Hypotheses:

1. Not enough “scarce” opportunities are available to those who have the most to contribute, because organizations frequently prioritize things such as increasing organizational size, monumental buildings, and pleasing institutional and individual funders above sustainable development towards long-term mission success.
2. The best possible mix of cultural products is not available (and people are not always matched with the best opportunities to engage in the arts), because arts organizations’ missions are not designed with the ecosystem in mind and a disproportionate number of organizations are committed to elite, Western art forms.
3. “Scarce” opportunities are disproportionately made available to people whose work connects with a large audience (rather than those who have a lot to contribute in other ways), because arts organizations produce traditionally populist art in order to increase their short-term returns.

A bit about our process

John started with searches on Google, Google scholar, and Project Muse, using search terms like

• arts nonprofits mission homogeneity
• arts nonprofits adaptive capacity
• arts nonprofits administrators motivations
• arts nonprofits administrators careers
• arts nonprofits organizational change
• arts organizations mortality rates

and other variations thereof.

John also looked into the numerous blog posts that sprung up in the wake of Rocco Landesman’s comments on the over-supply of arts organizations in 2011, to see if any of them cited any research or data that could be useful here, but found very little.

Most of the literature that came up in these searches was related to the management of nonprofits in general, rather than focused on the arts. In order to find some content that was more specifically related to the arts, John set out to review the tables of contents of some of the most relevant academic journals. John started by reviewing the last five years of the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society and was able to find a couple of good articles.

At this point, John passed the torch on to Devon, who continued the review of academic journals.

Devon reviewed:

• International Journal of Arts Management 2005 – 2010
• Museum Management and Curatorship 2009 – 2014
• Nonprofit Management and Leadership 2009 – 2014
• JSTOR for keywords
  • Arts infrastructure, arts investment in buildings, arts mission

Determine the extent to which research exists addressing the topic area in general.

Determine the extent to which research exists addressing the specific hypotheses that we developed.

There is quite a bit of research on factors (such as organizational rigidity and misaligned motivations) that can lead nonprofit organizations to be less effective than they could be. However, it seems that most of this literature defines success at the organizational level rather than thinking of the ecosystem as a whole.

John wasn’t able to find anything that addressed the second hypotheses (that the mission of the existing nonprofits might be part of the problem). Devon found an article about the influence of wide/narrow mission statements on financial performance, and one on the challenges/opportunities with wide missions. Devon also found journal articles on programming strategies tied to populist art, but not necessarily “Western, elite” art forms.

Identify any hypotheses that are missing from the list but should be added in light of what you’ve found in the research.

I didn’t notice any.

If possible, arrive at a broad understanding of where there are areas of consensus and debate in the research that does exist. (Looking for just a general impression here, not an in-depth review of particular studies.)

It seems that there are relatively cohesive bodies of literature on factors that influence decision-making processes, the capacity to innovate, and the capacity for organizational change in nonprofits. There are a few articles on compensation practices at the organizational and executive level, but none in the arts.

If possible, arrive at an initial impression regarding the extent to which each hypothesis is supported by the research that does exist. Again if possible, assign a low/medium/high level of confidence to this impression. You can divide the hypotheses into subcomponents if that’s useful.

There is literature to support a discussion of Hypotheses 1 and 3, but we haven’t found anything on Hypothesis 2. Much of the literature we have gathered so far is not specifically about the arts, and even the arts-related literature we have found does not tie the issues to the availability of “scarce resources” in the eco-system. That is, the literature discusses the issues that are identified in the hypotheses, but it is unlikely to tell us whether these issues demonstrably lead to the negative outcomes that we have surmised.

Report back on the utility of Zotero, Papers, and Google Docs/Sheets for tracking preliminary investigations like these. Decide whether to commit a team-wide solution at this point or experiment with other options in the next round.

John already used Zotero for the previous assignment and he continues to be pleased with Zotero as a bibliographic tool. Devon was using Zotero for the first time. She downloaded the browser plugin, but it did not seem to work for any of the journals she was using, so the copy/paste method for each article was the same for Zotero as Google Spreadsheets. Overall, seems like Google Spreadsheets is easier/better for short term research evaluation (to see/scan abstracts all at the same time), while Zotero is likely better in the long term, to track using folders & tags.

Process background

Devon and Ian spent approximately 10-12 hours on hypothesis definition and searching for research reports online. Ian spent the first two hours or so accessing literature on decision-making in general and in a management context via EBSCO, then switched to JSTOR to further explore the same topics, eventually narrowing the topic to decision-making in an arts administration context. Both Ian and Devon searched or browsed a number of arts-related research journals, such as the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society and Museum Management and Curatorship. A full list of research actions is reproduced below.

