Giving Voice To Cultural Enterprises From The Global South

Over the last decade-and-a-half there has been a rise in the amount of academic research exploring the conceptual and historical interactions of ‘culture’ and ‘the market’ (see for example Caves (2000), Cunningham (2002), Pratt (2004), Throsby (2008), O'Connor (2009), O'Connor (2010)). Although contentious, the impetus for this has largely been the establishment of the ‘creative industry’ discourse and how it has been applied globally in policy and practice (Cunningham 2009). Despite this, with only a few notable exceptions, the theory and concepts that underpin this discourse have largely been derived through research contexts that are Anglo/Euro-centric and metropolitan. The purpose of this paper is to initiate a new, open platform from which to critique the way arts enterprises operate with respect to a more global application. To achieve this, the paper merges Thornton, Ocasio & Loundsbury’s (2012) Institutional Logics perspective and Osborne’s (2006) New Public Governance approach to present an applied theoretical model of arts enterprise institutional alignment, which can equally be applied to arts enterprises from all over the world. The model gives credence to the multiple forces that shape, and are shaped by arts organizations from the contexts they operate within. Using this model, the paper explores 3 cases of arts enterprises stemming from, what has been termed, the ‘Global South’ (Connell, 2007; Cunningham 2009), to provide a juxtaposition to the dominant discourse of arts enterprise analysis.