Managing Culture

Reflecting On Exchange In Global Times

Victoria Durrer, Raphaela Henze, Victoria Durrer, Raphaela Henze

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030246457
• eBook ISBN: 9783030246464
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides new insights into the relationship of the field of arts and cultural management and cultural rights on a global scale.

Globalisation and internationalisation have facilitated new forms for exchange between individuals, professions, groups, localities and nations in arts and cultural management. Such exchanges take place through the devising, programming, exhibition, staging, marketing, and administration of project activities. They also take place through teaching and learning within higher education and cultural institutions, which are now internationalised practices themselves. 

With a focus on the fine, visual and performing arts, the book positions arts and cultural management educators and practitioners as active agents whose decisions, actions and interactions represent how we, as a society, approach, relate to, and understand ourselves and others. This consideration of education and practice as socialisation processes with global, political and social implications will be an invaluable resource to academics, practitioners and students engaging in arts and cultural management, cultural policy, cultural sociology, global and postcolonial studies.

© The Author(s) 2020

V. Durrer, R. Henze (eds.)Managing CultureSociology of the Arts https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24646-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Victoria Durrer¹ and Raphaela Henze²

(1)

Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

(2)

Heilbronn University, Künzelsau, Germany

Victoria Durrer (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Raphaela Henze

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

While not a new phenomenon, globalisation and internationalisation have facilitated new means for “crossovers between cultures.” (Bennett, 2001, p. 19). While globalisation refers to the process of increasing social, economic and political international exchange and interdependency, internationalisation is understood as:

specific policies and programmes undertaken by governments [and] academic systems [and] institutions, and even individual departments that cope with or exploit globalisation (Altbach, 2004, p. 6).

Both facilitate new forms of exchange between individuals and groups across cultures and between and within nations. The exchange of cultural values, ideas, and knowledge this brings can lead to forms of ‘cultural colonialism’ and inequality. Such exchanges can equally offer new, creative and alternative cultural experiences (Cowan, 2002, p. 6; Dewey & Wyszomirski, 2004).

Much literature has explored these ideas in relation to culture more broadly (Mishra, 2017) and heritage and museums (Bennett, 1995; Clifford, 1997; MacDonald, 1998; Gray, 2015) as well as popular or commercial and broadcast arts (Miller, 2007; Singh, 2011). This collection explores these ideas within the field of arts and cultural management.¹ In ‘managing’ creative and aesthetic expressions, as symbolic expressions of culture (Hall, 1997), the contributions here largely focus on the fine visual and performing arts (theatre, dance and music). As Ebewo and Sirayi (2009) explain,

culture plays such a fundamental role in shaping the personality of an individual in society and the character of the world that due attention must be given to the management of its organisations and institutions. (p. 281)

Yet despite important art historical research (see Brockington, 2009), Isar (2012) rightly points out that research has largely neglected fuller consideration of how cultural workers are active agents who “transmit”, guard, and exchange “ideas, values and practices [within] global economic change” (pp. 2–3), thus influencing the politics of representation on a global scale.

Consideration of socialisation processes existing in arts and cultural management practice but also in education and training are critical to this discussion. These processes include the exchange between ‘cultures’ that take place in the devising, development, delivery and staging of artistic and cultural projects and productions. They also include examination of teaching and learning experiences concerning that practice. In fact, the growing professionalisation of arts and cultural management practice through the standardisation and legitimation that education and training now provide on an international scale plays as important a role in representation as the practice of management itself (see Shome, 2009). To date, the role of either and their integration as social practices in the politics of representation, has yet to be fully interrogated.

What research does exist is siloed and disconnected. It focuses on particular cultural forms or is isolated in different academic disciplines or in arts and cultural management practice handbooks and readers. Further, while there has been some research on the personal experiences of exchange within practice (Rösler, 2015; Rowntree, Neal, & Fenton, 2010), there has been virtually none regarding education. Practitioners, researchers and educators have thus lacked opportunity to question how the field’s dominant ideologies and their own actions impact on global exchange (Henze, 2017). This limitation has so far stilted critical discourse on the subject (DeVereaux, 2009). It has also narrowed the potential for understanding the field’s impact on cultural understanding and rights on a societal level.

