IJAM Volume 11 Number 2 (PRINT)

EDITOR’S NOTE

This issue touches on three topics that are rarely addressed in the International Journal of Arts Management. The fact that these issues are of interest to researchers is good news for us, since they are part of the environment of arts organizations and are often important considerations for managers.

The first article, by Guintcheva and Passebois, looks at the position of museums in the leisure market. The authors draw a link between the attributes and perceived advantages of various leisure products and evaluate the intensity of competition between products in different sectors.

The authors of the second article, Falcão Vieira et al., examine the evolution and transformation of museums and theatres in Brazil and highlight the differences between organizations in the southern and northeastern parts of the country. This study illustrates the influence of the social and economic context on the structuring of organizational fields.

The next three articles deal with performance measurement in cultural organizations. The aim of the authors of the third article, Finocchiaro Castro and Rizzo, is to explore ways of measuring the performance of a group of conservation institutions that come under the supervision of the Sicilian department of culture. The authors use both a methodological and an empirical approach in their exploration.

For their part, Weinstein and Bukovinsky propose a performance measurement technique commonly used in industry to evaluate the results of an NPO operating in the field of arts and culture. 

While the primary mission of performing arts companies is an artistic one, the performance of such companies is nonetheless evaluated mainly on the basis of budgetary and financial criteria. In our fifth article, Turbide and Laurin analyze the findings of a survey of 300 organizations that show that, while several performance measurement tools were used internally by these organizations, the dominant measures were those linked to financial aspects.

Finally, our Company Profile, penned by Serge Poisson-de Haro and Sylvain Menot, focuses on Canada’s National Arts Centre, a multicultural showcase for the performing arts. The mandate of this parapublic institution encompasses the entire country – no easy task in a nation as vast as Canada, whose population is spread across a territory of 6,000 kilometres. Despite these challenges, however, the NAC’s management has come up with clever ways to fulfil its mandate and meet expectations.

Happy reading!

François Colbert
Editor