Doing (and Using) Research in Arts and Cultural Management

This book offers a rich, critical, and engaging exploration of cutting-edge methods for studying arts and cultural management in a digital age. The content will appeal to those who seek to study these topics by employing the latest data gathering and analytical methods. It is an informative resource for academics, including advanced masters’ and PhD candidates, as well as professional arts managers seeking to understand the changing landscape. This book is relevant to arts and cultural management, creative industries, cultural policy, festivals and events, heritage, museum studies, arts consumption and marketing, and cultural tourism. It will also appeal to consultants, evaluators, and fundraisers who do research on a regular basis. The chapters engage with both traditional and contemporary research topics, including providing examples of high-quality research from national, regional, and local settings in various parts of the world. The co-authors are five diverse scholars who are experienced not only in standard qualitative and quantitative methods but also emerging techniques such as netnography and digital analysis. This book provides real-world, empirical, and theoretical insights on how to navigate the complexities of research methods in a creative context.

François Colbert has been active in the field of arts and culture close to 50 years, particularly in the performing arts, museum and film sectors. He has given numerous training and professional development seminars in arts management, with a focus on the field of marketing management in a cultural context. He is professor of marketing and holder of the Carmelle and Rémi Marcoux Chair in Arts Management at HEC Montréal. He founded the AIMAC Conference and the International Journal of Arts Management. He is the codirector of the Master of Management in International Arts Management and author of the book on Marketing Culture and the Arts published in 16 languages.

Jennifer Wiggins is Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at Kent State University, Ohio, USA and Co-Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Arts Management. Her research on consumer willingness to donate, willingness to pay for arts experiences, and willingness to support new creative and social ventures has been published in top journals in Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Arts Management. Her methodological expertise is in experimental design and measurement. She has mentored over two dozen doctoral students and teaches philosophy of science, theory development, and research methods at the doctoral level.

Russell Belk is York University Distinguished Research Professor and Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York University. His research involves the extended self, the arts, collecting, gift-giving, sharing, digital consumption, and materialism. He is primarily qualitative and often conceptual, visual, and cultural. He has over 800 publications; in 2012 a 10-volume subset was published in Sage’s Legends in Consumer Behavior series. In 2023 he received an honorary doctorate with festschrift from Université de Reims. He co-initiated the Consumer Behavior Odyssey, the ACR Film Festival, and the Consumer Culture Theory Conference.

Ruth Rentschler OAM is Professor Arts & Cultural Leadership, UniSA Business, Adelaide, Australia. Her research entails creative topics focusing on inclusion and diversity. Ruth’s work is often qualitative, with particular interest in unique longitudinal secondary data sets, the self and others, more recently film and the digital world. She has designed and taught research methods at PhD level in numerous universities around the world. Ruth has received national and international awards for her contribution to arts and cultural management and higher education. She is widely published, including her most recent book, Routledge Companion to Governance in the Arts World (Rentschler, Reid & Donelli, Routledge, Eds., 2025).

Danilo Dantas is Professor of Marketing at HEC Montréal, Canada, where he serves as the pedagogical director of the Professional Master’s and Graduate Diploma in Management of Cultural Organizations. His research focuses on the marketing of music, employing various research methods. His work has been published in the European Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Interactive Marketing, the International Journal of Arts Management, and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, among others. He is also the co-chair of AIMAC, the International Association of Arts and Culture Management.