services, processes of meaning and value negotiation and the elaboration of preferences and perceptual habits play an important role. Since many cultural activities take place in an almost completely institutionalised setting, Cultural Institutions Studies are also concerned with financing structures, value-added chains, organisational change in the cultural sector, and with legal and cultural policy frameworks. Taking the approach of institutional and organisational theory, Cultural Institutions Studies also investigate processes occurring place within individual companies, as well as certain structural characteristics in cultural management. Aspects of occupational sociology connected with division of labour and integration of different types of activity are also relevant to understanding co-operation of different occupational groups in the cultural sector or in cultural industries. Delineation of the discipline Although Cultural Institutions Studies has been defined as an "inter-discipline", the following delimitation ought to contribute to further clarification of its profile. While Culture Management Studies – analogous to management studies – are usually considered to be an application oriented discipline, Cultural Institutions Studies are basically not oriented in this way. This new discipline observes, analyses and comments on structures and processes in the cultural sector and in cultural organisations. Its goal is to indirectly influence cultural policy, cultural economics, and conditions within cultural enterprises, i.e., their management and administration. In this way, Cultural Institutions Studies is also concerned with theory-building. Cultural Institutions Studies focuses on the emergence and development of specific cultural goods. This approach keeps a certain (but not critical) distance to the mainstream conception of "culture" usually encountered in contemporary cultural studies and sociology of culture. Speaking generally, anything created by man and enabled through socialisation is conceived as part of "culture". Cultural Institutions Studies, however, uses a narrower definition of "culture", reserving the term "cultural good" to artefacts embedded in a concrete institutional setting. Of course, historically, there were periods when music or painting were able to develop without any institutional setting. Researchers active in Cultural Institutions Studies, however, generally insist that cultural goods and practices "cannot be understood apart from the contexts in which they are produced and consumed". Commercial activities in cultural sector presuppose clear ownership relations as well as the establishment of scarcity: both are due to legal and economic policy interventions. However, in contrast to common traditional cultural economics studies, Cultural Institutions Studies proceed from the assumption that the formation of non economic value is not just an accidental accompaniment of