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This paper, first presented at a symposium on the ‘past, present and future of cultural studies,’ traces disciplinary changes in the study of culture from the perspective of ‘cultural science,’ a term that was used by some of the earliest practitioners of cultural studies, including Raymond Williams. The paper goes on to describe some problems with cultural studies as it has become institutionalised. It suggests that some of the concerns of the present moment, including work on the creative industries, show that a new version of cultural science is needed, based on evolutionary principles, in dialogue with the evolutionary approach in economics that was called for a century ago by Thorstein Veblen. This evolutionary turn, or ‘cultural science 2.0,’ it is argued, offers a radical and challenging future for cultural studies.</abstract>

‘From Cultural Studies to Cultural Science.’

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Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas. It is about adding value to products and services, to ways of undertaking tasks, and developing policies through the application of ideas that are new in a particular context. The importance of innovation flows from an understanding that the future of advanced economies lies in exploiting knowledge. This application of new ideas is essential in creating and maintaining high-value products and services which are prized within global markets. Policymakers increasingly recognise that their ability to address urgent social issues also rests on a wholesale commitment to innovation. Solutions to social problems such as terrorism, climate change, public health issues and ageing populations will require fresh thinking and the combined use of technological, cultural, social and economic change. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role that arts and humanities research plays in innovation and the challenges faced in making the most of its knowledge. It then goes on to explore the public funding structures that support this research in the UK, and the work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in particular.</abstract>

Arts and Humanities Research in the Innovation System: The UK Example

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This paper explores the rise of <italic>cultural economy</italic> as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’. While work undertaken in cultural studies has contributed to these developments, the development of neo-liberalism as a meta-concept in critical theory constitutes a substantive barrier to more sustained engagement between cultural studies and economics, as it rests upon a caricature of economic discourse. The paper draws upon Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism to indicate that there are significant problems with the neo-Marxist account hat became hegemonic over the 2000s. The paper concludes by identifying areas such as the value of information, the value of networks, motivations for participation in online social networks, and the impact of business cycles on cultural sectors as areas of potentially fruitful inter-disciplinary engagement around the nature of cultural economy.</abstract>

The Cultural Economy Moment?

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New advances in collaborative technologies, often grouped under the umbrella term ‘web 2.0’, are changing the opportunity space for organisational collaboration and decision making. Research and development can now be outsourced to external self-organising communities of scientists, new business models rely wholly on content created by end users and customers are increasingly asked for input to the development of new products and services. The way in which many strategic and operational decisions are made, once the sole prevail of executive management, is being challenged by new forms of knowledge, expertise and opinion from non-management employees, and increasingly, from those outside the organisation such as customers, partners and suppliers. The widespread adoption of web 2.0 technologies and their increasing use in the business context, in other words, is creating an inevitable tension between traditional ‘top-down’ strategic decision-making principles and ‘bottom-up’, ad hoc and sometimes unstructured collaborative processes.
This paper examines recent changes to the innovation process and the advent of so-called <italic>fifth generation innovation</italic>, and discusses the way in which web 2.0 technologies are further evolving these models, highlighting that <italic>ideation technologies</italic> are an important part of the new breed of so-called innovation technologies. It then explores the particular example of <italic>jam events</italic>, which bring together a targeted group of participants on the web for a time-limited period to respond to a specific challenge, defined by decision-makers, with ideas, opinions and votes in a socially mediated process. The final section introduces the concept of <italic>co-created strategy</italic>, and discusses the factors required for an organisation to build the <italic>absorptive capacity</italic> needed to truly take advantage of the new knowledge created by ideation technologies.</abstract>

The implications of ‘jam’ and other ideation technologies for organisational decision making

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The ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) commissioned two jams –online collaborative events – to discover new ideas for improving outcomes in two important aspects of the Centre’s work.
The first jam – known as the CCi Mainstreaming Challenge - was held for two weeks from 8th to 23rd June 2009 and focused on findings ways to improve the mainstream impact of the Centre’s research. The event involved 112 participants from the CCi’s nodes around Australia and internationally, CCi Advisory Board members and a select group of external ‘critical friends’ (see Appendix A for a full participant list). Participants posted their own ideas, and commented and voted on the ideas of others, on a challenge question related to improving the mainstream impact of the Centre’s research. In total the jam generated 22 substantial new ideas, 103 votes and 96 comments.
The second jam – known as the CCi RHD Challenge – was held from June 8th to 24th 2009 to elicit ideas and opinions from the Centre’s Research Higher Degree (RHD) community on how to improve their professional development experience and outcomes during their student tenure. The event invited 75 RHD students to participate and was kept exclusive to this group (i.e. no involvement from supervisors or Centre management). In total the community generated 17 ideas, 26 comments and 78 votes.
This report summarises the key results and insights generated from both Challenges, and is divided into three parts: Section One describes the challenges around which these two events were focused and participation rates achieved, while Section Two summarises the outcomes in terms of statistics and trends by theme, as well as the value of the tool for ‘capturing the long tail’ of collaborative processes. Section Three concludes by presenting the top ideas by popularity and activity, as well as identifying the ideas that most polarised opinion and emergent themes.</abstract>

