ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter explains the book’s and the INVENT project’s purpose: to generate fresh, research-driven insights into how Europeans understand, practice, perceive, and value culture amid major societal shifts - globalisation, European integration, migration, increased diversity, digitalisation, and growing inequality.
It begins by locating the study within the sociological “cultural turn” and tracing how European cultural policy models have shifted from high culture and democratisation to the creative economy, sustainability, and health agendas. The chapter highlights critical blind spots: both scholarship and policy frequently ignore citizens’ cultural understandings, everyday practices, and perceptions, the ways these intersect with broader societal transformations, and how such lived experiences diverge across social groups and national and local contexts.
Next, the chapter describes how the INVENT research team addressed these gaps by embracing a broad conceptualisation of culture and pairing a bottom-up approach with a comparative analysis. Nine European countries were chosen to capture diverse policy frameworks, value systems, media ecologies, degrees of globalisation, and inequality patterns. A mixed methods design - representative surveys, smartphone experience sampling, social media analysis, qualitative interviews, and sectoral focus groups - illuminates both the “doing” and “meaning making” of culture, yielding fine-grained evidence on how Europeans engage with and value culture amid intersecting societal transformation.
Finally, the chapter outlines the book’s core contributions: a bottom-up, inclusive conception of cultural values that centres citizens’ own understandings; a cross-national comparative perspective spanning diverse policy models and social contexts; and methodological innovation through mixed and digital methods. It closes by previewing the three parts of the volume - (I) practices and understandings, (II) perceptions and experiences, and (III) outcomes, affordances, and values - setting the stage for subsequent chapters.
