Executive Editor's Introduction

Over the years, the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada has acquired a strong reputation for its perspective on local cultural policy and approach to cultural planning. Toronto's original approach to cultural affairs has been discussed in the pages of this journal as early as 1989, in an article by Tom Hendry (1989), then-policy director of the Toronto Arts Council. Hendry's article provided a rich inner look at the dynamics and politics of Toronto' arts, while highlighting some of its challenges. The situation in Toronto, however, has changed since the 1980s, which has been reflected in a good number of studies that have looked at its cultural policy and planning in comparative perspective (e.g. Dowler 2004; Darchen & Tremblay 2013; Goldberg-Miller 2017), and have highlighted the city's unique approach to implementing cultural planning in light of the creative economy (e.g. Grundy and Boudreau 2008; Grodach 2013). This issue of the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society (JAMLS) contributes, once more, to reflections on Toronto's relation to culture with its first two brilliant contributions.

The lead article of this issue, by Meghan Robidoux and Jason F. Kovacs, brings public art – a sorely understudied theme from the perspective of cultural policy research – to the forefront, and should inspire further scholarship into the area. Additionally, this article sheds light on the new normativities and values driving both the design and decision-making processes surrounding public arts work in the municipal landscape. By looking at recent public art developments in Toronto, this article also helps decipher the new ethical requirements that are becoming the norm in the cultural sector – sustainability, environmental, and cultural – and bringing forward new obligations and “imperatives” in the process. This article brilliantly exposes how this logic is now informing and supporting cultural decision-making at the local level.

The second article in this issue, by Shoshanah B. D. Goldberg-Miller, honors Toronto's legacy in cultural affairs by delving into the practice of policy learning. In this piece, the author investigates how a number of influential stakeholders from Toronto's cultural community have looked to insights and policy practices from a number of North American cities. This article is not only an essential piece in understanding Toronto's unique approach to local cultural policy; it offers material for better understanding policy learning in the context of cultural research through fieldwork that constitutes, most certainly, one of the most thorough studies of policy learning published in recent years.

While these first two articles offer a good dialogue on cultural planning in Toronto, this regular issue of JAMLS is not an essay in Canadian chauvinism. The following two articles present European perspectives on arts administration. The third article, “Managing Autonomy: Analyzing Arts Management and Artistic Autonomy through the Theory of Justification,” by Bård Kleppe, invites a reconsideration of artistic autonomy in arts management. Building on the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), this article delves into the normative world of arts management through the vantage point of three artistic directors of theater companies (one in Norway, one in Britain, and one in the Netherlands). This article brings a lot to the debate on artistic autonomy; it is not strictly an application of a new theoretical perspective on arts management. Specifically, this article demonstrates that conventional views of artistic autonomy – defined vis-à-vis organizational constraints – offer, at times, an overly simplistic perspective on the factors limiting and/or enabling artistic autonomy. Rather, the author has provided evidence of a greater heterogeneity than often assumed in the normative foundations and limits to artistic autonomy in arts organizations. To this end, this article considers an important question: is artistic autonomy rooted in values and identity issues, or is it a function of the division of labor? By siding with the first perspective, Kleppe invites a revisiting of some fundamental assumptions about arts management.

The fourth article in this issue contributes to the issues of new public management and administrative reforms in public sector cultural organizations. Marianna Marzano and Monia Castellini provide an overview of the administrative reform process presently at play in the Italian Ministry of Culture. According to the authors, the administrative reform – which is aiming to further decentralize decision-making – has a potential to generate new networks and forms of association between actors in the museum sector. Changes in structure offer an opportunity, here, to revisit the governance of museums and heritage.