Performance Evaluation in the Arts and Cultural Sector: A Story of Accounting at Its Margins

In this article, I present a review of financial and management accounting literature on the arts and cultural sector. My objective is to understand to what extent this literature is able to offer a critical perspective on the study of performance evaluation practices in arts and cultural organizations, as it is currently missing in the arts management literature. Adopting a critical perspective means shifting the focus of research from the technicalities of evaluation rules and procedures to their embodiment by the different organizational and societal actors of the arts and cultural sector.     

Advocacy Coalition for Historic Preservation in the U.S.: Changes in Motivations

As the policy discussions of historic preservation have become complicated in recent years, the advocacy for the use of heritage is now even more important, and the number of coalitions for promoting the economic value of heritage has been on the rise. This research provides a historical view of the development of advocacy coalition networks that actively pursue the benefits of heritage resources. Through this context, the article then examines a case study of the Wheeling National Heritage Area. The case exemplifies the framework of how coalition networks can provide the structure necessary to push preservation policy in government.     

Arts Organizations and Branding: Creating a New Joint Brand for Three Arts Organizations

This article investigates brand architecture by analyzing stakeholder perceptions of brand images when a new joint brand is created for the existing brands of three arts organizations. The theoretical framework is based on previous literature on brand architecture and brand image. The empirical study is based on a quantitative, 418-respondent survey among stakeholders of these three arts organizations. The study makes two major theoretical contributions. First, the results show that the new joint brand can be endorsed by the existing sub-brands, contrary to brand-architecture literature. Second, even in the case of a new brand, stakeholders perceive the functional attributes as important.     

The Synergies of Artistic and Entrepreneurial Action

Arts Entrepreneurship education as a field continues to grow, but misperceptions of entrepreneurship seem to cause confusion among arts students, faculty, and administrators regarding the value of entrepreneurial training to higher education arts programs. These misperceptions are explored to determine if entrepreneurship, for artists, is harmful or helpful. By articulating the theoretical essence of entrepreneurship, it is suggested that entrepreneurial action is profoundly synergetic with artistic action and purpose, and that arts faculty and administrators can embrace entrepreneurship education and its value to aspiring professional artists.     

Managing the People: Art Programs in the American Depression

How do “classical” big art institutions (museums, the ballet, the opera, symphony orchestras) react to phenomena of globalization such as migration flows, the “denationalization” of artistic movements, the enormous growth of the number of artists, the trend of a global cultural branding of cities, etc.? And which cultural policies do governments develop to interfere in the relationship between those art institutions and their changing environments? Those were the central questions I asked while doing research about the position of art institutions in society today. The research concentrated on a very diverse sample of big art institutions in Europe. The research begins with the insights of Actor Network Theory and the political philosophy of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and leads to an ideal typical two-dimensional model to classify the possible strategies that such institutions and their responsible governments can use on the local, national and international level.     

The Effect of NEA Grants on the Contributions to Nonprofit Dance Companies

Affirmative action and diversity can serve as a powerful framework for helping arts management educators address the challenge of diversity in the arts. This article encourages arts management educators to use affirmative action and diversity to proactively recruit diverse students into academic degree programs.     

Can Twitter Add to Performance Evaluation in the Area of Performing Arts? Reflections from La Scala Opera House

ABSTRACT

Social media are continuously diffusing in performing arts organizations. Yet little is known on how social media data can contribute to the performing arts evaluation process. This article addresses this issue by investigating if and how Twitter data can add a valuable source of information to the performance evaluation process. A literature review with an empirical application on the evaluation of the performance Aida at Teatro Alla Scala provides evidence about the type of indicators that can be derived from Twitter and support a discussion about potentialities and pitfalls connected to their adoption for the evaluation of performing arts.     

Strategic Decision Making in Arts Organizations

Despite the growing economic and cultural importance of artistic institutions, relatively little is known about how aesthetic concerns and the demands of artistic production influence administrative roles. In this article, we investigate the strategic decision-making process in a varied sample of Canadian arts organizations, concentrating on the issues that emerge as crucial for the organization and the individuals and groups that participate in the decision-making process.     

Some Features of Cultural Policies Applied in Belgium,Particularly in the French-Speaking Community

The training of arts and cultural administrators in Taiwan is related to the development of Taiwan's cultural sector and the centralized system of its government. In this top-down system, the government has long played a leading role in the development of the arts, cultural policies, and industries. The purpose of this article is to examine elements of historical events and factors causing change in the environment to discover the characteristics of arts/cultural administrators, the skills needed for arts/cultural administrators, and the development of curriculum. The researcher divided the historical development of Taiwanese arts administration into three waves. The first wave is from 1949 to 1980, the second wave is from 1981 to 1990, and the third wave is 1991 through the present. Through a discussion of various historical events, factors concerning arts administration and its training system are discovered. In conclusion, after reviewing Taiwan's development in the area of arts administration, one finds that viewing arts administration as a profession is a relatively recent phenomenon. The training of arts administrators and curators in the visual arts was the first area to develop. Training for performing arts administrators was not emphasized until the 1980s. Graduate programs of arts administration in universities have been promoted only since the middle of the 1990s.     

Teaching Arts Management: Where Did We Lose the Core Ideas?

In light of the need to start clearing the methodological confusion in the field of arts management, this article provides a critical overview of the teaching curricula in the field. Distinction is made between programs that copy directly from business management; programs that focus on the technological process of producing an artwork (usually run by practitioners); those that interlink cultural management and cultural policy (highlighting the role of public governance as a higher principle); and programs that focus on an entrepreneurial approach to arts management, connecting it to issues of creativity and innovation. The author calls for clear goals to educate administrators and arts or cultural managers. The suggestion is made to follow what I call the Janus syndrome: looking toward managerial and economic realities but primarily focusing on the arts—the aesthetic and the social aspects of the field. A question is raised about the position of art in arts management curricula, as well as the organization of undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the field.