Reference
Paquette, Jonathan, Julie Bérubé. The Contingencies of an Academic Field: Arts Management Research in Canada. The Oxford Handbook of Arts and Cultural Management. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Summary
Disciplines such as biology, physics, sociology, and political science, among others, have a long-standing history and place in academia, and the institutional context in which research is conducted has evolved along these lines. Arts management, however, belongs to a different model; it is not a discipline but a heterogeneous field—which, for researchers, may imply a different context and set of conditions for conducting research. This chapter’s objective is to understand academic fields from an institutional perspective, by focusing on the possibilities available to those who navigate and conduct their career in the field of arts management in Canada. More specifically, this chapter seeks to understand both the dynamics of national institutions practicing research in arts management and the financial and symbolic capital available to and accumulable by researchers in the field who work in Canadian universities. To this end, four parameters are studied in relation to arts management: associations and learned societies, publications and journals, available research funding, and research chairs. This chapter concludes with observations on the conditions of arts management research in Canada, and reflections on the methodological challenges pertaining to its study as a field of research.