ABSTRACT
Over the years, it has become an orthodoxy to treat arts and cultural organizations as formalized, institutionalized, and rationalized phenomena. This chapter posits that such an approach is limited and/or problematic for numerous reasons, most importantly because it falls short of observing and understanding non-Western, non-formalized, and small arts organizations, as well as noticing “hidden” and quotidian practices that are not aligned with formal arrangement of the organization, as well as knowledge that is often tacit, partial, anecdotal, fictional, or contradictory.
With the aim to advance cultural management research beyond studying mainstream institutional settings in Western societies, this paper looks into prospects of applying practice-based theory research to the field of arts management. From such a standpoint, arts organizations are treated as arrays of recursive and habitual collective activities built on often unreflected assumptions about their surroundings. The role of such research is to uncover these practices and relate them to wider discourses on arts, politics, and culture.
To show the applicability of such research agenda, this chapter relies on a piece of practice-based research on audience development strategies of an arts organization from Serbia. The case shows that practices aiming to broaden and diversify audiences are hindered not by formal strategies and plans, but by, on the one hand, broader discourses on audiences and arts and, on the other, unquestioned and mutually contested assumptions of individual employees.
