From Culture 1.0 to Culture 3.0: Three Socio-Technical Regimes of Social and Economic Value Creation through Culture, and Their Impact on European Cohesion Policies

Abstract

We develop a new conceptual framework to analyze the evolution of the relationship between cultural production and different forms of economic and social value creation in terms of three alternative socio-technical regimes that have emerged over time. We show how, with the emergence of the Culture 3.0 regime characterized by novel forms of active cultural participation, where the distinction between producers and users of cultural and creative contents is increasingly blurred, new channels of social and economic value creation through cultural participation acquire increasing importance. We characterize them through an eight-tier classification, and argue on this basis why cultural policy is going to acquire a central role in the policy design approaches of the future. Whether Europe will play the role of a strategic leader in this scenario in the context of future cohesion policies is an open question.

1. Introduction

Culture-led local and regional development has been a policy and media buzz across Europe and almost elsewhere in the world in the last two decades [1], and there is ample evidence of success stories, as well as of instructing failures, that provides a basis for an understanding of the structural and contextual conditions that enable (or block) culture’s capacity to generate social and economic value [2,3,4]. Despite this, and especially so in moments of economic stagnation where culture is the natural target of public budget cuts [5,6,7,8], there is a widespread perception that the role and potential of culture in long-term competitiveness strategies is seriously under-recognized, and this is especially true for Europe [9].

It is therefore no wonder that culture plays a marginal role in the European cohesion policy and policy agenda [10], and that the share of public resources for cultural activities and initiatives falls short of the share of cultural and creative sectors in the total European Union Gross Domestic Product (GDP), despite the recognized importance of the latter [11]. Culture appeals to European policy makers for the promotion of social cohesion, but less so as a driver of economic growth [12]. Consequently, culture occupies a side seat in EU regional Smart Specialization Strategies [13], or becomes a tactical tool of local consensus building [14].

How can culture be at the same time a pillar of European identity and an important area of economic value and jobs creation and a marginal policy target? This apparently puzzling state of affairs is mainly the consequence of a persisting gap in the conceptualization of the role of culture in an advanced, knowledge-based economy as is the European one nowadays. Many policymakers outside the cultural sphere still regard the cultural sectors as a low-productivity branch of the economy, relying upon external subsidies more than autonomously creating economic value. As a consequence of this wrong conceptualization, cultural activities are regarded as a center of cost to be put under control, and pleas from sector stakeholders are perceived as partisan, rent-seeking advocacy.

The issue has a major national and trans-national dimension in the European policy debate. The relevance of successful case studies of culture-led development of cities and regions depends on the attitudes of national policymakers rather than local ones, as the latter behave as strategic followers [15]. Studies on the size and importance of the European cultural and creative sectors [16,17,18] raise some momentary attention but fail to enable a stable focus in the EU policymaking agenda priorities, due to the lack of a proper conceptual model of the role of culture in development processes. The importance of building a nation-wide awareness of the policy relevance of culture has become clear, for instance, when in 2013 a 100% cut in the cultural budget of Newcastle, one of the U.K.’s top success cases of culture-led development [19], although not free of controversy [20], was threatened. National newspapers covered the story [21], helping to turn the total cancellation into a, however shocking, 50% cut. Furthermore, even in the U.K. where cultural policy manages to make the headlines sometimes, the general trend heads toward a massive downsizing of cultural budgets [22]. In other EU countries, the trends are even worse.

Europe is therefore at risk of lagging behind in a field that elsewhere attracts strategic and policy attention and economic resources, such as in dynamic, Far-Eastern countries, such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and China, or in ambitious, small Middle-Eastern countries such as Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Also, Europe is not the incumbent leader in the global market for cultural and creative contents, to the advantage of the United States, due to EU countries’ failure to implement a joint strategy in the field, which would be a rather formidable task in political terms due to the fact that several EU countries have carefully developed, and consistently deploy, their own national cultural strategies [23,24,25,26]. Currently, the bigger challengers to the USA are Japan and China, with Germany, U.K., France, and Italy all following at some distance. Future spending trends suggest a widening gap, as the Asia-Pacific area consistently outperforms Europe in this regard [27]. As of 2017, among the top ten countries for market size of their media industries, there were the four larger EU creative economies (Germany, U.K., France, and Italy, in this rank order), but their combined size totaled slightly more than half of the USA market size [28]. Moreover, Japan and China as the second and third countries for market size both vastly outperformed EU’s largest creative economy, namely Germany, whose size amounted to slightly more than half of Japan’s or China’s. Finally, the combined market size of the three Far-Eastern countries in the top ten (Japan, China, South Korea, in this rank order, with Japan and China basically equivalent in size) again substantially outperformed that of the four top European creative economies (the combined size of the former being 34% bigger than that of the latter). Therefore, not only Europe’s combined top creative economies cannot stand the comparison with that of the USA, but they are not even the closer geo-economic competitor, having been replaced in this respect by the combined top Far-Eastern creative economies. Also, new global players, such as Brazil and Canada, also made the top list (as well as South Korea itself, whose market size already outperforms that of both Canada and Italy), signaling an ongoing globalization of the cultural and creative arena, a trend likely to further consolidate as more emerging, densely populated countries, such as India, Mexico, or Turkey, are increasing both their production and investment focus and their consumption spending in the field.

This latter intuition is reinforced at the urban geographical scale (see

Table 1. Top 15 global cities for entertainment and media spending, in billion $US. Source: [29].

