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on Cultural Economics |
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Issue of 2024‒01‒15
four papers chosen by Roberto Zanola, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale |
| By: | Skarpelis, Anna Katharina Mosha (Harvard University) |
| Abstract: | Racial purity and supremacy were core to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own “racial scientific” research showed that most Germans were “mixed-race.” Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely non-blond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inwards aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial self-understandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications for the sociologies of culture; race and ethnicity; theories of the state and of empire and science and technology studies. |
| Date: | 2023–11–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:8vk9r&r=cul |
| By: | Anil R. Doshi; Oliver P. Hauser |
| Abstract: | Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on GenAI ideas. We study the causal impact of GenAI ideas on the production of an unstructured creative output in an online experimental study where some writers could obtain ideas for a story from a GenAI platform. We find that access to GenAI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers. However, objective measures of story similarity within each condition reveal that GenAI-enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity, but at the same time there is a risk of losing collective novelty: this dynamic resembles a social dilemma where individual writers are better off using GenAI to improve their own writing, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content may be produced with GenAI. Our results have implications for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners interested in bolstering creativity, but point to potential downstream consequences from over-reliance. |
| Date: | 2023–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2312.00506&r=cul |
| By: | Pavel D Simashenkov (Samara State University) |
| Abstract: | The article critically covers the current issues of "value-driven management" and the creative economy. Analyzing the concept of a "fragile and incomprehensible" (BANI) world, the author conclude that the widely proclaimed era of the knowledge economy is nothing more than utopia. A value-based transformation is possible if it is approached in a comprehensive and systemic way, which requires large-scale transformations initiated and supported by the power structures. The author believe that the creative economy is more extensive than the traditional one, and its development potential is rather limited. The paradigm of "commercial creativity", in fact, is aimed at providing employment and meeting the needs of the population of the "golden billion" countries. |
| Abstract: | Статья в критическом ключе освещает актуальные вопросы «ценностного менеджмента» и креативной экономики. Анализируя концепцию «хрупкого и непостижимого» (BANI) мира, автор приходит к выводу, что широко провозглашенная эра экономики знаний — не более чем утопия. Ценностная трансформация возможна, если подход к ней будет комплексным и системным, для чего требуются масштабные преобразования, инициируемые и поддерживаемые властными структурами. Креативная экономика, как полагает автор, в большей степени экстенсивна, чем традиционная, а потенциал ее развития весьма ограничен. Парадигма «коммерческого креатива», по сути, нацелена на обеспечение занятости и удовлетворение потребностей населения стран «золотого миллиарда». |
| Keywords: | Creative economy, Innovation, Value-based management, Digitalization, Utopianism |
| Date: | 2022–10–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-04269559&r=cul |
| By: | Ferro Gustavo; Gatti Nicolás |
| Abstract: | Experts give scores to wines, which are quality proxies for marketers and buyers. The production of wine quality is explained by a set of observable objective attributes, plus another set of unobservable and subjective (sensory) features, and randomness. We use a Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) to understand whether objective and subjective (sensory) characteristics of wines explain the differences in wine scores. We estimate a wine quality stochastic frontier production function, using a database of 1800 top-scored wines, in an 18 years-window encompassing objective determinants (price, production, year, grape, country, etcetera), being sensory aspects related to wine grading unobservable. We find that the variables included explain half of the “efficiency” in attaining scores and our results suggest that sensory variables may have a role in explaining inefficiency. |
| JEL: | D61 L66 |
| Date: | 2022–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aep:anales:4621&r=cul |