The Handbook of Cultural Work is a collection of articles divided in 6 Chapters: 1) Spaces and Cultural Action. 2) Cross-sectoral cultural action. 3) Politics, power and access. 4) The cultural economy, funding and policies in Europe. 5) Culture, the climate emergency and the sustainable development goals. 6) The digital transformation of cultural practice.

Annick Schramme, professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium analyses the evolution of cultural entrepreneurship and funding policies in Europe. Since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, a more market-oriented approach has intensified. The economical crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020 also strongly impacted the cultural sector. This tendency encourages a context where rather than relying primarily on governmental support, cultural organizations are obliged to find other financial resources in order to survive and need to adopt an entrepreneurial behaviour, so called cultural entrepreneurship. Even though the creative industries can have a big economical impact on a country, they often seem to have the same barrier, the lack of entrepreneurial skills. Prof. Schramme analyses the European Commissions' Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan and its Communication on ‘Rethinking Education’, that emphasized the need to embed entrepreneurial learning in all sectors of education but doesn’t leave enough space for experimentation. With public, private and mixed funding available, a few questions rise: What does the role of the government in supporting the arts and the cultural and creative sectors continue to be? Will the market sphere or the social sphere, with mechanisms like crowdfunding, incubator and accelerator finance eventually replace the public sphere? Prof Schramme concludes that successfully supporting the cultural and creative sectors in the future will be a major challenge for governments, not only in Europe but also worldwide.