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Why do some theatres innovate more than others? An empirical analysis
107
Poetics 14 (1985) 107-122 North-Holland
WHY DO SOME THEATRES INNOVATE MORE THAN OTHERS? AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS * Paul DIMAGGIO
and Kristen
STENBERG
The authors develop a measure of the ‘innovativeness’ of the repertoires of U.S. resident nonprofit theatres and test four hypotheses about the relationship between environmental and organizational factors and innovation. Access to potential patrons rich in cultural capital appears to make theatre repertoires more innovate, while dependence upon the market (as opposed to grants and contributions) is associated with greater conformity of repertoire. Theatres with smaller budgets to maintain, fewer seats to fill, and less need for earned income are less conformist in their programming than are large theatres with capacious houses and high rates of earned income. Holding size and dependence on earned income constant, there is no evidence that age, structural differentiation, or the presence of subscription audiences - all associated with ‘institutionalization’ - have either a negative or a positive impact on innovation. New York theatres innovate more, and are less negatively affected by growth and the market, than theatres elsewhere in the U.S. It is suggested that artistic innovation has come to depend overwhelmingly on the behavior of formal organizations and that, consequently, we must understand the principles that govern the relationship of such organizations to their economic and social environments in order to understand artistic change.
1. Introduction A central concern of both students of the arts and cultural policy makers has been the origin of artistic innovation. It is clear that the rate of creative
* We are grateful to Judith Balfe, Wendy Griswold, Richard Peterson, and Margaret Wyzomirski for useful comments on earlier presentations of this work. Computing support from the Yale University Sociology Department and Institution for Social and Policy Studies is acknowledged with appreciation, as is institutional support from the Yale Program on Non-Profit Organizations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the latter through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Collection of survey data was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts Research Division, and historical research benefited from a grant to the senior author from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. None of these persons or organizations should be presumed to subscribe to the findings or interpretations expressed in this paper nor to bear responsibility for any of its imperfections. Correspondence address: P. DiMaggio, Yale University, 88 Trumboll St. (154 Yale Station), New Haven, CT 06520, USA. 0304-422X/85/$3.30
0 1985, Elsevier Science Publishers
B.V. (North-Holland)
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innovation and cultural diversity is greater in some eras than in others and, at any given time, in some art forms than in others. But we understand relatively little about the causes of these differences. Theoretical accounts of innovativeness have often stressed the influence of general factors. Some have emphasized broad historical alternations among different forms of cultural mentalitieaffecting all creative realms in similar ways. Others have attributed change in creative fecundity over time to coincidental fluctuation in the number of distinguished individual artists. Still others seek explanations for change in the rate of artistic ferment in the intrinsic logic of art forms themselves. Although such approaches may have value in explaining long-term change, they tell us little about variation in artistic diversity and innovation in the short run. And they neglect the lessons of the ‘production-of-culture’ school: That the range of art that is produced results from the structure of rewards to which artists respond and the organizational systems that select and transmit artistic work to the public at any give time (see Peterson 1976, and, for a similar view, Becker 1982). We believe that innovation and diversity can best be understood by focussing on the level of analysis to which these concepts pertain: For the study of diversity, the appropriate level of analysis is the population of producers; for the study of innovation, the appropriate level of analysis is the single producer. In a previous paper (DiMaggio and Stenberg 1985) we documented and attempted to explain changes in diversity within the population of American nonprofit theatres between 1971 and 1981. In this paper, we focus on variation among individual theatres in innovativeness, with the object of explaining why some theatres produced more innovative and nonconforming dramatic repertoires than others at a single point in time. Because so much attention has been devoted to individual artists as source of innovation, it may seem odd that we study organizations rather than playwrights or directors. We regard the conventional focus of students of the arts on the individual creator as underestimating the extent to which works of art are socially constituted and controlled (see e.g. Wolff 1981; Becker 1982). Increasingly, formal organizations - art museums, galleries, record companies, publishing houses, symphony orchestras, and theatres - have become the key ‘gatekeepers’ (Coser 1978) determining the structure of artistic opportunity and regulating the flow of new works to the public. Given the centrality of organizations to the emergence and sacralization (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin 1976) of new artistic works and to the refinement and transformation of the dramatic canon, we treat the theatre rather than the creative artist as our unit of analysis. Our approach is unusual in that we attempt to measure directly the innovativeness of the repertoires of specific theatres and use quantitative analytic methods to assess the effects on innovation of specific aspects of these
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theatres’ relationships to their markets, environments, and organizational structures. We regard such a strategy as essential to understanding any process as complex and multifaceted as the artistic choices of theatres’ managements. Although not all questions are susceptible to such empirical approaches, they deserve to be employed much more widely in the sociology of culture than they have been heretofore.