CCi Mainstreaming and RHD Jams Outcomes Report

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 14 (2022): Issue 1 (December 2022)

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Volume 1 (2008): Issue 1 (January 2008)

Cultural Science

A hallmark of human civilization has been to see ‘culture’ as a defining feature of humanity, epitomized in approaching the ‘humanities’ as the study of culture. Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture radically breaks with this tradition and extends the domain of the study of culture beyond the human, both in the dimensions of multi-species and machine culture, and by considering all forms of cultural hybridization in a more-than human world. ‘Cultural Science’ investigates structures, interactions, and processes of cultural systems at all levels of analysis and scales of application. It approaches culture as a semiotic medium integrating creative processes in the biosphere, anthroposphere and technosphere as constitutive layers in the life of planet Earth.  ‘Cultural Science’ promotes inter- and transdisciplinary methodological pluralism, reaching from the classical sciences such as biology or ecology to established approaches in the social sciences and the humanities and beyond, venturing into posthumanist alternatives that investigate more-than-human forms of cultural creativity, diffusion, and tradition. ‘Cultural science’ endorses theoretical innovations that stand in line with coevolutionary theories bridging the natural and the human sciences and with novel views on agency and materiality that pursue ontological unification of human and non-human domains of meaning. It encourages active dialogue with science and technology studies, evolutionary and institutional economics, cultural evolution studies, biosemiotics, complexity science, or network analysis, specifying the ‘uses of culture’ from personal meanings to planetary platforms and systems of meaning. In doing so, we assign a crucial role to culture as medium of more-than-human action meeting the existential challenges of the Anthropocene.  ‘Cultural Science’ looks forward to publishing new work that may be critical, analytical and/or empirical, but is most often dialogical; interested in the production and translation of new ideas and knowledge, especially across perceived and disputed borders between systems, groups, and identities as well as academic disciplines.  Contributions to the journal transcend specialist topical foci while remaining on the firm ground of the respective disciplinary methodologies. Exemplary topical fields include:    The study of non-human cultures in the biosphere and the role of naturecultures in the interactions between humans and non-humans;  The role of digital media in the emergence of naturecultures; Explorations of human cultural creativity mediating biosphere and technosphere. Investigations into the emerging forms of cultural creativity of Artificial Intelligence.  Research on interspecies media of cultural expression, such as interspecies art and play.  New theoretical approaches to coevolution and cocreation of cultural media in the more-than-human world.    Journal history  Cultural Science Journal was launched in 2008 as part of the research program of the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, and John Hartley’s ARC Federation Fellowship. It published 14 issues between 2008 and 2016, before transferring to Ubiquity Press where it continued until 2021. In 2021, the journal moved on to a new home at the Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab (CUDAN) Tallinn University, Estonia. The editors-in-chief were Indrek Ibrus and Maximilian Schich. The journal is now published on the Sciendo platform, a subsidiary of De Gruyter. In 2023, the journal moved on to its third transformation, while remaining on the Sciendo platform, with new editor-in-chief Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, and a second editorial office at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University, Germany, working in tandem with the Tallinn offfice.  Building on the work of Raymond Williams, ‘Cultural Science 2.0’, as it was framed by founding editor John Hartley, sought advances not only in the micro-contexts of culture, but also in systematic and general processes and the mutually conditioning relationships of micro, meso and macro contexts. Hartley and colleagues (Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Paul Ormerod and others) launched an effort aimed at conceptualising and studying such relationships systematically. The journal worked towards transdisciplinary frameworks linking the study of culture with evolutionary and institutional economics, complexity science and other evolutionary approaches to creative change.  This work has been pathbreaking, feeding into new approaches and further studies into evolutionary processes in media markets and cultural industries internationally (emergent fields of media innovation studies, cross-innovation systems, open publishing and so on). At the same time, parallel approaches have emerged linking the study of culture with other disciplines especially evolutionary biosciences, but also mathematics, physics, data science and network science, etc., resulting in novel and epoch making approaches such as cultural analytics, cultural evolution studies, computational humanities and social science, etc. ‘Cultural Science’, it can be argued, is evolving into an intensely dialogic, multidisciplinary and an ‘explosively’ (to use a Juri Lotman’s term) evolving domain.With the third transformation, Cultural Science 3.0, the journal further expands its reach, redefining and co-creating cultural science in the Anthropocene, embracing cutting edge developments in the posthumanist movement, while keeping its roots in emphasising the coevolutionary systems-based approach to culture explored since 2008.In this dynamically developing context, Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than human culture wants to provide an arena where the relevant dialogues are held, where centuries of humanities-based knowledge on culture’s forms, languages and systems of meaning can meet the most contemporary scientific methods, where new questions are asked, where novel conceptualisations can meet or emerge from rigorous empirical or analytical work.　  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 