ABSTRACT

Cultural management is characterized as a relational concept-as a compound of culture and management, but also related to manifold other elements in its sociocultural, economic, and political environment. This chapter qualitatively examines cultural management from a situational, relational, and interpretative perspective. In doing so, it combines Situational Analysis, developed by Adele Clarke (Clarke, Friese, & Washburn, 2015; Clarke, 2005), as a grounded, theorizing methodology and the Orders of Worth framework developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). The aim is to exemplify how analyses of cultural management processes can benefit from combined methods and theories for investigation of a variety of situations that will interest researchers and that practitioners confront, for example in negotiations about funding for culture. Following a discussion of the relevance of Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework and Adele Clarke’s Situational Analysis for cultural management research, the chapter highlights how these approaches can be combined. It then introduces implementation-practice based on an empirical example: a negotiation over funding cuts for independent cultural organizations in Linz, Upper Austria. The chapter concludes by pointing out the potentials for using the combined methodology for thick analyses of cultural management as coordination processes between different rationalities and actors that become manifest and analytically accessible and interpretable in specific situations.