2. The American theatre and the resident stage Theatre in the United States has historically represented ‘ un art moyen’, never fully sacralized as high culture but, at the same time, since the rise of the cinema, not truly popular culture either. American social progressives employed the theatre as a means of political struggle and social improvement both in the nineteenth century (when anti-slavery and anti-alcohol morality plays enjoyed considerable popularity) and in the early 1900s when reformers used dramatic activity to educate immigrate children in urban ‘settlement houses’. During the early nineteenth century, middle-class devotees of culture in American cities formed numerous amateur theatre clubs, devoted to providing refined recreation through the presentation of community drama. At the same time, however, the bulk of the American stage was profoundly commercial. Drama and dramatists were considered unwholesome or irreligious at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and northeastern cities sporadically prohibited theatrical presentations (although promoters commonly circumvented such bans by terming their performances ‘lectures’ and emphasizing their instructional qualities). By the second half of the nineteenth century, a vigorous commercial theatre had developed, as the stock system sent touring stars on the ‘road’ to cities and towns throughout the United States. The stock system was succeeded by the ‘combination’ system, whereby touring and bookings were centralized in the hands of a few New York-based theatrical promoters - notably the Erlangers and the Shuberts - who forged theatre trusts that monopolized commercial opportunities throughout the United States. The effect of this system was to increase the viability of new plays, which the trusts had the market power to promote effectively, but to decrease the overall variation in repertoires and production standards, which were regulated closely from New York City. The autonomy of the playwright declined markedly, for the monopolists could demand cuts and revisions in scripts and would only produce those that appealed to the ‘lowest common denominator’ of the public (Poggi 1968). Consequently, like American television during the era of network domination, American drama was a mass medium, with little innovation and little diversity. The rise of film (Poggi 1968; Moore 1968) effectively eliminated local markets for dramatic productions and, with them, the power of the theatre monopolies. For many years, touring companies and live drama were absent
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from many American cities. (The exception was New York which, then as now, supported a lively and lavish commercial popular theatre in its Broadway district.) The disappearance of the national commercial stage, however, provided opportunities for the sporadic emergence of more artistically oriented ‘little theatres’ throughout the United States. With the wholesale creation of local theatre companies by the federal government during the economic depression of the 1930s the scale and diversity of dramatic activity ~ this time locally controlled and noncommercial - expanded and, until the demise of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939, innovation flourished, at least in some quarters (see McDonald 1969; Flanagan 1940). After the Second World War, entrepreneurs in several U.S. cities created small theatre companies, locally controlled, and devoted primarily to artistic rather than to commercial ends. In the early 1960s several of these theatres were embraced by the Ford Foundation, which provided large grants to new and existing ‘resident theatres’ over the course of the next decade. Stimulated by this infusion of capital, and by the availability of substantial financial support from state and federal government by the 1970s the resident stage became a small-scale social movement, with new theatres arising in hundreds of U.S. cities over the next twenty years. Although Broadway survives as the heart of the commercial stage, and much noncommercial production is undertaken by universities, local community groups, and other ensembles, the creative core of the U.S. theatre is currently the resident stage, a set of several hundred nonprofit theatres under the control of private boards of trustees, with full-time artistic directors and administrative staff. The larger of these own their own houses and mount as many as a dozen productions a year. The audience for the resident stage consists predominantly of well educated managers and professionals; among the larger theatres, most tickets are sold through subscription, whereby the patron purchases for one sum tickets to each of the theatre’s productions for a full season (Zeigler 1977). There is substantial variation among resident theatres in the nature of their repertoire but, collectively, the resident stage represents the focus of most artistic innovation in the U.S. theatre. This role has been stimulated by private foundations and the federal National Endowment for the Arts (and its affiliated state arts agencies), which provide grants to resident theatres to produce new (or rarely performed classic) plays, to hire dramaturges, and to facilitate the work of young playwrights. By comparison to both the era of the theatre trusts and the period of Broadway dominance, opportunities for the production of new work have expanded markedly. The receptiveness of resident theatres to a wide range of materials is a function of three aspects of the industry’s structure: Its relative decentralization, with control vested at the local level; its noncommercial charter, and consequent freedom from the need to maximize profit; and the availability of public and private grants in support of innovative work.
