Contextualizing national perspectives on culture globally

The 17th AIMAC Conference was held at the ISCTE University of Lisbon from 23 to 26 June. Since its foundation in 1991, the International Association of Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC) has become an established platform for international research exchange and networking. The 2024 program consisted of 265 papers from fifty countries, divided into eight program tracks: Consumer Behaviour; Creative Industries; Cultural Policies; Entrepreneurship; Financial Management, Governance and Control; Organizational Behaviour; Strategic Management and Strategic Marketing. The richness of the program and the limited orientation between the different tracks of the program allow only a fragmentary reflection on selected topics that seemed particularly inspiring to the author.

 

 

Presentations from India, Singapore, and Latin America, among others, as well as the panel on the decolonization of culture highlighted the dilemmas that arise when Western cultural concepts and social ideas are perpetuated in the offerings and funding structures of formerly colonized societies. For example, Jason Vitorillo's presentation illustrated the transformation of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (Manila), which was originally designed as a Western-oriented space, into a multicultural, participatory, and decentralized institution that incorporates alternative and indigenous art forms to better represent the diverse Philippine society. The decolonization of cultural understanding plays a key role here. 

 

Michelle Loh, in turn, examined the problematic dominance of four ethnic categories (Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other) in Singapore's cultural policy. These colonial-influenced categories systematically ignore the linguistic and cultural diversity of, for example, Chinese and Indian immigrants, and thus bypass Singapore’s migrant society. According to Loh, Steven Vertovec's concept of 'superdiversity' as a method of studying complex social environments helps to overcome such a narrow, conventional understanding of multiculturalism, which assumes the coexistence rather than the intermingling of life forms. Intercultural identification plays a greater role than ethnic affiliation, which is why Loh advocates superdiversity as a future conceptual basis for cultural policy research and practice.

 

These insights are also highly relevant for critical engagement with ethnic categories and decolonization processes in European practice and research. Such studies lend themselves to affirming a postcolonial commitment to linking national representations with global perspectives and research questions. Cultural management does not end at national borders but is perhaps the most intense global project of human rights-based, democratic cultural practice and its academic perspective. In many places, however, academic research is dominated by Western perspectives, for example in the formation of artistic canons, the perception of non-Western art forms, and the disregard of internationally unequal power relations.

 

 

Not only ideologies and power relations, but also interdisciplinarity, the diversity of reference disciplines, and fields of action in cultural management emerged as major challenges at this international conference. For example, the often-synonymous use of "consumer" and "audience" in the research presented, prompts reflection on terminologies and epistemologies. "Wandering" concepts—to borrow from Mieke Bal—play a central role in cultural management as an interdisciplinary subject, e.g. when "consumer" reflects a traditional understanding of marketing, while "audience" encompasses educational and communicative activities as part of marketing and as part of a generic cultural management task. The reflective use of terminology plays a key role in reinforcing the specificity of cultural management, which results from the task of shaping the relationship between art and society (Evard and Colbert 2000). Working on a consistent terminology across reference disciplines and fields of action is an inherent meta-discourse of AIMAC 2024.

 

Beyond the fields of action covered by the program, cross-cutting themes of current international research were also identified. These include working conditions, governance beyond financial management, and aspects of digitization in marketing. Florence Euzeby and Juliette Passebois-Ducros, for example, used BookTok to question the transparency of the recruitment of influencers for the book market.  They criticized the fact that influencers are paid by publishers, a practice that often remains hidden, but which brings about a structural change as passionate amateur readers become quasi-professional advertisers.

 

 

Another term that cut across several tracks was "labour". Working conditions in different cultural sectors and the Creative Industries were explored through examples from Singapore (Laura Kee), Cuba (Lea Jakob), the UK (Ben Walmsley), and Austria (Dagmar Abfalter). Atypical forms of employment and lack of social security emerged as characteristics of cultural work across countries and sectors. Organizational conflicts, such as abusive leadership, contribute to precarization (Walmsley), as do inadequate budgets (Kee) or the need for multiple jobholding in the Austrian classical music scene (Abfalter). The importance of collective organization in the form of unions and their cooperation with government institutions was demonstrated by Kee using Singapore as an example. The "Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices (TAFEP)" was set up in 2006 to develop guidelines for fair working conditions. In practice, however, there is a lack of clear responsibilities for their implementation. The importance of research on working conditions is not only important to improve the state of knowledge but also to underpin change at a practical level. International contributions strengthen the discourse.

 

 

Another term that featured prominently at AIMAC was 'governance' as a steering concept. In the panel "Governing the Arts", Ruth Rentschler, Wendy Reid, and Chiara Donelli derived a conceptualization of the term from the international contributions they are editing in the "Routledge Companion of Governance in the Global Arts World" (Autumn 2024). The three editors distinguish five levels of governance: that of organizational management, that of individual members, that of a collective board, that of the regional level, and, finally, that of the cultural policy in shaping sectoral frameworks. 

 

The papers presented at AIMAC dealt with governance mechanisms in the context of the inclusion of people with disabilities in South Korea (ShinEui Park and Boram Lee), the funding of the arts by the market and the public sector in Colombia (Jaime Ruiz), community building through the example of a volunteer-run festival in Switzerland (Stéphanie Havet-Laurent), the threat to artistic freedom posed by right-wing extremists in Sweden (Katja Lindqvist), the role of interest groups in the development of cultural policy in Austria (Verena Teissl), comparative governance practices in France and the US (Dominique Jamin and Philippe Ravanas), and intersectionality  on the boards of US cultural institutions (Antonio Cuyler). As this diversity shows, governance opens up broader perspectives on organizational development and participatory transformation processes and expands the concept of cultural policy and its understanding of governance.

 

 

The study of the production, dissemination, classification, and impact of the arts has been significantly deepened by sociological insights since the 1970s, as Tasos Zembylas and Volker Kirchberg noted. Zembylas presented the introduction "The Social Organization of Arts” (Autumn 2024), co-authored with Kirchberg, which focuses on symbolic interactionism, systems theory, field theory, the production of culture approach, neo-institutionalism, cultural enterprise studies, and network theory. Zembylas emphasized their value for examining cultural management actions and organizational behavior in context-sensitive and methodologically robust research designs. Finally, sociology has a role to play in exploring the sociality of cultural managers as producers and mediators, and in understanding their experiences and worldviews. This sociological research perspective thus serves as a constitutive and unifying dynamic for the practice and study of cultural management in both international and country-specific contexts, alongside theories of postcolonialism and decolonization.

 

 

The varying quality of the papers, resulting from the mix of work-in-progress and long-term research, allowed for a beneficial dynamic. The methodological pluralism and thematic diversity revealed cultural management in an international context as a subject still in the process of finding. AIMAC 2024 demonstrated the inestimable value of international exchange. Fair working conditions, democratic and human rights values, digital expansion, and theoretical grounding connected emerging and established researchers. "The construction of knowledge is a step-by-step process," as AIMAC founder and research icon François Colbert stated.

 

The AIMAC 2026 will take place in Rio de Janeiro.