2009		2014		2018
Tokyo	17.6	New York	19.7	New York	23.6
New York	15.8	Tokyo	19.5	Tokyo	20.1
London	13.9	London	16.3	London	18.5
Seoul	8.6	Seoul	11.9	Seoul	13.5
Sydney	7.1	Hong Kong	9.1	Hong Kong	11.2
Los Angeles	6.9	Los Angeles	8.3	Los Angeles	9.9
Hong Kong	5.9	Sydney	8	Sydney	8.9
Chicago	4.7	Chicago	5.7	Singapore	6.7
Berlin	4.3	Singapore	5.4	Moscow	6.7
Singapore	4.1	Berlin	4.8	Chicago	6.5
Paris	3.8	Moscow	4.8	São Paulo	5.4
Moscow	3.2	Paris	4.4	Berlin	5.1
Toronto	3.2	Toronto	4.1	Toronto	5.0
Madrid	2.4	São Paulo	3.7	Paris	4.9
São Paulo	2.2	Shanghai	3.2	Shanghai	4.9

), looking at the top fifteen global cities for entertainment and media spending in 2009, 2014, and the projection for 2018 [29]. In the future, non-European mega-cities will likely have a growing impact on the global cultural and creative economy, exposing Europe to further competitive pressure. However, as it can be clearly seen by the trends highlighted in Table 1, European cities, with the exception of London, are already losing positions in the global ranking, with Madrid disappearing from the top fifteen in the 2010s and Berlin and Paris steadily sliding toward the bottom of the ranking. It can be expected that in the next decade, London could be the only European city left in the list.

The picture that emerges therefore puts Europe under pressure in terms of its future relevance in the global cultural and creative contents arena, and all the more if major EU countries fail to coordinate strategically under a common EU platform. Fragmentation (and small population size) leaves EU countries below the critical size needed to achieve a leading global player status, and this even applies to Germany and the U.K., despite London’s role as a global media and content capital, closely connected to its financial capital role (but with the pending uncertainty about the consequences of Brexit [30]).

The present paper offers some preliminary reflections in this respect by introducing a new conceptual framework for the understanding of the contribution of culture to economic and social value creation in terms of three different socio-technical regimes that have emerged over time. Such framework provides a basis for a rethinking of the role of cultural policies in future European cohesion and competitiveness strategies. Our framework also helps to explain why the contribution of culture to social and economic development tends to be overlooked by policymakers, and with what consequences. The logical scope of our framework is in principle not confined to Europe, but reflecting upon the European scenario is particularly useful in the light of the central role of Europe in the development of the cultural production regimes, which are the conceptual pillars of our reasoning.

2. Three (Complementary) Socio-Technical Regimes of Value Production: From Culture 1.0 to Culture 3.0

The misconceptions about the role of culture in the contemporary economic context can be traced back to the persistence of obsolete conceptualizations of the relationship between cultural activity and the generation of economic (and social) value added. To illustrate this point, we need to sketch out a basic, inevitably crude, account of the evolution of the relationship between the two spheres.

The emergence of a structured model of relationship between cultural production and the socio-economic context is intertwined with the construction of human relational structures and with the development of human cognition [31]. The socially embedded nature of cultural and artistic production in a grassroots regime has largely done without, for a long phase of human history, the social recognition of culture as an autonomous, socially legitimized sphere of activity, even in already advanced socio-economies, such as those of the Ancient Empires where the arts were flourishing, but were also mainly instrumental to the celebration of political and religious power. Cultural production abilities had a prominent role in many spheres of the Ancient Empires social and economic life, from court entertainment to crafts [32], but the only meaningful identity to be recognized, celebrated, and transmitted in relation to them was that of the King itself, with the artist remaining a humble, anonymous presence. The identity and social role of the artist are gradually defined in classical Greece [33], and find their full-fledged formulation with the patronage model of Imperial Rome [34].

For centuries, artistic and cultural production as a clearly identified, socially legitimized sphere of activity has been structured by what we could call the Culture 1.0 regime, founded upon the concept of patronage, which is at the root of the first, and most ancient, socio-technical regime of value production through culture. Culture 1.0 is typical of a pre-industrial economy, where culture is neither a proper economic sector, nor it is accessible to the majority of potential audiences. The provision of culture is secured by the individual initiative of patrons. In its classical form, patronage is the province of individuals with considerable financial possibilities and social status, who derived them from sources other than cultural commissioning, but decided to employ some to secure to cultural producers the material means to make a living in exchange for the enjoyment of the outcome of creative production to be shared with their acquaintances. Patronizing culture may substantially enhance the patron’s social image and reputation, and assume a sophisticated strategic character, like in Middle Age and, even more, Renaissance patronage [35,36]. However, as the resources are generated outside the cultural sphere, cultural production here lives on external subsidies, and could not survive otherwise. In the patronage relationship, moreover, the wage of cultural producers is not truly part of a market transaction, but rather of a symbolic, mutual exchange of gifts between the patron and the artist [37], a practice that still survives in some cultural realms [38], and finds intriguing developments in new, culturally-mediated social platforms [39]. However, this model can support only a limited number of cultural producers who entirely depend upon the discretion of the patron and limited audiences. Both production of, and access to, culture are therefore severely limited by economic and social barriers.

With the massive social changes associated with the industrial (economic) revolution and with the concurrent bourgeois (political) revolutions that led to the birth of the modern nation states, we witness a widening of cultural audiences, made possible by a few concurrent circumstances [40]. First, with the bourgeois revolutions questioning the privileges of the ruling classes, access to culture is gradually legitimized as a universal right that is part of the very idea of citizenship [41]. Second, with the steady improvement of the living conditions of the working classes, there is a corresponding increase in the willingness to pay for cultural entertainment [42]. Access to cultural goods and opportunities, however, remains limited until the outbreak of the “cultural” industrial revolution in the decades around the turn of the 20th century, which creates the technological conditions for the full emergence of cultural mass markets [42]. Meanwhile, the modern nation states had concurrently been developing new forms of “public patronage,” allocating public resources to support culture and the arts for the social benefit. Therefore, we can finally speak of cultural public policies, and of the corresponding cultural policy models [43], which articulate public initiative in the cultural field in a variety of country-specific forms: “facilitator,” “patron,” “architect,” “engineer,” “elite nurturer,” etc. [44], allowing for considerable local diversity in terms of mission, organization, design, and effectiveness.

