Review editorial

Abstract

As the strategy guru and academic Henry Mintzberg (1996, p.n/a) once noted, “Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense”. The three books in this review section all address the topic of arts management, two offering examples of management case studies on how to navigate the transition from theory to practice, and one showing the complicity of arts managers in failing to benignly exercise their power in the pursuit of equity and/or equality. Xia Zhu reflects upon Managing Organisational Success in the Arts, a review of global case studies edited by David Stevenson which seeks to challenge the dominant narrative about the cultural sector as one of “crisis, collapse and closure”. I must declare a vested interest here, as I have a chapter on Northern Ireland Opera in this collection, and so will simply echo Xia’s comment that the case studies are valuably grounded in empirical research alongside authors’ own observations and personal reflections. Alliteration is elsewhere present in Andrew Pinnock’s “white, middle class, male” review of Class, Control and Classical Music by Anna Bull. Pinnock sensibly and illuminatingly adopts an explicitly autoethnographic approach to what is, in part, an autoethnographic account of the power structures and dynamics of cultural authority at play in the world of classical music. Both the review and the book are very worthy of your time. Finally, Marina Zec reviews Cultural management: from theory to practice edited by Łukasz Wróblewski, Zdzisława Dacko-Pikiewicz, & Jerry Liu. Edited by a team from Poland and Taiwan, and with a range of case studies from Colombia, the US, Netherlands, Crete and elsewhere, this truly global collection comes with a foreword by the inestimable Milena Dragićević Šešić, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Management. The arts sector’s engagement with management, and the metricised tropes of managerialism, operates on a wide spectrum of behaviour and response. There are those still in thrall to the apparent legitimacy conferred on the sector by the language and tools of strategy and planning. Yet as Mintzberg (ibid) notes, when used to estimate the worth of a complicated professional service, measurement often goes awry: “Measurement mesmerizes no less than management. We had better start asking ourselves about the real costs of counting”. The work of addressing this issue is well underway in discourses of cultural value and evaluation, but we would do well to keep the discipline of arts management within ideological reach.