Artful organizing : essays on places, measurements and money flows in the Contemporary Cultural World

Abstract: This dissertation focuses on how individuals, organizations, and markets manage contradictory demands and expectations from their environment. It studies primarily two fields of cultural production: the art worlds for contemporary art and the organizational field of architecture. The doctoral thesis consists of five self-contained articles and an introductory chapter. Each study makes a distinct theoretical contribution to the body of literature on institutional theory. The first study analyzes the role of market practices in the Swedish art world between 1981 and 2011.  The second study examines the financing structures of four private contemporary art institutions in Stockholm and demonstrates that while some financing structures are regarded as unproblematic, others may be perceived as generating ‘dirty money’.  The third study is a multiple comparative case study of architectural companies in Beijing, London, Lund, Manchester, Stockholm, and Rotterdam. It shows the types of hybrid organizations that may arise in a field with plural institutional logics.The fourth study analyzes a collaborative project by an unlikely pair in the Swedish art world – Bukowskis and Tensta konsthall – and introduces the concept of organizational irony to the literature on competing logics. The fifth study focuses on the corporate art collection of Absolut Vodka and builds on interviews conducted in Stockholm, Paris and New York. It introduces the concept of strange loop reframings to the literature on institutional logics to describe how different actors talk about the items in the collection as ‘art’, ‘advertising as art’ and ‘art as advertising as art’ in order to manage the conflicting institutional logics of art and advertising.