Libraries are included in the widely accepted definition of Cultural and Creative Industries, together with heritage, performing arts, museums, visual arts, and archives, and they play an important role in the creative value chain. The Economics of Libraries highlights the economic importance of the library sector.Providing an accessible and concise expert overview of the most important economic features and diversified functions of libraries, the authors also summarise th...

This book reassesses central topics in cultural economics: Public finance and public choice theory as the basis for decision-making in cultural and media policy, the role of welfare economics in cultural policy, the economics of creative industries, the application of empirical testing to the performing arts and the economics of cultural heritage. Cultural economics has made enormous progress over the last 50 years, to which Alan Peacock made an important contribution. The volume brings to...

A notable feature in cultural life is the growing demand to preserve and promote public access to historical buildings and sites, and artistic treasures of the past. Governments are increasingly involved in financing and regulating private attempts to meet this growing demand as well as extending their own provision of these treasures in state and locally owned museums and galleries. These developments raise important issues about the scope, content, and relevance of heritage policies in t...

In principle the advanced, market-driven world in which we now live is fuelled by knowledge, information and transparency, but in practice the processes that produce this world systematically corrupt and denigrate knowledge: this is the powerful and provocative argument advanced by Colin Crouch in his latest exploration of societies on the road to post-democracy.Crouch shows that executives in profit-maximizing corporations have incentives to ignore or distort knowledge, especially...

World economy globalization is driven by multiple interactive forces. Theygive rise to a number of paradoxes that impact the functional and developmental characteristics of firms. This book offers for the first time an in-depth study of the logical contradictions that stream from economic integration on the supranational level.

Urban regeneration is a key focus for public policy throughout Europe. This book examines social sustainability and analyses its meaning. The authors offer a comprehensive European perspective to identify best practices in sustainable urban regeneration in five major cities in Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. This authoritative overview of the scholarly literature makes the book essential reading for researchers and post-graduate students in sustainable development, real est...

Cultural Economics and Cultural Policies offers a unique guide to the state of the art in cultural economics. First, it alerts scholars and students to the necessity for careful definition and measurement of the `cultural sector'. Second, it affords examples of how economic analysis can shed light on the motivation of creative and performing artists and of artistic enterprises. Third, Cultural Economics and Cultural Policies widens the discussion of public policy...

The process of globalization has had profound, often destabilizing, effects on space, at all levels (i.e. local, regional, national, international). This revealing book analyzes, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of globalization over space. It considers, through a dialogue among different paradigms, the ways in which space has become more important in the global economy.Globalization has been advocated as a way of shrinking time and space which will lead to a homogen...

Housing and Home Unbound pioneers understandings of housing and home as a meeting ground in which intensive practices, materials and meanings tangle with extensive economic, environmental and political worlds. Cutting across disciplines, the book opens up the conceptual and empirical study of housing and home by exploring the coproduction of the concrete and the abstract, the intimate and the institutional, the experiential and the collective.Exploring diverse examples in ...

Cultural policy is changing. Traditionally, cultural policies have been concerned with providing financial support for the arts, for cultural heritage and for institutions such as museums and galleries. In recent years, around the world, interest has grown in the creative industries as a source of innovation and economic dynamism. This book argues that an understanding of the nature of both the economic and the cultural value created by the cultural sector is essential to good policy-makin...

A collection of stimulating essays exploring the wide-ranging debates surrounding the relationship between business and society in 21st century Ireland.Wide-ranging, diverse and thought-provoking contributions from leading business researchers, economists, sociologists and political scientists from Ireland and abroad probe five central themes: the making and unmaking of the Celtic Tiger; governance, regulation and justice; partnership and participation; the nature of Irish borders ...

In an increasingly globalised world, economic and cultural imperatives can be seen as two of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour. This book considers the relationship between economics and culture both as areas of intellectual discourse, and as systems of societal organisation. Adopting a broad definition of culture, it explores the economic dimensions of culture, and the cultural context of economics. The book is built on a foundation of value theory, developing the twin noti...