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Publication type:	Conference other
Type of review:	No review
Title:	(Re-)Evaluating the artistic and social value of the arts : towards a contextualized model
Authors:	Labaronne, Leticia
Conference details:	Research Colloquium 2018, Winterthur, 23. Mai 2018
Issue Date:	2018
Language:	English
Subject (DDC):	700: The arts and entertainment
Abstract:	Arts and cultural organizations have come under a growing public scrutiny, particularly from external stakeholders such as public funding agencies, private donors, business sponsors, and the general public. Today arts and cultural organizations are increasingly faced with strong demands to prove how they add value to their communities and to implement performance measurement procedures as part of their management practices. The arts management literature has proposed numerous approaches to define, measure, and assess the value of arts and cultural activities and its impact on society. Yet, research has remained prevalently normative and instrumental rather than advancing the understanding of the specific artistic and broader contexts in which evaluation is practiced. Further, the literature has been dominated by decontextualized approaches inherent to the dominant positivist paradigm, which assume a context-neutrality of methods and techniques, thus presuming that similar evaluation practices can be applied to different contexts. Increasingly scholars argue that, rather than looking for measureable results and proof of impact, resources would be better spent trying to understand the arts themselves and exploring ways to more responsibly represent their value and contribute to a more effective policy making. This ongoing study contests the decontextualized approaches found within the positivist research paradigm and explores the evaluation practices embedded in the creative process of performing arts organizations. Based on the premise that artistic activities and their outcome/impact can only be evaluated within the contexts and processes that give rise to them, the scope of the empirical work focuses on how performance is enacted by the artists themselves, as experts, self-evaluators, and peer-evaluators. Hence, the originality of the research question lies in putting the creative process at the core of the enquiry and considering the intrinsic aspects of the individual and collective experience and the role of human agency in the art production and consumption. In order to do that used an ethnographic study design that triangulated qualitative data from (non-)participant observation, semi-structured formal and informal interviews, and document analyses in the context of two in-depth case studies. The chosen methodology aims at capturing the unarticulated assumptions and values of creative processes. The preliminary findings, such as the artistic value created by working with a particular artist and in a particular piece for the individual performer or the ensemble as a whole, enhance the existing body of knowledge about artistic value and achievement in the performing arts. The presented fresh insights and novel understanding to the existing literature and provide new opportunities that hopefully contribute researchers, practitioners and policy makers to better define, assess and subsequently, predict performance in the performing arts. In addition, considering that the arts as an extreme case of creative working environment have emerged as a promising research field for business, the study attempts to offer an alternative to mainstream approaches to (e-)valuation, assessment, and impact analysis that may allow relevant stakeholders to gain deeper insights in how to explore creative, knowledge, and experience-intensive processes.
URI:	https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/14970
Fulltext version:	Published version
License (according to publishing contract):	Licence according to publishing contract
Departement:	School of Management and Law
Organisational Unit:	Center for Arts Management (ZKM)
Appears in collections:	Publikationen School of Management and Law

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