1. MLK: Ian searched EBSCOHost Social Science Full Text for texts with decision making and cognitive bias in the title or abstract.
2. MLK: Ian searched EBSCOHost Social Science Full Text for texts with decision in the title and literature review in the title or abstract.
3. LOC: Ian searched JSTOR for texts with decision making and cognitive bias in the title.
4. LOC: Ian searched JSTOR for texts with decision making, bias and policy in the title.
5. LOC: Ian searched JSTOR for texts with decision making and literature review in the title.
6. LOC: Ian searched JSTOR for texts with “decision making” and “arts administrators” in the full text.
7. LOC: Ian searched JSTOR for texts with “decision making” and “arts managers” in the full text.
8. LOC: Ian searched Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society archives for texts with “decision” in the title.
9. At home: Ian searched JSTOR for texts with curation and marginalized in the full text that also mentioned art, music, theater, theatre or dance. (This was after a number of other combinations that didn’t turn anything notable up, like curation + arts + disadvantaged in the title.)
10. At home: Ian searched ResearchGate for texts with “arts organizations” and effectiveness in the title/abstract/keywords.
11. LOC: Devon browsed Journal of Culture Policy from 2012 -2014
12. LOC: Devon browsed Journal of Arts, Management, and Law from 2009 – 2013
13. LOC: Devon browsed Journal of Cultural Economics from 2012 – 2014
14. LOC: Devon browsed Museum Management and Curatorship from 2011 – 2014
15. LOC: Devon searched Nonprofit Management and Leadership for “evaluation”
16. LOC: Devon browsed International Journal of Arts Management from 2008 – 2010
17. LOC: Devon browsed Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts from 2012 – 2013
18. Home: Devon googled “does art improve lives” “instrumental value of arts”

Our collaboratively generated list of research can be found here.

Extent to which research exists addressing the topic area in general

There is certainly a wide body of literature addressing the topic of effective decision making in general. Much of this literature focuses on various biases that can interfere with rational decisions, although there is a competing strand that illuminates the virtuous qualities of intuition. Much less research exists specifically addressing the propensity of arts administrators to employ effective or ineffective decision-making strategies in their practice. The handful of studies we found on this topic tend to rely on surveys of management and seem fairly basic in their design.

Extent to which research exists addressing the specific hypotheses that we developed

We encountered difficulty finding research pertaining very specifically to most of our hypotheses, with one exception noted below, and what literature we have found has tended to take the form of theory or argumentation rather than empirical study.

We were able to find some research that is tangentially relevant to our hypotheses. For example, there is plenty of literature on diversity in the workforce, including the arts workforce. However, we were unable to find anything directly answering either whether arts managers with a curation role (e.g., artistic directors, literary managers, gallery owners) are failing to identify people whose work adds something unique to the cultural diet of humanity or whose culture is deeply marginalized in society, or whether a lack of diversity training is behind any such failure. Similarly, we know of literature on the existence and nature of instrumental benefits of the arts, but this literature does not seem to address the extent to which arts managers are aware of ways to measure these benefits or are choosing to incorporate those measures into their decision-making process.

The one area that did seem to offer relatively more promise relates to the hypothesis that arts managers are failing to connect people with opportunities they are likely to appreciate the most in part because they are not taking advantage of predictive analytics. Though the literature base is not extensive, we did find research addressing both the benefits of predictive analytics in an arts context and their lack of uptake within the sector.

That said, it should be noted that this was very much a preliminary review and further investigation would likely yield relevant sources that we have not yet uncovered.

Hypotheses that should be added in light of what we found in the research

During the course of our investigation, we did add to our first hypothesis, which now reads:

Arts administrators lack the skills to identify people whose work improves other people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways because evaluative metrics and methodologies typically don’t do a good job of measuring “improvement” across arts disciplines or treatment conditions, and because administrators don’t know of or how to use the research that does exist.

The portion in italics is new, and was inspired in part by search results.

Areas of consensus and debate in the research

In the broad decision-making research, it seems fairly uncontroversial that cognitive biases exist and that they affect decision making. However, there does seem to be a bit of debate around the extent to which this is a problem for the strategic management of organizations.

Otherwise, the literature was too thin for us to determine obvious strands of consensus based on this preliminary review.

Initial impression regarding the extent to which each hypothesis is supported by the research that does exist

• We have a low (Ian) to medium (Devon) level of confidence that the research that does exist supports the hypothesis that arts administrators lack skills to identify people whose work improves other people’s lives in meaningful ways.
• We have a low level of confidence that the research supports the hypothesis that arts administrators lack skills to identify people whose work adds something unique to the cultural diet of humanity or whose culture is deeply marginalized in society.
• We have a medium (Ian) to high (Devon) level of confidence that the research supports the hypothesis that arts administrators are failing to connect people with opportunities to participate that they would appreciate the most.
• We have a low (Ian) to medium (Devon) level of confidence that the research supports the hypothesis that arts nonprofits do not perform their role in a healthy arts ecosystem as efficiently or effectively as they could due to HR challenges.

With all of the above, it’s important to note that we did not find much research disconfirming these hypotheses; the low levels of confidence are primarily the result of most of the research having only tangential relevance. In addition, we feel that there is likely more out there on some of these topics that we were not able to find.

Utility of Zotero, Papers, and Google Docs/Sheets for tracking preliminary investigations like these

Devon reported no complaints with Google Docs and Sheets. Ian liked being able to track notes and actions easily in Google Docs, but found the grid format of Sheets to be time-consuming for recording information and limiting in terms of easily accessing the literature that had already been recorded. He is eager to try another solution.

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