The cooperating cultural organisation: Becoming relevant

TY - CONF

T1 - The cooperating cultural organisation

T2 - ICCPR 2018

AU - Kann-Rasmussen, Nanna

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - What is the purpose and legitimacy of arts and culture in society today? Do arts and culture have a role to play relation to social and political purposes? Alternatively, do the arts represent an absolute otherness in relation to the rest of society? Artists and scholars have discussed these questions continuously in the last 200 years. The Danish cultural policy researcher Jørgen Langsted (2010) acknowledges that arts and culture can have a social role to play, but only if it is not instrumentalised. For many years, arts and culture was not directly coupled to societal value, besides the assumption that the encounter between citizens and culture or the arts would ‘build’ and empower the individual, and thus contribute to the strengthening of democratic society. Cultural policy thus largely followed this line through arms-length support for arts and artists (the producers) as well as for cultural organisations (the mediators, protectors and presenters), in order to secure the access to culture for everyone. However, the last 30 years’ focus on economic growth have challenged the hegemony of this cultural policy. Present-day cultural organisations’ autonomy is challenged from several sides, and state subsidised institutions must increasingly articulate their purpose and raison d'être according to their societal relevance (Larsen 2014, Simon, 2016, Kann-Rasmussen, 2016). The paper discusses how cultural institutions position themselves in the discussion of culture’s value, and what it means for a cultural institution to be societally relevant. According to Kann-Rasmussen (2016), the term ‘societal relevance’ signifies two meanings. The term covers cultural institutions’ contribution to cultural policy’s original purpose of ensuring public enlightenment and education, and it relates to cultural institutions’ contribution to solving societal problems typically associated with other parts of society, such as climate, health or migration. The paper seeks to explore this dichotomy through the analysis of current strategies of cultural institutions. The discussion unfolds through a comparative study of three Danish cases. The cases are 1) The Royal Theatre, 2) The Workers Museum) and 3) Tårnby Public Library. The method used is primarily document analysis of the organisations’ strategies, yearly reports and programming. Theoretically, the papers uses a combination of institutional theory (Scott & Meyer, 1991; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008) and French pragmatic sociology (Boltanski & Thevenot, 2006, Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). A preliminary result of the research entails that “society” plays a new role in the way cultural organisations legitimise their worth and raison d'être. I argue that the organisations today engage in certain types of activities as an effect of a perceived problem of being out of sync with society, and that this behaviour or strategy must be understood in different terms than instrumental cultural policy.

AB - What is the purpose and legitimacy of arts and culture in society today? Do arts and culture have a role to play relation to social and political purposes? Alternatively, do the arts represent an absolute otherness in relation to the rest of society? Artists and scholars have discussed these questions continuously in the last 200 years. The Danish cultural policy researcher Jørgen Langsted (2010) acknowledges that arts and culture can have a social role to play, but only if it is not instrumentalised. For many years, arts and culture was not directly coupled to societal value, besides the assumption that the encounter between citizens and culture or the arts would ‘build’ and empower the individual, and thus contribute to the strengthening of democratic society. Cultural policy thus largely followed this line through arms-length support for arts and artists (the producers) as well as for cultural organisations (the mediators, protectors and presenters), in order to secure the access to culture for everyone. However, the last 30 years’ focus on economic growth have challenged the hegemony of this cultural policy. Present-day cultural organisations’ autonomy is challenged from several sides, and state subsidised institutions must increasingly articulate their purpose and raison d'être according to their societal relevance (Larsen 2014, Simon, 2016, Kann-Rasmussen, 2016). The paper discusses how cultural institutions position themselves in the discussion of culture’s value, and what it means for a cultural institution to be societally relevant. According to Kann-Rasmussen (2016), the term ‘societal relevance’ signifies two meanings. The term covers cultural institutions’ contribution to cultural policy’s original purpose of ensuring public enlightenment and education, and it relates to cultural institutions’ contribution to solving societal problems typically associated with other parts of society, such as climate, health or migration. The paper seeks to explore this dichotomy through the analysis of current strategies of cultural institutions. The discussion unfolds through a comparative study of three Danish cases. The cases are 1) The Royal Theatre, 2) The Workers Museum) and 3) Tårnby Public Library. The method used is primarily document analysis of the organisations’ strategies, yearly reports and programming. Theoretically, the papers uses a combination of institutional theory (Scott & Meyer, 1991; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008) and French pragmatic sociology (Boltanski & Thevenot, 2006, Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). A preliminary result of the research entails that “society” plays a new role in the way cultural organisations legitimise their worth and raison d'être. I argue that the organisations today engage in certain types of activities as an effect of a perceived problem of being out of sync with society, and that this behaviour or strategy must be understood in different terms than instrumental cultural policy.

M3 - Paper

Y2 - 21 August 2018 through 25 August 2018

ER -