Foreword of the Issue Editors: Reinstalling Culture as Common Good and Public Service

Abstract

In more and more countries globally, the common good and public services in social areas such as education and research, health and culture are being targeted by major reforms that seek to impose a different operating system for them, namely that of efficiency in areas that do not have the same metrics as economic sectors. The latest European cultural policy documents, influenced by the paradigm of creativity, emphasize the economic potential of the cultural sector, which appears under the name of cultural industries and is always present in public discourse alongside the creative industries. Culture is seen as a source of creativity, which in turn is a necessary ingredient of innovation, and innovation is seen as a vector of the competitive advantage needed by the European Union in the context of competition in the global creative economy.