The current notion of cultural public policy is still rooted in the Culture 1.0 (pre-industrial) regime, however evolved, although the debate on its role and scope in industrially advanced societies has a long, complex history [45]. The patronizing role is no longer exclusively in the hands of single individuals (even when they incarnate political institutions, as for Renaissance Princes or modern Kings), but becomes a public function, although in ways and forms that are sensitive to the socio-economic history of European nation-states [46]. Culture, however, is still economically un-productive, absorbing resources generated in other sectors of the economy. With the “cultural” industrial revolution around the turn of the 20th century, however, the technological possibility of cultural mass markets becomes real, through the introduction of modern rotary printing, photography and cinema, recorded music, and radio broadcasting [47]. The portfolio of cultural products dramatically expands, while being made available to much wider audiences, at increasingly affordable prices, and by means of new, tailor-made business models and strategies [48]. The transition to the Culture 2.0 regime is now possible, that is, the second socio-technical regime of value creation through culture finally emerges.

In the Culture 2.0 regime, audiences expand significantly, whereas cultural production is still severely controlled by entrance barriers as the access to productive technologies is difficult and financially expensive, such that would-be cultural producers are filtered by complex selection systems that differ across cultural sectors. Culture 2.0 is a new form of relationship between cultural production and the generation of economic value, dominated by the expansion of the cultural and creative industries [49]. Unlike Culture 1.0, in Culture 2.0 there are cultural and creative activities that produce economic value and become profitable, but they are a branch of a specific, minor sector of the economy if compared to the main manufacturing ones: the entertainment industry.

The idea of cultural mass production that became possible in the Culture 2.0 regime was far from universally welcomed in Europe [50], as it represented a direct challenge to the existing systems of control of cultural production, and of legitimization by the gatekeepers of publicly patronized resources [51]. From the European perspective of the time, cultural mass production could be regarded as a tool of mass manipulation [52]. However, in the USA, such concerns were less relevant due to the lack of an idealized, anti-commercial notion of culture nurtured by centuries of patronage and strategic gatekeeping by cultural elites. Quite to the contrary, the need to build up a compelling national narrative for the new global power found in the nascent cultural industry the ideal platform [53]. The enthusiastic adoption of the cultural industry in its heroic phase in the USA marks a departure from European culture, its intimidating highbrow rituals, and its defense of a paternalistic, publicly funded and monitored governance of cultural production.

The undisputed leadership of the USA on the cultural industry of the 20th century is a consequence of this crucial passage: the demise of market-oriented cultural production in Europe [54], despite that most of the technological innovations behind the cultural industry revolution were developed there, and despite its so far undisputed global leadership in the cultural sphere (a consequence of the 19th century colonial rule). The uncontested development of a mass-oriented cultural industry in the USA enabled the latter to seize the opportunity set forth by the rapid global growth of mass cultural markets, and to transform Europe itself in an export market for its own cultural content [55]. In Europe, cultural and creative industries flourished in all major fields—publishing, music, cinema, radio-television, design, fashion, and communication—but their relationship with the non-industrial fields of the cultural core [56], the ones that identify more with the European cultural tradition (visual arts, performing arts, and heritage) remained problematic. Moreover, the success parameters for European cultural industry are less directly identified with market performance with respect to the USA: gatekeepers approval and cultural stigma still play a major role, and for cultural producers “excessive” market success and recognition may be regarded by peers as a sign of capitulation of artistic excellence to the lure of “commercial” culture.

Only recently has Europe fully acknowledged the developmental potential of the cultural and creative industry [57], but the gap opened by decades of cautious suspicion as opposed to the pervasive U.S. control of the global market through decades of consistent strategies and investments cannot realistically be closed [58]. This recent (re-)discovery of the economic potential of cultural and creative industries in Europe, with creative industries gaining central importance for their connection to the tradition of historical European manufacture, may be seen as a mature development of the Culture 2.0 regime [59]. Public policies now increasingly focus upon audience development, but also upon entrepreneurial development in the cultural and creative sectors, due to a growing recognition of their economic impact [60]. However, Europe now faces the risk of overreaction from late adoption, excessively focusing upon the profitability of single sectors, and concentrating support toward the best-performing production segments only, threatening the viability of the whole industry by disregarding the complex ecological relationships that tie the sectors together [61].

Designing appropriate policies for the cultural industries is a particularly difficult task in view of their specificities, and of the peculiarities of their entrepreneurial cultures, that in Europe have developed relatively late, and with difficulty [62]. To understand the industrial organization logic of cultural and creative sectors, standard economizing models of profit maximizing and instrumental rationality are partially misleading [63]. In the cultural and creative sphere, expressive rationality, intrinsic motivation, and social exchange are essential aspects, often leading to forms of interaction that are not mediated by markets [64]. Moreover, the global financial crisis, that since 2008 has severely hit Europe, has negatively influenced Europe’s capacity to support its cultural and creative industries at the scale that would be required by global competition [65], and especially so in view of the huge investments carried out by emerging global leaders such as China [66]. If this can be seen as a limitation, it also paved the way to new forms of experimentation in cultural production, that rather than pushing the industrial dimension, have focused upon community involvement and upon bottom-up participation. This turn reflects the emergence of a yet another regime of cultural production where Europe can play a true leadership role if it is ready enough to acknowledge its potential and to embrace it consistently: despite the short-lived history of Culture 2.0, a new wave of social and technological innovation is already mounting and preparing the emergence of yet another socio-technical regime of value creation that we call Culture 3.0 and which is still in its early stage.

Culture 3.0 is characterized by a wave of social and technical innovations that, unlike Culture 2.0 at the turn of the 20th century, is no longer focused upon expanding the demand (audience) side, but is driven by a structural transformation of the production side. The technologies behind the birth of the cultural industry (radio, television, cinema, photography, recorded music, industrial printing) are all centered upon the massive, and cheap, reproduction of content. They make access to cultural content easier and affordable. The new wave of innovation, instead, is making the production of content easy and affordable [67]. Today, digital gear for professional treatment of text, still and moving images, sound, and multimedia is available to everyone, easy to learn, cheap, and undemanding in terms of physical equipment, something that would have been unthinkable two decades ago [68]. Thus, if the Culture 2.0 “revolution” has been characterized by an explosion of the size of cultural markets, the Culture 3.0 “revolution” is characterized by the explosion of the pool of producers, making it increasingly difficult to draw a meaningful distinction between cultural producers and users themselves [69]. Producers and users are now interchanging roles in a spectrum of possibilities where access to contents produced by others, and circulation of own content to others, are naturally juxtaposed and generally occur through the same platforms [70].