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There were approximately 620 nonprofit theatre companies in the United States in 1980 (Mathtech 1981). Many of these were very small, producing only two or three plays a year and presenting them to tiny local audiences. There were many fewer nationally visible and institutionally stable resident theatres, and these were members of a trade association, the Theatre Communications Group, originally founded by the Ford Foundation but, since the late 1960s an independent entity. The membership of this organization, which constitutes the population we have studied, includes almost all of the large resident theatres in the United States, most theatres that receive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and nearly all of the theatres whose directors or managers are influential in the national theatrical community. It excludes many local nonprofit theatres that have very few resources, that are very new, or that are primarily oriented to political or social rather than conventionally defined aesthetic goals. The resident theatres that are the population for this study represent the major port of entry for new dramatic work and the most visible sector of the American stage. Nonetheless, within the resident stage, there is much variation in artistic orientation. The repertoires of some local theatres are frankly commercial, catering to the most widespread popular tastes; while the productions of others are highly avant-garde and experimental. Still other resident theatres specialize in classic works that are rarely performed. In the remainder of this paper, we shall attempt to explain this variation in repertoire in terms of the environmental and organizational factors that influence these theatres’ choices from among the many available plays that they might produce.
3. Measuring innovativeness Innovativeness cannot be measured directly because students of drama do not themselves agree about what constitutes innovation. Instead we measure ‘nonconformity’: The extent to which a theatre’s repertoire diverges from that of the other nonprofit theatres. We do this by creating a ‘conformity/nonconformity index’ to characterize each theatre’s repertoire. This index represents the mean number of times that each play produced by any given theatre was produced by all theatres in our population. By definition, theatres that performed popular works scored high on this index; theatres that performed unpopular works scored low. (A score of ‘1’ means that no other theatre produced any of the plays in a given theatre’s repertoire. A score of ‘5’ means that, on average, each play in the repertoire was produced by four other theatres.) Our data are based on the repertoires for the 1977/1978 and 1978/1979 seasons of the 165 theatres that were members of the Theatre Communications Group at that time. Why do we regard this simple measure of ‘nonconformity’ as being a
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measure of ‘innovation’? Although dramaturges could not agree on a definition of ‘innovation’, the nonconformity score was correlated at about 0.50 with their ratings of the popularity and riskiness of a random sample of the plays that were produced. We regard ‘innovation’ as occurring when new works are entered into the dramatic repertoire, and when old works that have fallen into disuse are brought back in. The measure does not address innovation in stage design or performance style, of course. But we believe that it is an efficient measure of what experts mean when they speak of artistic adventuresomeness and what most educated laypeople mean when they speak of ‘innovation’. The measure has the distinct advantage over expert ratings of being unambiguous and easily interpretable.
4. Explaining
variation in theatre conformity
In this section, we shall consider four sets of factors that may be expected to explain the innovativeness or conformity of theatre repertoires: Demand characteristics of communities; autonomy from or dependence upon the market for financial sustenance; institutionalization, and organizational climate or manager preferences. Community characteristics Case studies of performing arts organizations have illustrated vividly the extent to which such organizations may become prisoners of audience demand, mortaging their participants’ artistic aspirations in the interest of organizational survival (Arian 1971; DiMaggio 1983, n.d.; Martorella 1982; Salem 1976, and Zeigler 1977). The aesthetic opportunities available to a theatre director whose organization depends on earned income, as to some extent the resident theatres do, will depend in part on the socio-economic composition of the local public. We anticipate that innovative theatre is most likely to prosper in areas that have large populations, and where these populations contain relatively high proportions of individuals rich in cultural capital (Bourdieu and Saint-Martin 1976). Consequently, we predict that Hypothesis I: Conformity in repertoire is negatively related to metropolitan area population, median education, and the percentage of workers employed in professional or managerial occupations. Autonomy from the market Noncommercial theatres vary in the extent to which they are subject to market discipline. About half of the theatres in our population earned between 45% and 75% of their income in 1978/1979 from ticket sales, subscriptions, and, to a much lesser extent, fees from ancillary activities like touring, selling advertisements in playbills, or operating parking facilities or refreshment stands. Unearned income came largely from govern-
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ment grants, corporate gifts, foundation grants, private patronage and, in some cases, endowment income. By providing partial relief from the dictates of the market, such support may permit the selection of innovative repertoires. (This is particularly true of those grants from government and private foundations that are targetted to artistic goals.) Thus, our second hypothesis is that Hypothesis
positively
2: High rates of paid attendance related to conformity.
