ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how the institutional ambiguity of a book fair is dealt with during a media reputation crisis by its organization. It is based on a qualitative study of the Gothenburg Book Fair, which is the biggest cultural event in the Nordic countries, between the Spring 2016 and the Spring 2018, when the Fair got highly and publicly criticized for admitting an extreme-right wing newspaper publisher to exhibit. The heated debate, that developed on traditional and social media, challenged the ambiguity of the Book Fair as a cultural institution which is at the same time a cultural arena and a market-oriented enterprise. This chapter unpacks the ways in which the organization managed institutional ambiguity during the crisis and highlights an organization’s attempt to solve the (newly-formed) problem of ambiguity by creating neat boundaries between logics or orientations and by doing so created itself as a hybrid entity. (Czarniawska and Solli, 2016) This hybridity implied, in turns, a problematization of the coexistence of different interests and a higher awareness of priorities among them.