In this new scenario, the role of cultural markets as distributional channels is challenged by the diffusion and expansion of digital platforms where communities of practice self-organize around production and sharing of content, and where members interact through non-market-mediated exchanges, a new possibility in-built in the architecture of digital online platforms, which still leaves ample space for free appropriation by profit-oriented platform providers [71]. The hallmark of the Culture 3.0 regime is the transformation of audiences (the target reference of cultural industry) into practitioners (with its consequently entangled notion of authorship and intellectual property). Access to cultural content loses its traditional passive, appreciative character and becomes a form of creative appropriation by users [72]. Access stimulates individuals to acquire skills to appropriate and manipulate cultural contents in personal ways [73]. Rather than just listening to stories, there is an urge to participate in the narration, to negotiate the unfolding of the story, and likewise for any other form of cultural production. Also, cultural content production and dissemination becomes socially pervasive and ceases to be confined in the entertainment sphere, to become part of the texture of everyday life, as reflected by consumption practices [74]. It is also important to stress how the notion of participation implied by Culture 3.0 cannot be subsumed into the more familiar notion of prosumerism [75], where bottom-up production of content tends to be market-mediated, whereas in Culture 3.0 the mediation of the market is not an essential element of participation. For this reason, prosumerism is more typical of an advanced stage of the Culture 2.0 regime than of the Culture 3.0 one [76,77]. However, in this transitional phase in which mature Culture 2.0 forms and early Culture 3.0 ones coexist and interact, it is not uncommon to observe hybrid situations in which elements of prosumerism and of active cultural participation mingle in a variety of ways [73,78]. In fact, the notion of prosumerism has also been used, in the absence of a full-fledged alternative paradigm, to categorize what would more properly be seen as a form of plain active cultural participation [79].

Culture 3.0 irreversibly transforms what previously was a separate macro-sector of the economy, the cultural and creative industry, into a web of layered, pervasive structural relations among all sectors of the economy and society. Its understanding requires a sophisticated, systemic representation of the structural interdependencies between the cultural and creative fields, which are already mutually interdependent, and the other spheres. This change of perspective has especially important consequences for a strategically effective approach to policy design.

3. The Strategic Importance of Active Cultural Participation

A signal of a widely-felt need to expand the traditional Culture 2.0 focus on the sectorial growth of cultural and creative industries in new directions is the increasing attention paid to the effects of cultural and creative production in terms of positive creative spillovers toward other sectors [80]. Arguments about the spillover effects of culture and creativity have been so far rather un-systematic, without a well-defined conceptual background, often failing to make a convincing case for policymakers. Reasoning in terms of the Culture 2.0–3.0 transition may help elucidating why and how cultural spillovers matter for the general economy.

The key point is shifting the focus from the economic outcomes of cultural activity to the behaviors that cause them. To understand the effects of culture outside of the cultural sphere, we should consider how cultural access changes the behavior of individuals and groups [81], fostering active cultural participation, the cornerstone of the Culture 3.0 regime. The active character of cultural participation goes beyond the passive absorption of cultural stimuli, motivating individuals to make use of their skills to contribute to the process: not simply hearing music, but playing; not simply reading texts, but writing, and so on. By doing so, individuals challenge themselves to expand their capacity of expression, to re-negotiate their expectations and beliefs, to reshape their own social identity. We can consider this behavioral dynamic as a knowledge-intensive form of the capability building process highlighted by Amartya Sen [82], supplemented by research insights on the vocational socio-psychological dimension of learning [83]. Clearly, capability building is already enabled, and significantly so, in the passive cultural access mode that is typical of Culture 1.0 and 2.0, but the active component added by Culture 3.0 makes it more deeply ingrained into individual motivational systems and social attitudes, and helps re-contextualize the importance of cultural access beyond the leisure-entertainment sphere, as a pillar of everyday practices in all areas of human activity. As already emphasized, capability building and skills acquisition is not merely an individual activity, but a highly social one, and crucially depends upon the social environment [84]. Moreover, in social contexts marked by strong social incentives toward active cultural participation, individuals are more likely to be interested in active socio-political participation, and vice versa.

The Culture 3.0 regime also entails an alternative approach to the financial sustainability of cultural production and participation. Whereas in Culture 1.0, such sustainability is ensured by the patron’s provision, be it in terms of personal funds or of public resources, such as in the case of public patronage, and whereas in Culture 2.0 it is rather ensured by the spending capacity of the audience that purchases cultural and creative products on the market, in Culture 3.0, we witness the emergence of new forms of financing that leverage upon the community structure itself, as in the case of crowdfunding schemes [85,86,87]. One should not, however, consider crowdfunding in its currently explored forms as the final and characteristic forms of financial sustainability of the Culture 3.0 regime, as it is likely that this and other forms will further develop in the near future. The Culture 3.0 regime is in its early phase, and therefore we need to eschew the temptation of crystallizing its current features as mature expressions of such a regime. The next few years will certainly provide rich material for further analysis and conceptualization in this vein as well as in many others.

One thing that can be stated with confidence, however, is the increasing future emphasis on active cultural participation in its many forms and meanings. Through active participation, individuals are not simply exposed to cultural experiences, but are encouraged to explore and customize the rules that generate them; they learn to experiment with the “source code” that is behind the generation of cultural meaning. Active participation, on the other hand, fosters interest and curiosity toward exploring cultural expressions from others: a classical virtuous social circle of capability building, human development, and social cohesion. In the Culture 3.0 context, individuals organize their cultural interests as intermittent runs of expression and reception, i.e., moments in which they are active and “transmitting” and moments in which they are passive and “receiving,” as equally necessary aspects of cultural participation. The acquisition of cultural skills motivates them to develop capacity for expression, raises the level of attention, critical filters toward received contents, prompts further willingness to transmit new contents, and so on, paving the way to new forms of open innovation and co-creation [88], to more constructive uses of social media platforms [89], to new knowledge-intensive and experience-intensive socio-economic practices [90], etc., a social efflorescence of which we are currently witnessing just the early developmental steps.

