Work Package Leader: University of Bologna
Principal Investigators: Luca Zan, Paolo Ferri

WP3 addresses the central challenge of understanding the tensions relating to how different actors in the cultural field (i.e. citizens, professionals, public administrators) construct, measure, compare and rank the values they attribute to culture.

Specific objectives of WP3

• To analyse the grammars of valuation and evaluation in cultural practices
• To analyse the practices of evaluation in cultural production and heritage management
• To understand how do public administration evaluation methodologies influence cultural production and heritage management
• To investigate the representations of cultural value in cultural information systems
• Constructing a view of the societal value of culture

The focus is placed on three fundamental drivers of the cultural matrix:

• the citizens involved in cultural participation activities
• the cultural professionals collaborating in cultural production and preservation
• the experts and policy-makers representing, intervening and regulating culture

With the collaboration and participation of these different cultural actors, it carries out observation protocols, consultations and discussion processes.

In each case, the primary objective to be achieved is the identification of assessment and evaluation systems, more or less formalized and instrumentalized, present in the different areas.

The final goal of this phase of the research is to reach a more comprehensive, plural and integrated vision of the societal value of culture than the currently dominant.