The Art of Market Change: Government Grants, Local Arts Revenue Concentration, and the Influence of Large Arts Organizations

The arts sector can be plagued by characteristics that make its sustainability difficult, and it would appear that those in the arts sector consider that Australia's tax system has an important role to play in contributing to a sustainable arts sector. For example, within the 2020 Summit, at least 19 recommendations by the committee on “Towards a creative Australia” related to proposed tax changes (Australia, 2008). However, there are already a number of tax provisions that assist the art sector (either directly or indirectly) – is it that the current concessions are ineffective, not well understood or something else? This article reports on the survey results of 236 people involved in the arts sector (either as artists, arts organizations, advisors or supporters). This article reports the findings of the survey in terms of bettering understanding how taxpayers, particularly those involved in the arts sector, accessed tax information, their tax awareness of current tax provisions that directly/indirectly affect the arts. Furthermore, it explores what those involved in the sector consider to be their greatest tax issues. Given the survey results, it will be argued that to ensure that any reforms for this sector to be effective there needs to be greater considerations to the way that artists access tax information, and their level of competency in dealing with tax obligations, and how practical strategies can be implemented within the current framework to assist the arts. It will be argued that this background understanding is critical in determining what tax reforms, if any, are needed to ensure that reforms are not done just for change's sake.

Leadership influence in large complex organizations, though commonly assumed to be greatly significant, is normally not studied in terms of the variance accounted for in organizational performance. The leadership effect is viewed here as a product of an organization's environmental constraints and its leadership variance. Based on sales, earnings, and profit margin data for 167 large corporations over twenty years, we compare the impact of leadership changes with yearly, industry, and company influences. Industry and company account for far more of the variance in two performance variables than does leadership, but not for profit margins after lag effects are considered. It appears that the importance of external restrictions, and hence the maximum possible leadership influence, may range widely between specific performance criteria. The second phase of the study considers industry characteristics that appear to be associated with high and low leadership influences. These results suggest a perspective on organization performance that may be applied to the leadership influence in other large organizations and political bodies, like cities, states and nations.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on American society broadly and within that, arts were one of the hardest hit sectors. Amidst the ongoing trajectory of the pandemic, the concept of resilience became a frequent concern. This article examines the many dimensions and facets of resilience and provides snapshots and examples of many kinds of efforts that have been taken to foster and enhance resilience for the arts sector in the United States, with a focus on the case of New York City, arguably America’s cultural capital. The first section explores the scale and scope of the pandemic’s ongoing impact on individual artists and the NY arts sector. The second section provides an overview of key examples of how the arts sector itself sought to assist its members during the first year of the pandemic. It also explores key efforts of national, state, and local governments to provide survival and relief assistance to individual artists, arts organizations, and cultural industries. The final section looks at tentative reopening and recovery efforts, including rethinking norms, expectations and practices as resilience begins to move toward adaptation and sustainability. It concludes with observations on future challenges in cultivating and finding resilience.

A small but intriguing literature explores the significance of geographical distance for attendance at arts and cultural institutions. This research turns attention from a longstanding emphasis on the impact of individuals’ attributes, to also address issues of accessibility. This article furthers the research in two major ways: First, prior literature mostly focuses on European arts organizations, and here we examine the American context. Second, we examine variations in audiences’ willingness to travel. Employing mixed models, we analyze data on 15 performing arts organizations (with over 250,000 attendees) from around the United States at two points in time. We find that distance is associated with venue attendance, that this holds for multiple arts disciplines, and in areas with varied socioeconomic characteristics. We further find that organizational size and artistic programming are associated with variations in audiences’ geographical distance, with larger organizations and more popular productions attracting people from further away. Distance’s impact has ramifications for strategies to expand audiences, and for organizational engagement with local communities.

Hybrid buyer–supplier relationships in global electronic markets

ABSTRACTNonprofit organizations are told to diversify their revenue sources to avoid relying on any one source as a way to manage financial risk. However, arts organizations in the United States frequently do rely on government funding as part of their revenue mix. The purpose of this research is to determine to what extent arts organizations are dependent on government grants and the implications of government funding on other revenue such as individual and foundation support. The findings suggest that arts organizations that receive state-level public funding are more successful in gaining donations from other sources (e.g., board members, foundations, corporations, special event fundraising and in-kind support), but they receive less city and county funding.

