The Equilibrist Hope: Perspectives & prospectives on cultural-creative crowdfunding

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation aims to grasp how cultural-creative crowdfunding (CCCF) can be comprehended as a responsible innovation within (and for) the culture sector, by understanding its potentialities as not only an alternative finance tool but also an instrument of collaborative endeavor, values co-creation, and collective mobilization. Artists were pioneers in adopting crowdfunding, yet the practice seems to remain on the outskirts of the culture sector activities and policy settings due to the tension between art and commerce. Moreover, crowdfunding has been underexplored in earlier scientific work, especially from the cultural community perspective, thus CCCF literature remains embryonic. Therefore, by following a theory development approach, this PhD looks at CCCF as the intersection of the culture sector production chain and alternative finance technology. While the practice of getting small amounts of money from the crowd – busking and aspects of patronage — is not new to artists and cultural-creative agents, the CCCF novelty lies in doing so through a digital intermediator, a crowdfunding platform. From this perspective, the PhD thesis conducts a multi-angle analysis of CCCF, aiming to address the aforementioned research gap and provide a more nuanced conceptual understanding of CCCF as a practice mirroring the culture sector dynamics and enhancing its performance. To do that, this dissertation is anchored in three main inherently transdisciplinary frameworks; 1) the culture sector, specifically cultural economics and cultural studies; 2) the research on crowdfunding per se, in particular, CCCF; and 3) the exploratory field of responsible research and innovation (RRI). The theoretical outlook, analytical perspectives, and proposed interconnectedness evolved throughout the project in the course of producing three (main) articles within a coherent storytelling backstage.

The journey starts with a descriptive, single-context-based approach and gradually moves towards mapping the multi-faceted CCCF practice possibilities in a contrasting Global North (mainly Norway/Europe) versus Global South (mainly Brazil/Latin American) context. In short, Paper 1 seeks to understand the current CCCF discourse through the multiple artists/creators’ narratives based on discourse analysis and statistics from the CCCF campaigns in Norway. Paper 2 explores if and how CCCF is being embraced within the various cultural-creative industries beyond its function of raising money. By adopting a multiple-case approach in two contrasting realities, Brazil and Norway, it searches for the multiple roles that CCCF can play within cultural projects’ development and artists/creators’ careers. Paper 3 follows a crossmeta- perspective of CCCF and develops a systematic mapping of CCCF structures and relational forms by creating a database of CCCF platforms in Europe and Latin America and further elaborating on current perspectives, crucial dilemmas, and potential prospective practices. Being of an overall inductive-constructivist nature, the set of the three papers explores the phenomenon of crowdfunding in the empirical context of the culture sector, respectively embedded in distinct socioeconomic realities which enriches theoretical insights and can inspire future solutions. Ergo, in an iterative process of a multi-method research design, the end goal is to support the theoretical development of CCCF as a dispersed community of practice in innovation (cultural) commons, following an epistemological view of science that corresponds to a world to be constructed. In other words, the three articles set together with the kappe elaborate on CCCF perspectives and prospectives, hoping to inform academics, policymakers, and practitioners.

CCCF represents a promising new form of organization for the culture sector with possible novel arrangements for the funding ecosystem, e.g., match funding mechanisms. This doctoral dissertation, embedded in the lens of responsible research and innovation, focuses on re-positioning the CCCF as a rhizomatic assemblage of symbolic nature that can serve the culture sector – not only financially but also innovatively, by enhancing its dynamic socio-aesthetics practices and broadening its societal applications and implications. As a result, this work provides an augmented comprehension of how CCCF can be incorporated into the cultural policy debates and within artists/creators’ management and ventures, in a broader apparatus of an ecosystem of funding and financing for arts and culture. Ergo, this PhD advances the CCCF theory by proposing a conceptual framework that illustrates the multiple additional ways in which crowdfunding affects cultural production in a general context of digital transformation. Moreover, by offering a vaster awareness of CCCF discourses, this work contributes to the cultural-creative own narrative and enables the culture sector to take agency in shaping CCCF given its umbrella of chameleon practices aligned with the culture sector’s relational-structural forms, spinning from co-creation of diverse values towards a more sustainable-democratic-common future.