Some of the positive systemic effects of cultural access can also be generated within a traditional mode of passive reception, e.g., within the passive audience mode, but by confining ourselves into this (obsolete) perspective, we are unable to appreciate the ongoing process, but only some details. There are at least eight different areas where cultural participation can cause significant macroeconomic effects that are not limited to the direct economic impact of the cultural and creative industries on GDP and jobs, and which can benefit in turn from strategic complementarities with the cultural and creative sectors. We briefly survey them in the next section. As we will see, they provide the basis for an innovative rethinking of the aims and scope of cultural policies in a Culture 3.0 regime.

On the other hand, not all forms of cultural access have an unambiguously positive effect. There is ample evidence that digitally-mediated access to content can be a source of a vast range of pathologies and behavioral disorders, such as internet addiction [91], sedentary behaviors and obesity associated to excessive screen time [92], sleep [93] and attention [94] disorders, depression and social phobia [95], and so on. Likewise, digital access and participation have caused the emergence of a whole range of new social issues or of the amplification of old issues at a new, unprecedented scale. Examples abound, such as fake news and news manipulation and the consequent crisis of social “objectivity” [96], online bullying and shaming of people with different opinions and views [97], and the diffusion of pseudoscience [98] and conspiracy [99] theories. Digital media are clearly not the only ones that can provoke such negative effects, as shown, for instance, by the large literature on TV-related disturbances [100,101]. Equally serious concerns might be raised by future digital platforms and environments such as immersive virtual and augmented reality and/or artificial intelligence. As a matter of fact, however, all new cultural media have raised concerns and sparked fears at the time of their introduction and diffusion. What is needed is a balanced assessment of the potential and threats, and a careful design, testing and implementation of targeted therapeutic approaches [102] and capability building strategies [103], in the context of a comprehensive public health strategy to prevent and minimize negative effects and to enable people and communities to successfully adapt to the new scenario. This is what the human kind has always done when facing challenging environments [104], and adaptation to increasingly complex digital environments is no exception in this regard.

4. The Power of Cultural Participation: A 8-Tiers Approach

A detailed discussion of the theoretical foundations of the structural interdependencies that we present in this section is outside the scope of the present paper, which aims at sketching a first, raw picture of the social and economic impacts of cultural participation as the key driver of the Culture 3.0 socio-technical regime of value creation. The reader will find more detailed accounts, analysis, and data in the provided references. The eight tiers that we present and discuss in this paper have been chosen as the ones for which research activity, policy design and practice (or at least conceptual development) are significant enough to warrant their inclusion in a first list of areas of interest to assess the potential social and economic impacts of cultural participation. The list is by no means exhaustive and it is possible that further areas will add up in the future. For this reason, one should regard this analysis as a first exploration.

Thinking of the spillover effects of culture, a first area which has been the object of exploration is innovation, not simply within the cultural and creative sectors, but in the economy as a whole [105], and there is an interesting literature that sheds some light upon this important functional link [106]. Here, the effect of active cultural participation may be especially appreciated. Direct involvement in, and active experience of the rules of, creative content production enables individuals to learn how innovative meanings and practices can be constructed, and how they can challenge and de-structure previous beliefs, prejudices, and attitudes [107]. The more such activity is socially pervasive, the more the socio-cognitive effects of cultural participation upon attitudes toward innovation and change become relevant and visible. As argued by Phelps [108], massive bottom-up capability building is the most effective route to the creation of an innovation-driven economy and society. As innovativeness has not simply to do with research and development (R&D) labs distilling new ideas, but with the deployment of effective social transmission, translation, and implementation of new ideas into business practices through the cooperation of a myriad of social and economic actors (one may then speak of “innovation systems” [109,110,111]), it is impossible to dismiss the importance of achieving and strengthening a favorable societal orientation toward innovation. Likewise, the implications of the latter in terms of enhancement of several dimensions of competitiveness are widely agreed upon. Through its (still underrated) impact upon orientations toward innovation, active cultural participation might bring about indirect macroeconomic impacts, which could in principle measure up to the direct economic turnover of the cultural and creative macro-sector, although an appropriate measurement approach in this field has not been fully developed yet.

Cultural participation may then be thought of as a driver of endogenous economic growth [112,113] in ways that are complementary to the extensively studied education-driven ones. Despite supporting evidence is still fragmentary, mainly due to lack of specific research, it may be interesting to consider a comparison between the rankings of EU countries in terms of their innovative capacity measured by the 2017 European Innovation Scoreboard metric [114], and of the Index of Cultural Practice as measured by the Eurobarometer [115] survey, the latest available source for this indicator. Each ranking has been divided into three performance classes (top, average, and bottom). For innovation, the top performance class corresponds to innovation leaders plus strong innovators according to the Innovation Scoreboard classification; the average class to moderate innovators, and the bottom class to modest innovators according to the same classification. For culture, the top performance class corresponds to countries whose combined amount of very high plus high percentage levels of cultural practice totals 20 or higher; the average performance class to countries whose corresponding combined percentage lies between 10 and 20, and the bottom performance class to countries whose corresponding combined percentage lies below 10. The following classification of EU countries then emerges (

Table 2. EU 28 performance classes in cultural practice and innovation. Source: [114,115].

Top performance in both innovation and cultural practice	Sweden Denmark The Netherlands U.K. Luxembourg Finland Slovenia
Top performance in innovation and average performance in cultural practice	Germany Belgium Austria Ireland France
Top performance in cultural practice and average performance in innovation	Latvia Lithuania Estonia
Average performance in both innovation and cultural practice	Spain Malta Czech Republic Poland Slovak Republic Croatia
Average performance in innovation and bottom performance in cultural practice	Cyprus Portugal Greece Italy Hungary
Bottom performance in both innovation and cultural practice	Bulgaria Romania

).

