Jonathan Paquette

Arts management and cultural policy research

Introduction 1. Knowledge: Disciplines and Beyond 2. Academic beginnings: Arts Management Training and Cultural Policy Studies 3. Functions of Management as Disciplinary Bridges 4. More than Management: Organizational Perspectives 5. Cultural Policy as Conventional Public Policy 6. Cultural Policy Research: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests 7. On Paradigms: From Epistemology to Epistemic Cultures 8. Mapping the Field: Institutional Settings of Knowledge Production Conclusion

Mentoring and Change in Cultural Organizations: The Experience of Directors in British National Museums

In management and arts management literature, mentoring is generally associated with social reproduction and emulation, and illustrates a phenomenon that is rather conservative in nature. Rarely is mentoring associated with change. In this article, we explore how mentoring has been a force of renewal for the institutional culture of British museums. This qualitative research brings attention to mentoring as a lever for cultural change through the experience of a new cohort of museum directors—one that has translated a new vision and approach to museums and the public into reality, and has brought forward the Labour governments cultural policy ideals.

Storytelling, organizations, and the coherent self: The chronotope of childhood in professional life histories

Professional life histories and organizational stories rarely follow the model of beginnings, middles, and ends. Most interviews end up being subjected to what Boje (2008. Storytelling organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage) refers to as the spiral of story disorder. However, some storytelling strategies are often used by interviewees to produce a coherent projection of the self and convey a unified professional ethos. This is the role the time and space of childhood – the childhood chronotope – plays in professional life histories. Childhood is often used by storytellers to bring coherence to their organizational stories – and this is no truer than in the context of interviews. Based on interviews from museum directors, this article illustrates how the childhood chronotope might be a meaningful notion for narrative analysis in organizational studies: childhood is mobilized and reinvested by the individuals self-construction in order to produce a sense of coherence and control over his or her organizational experience and professional self.

Science as culture and leisure: cultural policy, industry and scientific culture in the Canadian context.

Government ministries of industry have long been promoters, co‐producers and even sometimes producers of cultural policy – from local and regional development strategies to initiatives that fund cultural organizations to support emerging fields such as the technological arts. This article explores the relationship between cultural policy‐making, science museums and industry ministries in Canada. More specifically, this article investigates the emergence and institutionalization of scientific culture policy as a result of advocacy by science centres in the 1980s. Beyond the delineation of scientific culture as a field and of the contribution of industry ministries to cultural policy, this article highlights the entrepreneurial strategies of cultural organizations and their impact on policy and facilities, thus suggesting that cultural organizations are not just passive instruments of social regulation and reform.

Positivism as cultural policy: art and social change in the works of Comte and Saint-Simon

Abstract When discussing positivism today, it almost systematically falls into the realm of epistemological discourse. This discursive turn is primarily the by-product of the social sciences’ now-traditional approach to positivism—a turn which has been seen as largely dismissive of positivism for its antiquated and reductionist approaches to research. Without trying to make an apologetic account of positivism, this article reframes it in its broader social and historical dimensions. In particular, this article aims to illustrate how positivism—as a social and political movement—conveyed a cultural policy. In other words, this article attempts to re-engage with the intellectual legacy of positivism to resituate its significance in cultural and artistic terms in French culture, society and beyond. By drawing on the notion of implicit cultural policy, this article retraces the steps of positivism and specifically builds a case for its influence on French cultural policy in the Third Republic.

Reflections on Public Culture: An Interview

The forty-second edition of the Social Theory, Politics and the Arts (STP&A) Conference was held in Montreal from October 14 to 16, 2016. For the occasion, STP&As first Lifetime Achievement Award ...

Settler colonialism and cultural policy: the colonial foundations and refoundations of Canadian cultural policy

This article aims to reintegrate the colonial history of Canada as part of the grids of analysis for understanding the evolution of its Federal cultural policy. Building on the notion of settler colonialism and its implication for Indigenous population (For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘Indigenous’ is used in place of, perhaps, more popular or familiar terms – such as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Native’ – in order to remain consistent with current Indigenous politics. In particular, some Indigenous scholars are reluctant to accept the label Aboriginal because they feel it is consistent with the colonial order imposed by the Canadian government [Alfred and Corntassel 2005, p. 599]). The term Indigenous also alludes to a global political awareness and to forms of alterity between different populations from North America, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. in Canada, this paper documents different transformations in cultural policy and illustrates some of its paradoxes and challenges. Building on principles developed by Indigenous scholars, this article highlights some of the components for decolonizing cultural policy in Canada. It is argued that a post-colonial cultural policy must build on the grounds of ethics (and ethos).

Academic Beginnings: Arts Management Training and Cultural Policy Studies

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.

On Paradigms: From Epistemology to Epistemic Cultures

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?

Cultural Policy as Conventional Public Policy

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.