Zwischen Management und Governance
Braucht Kulturmanagement eine Reflexionstheorie?

Abstract

Culture management is primarily a practical affair that needs appropriate management skills and competencies. It is argued that culture management moreover needs a properly reflexive theory of cultural processes, and more specifically, cultural processes in the various domains of the arts. Such a theory must go far beyond what usually passes as “management theory” since it has to deal with the complex logic of cultural objects, activities, practices, persons, incentives and constraints. In particular, culture managers would benefit (it is argued) from the social theory of the professions and of professionalisation. Cultural managers can strife for genuine professionalisation, on the model of other genuine professionals like doctors or lawyers, if they understand the basic challenge in their job as trying to help to sustain the intrinsic rationality of the primary cultural practice that they care for as managers vis-a-vis other determinate rationalities embodied in other social systems, fields, and actors, e.g. economic and political rationalities. The core normative purpose of culture management, on this view, is the reconciliation of various rationalities that compete but whose joint synergies are needed in order to promote as much and as good as possible the rationality of the particular cultural practice (e.g., an opera house, a theater, a cinema) for which the cultural manager has been trusted with a mandate.