heritage, and bringing the creative industries at the core of the so-called knowledge society. The general evolutionary trend shows four distinct phases: 1) the creation of a systematic cultural supply policy based on a limited definition of culture suitable for public financing and based on a vertical concept of democratization by conversion; 2) the gradual decentralization of public action, which leads to an increasing disparity in its aims and functions, and which challenges the initial universalist, top-down egalitarian model; 3) a revision of the legitimate scope of public action, which declares symbolically obsolete the founding hierarchy of cultural politics, that which would oppose high culture, protected from market forces and entertainment culture and governed by the laws of the industrial economy; 4) an increasing tendency to justify cultural policy on the basis of its contribution to economic growth and to the balance of national social diversity, which legitimises the regulatory power of public action as well encouraging the expansion of the creative industries and the demands for the evaluation of procedures and results. The last section of this paper moves away from the state centered perspective and focuses on the city as the incubator of cultural generativity, in order to suggest how a city-centered approach to cultural development challenges the state-centered doctrine of cultural policy.

Lluís Bonet, Emmanuel Négrier

The redistribution of powers concerning cultural policy corresponds to a specific historical trajectory as well as to political and commercial dynamics. Thirty years since the 1978 Constitution, Spain is a quasi-federal state. Their cultural life and policies have expanded and have been decentralized. The redistribution process is a result of the search of effectiveness confronted with the question of the legitimization of power. Legitimacy is a permanent theme of debate as well as a discursive and strategic instrument between institutional actors, and it sheds light on the apparent inconsistencies of the multi-level governance of cultural policies. To study the different aspects of these relationships, the article principally focuses on three areas. The first is an institutional analysis, which allows us to determine the place of each institutional actor within the network of cultural policies as well as the horizontal and vertical interactions. The second is an analysis of the public financing of culture, which permits us to measure the quantitative impact of cultural policies within the centre–periphery dynamic. The third is an analysis of public policies, which allows a comparative approach to the dynamics of the autonomous community regime. The dialectic between differentiation and standardization, a mark of cultural policies modernity in the context of centre–periphery relationships, is a result of the pressure from the main players on the different Spanish cultural and territorial markets. Examples of “good practices” mimicry as well as of “new” pattern models, like the new Arts Council of Catalonia, are used to expose the non-existence of a formal Spanish model of cultural policy, but shows the process of innovation-reply product strategies, and the dialectic between political autonomy and homogenization processes.

Jung Hwan Lee

Well known for its centralized local economic system under the national equity principle, Japan has experimented with transforming this regional redistribution system into a new local economic system of governance for more autonomous local economic growth over the past decade. This new local economic governance has been characterized by the increasing involvement of social actors, such as large private corporations and local communities, in policy processes.This dissertation reveals that new local economic growth strategies for the new local economic governance have operated under very different models in different regions of Japan, although all new local programs have been introduced under the banner of public-private partnership. New partnership programs in the local economic policy arena in the 2000s have moved toward the market model, in which local authorities pursue growth by attracting international business resources, in the major metropolitan areas around Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, whereas they have moved toward the community model, in which local authorities purge growth by mobilizing local organizational resources, in the rest of Japan. The market model is embedded in market reform for deregulation that makes large private corporations' freer activities easy, whereas the community model is an attempt to strengthen the structure of endogenous networks among local authorities and local economic and social elites.This dissertation highlights two variables to explain regional variations of local economic growth strategies: dual local economic structures and diverging politico-economic coalitions. First, under the rule of Koizumi Junichiro, a coalition of promoting market reform among neoliberal politicians and large private corporations has won politically over a coalition for maintaining national equity among politicians embedded in traditional conservative center-local linkages, local business groups, and local leadership of underdeveloped areas, in national politics. The regional redistribution mechanism stopped functioning in this political choice. Instead, market reform and local community participation have been introduced as alternatives to regional redistribution mechanisms. Second, the major metropolitan areas and other underdeveloped areas, which came to stand on equal conditions for autonomous local economic growth strategies under decentralization reforms, are characterized by different situations in attracting private investment. The competitive regions of the major metropolitan areas have taken the market model as their main local economic growth strategy because they are competitive to attract private investment. In contrast, the protected regions outside the major metropolitan areas have taken the community model as their key local economic growth strategy because they have less competitive local economic structure of fading industries and scare population for attracting private investment.Over the past decade, reforms for public-private partnership in the local economic policy arena resulted in the disturbance of the Japanese way of balancing market powers and local interests in the postwar period. In the postwar period, the centralized regional redistribution mechanism, led by national politicians and central bureaucracies, functioned as a tool for social integration with consideration for national equity. However, experiments with the new form of local economic governance were not successful in balancing market reform with local community mobilization. The mobilization of local community resources could not match the political role of the regional redistribution mechanism outside the major metropolitan areas. In addition, market reform, which has been more effective in the advanced major metropolitan areas, has produced increasing regional economic disparity. Japan has faced a complicated stand-off between large private corporations detached from specific localities and local communities locked in place, which were connected by national political coordination mechanisms in the postwar period. Although each of two diverging local economic growth strategies has been effective in different regions, there was no national political mechanism for mediating local variations of these localized programs in the 2000s.