It is interesting to notice how, despite the two indicators apparently measuring completely different phenomena, there is a clear association among variables, which establishes a distinctive pattern across EU countries. No top performing country on one dimension is a bottom performer on the other, and vice versa. Moreover, a clear geographical pattern emerges, with the leading group consisting of Northern European countries with the addition of Slovenia; the next best group hosts Central European countries with the addition of Ireland and the three Baltic States; finally, the other groups in decreasing order of performance consist of different mixes of Mediterranean and Eastern European countries. Clearly, many intervening factors may be at work here, and no causal inference can be drawn from such data. Nevertheless, such evidence is in principle compatible with a possible role of active cultural participation as a stimulator of societal innovation thinking [116,117], and even more fundamentally, as a social platform of pre-innovation. In this perspective, it would be interesting to investigate whether the top-performing countries for cultural practice are characterized by socio-cognitive environments that, as an effect of a sustained, society-wide acquisition of specific cognitive capabilities through cultural participation, also provide a more favorable context for the diffusion of innovation, as compared to countries with lower levels of cultural practice. This hypothesis calls for a substantial amount of future research, and in case it is corroborated, would open a new line of both scientific and policy design work on the cross effects of cultural and innovation strategies at the national and regional levels.

A second important link points to the politically critical area of welfare. There is an impressive amount of evidence that cultural participation may have significant effects on life expectation [118], but more recent research seems to suggest that the impact is equally significant in terms of self-reported psychological well-being [119,120,121]. In particular, it turns out that cultural participation is the second predictor of psychological well-being after (presence/absence of) major diseases, and in this regard, its impact is comparable to that of income, and significantly stronger than that of variables such as place of residence, age, gender, or occupation. The effect is particularly remarkable for the seriously ill and the elderly, where psychological well-being gaps between subjects with high versus low cultural access are huge. Moreover, the effect of social relations on the well-being consequences of cultural participation is relevant: a given level of cultural participation has a bigger impact on individual well-being in social contexts with high cultural participation than in low-participation ones [122].

Another relevant channel of positive spillovers from cultural participation might then relate to cultural welfare. If cultural participation strongly affects the well-being perception of the ill and the elderly, and provided that welfare treatment costs are a major public finance burden in the EU, suitable culturally-focused prevention strategies, if causing even a small reduction in the rates of hospitalization and in the resort to treatment across such categories, could entail significant savings of public resources. Such savings could be used to fund the program itself and be partially relocated to other socially valuable uses, while substantially improving quality of life of critically disenfranchised citizens [123]. Some preliminary evidence in this regard [124] shows how, based on Italian census data, higher levels of cultural participation have a positive impact on discharge rates from mental illness treatment. Once again, there is a new area of cultural policy action with potentially significant macroeconomic effects, and in addition, one that can disclose new kinds of careers and opportunities for cultural professionals.

A third important link regards sustainability. The increasing emphasis on the social dimensions of sustainability, as highlighted by Agenda21, has sparked a reflection on whether socially transmitted behaviors, habits, and customs may influence the effectiveness of resource-saving programs and strategies. In this respect, however, attention has been mainly devoted to traditional forms of social mobilization [125]. However, again, cultural participation may have an important indirect role in fostering social mobilization and awareness about the social consequences of individual behaviors related to environmentally critical resources. For instance, working on data from the Italian Multipurpose Survey from Italy’s National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), Crociata et al. [126] have proven that there is a strong association between cultural participation and effectiveness of differentiated waste recycling. Moreover, the social dynamics of recycling behavior seems to be sensitive to proximity effects [127,128], so that there can be a potential for combined action of cultural policies improving cultural participation, and the socio-spatial transmission of pro-social (environmentally responsible) behaviors. Once again, the likely reason is that the acquisition of competences and skills from cultural practice may spill over significantly in terms of individual capacity of successfully classifying and stocking different types of waste, and more generally in terms of individual awareness of the social value of, and motivation for, embracing environmental responsibility in everyday choices.

A fourth important link is to social cohesion, also in view of the recognition of culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development [129]. There is again ample evidence of how certain types of cultural projects may be effective for juvenile crime prevention, pro-social vocational orientation, or conflict resolution [130,131,132]. We are currently already beyond the exploratory phase in this field, so that some of the most successful projects are now providing the basis for full-fledged policy approaches, as in the case of musical education and juvenile orchestras [133]. As far as music is concerned, it has been proven that joint music-making in early childhood is effective for the promotion of pro-social behavior [134], and therefore musical education can legitimately be regarded as a pillar of a new generation of social cohesion strategies. One relevant effect of active cultural participation on social cohesion is in terms of human development, for instance by driving the self-esteem in subjects of infants and youth at high social risk of deviance onto a constructive, rather than self-destructive, developmental path. Another, equally relevant one concerns building a capability basis for intercultural dialogue and exchange [135], a theme that in Europe’s current socio-political context acquires an unprecedented importance. In this regard, the indirect effect of cultural participation is creating the basic trust conditions for dialogue through appreciation of cultural diversity and the overcoming of negative social stereotyping [136], often linked to ethnicity factors [137].

There have been strategic approaches to cultural infrastructure building that have explicitly addressed the social cohesion dimension, as in the case, e.g., of the Maisons Folie network of cultural facilities created by the Région Nord-Pas de Calais in the context of the Lille 2004 European Capital of Culture program [138]. The most successful Maisons have become spaces of multi-cultural interaction and exchange in socially critical areas, facilitating mutual knowledge and acquaintance of people belonging to different, and often mutually segregated, ethnic communities. The indirect effects of cultural participation on social cohesion stem from the fact that increased participation provides individuals and groups with new skills to conceptualize and understand diversity, and to reprogram their behavior from defensive hostility to communication, while at the same time uncovering new possibilities for personal development [139]. Looking at the costs of inter-ethnic and inter-cultural social conflict across Europe, this area qualifies as one of the most promising and urgent in terms of a reformulation of the cultural policy agenda, and of the corresponding macro-impact.