Chapters in this collection address this gap. Contributions consider the institutions, organisations, groups and individuals who coordinate and lead the protection, marketing, mediation and financial organisation of creative and aesthetic expressions. They also consider the experiences of those involved in, and in receipt of, education and training. Ways in which ‘crossovers’ are explored in this context include:

1. 1.
   project activities between individuals, institutions and/or organisations working or residing in different countries and the experience of those involved in them; and
2. 2.
   teaching and learning within higher education as well as training activities led by cultural institutions.

Consequently, the contributions presented see ‘exchange’ as interaction between individuals, communities (of identity and of practice), institutions, and/or nations with different (and perhaps similar) values and perspectives.

Culture

In thinking about ‘culture’, we approach the term in three ways. First, in the anthropological sense of culture as a whole ‘way of life’, such as language, habits and common traditions (Williams, 1989, p. 6). Such aspects are ‘ordinary’. That is, they are commonly known, understood and shared amongst a group of people in ways that shape collective identity and the common reasons and processes for how and why groups come to conduct life in specific social, political and economic ways (NicCraith, 2003)—cultural logics, as it were.

Secondly, it is an approach to understanding culture “in the context of artistic output” (Paquette & Beauregard, 2018, p. 19). These are the symbolic forms of representation through which we produce, reproduce, circulate and interpret meaning (Hall, 1997, p. 3). Meaning here refers to “ideas, knowledge, values and beliefs” (Hesmondhalgh & Saha, 2013, p. 188). Often times, artistic output is used to mark “differences and similarities in taste and status within [and among] social groups” (Miller & Yúdice, 2002, p. 1). Paquette and Beauregard (2018, p. 19) refer to this marking as the ‘aesthetic register’, which has resonance in the anthropological sense of culture. They explain

Much in the same way that culture in the aesthetic register is understood as a question of taste, so do the elements of culture-as-a-way-of-life—that is to say the language, customs, etc., that go into a culture—represent tastes and choices—albeit “unconscious canons of choice” (Benedict, 1934[2005], pp. 47–48) that have gradually evolved and come into being [over time]. (p. 19)

How this comes into being, relates in part to our final interpretation of culture: the culture of a field—arts and cultural management. As a field, those engaging in arts and cultural management come to share (and possibly contest) knowledge, habits, traditions, language and values, which are in turn informed by, and informing of, the forms of culture discussed above (Paquette & Redaelli, 2015; Bourdieu, 1993). Knowledge in the field is shaped through the work of practitioners and consultants and by academic researchers from diverse disciplines (anthropology, cultural policy, cultural studies, sociology, management and political science). Education and training, organisational cultures, recruitment practices, and personal, social as well as professional relationships are some of the ways in which people come to learn and/or question these forms of knowledge, traditions, language and values (Brim & Wheeler, 1966).

To elaborate, the decisions taken and avoided in showcasing particular artists and in framing their work both physically and conceptually through marketing materials and exhibition and staging choices are part of a process of meaning making and representation (in the anthropological sense of culture). Studies investigating reception of work and evidencing social and economic impact of that experience equally plays a part. The establishment of education and training has particularly come to ‘professionalise’ and legitimise these practices, in ways that were once largely established from learning-in-practice or learning through work or career development (Suteu, 2006). As ‘signifying practices’, together these processes contribute to the setting of “the rules, norms and conventions by which social life is ordered and governed” (Hall, 1997, p 4).

Management and Culture

In further exploring the notion of ‘managing culture’ presented in this collection, it has been useful to draw on the work of the late Zygmunt Bauman (2004), which provides deft explication of the relationship of one to the other. Taking a historical and sociological approach, his work reminds us of the chronology of things, as it were, where the emergence of the term ‘management’ predated that of ‘culture’. In doing so, he detailed the nature of power and control that is deeply embedded within each term. He (Bauman 2004) explained,

Deep in the heart of the ‘culture’ concept lies the premonition or tacit acceptance of an unequal, asymmetrical social relation—the split between acting and bearing the impact of action, between the managers and the managed, the knowing and the ignorant, the refined and the crude. (p. 64)

Forms of regulation that exist between but also within nations are particularly implicated in the management of culture. As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Conditions
• Part II. Practice
• Part III. Education
• Part IV. Future Directions
• Back Matter