What is Arts Entrepreneurship? Tracking the Development of its Definition in Scholarly Journals

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the ways in which arts entrepreneurship has been operationalized and defined in the literature.We identify eight scholarly journals in arts administration and policy, in business administration, and in nonprofit marketing published during 2003-2013 and review articles published in these journals.Our review found that the scholarly literature on arts entrepreneurship has in fact been quite scarce.We also examine all articles in Artivate, a journal that specializes in arts entrepreneurship.Taking the literature as a whole, we found a plethora of meanings used in the literature, indicating an, as yet, unsettled definition.We suggest that some analytical clarity can be obtained by grouping the many meanings of arts entrepreneurship into five analytical "levels": Personal Character traits, Goals, Strategies, Tactics, and Context.We also suggest a possible general definition: "arts entrepreneurship" is a management process through which cultural workers seek to support their creativity and autonomy, advance their capacity for adaptability, and create artistic as well as economic and social value.This management process involves an ongoing set of innovative choices and risks intended to recombine resources and pursue new opportunities to produce artistic, economic, and social value.Identifying the emerging clusters from the meanings found in the literature, we conclude that to understand arts entrepreneurs, one must focus on the innovative combinations of strategy, individual skills, and mindset operating in each case of arts entrepreneurship and its context.As arts entrepreneurship is a constant exercise in recombination of skillsets, the possibility of flexible recipes begins to reveal what might be regarded as the recombinant DNA of arts entrepreneurship. What is Arts Entrepreneurship? Tracking the Development of its Definition in Scholarly JournalsArts Entrepreneurship is a relatively new topic of research in arts management, cultural policy, and arts education, as well as a relatively new focus in entrepreneurial research.In artsrelated fields, the topic appears on the program of many scholarly and professional conference programs.From the conferences of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE), the international conference on Social Theory, Politics and the Arts (STP&A), the International Association of Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC), the International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR), the International Council of Fine Arts Deans (ICFAD) to the annual conferences of the League of American Orchestras (LAO), Dance/ USA, and the US Association for Small Business & Entrepreneurship (USASBE), arts entrepreneurship has been the focus of panel sessions, keynote speakers, and/or affinity groups.The practice has even been recognized with the award of a first MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 when musician Claire Chase was named a MacArthur Fellow for arts entrepreneurship.In his 2007 article surveying the landscape of higher education offerings, Gary Beckman identified 36 institutions that offered courses and/or certificate or degree programs in arts entrepreneurship.Writing more recently in 2013, Jason White noted the number had grown to 60.In 2012, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, an online journal on arts Chang and Wyszomirski What is Arts Entrepreneurship?Tracking the Development of its Definition in Scholarly Journals ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Artivate 4 (2) Identifying the Literature PoolTo assemble a broad pool of relevant literature we chose to review all issues of selected journals that appeared regularly over the ten-year period between 2003 and 2013.This period was selected because 2013 was the most recent year for which online copies of the journals and their articles were downloadable from university library holdings and because scholars in arts administration broadly share the impression that the literature on arts entrepreneurship is steadily growing (e.g., Beckman, 2007;Beckman & Essig, 2012;Rentschler, 2003; Scherdin & Zander, 2011).Then we moved back ten years to 2003.As we discovered, moving back a decade brought us to a cluster of entrepreneurship articles that appeared in the leading arts management journals at the very beginning of the decade, likely reflecting the emergence of arts entrepreneurs in practice.We identified major groups of regularly published scholarly journals.The first group, journals in the fields of arts administration and policy, was selected on the basis of published ranking and impact studies, specifically the assessment compiled by Ruth Rentschler and David Shilbury (2008), which was "the first internationally accepted ranking in the field of arts management" (Rentschler & Kirchner, 2011).This multidimensional rating survey identified 14 journals using 30 expert informants who ranked each journal according to four quality and knowledge use indicators.Four major journals in arts administration and cultural policy received top rating scores.These included the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, International Journal of Arts Management, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Journal of Cultural Economics.We reviewed all articles published in each journal between 2003 and 2013 to identify those that dealt explicitly with entrepreneurship.A second group of journals treated the subject of entrepreneurship from the perspective of business administration.These included the Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.Both of these received high rankings in the 2011 study by Dos Santos, Holsaple and Ye.In addition, we looked at the journal Creativity and Innovation Management, understanding that its explicit commitment to creativity (as can be seen in the journal's title and introduction) might make it focus particularly on arts entrepreneurship.We reviewed all articles published in these journals over the 2003-2013 decade and identified those that discussed entrepreneurship in a setting of the arts, culture, creativity, or any single artistic discipline (such as dance, music, opera, theatre, crafts, etc.).Finally, two other likely publication outlets on arts entrepreneurship that are dedicated to nonprofit marketing were identified: Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing and International Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing.Finding and building audiences is a leading subject of concern for arts managers and funders, and there is a stream of thinking in the field of arts management that implies marketing and entrepreneurship are closely Chang and Wyszomirski What is Arts Entrepreneurship? Tracking the Development of its Definition in Scholarly Journals

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