and large seating capacities
are
Note that we assume that audiences tend to be conservative and that theatres do not routinely educate their audiences to appreciate unusual or challenging fare. Other things equal, we expect that theatres that must keep attendance levels high will present more popular productions, rather than using the income that attendance yields to perform more experimental work. Note also that we expect seating capacity to affect conformity positively for two reasons: First, because it represents the number of seats a theatre needs to fill, and, second, because seating capacity is associated with expensive financial commitments to a large house. Institutionalization Institutionalization is the most difficult of our causal factors to operationalize, in part because its meaning - both in sociological discourse and in the resident theatre movement - is often obscure. In the American resident stage, ‘institutionalization’ has four related but distinct connotations: size; age; bureaucratization (measured here as the percentage of expenditures going towards administration), and the extent to which the theatre adheres to the norms of the field. We have inferred these norms from interviews, observation, and reading several years worth of newsletters and speeches given at resident-theatre convocations. The norms include cultivation of a large subscription audience; achievement of a substantial rate of earned (as opposed to contributed) income, and differentiation of the administrative structure, which we operationalize as the presence of a full-time employee other than the senior manager with primary responsibility for marketing activities. The orthodox view of institutionalization, fostered by the National Endowment for the Arts, service organizations, and many private foundations, stresses that a strong economic base, sound management, and a subscription audience provide theatres with the stability they need to plan ahead and to pursue their artistic goals. In this view, the institutionalized theatre develops an audience that grows along with it, enlarging its subscribers’; appetite for artistic challenges as it ensures its own survival through market success. By contrast, critics of institutionalization associate age with conservatism, size with stultification, earned income with enslavement to Philistine audience tastes, and managerial growth and differentiation with the displacement of
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artistic by financial goals. In this view, institutionalized theatres lose their innovate zeal: Influence gravitates to professional managers who place revenues above artistry. Dependence on the whims of subscribers makes risk-taking financially disastrous. Large-budget theatres build up burdensome commitments - to administrators, to patrons, and to large and costly physical plants ~ that make innovative programming impossible. Thus: Hypothesis
3: Institutionalized theatres - those with large budgets, high rates of subscription income, and differentiated administrative structures ~ are more conformist than less institutionalized theatres. Organizational climate and manager preferences A fourth perspective stresses organizational climate and the preferences of participants as factors of prime importance in determining the style of a theatre’s programming. Some theatres, so the argument goes, have powerful artistic missions, and such theatres continue to innovate or else go out of business. Others lack this vital sense of mission, and these become conformist in their repertoires. There are three versions of this argument. First, the circumstances surrounding the birth of an organization may be expected to shape its destiny. Theatres founded to realize specific artistic visions (for example, those founded by artistic directors who remain with the theatre) may be innovative, while those founded by formal organizations of non-artists (e.g. schools or community groups) will be more conformist in programming. Second, the identities and backgrounds of key personnel are likely to exert an influence on repertoire. Managing directors with theatre degrees and acting experience, for example, may be more likely to support innovative repertoires than those with managerial career backgrounds and no artistic experience. (The backgrounds of top administrators may also provide a clue to the values of the trustees who hired them.) Finally, organizational structure - especially the relative influence of the artistic director and the top administrator ~ may influence the extent to which artistic or commercial considerations exert greater influence on repertoire selection. These considerations lead to our fourth and final hypothesis: Hypothesis
4: Conformity in repertoire is positively related to (a) predominance of nonartistic over artistic forces in a theatre’s origins; (b) the presence of a managing director whose educational and career background is administrative rather than artistic, and (c) the dominance of the managing director over the artistic director in the theatre’s decision making.
