Sustainability, Ethics, and Aesthetics

This is the author’s accepted manuscript. For the publisher’s version, see: http://ijspp.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.274/prod.11Among four dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, social, and cultural), it is the latter aspect that is least examined by scholars. However, understanding how culture contributes to the long term sustainability of communities and societies is one key to a holistic understanding of sustainability itself, and is worthy of scholarly attention. This paper argues that the ethic of long-term sustainability can be informed by aesthetics and art in their embodied, institutionalized form. The resilience potential of art organizations is important for configuring the long-term impact of aesthetics and its place for future generations. As art organizations struggle with addressing the consequences of economic recessions and finding new models of conducting their temporal business, their very existence and preservation contributes to the long-term sustainability of communities and societies as a whole. This paper suggests two avenues for further research: first, the values and ideals embedded in strategic priorities of art institutions and promoted through their programs contribute to building resilience capital and serve as the foundation of long-term institutional survival; second, by fulfilling their institutional missions through both short and long-term strategies and acting ‘sustainably,’ managers of art organizations ensure institutional endurance, thus vouching safe the interests of future generations

Sustainable Public Administration: the Search for Intergenerational Fairness

This study presents a broad understanding of sustainability-sustainability as intergenerational equity, or fairness in relation to future generations. It seeks to fill the theoretical gap in the sustainability literature, in particular the preoccupation of that literature with short-term sustainability strategies, and its lack of both theoretical and empirical inquiries concerning intergenerational sustainability. The study looks at the experiences of particular art organizations (art museums, literature, and music and performing arts) with the purpose of exploring the determinants of institutional resilience and management strategies that enhance the long-term sustainability of organizations. I seek to challenge the widespread theoretical and empirical orientation in the culture-based development literature that looks at arts organizations as sites for sustainable development, and thus assigns them purely instrumental and temporal value. Interviews with art managers and experts from eighteen arts organizations across the United States, examinations of organizational practices and strategic documents, historic analysis, and other forms of field research all suggest that there is a special kind of institutional rationality that, over time, translates into what I call institutional capital for sustainability. I also find that institutional arrangements are important predictors of a choice of sustainability strategies, however, sustainable thinking and sustainable acting by managers of art organizations matter more for long-term sustainability than particular institutional structures. The study identifies particular managerial roles associated with sustainable decision-making. I find that through their day-to-day choices managers of art institutions almost inadvertently pursue an ethic of sustainability, vouching safe the interests of future generations

Inter-Organizational Networking and the Great Recession: Lessons from Detroit Arts and Culture Organizations

Drawing upon the resource dependency and social network perspectives, this article investigates the structure and composition of inter-organizational networks that 27 arts and culture organizations from the Detroit Metropolitan Area relied on during and after the Great Recession. An analysis of the ego networks of these cultural organizations shows that their ability to withstand stress is unrelated to their network structure and composition. Strategic forms of network configurations, however, appear to be more common among larger and older organizations, thus affirming a powerful role of capacity and reputation for the formation of organizational social capital

Conducive Motivations and Psychological Influences on Volunteering

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio