Emerging modes of public cultural spending: Direct support through production delegation

Abstract

This article addresses the evolution of modes of public support of cultural production by discussing and analysing the emerging phenomenon of outsourcing of public cultural services taking place in Continental Europe, especially Italy. We argue that in this context, which is traditionally characterised by the public production of cultural services, the current outsourcing trend is changing the very nature of public intervention in the market for cultural goods and services. This change leads to the recognition and definition of a new category of public intervention in the cultural field: direct support through production delegation. Its main and distinctive feature is a combination of institutional arrangements aimed at reducing public spending inefficiency while preserving government determination of cultural policy guidelines. Increased uncertainty about economic conditions, such as the prospective cost reductions associated with outsourcing, future economic cycles and cultural consumer preferences, may also help explain the selection of this institutional arrangement.

Ownership, organization structure and public service provision: the case of museums

“…All decisions not pertaining to the strictly cultural domain were taken by the politically elected head of the culture department (and approved by the legislature) or by bureaucrats. As Dalle Nogare and Bertacchini (2015) illustrate, all this began to change in the mid-Nineties due to the new ideological atmosphere and the necessity to shrink public expenditure to meet the Maastricht criteria. 4 In 1997, the Pompei archaeological site was granted some limited form of…”

Guidelines for public sector managers on assessing the impact of outsourcing on business continuity strategies: a Brazilian case

“…However, literature also shows that there is a diversity of areas to which, in particular, the public sphere usually outsource services or activities (i.e. internal services and services delivered to the community), such as communication (Brege et al , 2010); culture (Nogare and Bertacchini, 2015); education (Elinder and Jordahl, 2013); energy (Polzin et al , 2016); information technology (Cordella and Willcocks, 2012; Cuadrado-Ballesteros, 2014; Joha and Janssen, 2010); health (Czerw et al , 2014; Ikediashi and Ogunlana, 2015; Ikediashi et al , 2015); human resources (McCracken and McIvor, 2013); logistics (Zhu et al , 2017); maintenance (Assaf et al , 2011); and safety (Cabral et al , 2013; Puolokainen et al , 2018). Due to the variety of outsourced activities in the public sector, the outsourcing strategies formulation should consider contextual factors, such as the nature of outsourced activities, the characteristics of outsourced sectors, and their organizational culture (Fontana et al , 2019).…”

“…There are excellent studies that address outsourcing in the public sector (Bach-Mortensen and Barlow, 2021; Ikediashi et al , 2015; Mohammad, 2020; Nogare and Bertacchini, 2015; Polzin et al , 2016; Puolokainen et al , 2018; Taponen and Kauppi, 2020; Zhu et al , 2017) or the importance of BC strategies (Kato and Charoenrat, 2018; Lindström, 2012; Niemimaa et al , 2019; Sahebjamnia et al , 2018; Schätter et al , 2019; Xing et al , 2019). However, Aragão and Fontana (2021) showed that studies on BC strategy in the context of outsourcing public services are limited.…”

Criteria for the optimal financing model of public theatres

“…The authors do not attempt to decide whether culture is or is not a classically understood public good, although in the literature it is often emphasised that clear public goods in Samuelson's meaning (Samuelson, 1954) are scarce (Buchanan, 1965) and cultural services should be classified as a club good (Buchanan, 1965), although this is questionable. Our considerations directly concern cultural services as public services financed from the public budget (Musgrave, 1957). It is hard to state clearly that the usability of a seat in the audience decreases with the number of repeated productions (Fiedor, 2002) and such considerations are also beyond the scope of our paper (Aridelli and Becica, 2018).…”