Michele Tamma

Prodotti culturali e territori: l'immateriale che vive nella materialità

In recent years the relationship between culture and territory has been the subject of increasing interest, in relation to the fact that “culture”, in its broadest sense, is now widely recognized as a key resource for economic development and competitiveness. Especially considered in its relationship with territory, culture – immaterial - “lives” in materiality, in that it creates, regenerates, settles in people, in relationships, in artifacts, in institutions, and also in organizations and in products. How does an area “offer” culture, i.e. create it, preserve it, make it usable? A vision that builds on the possible forms of “cultural products”, and on the resources and processes that make them possible, can contribute to the understanding of viable ways to exploit potential that certainly cannot emerge and develop spontaneously.

Making cultural tourism networks work - the role of collective actors

Culture and tourism have a complementary and mutually beneficial relationship: value offerings are co-created by integrated value chains and networks of interdependent actors. However, building and maintaining cultural tourism networks is far from straightforward: both the tourism industry and the cultural sector are fragmented and heterogeneous, and often seem to be speaking different languages. We investigate how collective actors can contribute to fostering collaborative strategies, focusing on a specific inter-organizational network located in the city of Venice. Our main findings have implications both for managerial and public policies: the identification of actors, positioned at intermediate network levels, who can influence a network’s functioning allows for interventions not generally addressed to the destination as a whole but aimed at solving specific network’s weaknesses.

Culture-Based Products: Integrating Cultural and Commercial Strategies

Today it is customary to speak of the collaborative potential of culture and business to achieve benefits in one’s cultural and professional lives. Making sense of the involvement of culture in firms, however, requires a better understanding of the link between cultural practices and projects and the development of business models. This paper focuses on companies that place culture at the core of their respective production practices and business models, with particular reference to those offering culture-based products. For these kinds of products, the creation, preservation, enhancement and transmission of a specific culture all play vital roles in embedding particular aesthetic and symbolic content in their unique consumption experiences. In order to explore the integration of cultural and commercial strategies that culture-based products seem to drive, we propose an early study through the investigation of a set of brands competing in the same field.