Maintenance costs can be substantial for large organizations (several hundreds of programmers) with very large and complex software systems. By large we mean lines of code in the range of hundreds of thousands or millions. Our research objective is to improve the process of handling anomaly reports for large organizations. Specifically, we are addressing the problem of the manual, laborious and time consuming process of assigning anomaly reports to the correct design teams and the related issue of localizing faults in the system architecture. In large organizations, with complex systems, this is particularly problematic because the receiver of an anomaly report may not have detailed knowledge of the whole system. As a consequence, anomaly reports may be assigned to the wrong team in the organization, causing delays and unnecessary work. We have so far developed two machine learning prototypes to validate our approach. The latest, a re-implementation and extension, of the first is being evaluated on four large systems at Ericsson AB. Our main goal is to investigate how large software development organizations can significantly improve development efficiency by replacing manual anomaly report assignment and fault localization with machine learning techniques. Our approach focuses on training machine learning systems on anomaly report databases; this is in contrast to many other approaches that are based on test case execution combined with program sampling and/or source code analysis.

Maintenance costs can be substantial for large organizations (several hundreds of programmers) with very large and complex software systems. By large we mean lines of code in the range of hundreds of thousands or millions. Our research objective is to improve the process of handling anomaly reports for large organizations. Specifically, we are addressing the problem of the manual, laborious and time consuming process of assigning anomaly reports to the correct design teams and the related issue of localizing faults in the system architecture. In large organizations, with complex systems, this is particularly problematic because the receiver of an anomaly report may not have detailed knowledge of the whole system. As a consequence, anomaly reports may be assigned to the wrong team in the organization, causing delays and unnecessary work. We have so far developed two machine learning prototypes to validate our approach. The latest, a re-implementation and extension, of the first is being evaluated on four large systems at Ericsson AB. Our main goal is to investigate how large software development organizations can significantly improve development efficiency by replacing manual anomaly report assignment and fault localization with machine learning techniques. Our approach focuses on training machine learning systems on anomaly report databases; this is in contrast to many other approaches that are based on test case execution combined with program sampling and/or source code analysis.

Increasingly, local cultural communities are called upon to support global mega‐events such as the Olympic games with the promise that this global occurrence is a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ for an urban artistic community. What evidence exists to support the premise that hosting a Cultural Olympiad provides a professional arts sector with positive and substantive legacies, sustained material and financial benefits, or increased national and international profile? Data collected on the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad suggest that the local arts sector did not enjoy any of the claimed global benefits. However, it is also clear that some arts organizations, by virtue of the artistic and operational decisions they took, were able to exert influence over and upon the outcome; this outcome ultimately depending on whether they elected to play for a global or a local stage.

Project organizations are globally facing challenges for satisfying local communities through allocation of higher financial resources on hard infrastructure and development programs. Ascending trend of communities’ protest and resistance against the projects, on the other hand, deems the efficiency and effectiveness of these schemes. Furthermore, reviewing the stakeholder management literature elucidates that vast majority of stakeholder research is underpinned by the implicit assumption that the focal organization is the one and only decision maker and thus over emphasizes on reflecting the organization’s viewpoint. Consequently, the perception and viewpoint of the local communities are neglected and the literature fails to bring a comprehensive image of the debate. The purpose of this research is to depart from the organization centric approach of stakeholder management literature and analyze the local communities’ stakeholders to explore how they perceive the project organizations. To achieve that, this research establishes its foundation over the normative core of stakeholder theory and adopts theoretical lenses from psychological research, organizational studies and ethics of care to investigate how individuals within local community perceive organization’s activities and how contextual and organizational factors influence this perception. The results of this research concur that project organizations essentially assign roles and rights to the stakeholders according to their group belonging. In the governance structure of the organizations, the local communities’ stakeholders are routinely positioned quite distal from the organizational level where the decision making processes are undertaken. The local communities’ individuals, consequently, are excluded from the decisions that influence them the most. Conceptualization through attribution theory elucidates that this exclusion results in development of negative bonds between the organizations and local communities. The communities’ perception can also be influenced by the level of power and perceived legitimacy of local government and media. Informed by feminist formulation of stakeholder theory, this research suggests that construction of the organization’s knowledge from the demanded care of the local communities and carrying out the caring activities at the local level considerably alters the perception of the communities. To recognize the communities’ demanded care, the organizations ought to decentralize the decision making to their border where individuals from inside and outside of the organization are in contact with each other. Through principled dialogues, these multidimensional selves at the local level develop a unified army to conduct the caring activities. The responsibilities of organizations, therefore, are not essentially identified by the organization’s limited knowledge and are not broad brushed by excessive concentration on the financial developments. They rather have an adoptive and democratic nature and are designed according to the recognized demands of the local communities. This approach empowers the local communities and protects them on their vulnerable points from the harm of the projects. For the practical implications, this research suggests that management for stakeholders in large organizations ought to be done through the embodiment of virtue of caring in individuals. It is believed that these are the virtuous individuals that allow the organization to perform ethically. The code of ethics and formal contracts developed at the organizational level do not independently result in satisfaction of local communities. Furthermore, these contracts cannot support the local communities’ individuals to make correct perceptions from the motives behind the organization’s behavior. These are the individuals at the local level who, getting connected to these stable components of the organization, make caring activities practical and by conducting principled dialogues with them create an environment within which the perceptions at the two sides of the organization border are mutually constructed.

