Arts management has changed dramatically over the past twenty years and in recent years, the way that managers are trained has changed too. Maeve O?Brien explains.
A quick search on a postgraduate-course search engine will bring up 151 postgraduate training programmes in arts and cultural management offered by at least 16 institutions across the UK, and there are more than 400 postgraduate training programmes worldwide (1).
Despite all these training opportunities, or perhaps fed by them, it seems that the training of arts and culture sector managers is never much out of the spotlight these days. In the past five years, several high-profile reports have pointed to a crisis in the management of the UK?s institutions and, increasingly, qualifications are being sought for entry-level positions. Link this to high-stress, low (financial) reward employment and poor conditions and you have a volatile sector where individuals, before they even start work, have to be adept at spotting, creating and exploiting opportunities for paid employment. In such a climate it is not surprising that individuals seek out training that will develop their skills and, many hope, give them a competitive edge in the employment market.
The higher education sector is responding to these changes by recognising arts and cultural management as a legitimate discipline and allowing programmes to develop. However, questions arise as to what types of programmes are developing and whether academics working in the field are being allowed to pioneer new techniques. Each institution has its own style and approach to training but at their foundation lies a mix of practical ?hard? skills and interpersonal ?soft? skills delivered by a core team of tutors often complemented by outside expertise. In my experience, as a student and as an academic, tutors are genuinely interested in the progression of their students and guest speakers are unfailing in their willingness to contribute ? often because it gives them a rare opportunity to reflect on their own work. This training model is tried and tested and works quite well most of the time ? so why are we still in crisis?
The appropriateness of borrowing the ?leadership? models taught in business schools for the arts and culture sector has been questioned by Robert Hewison (2). His main premise is that it does not seem logical to use training methods devised for sectors that focus on the ?bottom line? for measuring success in a sector wherein ?value? is not primarily monetary. I would add to this that careers in the arts are almost never exclusively ?institutionally? based so an individual must also be entrepreneurial and able to manage their career as they would an enterprise.
A common opener for training programmes is ?What do you want to get out of this??. Rarely can this be easily answered ? especially when the individual is propelled by a diverse range of needs, often complicated further by financial and time constraints. The University of Sussex currently offers a part-time MA in Arts and Cultural Management that recognises the diversity of work in the arts and explores the links between it and other sectors, notably the public and voluntary. The founding philosophy for the programme is collaborative enquiry. It seeks to create a learning community wherein the students, tutors and guest speakers share and exchange their expertise. We achieve this by maintaining small groups, and by designing individual and group work that is carried out outside of teaching time and that helps individuals hone their networking and partnership working skills. An emphasis is placed on developing good management practice through reflection, adaptation and innovation, not through surveying management techniques or business skills. Assessment is carried out by exploring theory in practice.
Working with All Ways Learning, the South-East?s continuing professional development agency for people managing in the arts, the programme is developing a research strand. which focuses on organisational development in the arts ? in particular, looking at the organisation of work, governance, and leadership. Dr Janet Summerton and Madeline Hutchins (3) take the view that ?there is little shared understanding amongst the arts communities and elsewhere about how people working in the field successfully create and sustain their activities?. Examining the way in which we work and the conditions in which we work, and striving towards valuing the distinct qualities of working in the arts, whilst empowering arts professionals to make reasonable demands for decent pay and conditions, can only serve to strengthen our field and move us away from the ?crisis? mentality that does so much to undermine our working lives.
Maeve O?Brien is Convenor and Lecturer in Arts and Cultural Management at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sussex. t: 01273 678566; e: m.obrien@sussex.ac.uk
(1) Evard, E. and Colbert, F. (2002) ?Arts Management: a new discipline entering the millennium??, International Journal of Arts Management, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 4-13
(2) Hewison, R. (2004) ?The Crisis of Cultural leadership in Britain?, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 157-166
(3) Hutchins, M. and Summerton, J., (2005) ?Diverse Voices, Personal Journeys?, All Ways Learning