Impositions of organised work in the cultural sector

This article identifies key issues for understanding cultural management as a profession. The starting point is the understanding of organisation as communication about work, of culture as communication about values, of art as communication about perception, and of management as communication about decisions. Each of these forms of communication is an imposition if one assumes that the workforce usually already knows what is at stake, that values are taken for granted, that perception is treated as a private matter, and that decisions are rooted in established traditions and routines. Cultural management, therefore, involves weighing up these impositions against one another and balancing them out by referring to one another. This presupposes a modern flexibility of work and culture, art and management, which traditional societies neither recognise nor can tolerate. From a sociological perspective, this article develops a contextually rich understanding of the field of cultural management – perhaps too rich – and reduces this understanding to the formulation of a navigation code for the options of cultural management that may be too simplistic. The thesis is that cultural management can address any conceivable topic, provided it addresses each of the four forms of communication mentioned. Cultural management is thus as limited as it is broad in scope. It takes on a form that makes nothing less than global society the medium of its possibilities.