Whitley, Richard and Jochen Gläser (2026). Innovations in the Modern Arts and Sciences: Explaining Lasting Change in Novelty- Driven Cultural Fields. Bristol University Press,https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/innovations-in-the-modern-arts-and-sciences [bristoluniversitypress.co.uk]. 2026. DOI: 10.51952/9781529239393.
The modern arts and sciences are fields of cultural production in which the creation of original works has become an everyday activity generating a large variety of novel outputs. However, only some of these products become innovations that have a lasting effect on the kinds of problems that other competent producers work on and how they do so. It is the extent to which novel ideas, techniques and results alter the nature, organisation and valuation of artistic and scientific activities that determines their long-term importance as aesthetic and epistemic innovations. An important question in the analysis of changing practices and goals in the modern arts and sciences, then, is how, and under what conditions, do particular kinds of innovations become established and alter dominant ways of doing things in different fields? These processes can be expected to vary between differently organized and governed artistic and scientific fields as well as being affected by the nature of the broader socio-economic circumstances in which they are conducted.
In this book we present an explanatory framework for analysing how different kinds of lasting change are developed and institutionalized in different artistic and scientific fields. Building on a number of examples from the modern arts and sciences we show how the development of different innovations are affected by the distribution of authority over aesthetic and epistemic standards, goals and access to resources. The development of different kinds of innovations in differently structured art worlds and science worlds is explored in more detail in nine case studies of successful innovations: Bebop in modern jazz, the Nouvelle Vague in French cinema, Cubism, Anglophone Metafiction, the Oncogene approach in cancer research, Financial economics, Radio astronomy, the realisation of Bose-Einstein condensates, and Evolutionary-developmental biology. These comparative analyses help us to understand how changes in socio-economic conditions have been significant factors in re-shaping the processes by which innovations in the arts and sciences produce lasting change by modifying the productive relationships between practitioners in the arts and sciences and the nature of authority relations in art worlds and science worlds.