Phil Jenkins

James O. Young, professor and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Victoria, has given us a clear, concise, and overwhelmingly informative introduction to the complex subject of the ethics of cultural appropriation. This book could only have come about through many years of travel and scholarly investigation. It is a valuable introduction for those not familiar with the literature on this interesting subject. Young—whose writing voice is always confident, displaying an authoritative grasp on the relevant issues—manages to bring to the work a fastidious clarity of thought and the ability to lead the reader by the hand through his arguments. In five chapters, Young lays out what is at stake in the various kinds of cultural appropriation of artworks, his own views about what should and should not be considered morally wrong about cultural appropriation, and his recommendations for what part public policy should play in this area. His motivation for writing this book is clearly to defeat as many arguments against cultural appropriation of artistic elements as possible. In this, he is mostly successful. In chapter 1, Young introduces the topic and stresses his position that the understanding of what constitutes culture need not be too precise for the views he presents to have value. There are two main types of appropriation he is interested in here: They can be roughly thought of in terms of content (the taking of an idea or a style) and object (the taking of an artwork itself). He further breaks cultural appropriation into five different, more specific types, namely: tangible objects, content, style, motif (influenced by the art of a culture), and subject. He also discusses various objections to cultural appropriation that different writers have offered, objections that have tended to become the orthodoxy in scholarly debates. For example, one might say that cultural appropriation is wrong because a culture is harmed, or that a work or a style or an idea has been stolen from it, or that an artwork in a culture's style by an outsider is profoundly offensive to members of that culture, or that appropriation is wrong not for ethical reasons, but because there are aesthetic flaws when outsiders take something from insiders. The rest of the book is organized according to these different possible aesthetic and ethical wrongs. Chapter 2 addresses the question of whether culturally appropriated artworks always suffer aesthetically. There are two versions of what he calls the aesthetic handicap thesis: The first maintains that outsiders will always necessarily employ aesthetic content ineffectively; the second says that the mere fact that the content has been appropriated from another culture constitutes an aesthetic flaw. Some have argued that an artist must be a member of a culture in order to produce aesthetically valuable artworks distinctive of that culture. This he calls the cultural experience argument. Young's answer to this argument is that many cultural outsiders in fact have produced such artworks. For instance, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and others have played blues music so well that they have won awards and praise from African American cultural insiders. Working in a given style is like learning a language, Young tells us, so that the language can be learned by anyone, even outsiders (p. 41). It is here that I encounter my first difficulty with Young's arguments. While it is certainly true that someone with enough talent can master most any style, even one that arose from outside of one's own culture, I do not think Young does the cultural experience argument justice. I think he mischaracterizes the claims made by proponents of the view. For instance, Young quotes Charlie Parker as having said, “If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn” (p. 35). This statement does not sound as strong to me as it apparently does to Young. I would paraphrase it something like this: The manner in which you perform music is crucially formed, in part, by the unique life experiences you have had, and so if you try to perform music as if it were coming from someone who had different experiences, you will be in some way unsuccessful. But Young takes this quote and others like it as saying that if one has not had a particular cultural experience, one will necessarily produce works of poor quality in that style. This seems an overly simplistic interpretation of the view. One with a non‐African American background can certainly produce music in the blues style, especially if one has had oppressive cultural experiences of one's own (which is often the subtext of much of the blues), and the resulting music can in fact be very good. Young mentions several examples of white blues musicians who have even been praised by black blues musicians (as if this is any kind of proof that there is no difference!). But what white blues musicians cannot produce is blues music that reflects the oppressive cultural heritage of African Americans. This is the point, I think, that all of Young's quotes on this topic make. In chapter 3, the large topic of cultural appropriation as theft is discussed. Two types of theft structure the discussion: (1) theft of objects and (2) theft of styles, motifs, and subjects. Young leans heavily on the issue of who (a culture or an individual) can own an object or a style and why. Here as elsewhere in the book, Young is a strong advocate for the maximum freedom of artists to appropriate subject matter, as he finds the idea of a culture's owning subject matter—by inheritance, traditional law, or as have being given it by gods, for instance—to be unfounded. Young argues that only individuals can own things, and only concrete things at that. This Eurocentric position is evident in many of his arguments against any moral obligation to regard property (intellectual or artistic) as collective. While I tend to agree with the outcome of his argument here, his argument itself seems to rest on assumptions that not everyone would accept. Chapters 4 and 5 cover cases where cultural appropriation could be wrong due to the harm and the profound offense it does to the culture's members, respectively. With regard to harm, misrepresenting the style of a culture can do that culture harm; however, that harm can be done by both insiders and outsiders. With regard to offense, even though it is prima facie wrong to engage in activities that are profoundly offensive, Young argues that, nevertheless, appropriation that causes profound offense is not always wrong. Borrowing from Joel Feinberg's works in philosophy of law, Young holds that two considerations are important for determining whether causing offense is a moral wrong: the availability of alternative arrangements and the reasonableness of the offense. I think there are a pair of dichotomies implicitly lurking beneath the surface of this book. The first is an observable–unobservable dichotomy about aesthetic properties; the second is a consequentialist–deontological dichotomy about morality. With regard to the first, there are those who hold that only observable properties are relevant in evaluating an artwork on the one hand and those who hold that much of what is unobserved about an artwork is relevant for aesthetic evaluation on the other. All Young's aesthetic arguments lean toward countenancing only strictly observable aesthetic properties, which may explain why he so often comes down in favor of free and open cultural taking (though there are exceptions). In other words, if an outsider can make a work that appears to be aesthetically equivalent to an artwork made by a cultural insider, then that work is just as aesthetically authentic and valuable as a work made by an insider. While this may seem initially plausible, after further and deeper thought, it seems that many works do in fact have unobservable, aesthetically significant properties. With regard to the second dichotomy, Young appears to give a largely (though again, there are one or two exceptions) utilitarian evaluation of the ethics of cultural appropriation. This theoretical position leads to what feels, to a westerner, like an agreeably simple formulation in which pleasure and freedom are maximized. This is a laudable outcome in most cases. But this hidden orientation also allows Young to too quickly claim unargued‐for ethical priorities; he merely takes them for granted. For instance, when he discusses the idea that some cultures believe that they have been given artworks or property as gifts from their gods or ancestor beings, he suddenly says that “claims to have been given something by the gods or ancestor beings are false” (p. 78). Of course, Young is entitled to his beliefs, but especially in a book of philosophy, whose grounds are presumably always open to question, this seems particularly abrupt. No argument for this is even attempted. All in all, however, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts is a commendable achievement. I had fun arguing with this book, and it must always be appreciated that it is only in clearly written works that one can find positions presented lucidly enough to argue with. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts will become the standard work in this field for many years to come, and undergraduates could gain every bit as much from its interesting examples and clear arguments as graduate students and professionals can. In the current world political climate, with national boundaries becoming ever more amorphous, we should be having lively debate on the ethics and aesthetics of the cultural borrowing and stealing of artworks. Young's book serves as a sterling contribution toward this important goal.

