Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2012

This article offers a critical review of cross-boundary ties and tensions between the arts and management. It considers various reactions to managerialism in this context, providing a cautionary insight into managerial art and calling attention to the dual role compromises that can arise for artists who engage with business management. It also highlights the common ground between critical art and critical management studies, arguing that complementary concerns and activities within these traditions present opportunities for collaborative engagement to reach beyond managerial orthodoxy and anticipate more progressive, empowering and accountable forms of management. This discussion sets the scene for subsequent contributions to this special edition.

This article addresses the practice of community drama as an aspect of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland since the beginning of the peace process established by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, particularly examining the tensions between public policy, arts management, and the experiences of practitioners and participants. The key focus will be an analysis of the ways in which organizational contexts have enhanced or restricted the potential for critically reflective practice. As has been discussed in a previous article by M. Jennings and A. Baldwin, the prioritization within cultural development organizations of adhering to ‘top-down’ funding agendas and evaluation criteria has neglected consideration of the real challenges faced and the achievements attained by facilitators and participants within the context of specific projects. The complexity of the relationships between artists, cultural development organizations, funding bodies and the state have made it difficult for community artists to establish and transmit the values and significance of their own practice. The tensions between these stakeholders have undermined both the efficacy of community arts practice and the credibility of cultural development policy within contemporary Northern Ireland. The controversies, scepticism and even bomb attacks on the offices of the UK City of Culture company in Derry/Londonderry during the last two years indicate the risks of failure in these areas.

Applied Theatre Consultants Ltd is a theatre company based in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Since 2003 they have received funding from a government department for ‘Everyday Theatre’, a programme about family violence and child abuse. Drawing on an ethnographic study undertaken with the company, this article presents an analysis of the ways in which they have experienced and managed changes to this funding relationship. It will address concerns raised in the academic discourse of applied theatre about the ways in which funding can determine, constrain and compromise practice. Over nine years, tensions have emerged between the arts and social justice values that informed the creation of Everyday Theatre and the rational management systems that have since been implemented by the funder to manage the contractual relationship. Rather than just focusing on the negative effects of these changes, I will draw on theories of arts management as an ‘arts-led’and care-based activity to highlight the particular affordances and strategies used by the company to negotiate between the requirements of their funder and their core artistic and organizational values. I will argue that to understand better the implications of funding relationships for the practice of applied theatre companies, attention needs to be paid to the changing dynamics of such relationships and to the particular ways in which management is constituted within such organizations.

The neo-liberal agenda that has dominated the creative industries for the past few decades has engendered a range of problems for artists, arts managers and policy-makers. This article critiques the application of commercial strategic management and marketing tools, theory and principles to arts and cultural organizations and proposes alternative approaches to assist these organizations in creating, identifying and evaluating value on their own terms and in line with their artistic missions and objectives. The solutions proposed are generated by an application of the literature on arts management and evaluation, cultural policy and sociology and through a qualitative study of audiences’ articulations of value. The article reports and analyses the responses of 34 semi-structured in-depth interviews on the value of theatre with participants drawn from audiences in the United Kingdom and Australia. It highlights the discrepancies between the instrumental methods of evaluating value imposed on arts organizations by governments and the personal, intrinsic insights provided by audiences themselves. It argues ultimately for a neo-institutionalist and creative approach to articulating artistic value, which would evaluate organizational performance in line with artistic objectives. In so doing, it makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about cultural value, and proposes a creative, alternative evaluation framework for artists, arts managers, arts marketers and cultural policy-makers.

The nature of neo-liberal management theory, based on the artist as a model worker, has proven problematic for theorizing and analysing contemporary socially engaged artistic practices. In the past, these practices were considered to be hostile to capitalism but now, with the rise of project-driven work within mainstream business models, how can we understand the socially engaged artist’s relationship to capitalism? The project, the network and communication have become key attributes within neo-liberal management discourse. In this article it is argued that a certain type of artistic practice has accompanied neo-liberalism that borrows these specific tropes akin to project management. It makes connections between Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s exploration of these ideological tropes in The New Spirit of Capitalism ([1999] 2007) and neo-liberal management ideas manifest in the Creative Industries in Britain. This analysis provides the theoretical base for examining Thomas Hirschhorn’s role as a ‘project manager’ within the Bataille Monument (2002) project in the second half of the article. It is argued here that Hirschhorn retains his anti-capitalist leanings whilst also adopting neo-liberal management tropes in the articulation and execution of his project.

This article examines motivations and methods for external evaluators in taking on a brokerage relationship between artists, arts managers and governments (national and local) during an appraisal process of community arts events. The argument is situated in our experience evaluating the Creating Queensland programme, a multifaceted community arts programme presented as part of the one of Australia’s largest arts events the Brisbane Festival, in 2009 and 2010. We use this case to identify a number of principles and processes that may assist in establishing an effective evaluation process – defined, for us, as a process in which partners representing different elements of the community arts project can share information in a learning network, or an innovation network, that embraces the idea of continuous improvement. We explain that we, as consultants, are not necessarily the only participants in the evaluation process in a position to broker the decision making about what to research and report on. We argue that empowering each of the delivery partners to act as brokers, using the principles, protocols and processes to negotiate what should be researched, when, how and how it should be shared, is something each delivery partner can do. This can help create a common understanding that can reduce anxieties about using warts-and-all evaluation data to learn, grow and improve in the arts. It can, as a result, be beneficial both for the participating partners and the community arts sector as a whole.

The use of actors and applied theatre methods for workplace management and leadership training has become increasingly common. Organizations have sought to obtain competitive advantage by drawing on theatre methods to enable staff to perform their work roles in a context of rapid and fundamental change to work practices and structures. This case study explores the impact of a specific form of theatre-based learning inside the insurance provider, Friends Provident. It presents a nuanced picture of applied theatre in this commercial context. Whilst the business use of this form of theatre may be driven by imperatives for efficiency, in practice a unique space can be generated in which participants can express and address the tensions of organizational life. I suggest this study will be of interest to researchers concerned with approaches to training in leadership and management, as well as scholars from the fields of applied theatre and acting.

The Arts Management Handbook: New Directions for Students and Practitioners, Meg Brindle and Constance De Vereaux (eds) (2011) New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 368 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7656-1742-2, p/bk, £37.53

Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape, Petra Kuppers (2011) Palgrave Macmillan, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-0230298279, Basingstoke, England / £58.00