ABSTRACT
Cyprus’s ongoing process of Europeanization, begun in the 1990s and culminating in its 2004 accession to the European Union, has destabilized long-recognized criteria for organizational legitimacy in the local art music field. 1 By examining how various types of organizations have attempted to stake and defend their claims for legitimacy in these changing circumstances, I hope to show how local participants experience this dynamic process. It may be necessary at the outset to clarify the technical significance of ‘organizational field’, a theoretical concept of neo-institutional sociology. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, two exponents of neo-institutionalism, define an organizational field as the aggregate of ‘organizations that … constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products’ (Powell and DiMaggio 1991, 64–65). According to this view, understanding an organizational field amounts to analysing its constituent organizations’ interactive relationships in explicitly economic terms. Moreover, it entails accounting for ‘institutional life’, through which various rules, norms and cognitive categories constrain organizational activities so that they may have recognizably legitimate meaning within the system.
