Can public arts education replace arts subsidization?

The debate about whether the arts should be supported or not is far from new, and most governments support the arts in one way or the other. The literature considers several arguments in favor of such interventions. Public education may seem to be an action which could, in the long run, lead to possible reductions of subsidies. Surveys show that those who have been exposed to the arts when young participate more when adult. However, the “non-market” transmission from parents to children generates an external effect, which has to be taken into account to reach first-best situations. We construct an overlapping generations model in which young consumers are exposed to both public education toward the arts and to non-altruistic transmission of such a taste from their parents. We show that the first-best can be reached only if there is both public cultural education and subsidization of arts consumption. Therefore, education cannot be considered as a substitute for subsidies to arts consumption. However, as is often the case in European countries, government intervention is usually below the first-best level. Using a model calibrated on French data, we show that it is then preferable to subsidize education, while consumption, especially of the older generations, should be taxed rather than subsidized.

From shanzhai chic to Gangnam style: seven practices of cultural-economic mediation in China and Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.     

Color characterization of roofing slates from the Iberian Peninsula for restoration purposes

Substitution of slate roofing tiles is a conventional operation during building restoration, since tiles are very difficult to restore or clean because of the high degree of alteration they suffer. Criteria for replacement of historical building stones must be based on geological, geotechnical and esthetic parameters, among which color is of great importance. In this sense, this paper constitutes a comprehensive and useful colorimetric study of roofing slates from the Iberian Peninsula, for the purposes of restoration. The color of 50 commercial varieties of roofing slate mined in quarries from the 12 mining districts in the Iberian Peninsula was analyzed with a spectrophotometer device, by considering the CIELAB color space. The results of the study were used to develop a protocol for characterizing the color of roofing slate and to define the color range of roofing slate from the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, the similarities and differences in the color and microstructure of the different commercial varieties of Iberian roofing slate were established and the limit of acceptability of replacement of one type of slate by another was determined. Parameter h_ab was found to be the most important CIELAB color coordinate as regards the formation of homogeneous color groups, and the specular component excluded (SCE) mode was most sensitive as regards detecting color differences between two samples.     

The Job Interview and Cognitive Performance: Does Structure Reduce Performance on Selection Batteries,and Can Explanation of Purpose Improve It?

Structuring job interviews is a method of decreasing bias and increasing the predictive validity of job performance, but research suggests that applicants can react negatively to structure (Chapman & Zweig, 2005) and that negative attitudes about selection tools can predict performance (Hausknecht, Day, & Thomas, 2004). The current exploratory study investigates how structuring the job interview in conjunction with priming the ethnicity and sex of the applicant, and in some conditions providing an explanation of the structure, affected post‐interview cognitive ability performance. Three levels of structure were randomly assigned. Those who experienced a structured interview without an explanation of its purpose scored lower than those who experienced an unstructured interview, but those who experienced a structured interview with an explanation of its purpose did not score lower than those who experienced an unstructured interview. Scores differed for females and Hispanics depending on the structure condition, but not in the same manner. Implications for recruitment, selection, and performance management are discussed.     

Accountability and the Framing Power of Visual Technologies: How Do Visualized Reconstructions of Incidents Influence Public and Political Accountability Discussions?

In this article visual technologies and their use in three reconstructions after an incident are linked with accountability issues. Conclusions are drawn on the relation between administration, the choice of technology to create and distribute visual occurrences, and society and how visualizations are used to frame accountability issues.     

How do your rivals’ releasing dates affect your box office?

In this paper, we study to what extent a movie’s box-office receipts are affected by the temporal distribution of rival films. We propose a reduced-form empirical model to measure and test competition effects among films released close to each other in a standard regression framework. Such an analysis is appealing in terms of its policy implication and may provide guidance to distributors to decide on their releasing dates of their firms. We estimate this model using information on the films released in five countries: the USA, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain. The geographical dimension of our data set permits us to control for unobserved heterogeneity among films released using panel data techniques, which allows us to evaluate the individual and specific effects of each film. Thus we deal with one of the most relevant features of the movie market, namely the presence of highly differentiated products.     

Science education — I: The spirit of science

In these two essays we explore the questions: what are the essential features of a workable context for science education? What are the givens, the “of courses,” the “fundamental dispositions” toward science and toward education necessary — or at least sufficient — to provide a fertile ground upon which a functional approach to science education can be established? In the present essay it is argued first that science education must reflect that science is a way of thinking — in fact, more comprehensively, a way of being; and second, and that the fundamentally antiauthoritarian spirit of science must be reconciled with education, with its built-in tendency to be authoritarian.