Cultural sociology as a tool for art policies

During the last decades, the discipline of cultural sociology has produced a considerable amount of knowledge on cultural production. Institutional approaches, notably inspired by DiMaggio and Powell (1982) classical article, have notably given the production of culture perspective (Peterson and Anand, 2004). Field analysis (Bourdieu, 1979) have inspired many works that have enlighted the link between social boundaries (Lamont and Molnar, 2002) of cultural practices. Symbolic interactionism, best represented by Howard Becker art worlds (1982) explored the different modes of collaboration between actors and have highlighten the collective aspect of artistic production. Finally, study of mediations have highlighten the role of artworks in constructing social life (Hennion, 1993 ; DeNora, 2000). All these theoretical fields of study have produced a considerable empirical knowledge of different artistic fields, in different countries, both at the level of production and consumption. At the same time, cultural policies seems to take a more and more important position in political life. The best exemple of this might be the dynamism around the 2005 UNESCO convention on the promotion and protection of the diversity of cultural expressions. This convention is used, for instance, by State Parties to inspire cultural policies that they want to develop. It is also used as a platform of exchange of good practices, that it tries to define through directives. For instance, the last Conference of Parties has stated that net neutrality was necessary to cultural diversity. However, the knowledge produced by cultural sociology, mainly through qualitative methods, is curiously absent of the debates of the organization, that produces reports mainly based on quantitative approaches, and make little or no reference to the corpus we have enunciated. This absence can also be found in different states. In our presentation, we will explore some of the possible ways in which the theoretical and empirical knowledge produced in cultural sociology can practically inform arts policies and provide useful practical tools for their conception.