A fifth link is to new entrepreneurship models. There is a clear perception that the cultural and creative field may be a powerful incubator of new forms of entrepreneurship [140,141], and the rapid growth of the online content industries is setting the stage for a new entrepreneurial culture with a strong generational identification [142]. At the EU level, this scenario is being taken seriously enough [143], but the development of creative entrepreneurship still lags behind, if compared to the attention and resources devoted to entrepreneurship development and support in other sectors of the economy [144]. Making space for a new, successful generation of creative entrepreneurs in Europe is essential to secure the future competitiveness of European cultural and creative productions, and to build the premises for a European leadership in the emergent knowledge economy [145]. Moreover, these new forms of entrepreneurship could significantly improve the employability of graduates from the humanities, whose appeal to employers in more traditional spheres of innovative entrepreneurship is generally considered weaker than that of quantitative and technology majors [146]. However, innovative culture-related forms of entrepreneurship might prove important in tackling the new societal challenges of employability and shorter worktimes in the fourth industrial revolution context, as well as the new, unprecedented issues of designing social environments characterized by pervasive man–machine interaction [147].

The sixth, further major link is with lifelong learning and the development of a learning society. The connection between effectiveness of lifelong learning and intelligence, meant as the development of capacities allowing the successful adaptation to, and the selection and shaping of, the environmental context, has been well established [148]; again, there is a clear relationship between the evolution of this form of intelligence and acquired cultural capital [149], an effect that may be regarded as a consequence of strong evolutionary selection pressures [150]. The association between active cultural participation and lifelong learning is thus a very natural one, and unlike others, is not particularly surprising. In fact, one might even think of active cultural participation as a specific form of lifelong learning [151]. It is however an open point to check whether, and to what extent, there is a strong, stable association between breadth and effectiveness of lifelong learning programs and (active) cultural access figures [152]. Research on this topic would be of great interest, not to speak of its implications in terms of synergies between educational and cultural policies, and of corresponding endogenous growth mechanisms. As lifelong learning takes a central place in EU long-term strategies [153], it could be of interest to launch innovative programs that exploit the strategic complementarities between lifelong learning and cultural communities of practice [154], as experimentations on advanced platforms of educational services and of cultural and creative production at the same time.

A seventh link is with soft power. Starting from the seminal work of Nye [155], today there is a strong awareness of the potential of cultural and creative production in contributing to increase the visibility, reputation, and influence of countries and regions at all levels of international relationships, from the political to the economic [156], and to the social [157]. The effective deployment of soft power may open up new markets to national and local products through the identification and emulation dynamics which are typical of post-industrial consumption [158], may attract more visitors [159], talents and investments [160], and may stimulate new, sophisticated strategies of value creation through branding and marketing tools [161]. The Monocle Institute for Government soft power index [162,163] reveals how, at the beginning of the current decade, EU countries stably occupy 6–7 among the 10 top positions in the global soft power ranking, but the scenario is rapidly evolving and many non-European contenders are challenging the historical incumbents such as major European countries, USA, and Japan; for example, South Korea’s Hallyu [164,165], or Australia [166], Canada [167], and New Zealand [168]. As with the lifelong learning link, the relationship between soft power and cultural and creative production (and participation) is so strong and direct that it does not need extensive justification. What is less mechanical, however, is finding out effective ways of mainstreaming a country or region’s cultural and creative contents to global cultural and economic platforms [169]. In this field, a primary role is played by national cultural diplomacy networks (British Council, Alliance Française, Goethe Institut, IFA, etc.). At the EU level, after a long period of neglect of European-focused forms of soft power [170], there has been a revamping of interest in cultural diplomacy [171], aimed at repositioning Europe in the emerging scenario of strongly multipolar soft power [172]. This is therefore another area where investing in cultural production and participation will likely cause relevant indirect macro-effects on Europe’s competitive potential, visibility, and socio-political influence.

Finally, an eighth link can be traced to local identity. In recent times, considerable emphasis has been put on the role of new, spectacular cultural facilities in the catering for global visibility of urban or regional milieux [173], and more generally on the role of culture in re-defining the social and symbolic foundations of place and of its development [174]. This is probably one of the best understood indirect macroeconomic effects of cultural production and participation, but it is worth remarking how such an effect has been often misread as the last version of a commodified economy of mass spectacle [175]. Quite the contrary, the developmental potential of a culturally-rebuilt local identity lies in the capacity to stimulate new, inclusive dynamics of the production of cultural content and new modes of cultural access by the local community [176], as a consequence of the new opportunities created by the attraction of outside resources, as it has been for instance the case with the already cited NewcastleGateshead urban renewal strategy [177]. The crucial developmental impact of culture on local identity is to enable the community to reweave a long-term view of its development, and to elaborate visions and make choices accordingly. One of the major factors of crisis of contemporary Europe is the overwhelming influence of very short-term concerns on the public agenda, which paves the way to populism and instrumental conflictual local narratives [178], also due to oversimplified approaches to community participation and involvement in local regeneration processes [179]. In this respect, for instance, serious gaming may become a very practical and useful tool to invite residents to new forms of active, playful cultural participation allowing them to look at their own local reality through the eyes of other ethnic groups and/or from a totally different socio-economic perspective than their familiar one [180], or to be fully engaged in the co-design of public spaces and facilities [181]. In this sphere, the controversy upon the effectiveness and focus of European cohesion policy [182] makes it particularly evident how necessary it is to pour new energy into the civic foundations of European societies as a basis to revitalize local identities and to contrast the idea of Europe as a remote technocracy, not in sync with the lives, concerns and issues of European citizens [183]. Rather than helping marginal territories to regain confidence and energy, and contrary to stated intentions and goals, European policy discourses on local identity have de facto been so far unable to counter nostalgic or self-segregating narratives of ethnicity and particularism [184], as well as vicious circles of local identity impoverishment and stereotyping, finalized to tourist attraction [185]. A major rethinking is called for, in terms of responsible re-appropriation of community assets [186]. A new generation of participatory development projects based upon bottom-up creation of culturally mediated social capital might be particularly effective in this respect [187,188,189]. Rather than breaking new ground, in this case the role of active cultural participation may be that of refocusing already ongoing programs and initiatives [190].

