Social Artrepreneurship and Collectives: Lessons for Social Entrepreneurs from the Wanderers Art Movement in Imperial Russia

Abstract

We draw on a hybrid organisation of artists in Imperial Russia to examine the experience of ‘social artrepreneurs’ – artists who pursued both social and commercial goals. Using contemporary theories of organisation, we argue that a key feature of this organisation – the collective of artists – helped in connecting means and ends while balancing hybridity through the process of partial organising. Our paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on how organisations deal with hybridity challenges by exploring the means-ends perspective at the level of an organisation. It highlights the use of partial organising for balancing social and commercial pursuits.

Keywords:

• Artrepreneur
• partial organising
• collective
• Russia
• artist
• social entrepreneurship

Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers and Riad Shams for helpful comments, as well as participants of the 16th Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference. We appreciate the research assistance of Oleksiy Tsuber.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As recent research suggests, such as https://medium.com/@jeffgoins/the-12-new-rules-to-become-radically-successful-as-an-artist-e7c89434bee6.

2 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/14/shepard-fairey-new-exhibition-la-damaged

3 See Phillips (2017) and more information at the websites of the organizations: https://www.thenawa.org/, https://www.guerrillagirls.com, http://afhboston.org/.