Mission focus and resource strategy management in cultural centers
This chapter will begin with an account of the problem of mission drift that many organizations face while striving merely to survive. Instead of defining what mission focus is, this chapter will focus on what it is not. A part of the problem with mission focus is the difficulty of solving mission-related questions and communicating them across the organization, while making enough revenues to maintain the core focus of displaying a versatile offering of culture. As Paul Bogen (2018, p. 14) puts it in his report on arts and cultural centers in Europe:
Far too many Arts/Cultural Centers’ do not have a clear, stated vision, mission or values that are produced by all of the key people involved in the organization and are understood and believed in by all of its team and key stakeholders. And if the organization’s vision has been produced by and is owned just by its leader, what happens when they depart?
It seems as if 88% of the European centers had a written mission or vision statement, which would appear as a good result (Bogen, 2018). But only 68% declared that the key people in their organization had a shared, clear understanding of why they existed. With 82% of the centers’ CEO’s stating that everybody in their organization were clear with the why, only 53% of the staff agreed with this. There seems to be a clear problem with at least communication.
Looking at mission drift through the lenses of resource dependence strategies, which we covered in Chapter 6, some interesting questions emerge. Where is the limit for what an organization can do within the scope of its mission, and who defines it? Better yet, when is it defined accurately?
The hypotheses for the quantitative part of the study are:
H3: The type of perceived strategic options leads to a higher degree of mission drift in private cultural centers.
H03: The type of perceived strategic options does not lead to a higher degree of mission drift in private cultural centers.
As with the earlier chapters, let us start by looking at the theories, or the basics of the concept mission focus and mission drift. Thereafter, we will look upon how cultural centers position themselves in relation to these concepts.
