Performance evaluation in the arts A multidisciplinary review and a new pragmatic research agenda

Arts management research on performance evaluation has been characterized by an applied approach, focusing on providing arts organizations with performance evaluation models and techniques, rather than seeking to understand the meaning of performance and its evaluation in the specific contexts in which individual organizations operate. However, the latter is a precondition for developing and implementing performance evaluation systems that mirror the reality of artistic work and are thus useful for both organizations and their stakeholders. This chapter reviews two bodies of literature: critical accounting studies and valuation studies. Though both fields have remained lateral to arts management research so far, the review shows that critical accounting studies can contribute to a better understanding of the friction between different logics that emerges from the application of new public-management-oriented procedures of evaluation to arts organizations. At the same time, they show the limits of accounting in representing the alternative logics and systems of evaluation that arts organizations apply in order to compensate for the inadequacy of those imposed by regulatory bodies. Valuation studies on the arts stimulate the inclusion of non-market-driven concepts of value and the valorization of aesthetic-emotional logics of evaluation rather than scientific-rational ones. In particular, they highlight forms of judgment that provide alternatives to the currently dominant calculative technologies of evaluation. Closing the current gap in understanding is the first step in a new pragmatic agenda for research on performance evaluation in the arts.