Performing arts organizations (PAOs) need to manage their artistic ambitions in the face of public sector reforms that promote cultural entrepreneurship, the commercializing, and marketization of art. This study of Mometti and Van Bommel uses an institutional logics lens to examine the tensions PAOs experience resulting from this need and their responses to and management of the complexities in their environment. This study draws on a qualitative analysis of nine PAOs in the Netherlands and finds that the main tensions experienced by PAOs stem mainly from stakeholder plurality and the identity of the individual organization. PAOs primarily employ the coping strategies of acquiescence, avoidance, and compromise, which they prioritize over stronger forms of resistance such as defiance and manipulation, and maintain separate logics of operation rather than working towards their synthesis. This leads to a dynamic process model which identifies both a vicious and a virtuous approach to managing tensions.
In this paper we argue that mature political democracies require an agonistic form of populism in order to function. Agonistic populism counters technocratic apathy and instrumental reductionism and provides democracies with discursive legitimacy for the expression of antagonisms. We draw on the exemplary case of Brexit to show how the long-term suppression of English populism by an all-conquering British imperial discourse, and the hegemony of technocratic solutions in Europe, transformed populism's potentially virtuous agonistic effects into an often anachronistic, toxic and ill-directed ressentiment against the European Union. We call upon management scholars to focus on how popular ressentiment can be used as a force for good in two ways: (1) by contributing agonistically to an alternative, emotionally founded discourse about England, the European Union and a new popular civilizational project that could bind them; and (2) by inducing the creation of collective moral categories embraced across the elite/non-elite divide in the image of the post-World War II National Health Service.
In: Organization studies: an international multidisciplinary journal devoted to the study of organizations, organizing, and the organized in and between societies, Volume 32, Issue 12, p. 1717-1744
This paper explores how new institutional fields are established and extended. We argue that they are created by social movements engaging in hegemonic struggles and which develop social movement strategies, articulate discourses and construct nodal points. We examine how this process played out during the creation and development of the Slow Food movement. We argue that the positioning of Slow Food as a new field was based particularly on using multiple strategies, increasing the stock of floating signifiers, and abstracting the nodal points used. This mobilized new actors and enabled a more extensive collective identity which allowed the movement to progress, extend, and elevate the field of Slow Food. The field of Slow Food was transformed from appealing only to gastronomes to becoming a broader field that encompassed social justice activists and environmentalists. This study contributes to the existing literature on field formation, the role of social movements in this process, and political dynamics within social movements. We focus on the importance of hegemony in the institutional processes around field formation by drawing out how Slow Food created a field through the forging of hegemonic links among a range of disparate actors.