It’s been a year since I posted to the Artful Manager, when I reflected on the passing of my dear friend and colleague Diane Ragsdale. Since then, I’ve been focusing my public writing in the ArtsManaged initiative, an effort to create free, online, and evolving resources for Arts Management practitioners. You can subscribe to the weekly newsletter, browse the emerging digital textbook, and watch some short videos to get the gist of it.
But as I start a semester-long sabbatical from teaching at American University to think and write, I’m revisiting/repurposing this platform for that journey. I’ll use this space to share updates and essays on my sabbatical work, and to welcome feedback and insight to advance or challenge that work.
Here’s the drive and direction of the semester ahead:
The management of nonprofit and public arts and cultural organizations (Arts Management) has been conventionally understood, analyzed, and taught as a reasoned and explicit practice: Fully conscious, independent people make deliberate choices, constrained in space and time, and derived from known and knowable motives, skills, and resources. Sociologist Charles Tilly calls these “sequential, explanatory accounts of self-motivated human action” standard stories, writing:
Standard stories, in short, pop up everywhere. They lend themselves to vivid, compelling accounts of what has happened, what will happen, or what should happen. They do essential work in social life, cementing people’s commitments to common projects, helping people make sense of what is going on, channeling collective decisions and judgments, spurring people to action they would otherwise be reluctant to pursue(Tilly 2002).
But while the standard story is a powerful and productive approach for collective action, it has a useful limit. When the work and the world become highly entangled, complex, and uncertain, the standard story not only misses essential and driving dynamics but also blinds its characters to the larger view.
“Most significant social processes fall into a nonstory mode,” Tilly suggests. “Most of them do so because at least some crucial causes within them are indirect, incremental, interactive, unintended, collective, and/or mediated by the nonhuman environment” (Tilly 2002).
My three decades of researching, teaching, and supporting Arts Management practice have led me to believe that our standard stories are no longer equal to the challenges at hand – that the work is already predominantly “indirect, incremental, interactive, unintended, collective, and/or mediated by the nonhuman environment.” As poet David Whyte names the problem, “the language we have…is not large enough for the territory that we’ve already entered” (Tippett 2016).
Philosopher Mary Midgley offers a similar suggestion, writing that “We need a new model that does justice to the many different kinds of question that we ask and the ways in which they all converge” (Midgley 2011).
During that same three decades, we have come to understand a lot more about how humans make sense and take action. There is opportunity to reimagine collective action in the arts with these emerging insights. Drawing upon scholarship in naturalistic decision-making, affective science, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive philosophy, I will develop and refine an evolving framework for managing artistic expression and experience beyond the standard story.
I have a sketch of what that looks like. I’m grateful for this sabbatical and its opportunity to dig in and build out.
Don’t expect weekly or even frequent posts along this journey. But I do plan to return here to share what I’m learning. I’m grateful for any who want to follow along or contribute to the conversation.
Sources
- Midgley, Mary. 2011. The Myths We Live By. 1st Edition. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge.
- Tilly, Charles. 2002. “Chapter 3: The Trouble with Stories.” In Stories, Identities, and Political Change, 25–42. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
- Tippett, Krista. 2016. “David Whyte — Seeking Language Large Enough.” On Being.
