Arts Management and Cultural Policy Research

The landscape of arts management and cultural policy research is fragmented and variegated. This situation calls for a comprehensive analysis of the foundations and dynamics of knowledge production in the field that can help navigate this complexity. This book is not the first attempt at providing a reference for arts management and cultural policy research. Propositions to provide a comprehensive idea of the field of arts management (Byrnes, 1993; Chong, 2010), as well as propositions to formulate a somewhat stabilized identity for cultural policy research, are numerous — as attested by many publications in the recent years (Miller & Yudice, 2002; Lewis & Miller, 2003; McGuigan, 2004; Flew, 2011; O’Brien, 2013). These contributions have been extremely helpful in developing a better sense of what it means to engage in arts management and cultural policy research, and this book draws from their accomplishments. At the same time, it aims to go beyond these contributions to merge the two bodies of literature of arts management and cultural policy.

The Western construction of knowledge has been the source of a longstanding debate between Platonists and Aristotelians (McKeon, 2001). For Plato, the sensory side of human experience leads away from the critical rationality upon which truth depends (Eisner, 2007). For Aristotle, knowledge is differentiated along three lines: theoretical, practical, and productive. Theoretical knowledge is knowledge that purports to know things that cannot be any other way than the way they are; practical knowledge is knowledge of contingencies; and productive knowledge is knowledge of how to make things. The modern university’s engagement within the philosophical roots of knowledge is reflected in the vocational-academic tension among faculty in the traditional disciplines of letters and science, and faculty affiliated with professional schools.

While exploring the meaning of knowledge, in the previous chapter we identified academia and its disciplines as a central place of knowledge production. However, that does not encompass all the agents involved in the field. Disciplines emerge as discursive practices that reflect specific rules of academia, whereas the notion of field includes an epistemic culture that does not conceptualize knowledge as built on a privileged epistemic paradigm, but rather occupies a transdisciplinary space. Nevertheless, academia remains central and we take it as our point of departure for an understanding of the field by investigating how arts management and cultural policy developed within this setting.

Discussion on arts management has developed into three main strands as a means of addressing the often complex relationship between business management and arts management (Palmer, 1998). The first strand claims that there is little difference between managing an arts organization and any other kind of business (Shore, 1987). The second strand’s argument considers arts organizations to be fundamentally different from other businesses (Pick & Anderton, 1996). Finally, the third strand’s position reverses the previous arguments and states that business management has a lot to learn from both arts management and the arts in general (Adler, 2006).

Arts administration literature and research typically emphasize managerial functions and profiles over organizations. Despite the great diversity of cultural organizations, and despite the existence of important and rich contextual elements that could prove to be extremely helpful in uncovering some of the challenges that arts organizations and their managers face, our field has a genetic bias towards questions of management over questions of organization. Budgeting, marketing, and issues related to the characteristics of managers (charisma, leadership, training, etc.) are given precedence over any theorization of cultural organizations. It is as if, in the context of arts management literature, organizations only exist implicitly through the existence of management and arts managers. As a level of analysis in its own right, the organization reveals many of the subtleties of the collective nature and life of arts organizations. Moreover, the organizational level sheds light on many important phenomena, such as the sense of identity, the power dynamics at play, the dynamics of organizational change, and the constraints that are exerted on the institutional environment of arts organizations. These questions are only a small sample of the type of questions that are brought to awareness when we approach arts organizations from lenses that are broader than those recommended by a managerial perspective.

There are many different research traditions that claim ownership of cultural policy as an object of study. The most conventional approach to cultural policy research used by these traditions consists of approaching cultural policy through the lenses of political scientists or public policy researchers — meaning that cultural policy is given no specific status and is seen as a “policy area or subfield” among others (environmental policy foreign policy immigration policy, transport policy fiscal policy social policy etc.). This approach builds on concepts, theories, and methods that rarely differ from those used to study other policy areas — from environmental policy to social policy, regardless of how unique or different these policy fields might be, the outlook and methods used to analyze them are often similar. This lens on cultural policy has been considerably influential in the development of the field and has contributed to a better understanding of national, regional, and local cultural policies. Additionally, the tools developed by this approach for comparative analysis and program evaluation have led to a rich practice of collaboration and knowledge dissemination between academia, governments, think tanks, and the broader arts community. Of course, this conception of cultural policy falls short at times, and many cultural policy researchers who are interested in some of the more specific dynamics of culture may consider this conventional approach to be oblivious to a number of important debates in cultural policy research.

In our attempts to situate and define cultural policy research in the previous chapter, we sided with political science and policy studies to formulate what is often seen as a basic definition and understanding of cultural policies. Cultural policy is seen and defined as the outcome of a state-driven process. Needless to say this is only one of many ways of approach cultural policy. As there are no agreed upon definitions of what culture is in the humanities and social sciences, there is no unanimous definition of what cultural policy is. This is, however, common currency in any discussion about the nature of cultural policy research, and by stating this we are only reiterating what is in evidence for most of us. In this chapter, we illustrate how cultural policy research is subjected to a multidisciplinary account.

This chapter revisits the question of knowledge in arts management and cultural policy research. What is the nature of the scientific claims — claims to truthfulness — being made by arts management and cultural policy research? On what grounds are these research findings to be considered valid, truthful, reliable, or even worth considering? What are the grounds on which the voice of the researcher can be said to be distinct or different from the voice and claims being made by practitioners, journalists, or the general public?

Arts management and cultural policy research have a polyphonic nature. While the majority of the research in the field rests on social science and humanities traditions, its close relationship with practitioners often shapes its research in the direction of what one might refer to as an applied field. The aim of this chapter is to describe and analyze the different sources of this polyphonic research, charting the different institutional settings of knowledge production. Considering that institutions are context-specific, as they are linked to the social, economic, and political history of the country, this chapter focuses on the USA. Each section illustrates the characteristics — purposes and logics of inquiry — of the four institutional settings that produce the current knowledge for and about the field: academia, arts organizations, government, and a collection of private organizations. The chapter concludes with a proposal for the development of an ethics of research that would foster a community of practice geared towards cultivating an inclusive view of the knowledge produced in these different institutional settings, but serving the same field.

We started our investigation by considering that the field of arts management and cultural policy research is characterized by a fragmented and heterogeneous knowledge. In particular, we described this complexity as twofold: it includes two main discursive practices — arts management and cultural policy — and it involves multiple actors producing knowledge in different institutional settings. We started our investigation using the concept of field as a relational construct that allows us to think about these different modes of knowledge production and actors as part of the same construct. Then we proceeded by further analyzing the concept of field in order to better articulate both the differences and elements that keep the field together.