Katja Lindqvist

Museum finances: challenges beyond economic crises

Economic crises directly and indirectly affect the financial health of museums. Despite this reality, however, analysing the impact of the economic cycle on museums has not generated much interest among researchers; to date published studies on the recent financial crisis and its reverberations in the museum sector are rare. This article, after acknowledging this lack of research, discusses specific challenges facing the financial management of museums and identifies the need for additional empirical research on the problems facing these institutions. Based on the authors findings in published research and accumulated field experience, the article identifies income originating from various museum stakeholders and examines the vulnerability of these funds to fluctuations in the economy. While most museum income streams are not found to be particularly vulnerable to economic fluctuation, structural challenges for the financial management of museums do exist beyond economic crises. Therefore, the management of long-term, stakeholder relationships is a more reliable way of achieving financial stability than the implementation of short-term strategies to counter the effects of a recession and financial crises.

Effects of public sector reforms on management of cultural organizations in Europe

This article investigates the effects that public sector reforms had in the cultural field in European countries over the past two decades. The study highlights changing conditions for public/nonprofit management due to governance and public sector reforms. It does so by applying a multidisciplinary literature survey methodology, which is rare in management studies. The literature survey identifies macrolevel trends such as projectification and shorter term employment; new organizational forms, decentralization, and fragmentation of control; frequent external audits; cultural governance replacing state culture in east European countries and the fact that museums are studied more than other types of organizations; and organizational-level trends, such as strategies of managerialization, policy attachment, and instrumentalization, managing to audit and symbolic management, and tensions within professional roles. The study, furthermore, points to the difficulty of reaching a deep understanding of the management of arts and cultural organizations from a general management perspective.

Dilemmas and Paradoxes of Regional Cultural Policy Implementation: Governance Modes, Discretion, and Policy Outcome

Bad policy design affects public service delivery and the conditions for providing public services at operational level. Fragmentation of public management due to governance reforms becomes visible in policy failure; a problem for governments, public service providers, and citizens. The poor outcome of a reformed regional museum education policy is the starting point for a study of paradoxes of regional cultural policy implementation. The article opens up the black box of policy implementation and identifies goal conflicts in regional development policy, conflicting expectations among stakeholders, as well as governance paradoxes resulting in gaps between policy intentions, output, and outcome.

Art ventures as hybrid organisations: Tensions and conflicts relating to organisational identity

Research indicates that hybrid ventures face more complex challenges than other ventures, due to multiple institutional logics. Institutional logics theory suggests that this is due to different institutional backgrounds that influence actor perspectives and expectations on decision making authority and venture identity, which in turn result in tensions and possible conflicts, especially over time. The article explores challenges of art ventures related to such tensions through a multiple case study. A conclusion from the study is that tension and conflicts are unavoidable as ventures grow or reach a stabilisation phase, in art ventures as in other organisations. Art ventures as hybrid organisations need to balance artistic, managerial and political logics if they are to be successful. There is a need for more research on art entrepreneurship, in particular as regards similarities and differences in relation to venturing in other fields.

Making sense of financial incentive as a policy tool for the independent arts sector

The local government of Stockholm in 2008 introduced a growth scheme including a financial incentive for the independent arts sector. As financial incentives are virtually non-existent in the cultural sphere, this must be seen as a rather extreme development in cultural policy. The article explores both the rationale behind the new growth scheme as policy tool as well as its reception by the sector through three complementary perspectives: historical institutionalism, ideology analysis and policy values analysis. Contributing to the empirically under-researched area of cultural policy, the combined approach offers a broader understanding of policy development and implementation than would a single perspective interpretation, and acknowledges the complexities of policy making and policy change. The institutional perspective shows that marketisation policy is layered on a previous Folkhem policy with an extended budget facilitating its introduction. An ideology perspective shows how the new growth scheme follows neoliberal ideas of the role of the state as facilitator of market growth in the arts. A values perspective, finally, shows that the economic values of the new cultural policy are not shared by the independent arts sector, but new policy instruments are accepted as they expand resources available for the sector.