5. Conclusions: Culture 3.0 and the Future of Cohesion Policies in Europe

The Culture 3.0 framework presented in this paper is an original theoretical construct that cannot be found in the previous literature, although it systematizes a vast amount of previous research and analysis, as discussed above. It should be seen as a conceptual canvas to stimulate future research in a more and more systematic exploration of the effects of cultural participation on a variety of social and economic domains whose policy relevance has already been acknowledged, and that could benefit from such effects to effectively enlarge their own strategic menu. This also amounts to advocating a bigger role for culture in the policy agenda not in terms of simple advocacy of culture for culture’s sake, but also in terms of culture’s proven capacity to expand the scope of other, more recognized policy areas. To assess how grounded such a new form of advocacy really is, we need a substantial amount of interdisciplinary research, that for some tiers is already well on its way, whereas for others is still to be properly formulated and translated into a full-fledged research program. The more such research yields interesting confirmative results on the strength and significance of the links between cultural participation and the corresponding spheres of social and economic impact, the more relevant the Culture 3.0 framework will be for future policy design, and vice versa. The output of future research in this vein will therefore be either a source of support or of limitation of the framework’s scientific and policy relevance by confirming or questioning its fruitfulness in generating interesting research hypotheses and providing a basic for effective policy design.

Our eight-tiered classification of the indirect developmental effects of culture finds its full sense within a Culture 3.0 regime, where active cultural access and participation becomes the social norm and the natural orientation of knowledge economies and societies. It provides a first list of possible areas of indirect impact of cultural participation in the creation of social and economic value, but such a list could even be partial and amenable to further enlargement in the future. This is not to say, of course, that the direct macroeconomic effect of the growth of cultural and creative industries should become less relevant in the new context. Quite the contrary, as we have argued, there is a strong complementarity between direct economic impacts and indirect ones, as they concur to increase individual participation and access to cultural opportunities, and stimulate further culturally-related capability building.

The advent of Culture 3.0 lays the premise for a profound rethinking of the sense and scope of cultural policy in the decades to come. In Culture 1.0, cultural policy is basically the channel for the implementation of public patronage. In Culture 2.0, it is a tool to improve the financial sustainability and the market drive in the production of cultural and creative contents. In Culture 3.0, however, cultural policy becomes much more than a mere sectorial policy and qualifies to be considered as a major policy pillar for the economy and the society as a whole. In this perspective, the role of European institutions, such as Europeana [191,192], whose mission is to make European cultural heritage accessible and usable to all citizens through smart digitalization, and therefore to foster active cultural participation through a straightforward Culture 3.0 logic, goes much beyond a mere sectoral dimension and can be regarded as a pilot experiment of a new generation of cultural institutions that make massive bottom-up participation their main focus. As shown through the eight-tiered classification, cultural participation opens up new, unprecedented possibilities of economic and social value creation in so many different spheres that fall outside culture’s conventional domain of action and impact. Such a new perspective has been explicitly recognized by the New Agenda for Culture of the European Commission, which explicitly indicates the health, innovation, social cohesion, and soft power tiers (the latter re-defined in terms of cultural diplomacy) as a key orientation of the EU future policy, and more generally emphasizes the key strategic role of cultural crossovers as a full-fledged internalization of what could previously be regarded as spillover (i.e., unintentional and unplanned) effects into a coherent and cohesive policy design paradigm which purposefully pursues them [193]. This means, in particular, that culture may cross paths with practically all the major policy themes of today: from innovation to welfare, from inter-cultural dialogue to sustainability, and many more. However, if this shift of perspective is not appropriately realized by policymakers, this amounts to failing to acknowledge a key nexus of the emerging socio-economic organization made possible by the ubiquitous production of cultural and creative contents. In European programming terms, this calls for empowering cultural policies with new, key roles in the design and deployment of more context-specific cohesion strategies [194], and as an innovative platform for smart specialization [195]. Learning to integrate cultural policies into the traditional policy toolbox and finding for them an appropriate space in the policy agenda priorities are therefore key challenges for the policy making of both the near and the not-so-near future.

It should also be noted that the Culture 3.0 paradigm is not denying the importance of more conventional forms of culture-driven development such as, for instance, cultural tourism. It is simply arguing that it should not be taken as the main driver of regional culture-led development, as it could be done in a mature Culture 1.0 perspective, but rather as a complementary sector which generates economic value as a consequence of the main drivers. A culturally thriving milieu can also attract cultural tourism, but the vice versa is not true, in the sense that large tourist flows without a strong, lively base of local cultural production quickly transform the milieu into a tourist-dependent theme park [196]. The best way to create social and economic value through culture is in terms of expressive, not instrumental rationality. The value of culture is tightly linked to its crucial capacity to produce, preserve, and transmit meaning generatively, that is, as a self-catalytic process of human flourishing, capability and skills creation, and equitable development [197].

Will Europe manage to seize the opportunity? The signals are contradictory so far. As we have just noticed, the Culture 3.0 perspective is finding space in the EU strategic thinking on the role of culture in future policies. However, having to face the urgencies posed by the many economic and social criticalities of today, there is a constant risk that the EU marginalizes in practice the role of cultural policy rather than upgrading it to the new level, and that would be a sign that there is still a significant gap in terms of strategic vision and conceptual awareness of the revolutionary implications of Culture 3.0. At the moment, it is difficult to anticipate which side will prevail. If the new conception of cultural policy making will not be able to inform the strategic policy vision for the next 2021–2027 policy cycle, it seems reasonable to conjecture that a full-fledged cultural participation-driven concept of cultural policy making will eventually flourish elsewhere, as it already happened with the emergence of Culture 2.0. Furthermore, there are many interesting candidates in this respect. The future scenario is open, and the race has already begun.