Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts

Chapter 1: Building Arts Participation through Transactions, Relationships, or Both

13 Arts organizations today find themselves in a dilemma. The artistic mission essentially involves a long-term proposition: that is, to make an important and lasting contribution to the creation and preservation of culture. Yet participation-building strategies until recently have largely been conceived as target-driven, strategic operations—essentially shortterm activities designed to identify and convert new audiences. In theory, arts organizations identify desirable groups to add to or more deeply involve in the work of their organizations, then set a course to reach their goals. But just like sailing a boat into the wind, arts organizations have at times found themselves tacking, or zigzagging toward shorter and shorter interim goals as they encounter forces of external resistance; at other times, the weight of institutional constraint slows progress like a dragging anchor. While touching on the work of numerous organizations, this chapter shows how several different types of organizations—the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. (est. 1846), the San Francisco Symphony (est. 1911), the Old Town School of Music in Chicago (est. 1957), and Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis (est. 1973)—are crafting long-term participation -building practices to enable consistent and sustainable change. Their stories reveal two distinct strands of organizational effort, both developed to achieve long-term goals of reaching more people, different kinds of people , and more sources of income. The first strand follows a consumerist orientation and involves transactional practices—the process of capturing and tracking consumer interaction in order to build consumer markets for cultural products. The second has a humanist orientation and involves relational practices—the building of relationships with participants from 1 Building Arts Participation through Transactions, Relationships, or Both diane grams 14 diane grams local communities that may or may not lead to consumer or donor relationships . But, just like strands of DNA, these sets of practices have distinct characteristics but intersect; they are interactive and interdependent in ways that are important to the participation-building process. emerging from an institutional base With more than a century of development in the United States and more than five hundred years of development in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the cultural field today is rooted in historic, institutional routines (see Meyer and Rowan 1977; Scott 1991). However, through two strands of effort— relational and transactional practices—arts organizations are challenging long-held institutionalized routines that have been developed according to the aesthetic preferences of patrons who were traditionally drawn from well-educated and wealthy elites (see Bourdieu 1984; DiMaggio and Useem 1978; DiMaggio and Ostrower 1992; Halle 1992). These organizations are tapping the knowledge, values, and spending habits of a wider spectrum of people and tastes in order to build new kinds of participation and attract new participants (see Grams and Warr 2003; Cherbo and Wyszomirski 2000; Peterson 1980; Peterson and Rossman 2005). In this chapter, consistent with the language established by sociologist Howard Becker in Art Worlds (1982), standardized practices that are embedded in institutional routines are referred to as “conventions.” The transaction is the smallest unit of one type of participation based in economic values and geared toward building consumer markets; the relationship is another type of participation, this one based in humanistic values such as respect, appreciation, trust, and shared interests all geared toward building cultural communities (table 1.1). With the increased emphasis on marketing and consumer relations since the early 1990s, many arts organizations have been building their own organizational capacity to generate and manage consumer transactions . Most research focuses on the marketing message or on the characteristics of markets themselves rather than on the human interaction table .. types of participation-building practices Types of Target of Success practices Goal Environment Exchanges activity indicators Conventional Legitimacy Institutional Authoritative Experts Recognition Transactional Sales Technical Consumerist Markets Income Relational Human Participatory Collaborative Communities Range of involvement 15 building arts participation that takes place during and after the transaction. As illustrated in table 1.1, transaction building requires an increasingly technological environment to attract consumers, to document and manage the transactions, and to guide the consumer through the range of purchasing choices. The goal is sales, and the measure of success is earned income. This kind of participation building begins with an organization identifying the kinds of products it can produce that consumers want to buy, then producing those items that appeal to local markets. They set in motion a series of economic exchanges with consumers who collectively make up...