As arts organizations face the challenge of attracting emerging audiences in a competitive market, they are tasked with setting themselves apart with strategic marketing techniques that will sustain their organization. One technique is place marketing, which incorporates an organization's location into the marketing storytelling to draw audiences to the organization as well as the destination. This study examines three Philadelphia arts organizations that currently use the city to tell their marketing stories to local audiences: Opera Philadelphia, Theatre Exile and the Barnes Foundation. Opera Philadelphia is a 43-year-old performing arts company that incorporated place marketing less than a decade ago. Theatre Exile is a 20-year-old theater company that weaves Philadelphia's story into each artistic and marketing choice. The Barnes Foundation is a 95-year-old regional landmark established in Merion, Pennsylvania and moved to Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012. It is only within recent years that the Barnes embraced the city through marketing new audiences. The review of these cases intends to support that the use of place marketing to attract local, emerging audiences, specifically among Philadelphia arts organizations, will enhance a connection to the community and an organization's own relevance to ultimately influence a city's position in the arts sector. The paper concludes with recommendations for arts organizations to employ place marketing to their own local communities to elevate their city to a premier arts destination.

The number of artists and arts organizations in regional metropolitan areas like Busan has declined, while those in Greater Seoul area including Incheon and Gyeonggi Province have increased. This disparity underscores a growing threat to the sustainability of local artists and arts organizations outside Greater Seoul. With culturla decentralization gaining prominence, regional cultural foundations have emerged as critical policy actors in addressing this issue. However, there has been a lack of macro-policy discussions on how these foundations can support the sustainability of local artists and arts organizations. This study aims to examine the role of regional cultural foundations in promoting the sustainability by examining the case of the Busan Cultural Foundation through the lens of Wyszomirski’s Triple-Bottom Line (TBL) framework. The foundation has developed a variety of grant programs aligned with the three pillars of TBL—artistic vitality, financial sustainability, and public benefits. While many programs are designed to address income gaps under the financial sustainability pillar, they often lack strategies to enhance fundraising capacities or diversify revenue streams. This finding highlights the need for program redesign to strengthen financial self-sufficiency and encourage engagement in broader market alongside the arts sector to ensure long-term sustainability. Moreover, a significant gap persists between the implementation of these programs and the actual sustainability experienced by the local arts community. To bridge this divide, it is imperative to adopt more diverse and innovative support mechanisms that empower local artists and arts organizations to independently achieve a balanced approach to the TBL. Moving beyond mere funding stabilization and administrative improvement, these mechanisms should aim to equip the local arts ecosystem with tools necessary for enduring growth and resilience.

This paper investigates the mechanism by which the federal government's funding of the arts through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) displaces private charitable contributions to non-profit arts organizations. I estimate that private charitable contributions to arts organizations increased by 50 to 60 cents due to a major funding cut to the NEA during the mid-1990s. These increases, however, also coincided with, on average, a 25 cent increase in fund-raising expenditures by arts organizations for every dollar decrease in government grants. The estimate of crowding out found in this paper is relatively large, particularly for a study using a micro-data set. I argue that an appropriate interpretation of an estimate of a crowding-out parameter, in general, depends crucially on the context.

This chapter offers an overview of some contemporary issues in charity and nonprofit arts marketing. Taking as its focus the current challenges which the arts sector is facing due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the chapter demonstrates how these have aggravated pre-existing funding inequities in the UK arts sector. An examination of how arts organisations have had to diversify their revenue to tackle these challenges follows, illustrating the pressures involved in satisfying multiple stakeholders. In untangling the ideological underpinnings on which the arts sector is built, an overview of the literature on individuals’ motivations and giving practices to the arts differentiates between micro-, meso- and macro-level perspectives to further evidence the hybrid model in operation. Finally, two case studies highlight innovative responses by arts organisations to broaden their audiences, offering alternative models to move forwards.

The Role of Creative Placemaking