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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.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137460929_5

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