Akitoshi Edagawa

Structural reforms focusing on decentralization of power have allowed local governments to undertake a broader range of cultural activities than ever before. However, such activities are mainly financed with subsidies from the national government and donations from companies, because local governments do not have sufficient sources of revenue on their own. Meanwhile, the 21st century is being called the era of art and culture. Although local citizens are impacted mentally as well as economically by the deteriorating employment situation, they are mentally encouraged by artistic and cultural activities. Moreover, there have been a growing number of cases where local communities are revitalized by artistic and cultural activities.This research is designed to identify activities that local citizens can experience in daily life in an effort to see if the local communities have gained control over cultural activities that used to be shackled by subsidies, guidance and advice from the national government (in other words, to see if such local cultural activities meet the needs of this era of decentralization). The data reflect financial aspects of these activities quite accurately. Having said that, each local government takes different measures for the target activities, from improving local cultural standards (e.g., increasing the number of local citizens who appreciate such activities), preserving traditional performing arts, enhancing publicity, increasing the number of people engaged in exchange programs, to community development (e.g., measures against depopulation). It is worth noting that most of these activities are undertaken by municipalities and non-profit organizations.While the 21st century has been dubbed the era of decentralization with the 1999 passage of the Law Concerning Decentralization of Government Authority, local governments receive subsidies exceeding 50% of their budgets from the Japan Foundation for Regional Art Activities under the control of the Agency for Cultural Affairs.JEL classification: R51, R53, Z11

Mário Fortuna, José António Cabral Vieira, Margarida Mendes

One objective frequently found in models of decentralized financing is that of equalization. The concern is that poorer jurisdictions receive enough resources for basic services and for development promotion, thus eliminating horizontal and vertical imbalances. In Portugal, decentralization has occurred at two levels: the local, for the whole country and the regional for the autonomous regions of the Azores and Madeira. Decentralization to local governments has undergone several changes in recent decades. The current paper focuses on testing for the presence of an equalization effect in the models adopted to finance municipalities in Portugal, since the nineteen nineties. Using the theoretical background that maintains that for the presence of an equalizing effect it is necessary that, on a per capita basis, poorer regions or localities receive relatively more transfers than the richer jurisdictions, a test is made using a data set that includes all municipalities of Portugal. The situation of the two autonomous regions is controlled with dummy variables. The hypothesis that the models used have an equalizing effect is tested through the sign of the coefficient of the regression of per capita transfers on per capita own resources. In the presence of an equalizing effect the sign will be significant and negative. It is confirmed that, for the period under analysis, the municipalities with lower per capita own revenues are those that receive more transfers per capita. There is, therefore, an equalizing effect in the current transfer system to municipalities. Using pooled data, one can also conclude that the equalization effect has become stronger with the 1998 and 2002 reviews of the system, when compared to the system in effect in 1991.