5. Analyses The data used in the following
analyses
come from three sources. Conformity
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indices were calculated from information in the biennial directory of the Theatre Communications Group for the 1977/1978 and 1978/1979 seasons. This directory also provided data on each theatre’s operating expenditures, the region of the United States in which it was located, annual attendance, the percentage of its income that was earned, the seating capacity of its principal house, the number of subscribers, and the circumstances under which it was founded. Information on the socio-economic composition of the metropolitan areas in which the theatres are located was coded from the 1970 decennial census of the U.S. population. Data on the characteristics of top administrators and on the relative position of artistic and managing directors came from a mail survey of the population’s theatres by the senior author. Data on the presence or absence of marketing directors are from a telephone survey of the theatres by the senior author. Ordinary least squares regression analysis was used in all of the analyses reported below. The purpose of this form of analysis is to gauge the statistical impact of each independent variable on the conformity score, net of the effects of all other independent variables. We report two coefficients estimating the impact of each independent on the dependent variable: A ‘B’ (or ‘metric’) coefficient, reflecting the effect on the dependent variable of a unit rise in the independent variable; and a beta coefficient, which transforms the B coefficient into a common measurement scale ranging from - 1.00 to + 1.00 for all independent variables. (In tables 1 and 2 the beta appears below the B coefficient.) Following convention, we treat coefficients of less than 0.20 as small, between 0.20 and 0.40 as moderate, and greater than 0.40 as large. Although we shall use the conventional language in describing coefficients as measurements of ‘effects’, the reader is reminded that our data are cross-sectional and that generalizability is restricted to the population under consideration. The reader should note as well that varying item and survey response rates in the data sources employed required analyses to be undertaken on varying numbers of cases. Because of the relatively small size of the population of theatres, separate regression equations were executed for each set of factors identified as potentially influential. Size and location The most striking results of these analyses are the consistent impact of two factors - location and size of budget - on theatre conformity. Theatres located in New York City are much less conformist than those in any other part of the United States. The typical play produced by the average New York City theatre was presented only 1.84 times by all theatres in the sample during the two seasons considered here. By contrast, the mean conformity index for theatres in the next most innovative region (the midwestern and central states) was 3.06. Southeastern theatres were somewhat less adventuresome than others. Notably, northeastern theatres outside of New York City were about as conformist as those in the rest of the United States.
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As we shall see, the difference between New York City and other regions persists no matter what controls are introduced into our models. There are probably three distinct reasons that New York City is unique. The first has to do with demand factors: There are simply more potential consumers in New York City than anywhere else in the U.S., and more well educated professionals with a taste for artistic innovation. Second, the labor market for theatre professionals is more crowded in New York than anywhere else. The abundance of actors, directors, technicians, and stage managers supports theatrical innovation by (a) creating a pool of surplus labor that subsidizes productions through low wages; (b) providing ready materials for the artistic entrepreneur, and (c) creating the density required to sustain aesthetic ideologies that legitimate material sacrifice in the interest of art. Finally, the number of theatres in New York City - Broadway and Off-Broadway showcases as well as resident theatres - is itself a factor in stimulating innovation. In most American cities, a single major theatre holds a virtual monopoly of regular programming. In New York, competition encourages differentiation and different theatres occupy different niches. Because the commercial Broadway stage entertains the causal theatre-goer more lavishly than resident theatres can, the latter are pressed towards innovation as a competitive strategy. If the effect of New York City location on theatre conformity can best be explained in terms of consumer and labor markets, the effects of operating budget size are more ambiguous. For budget size may represent unmeasured aspects of market dependence, institutionalization, or organizational structure. Because levels of government and private giving in the U.S. are relatively low in absolute dollar terms, most large theatres must make up the bulk of their budgets from earned income. Large theatres tend, as well, to acquire the stability, prestige, and community legitimacy associated with institutionalization. And large theatres tend to have more differentiated administrative components. Consequently, the negative impact of size on innovativeness is overdetermined and does not permit us to distinguish among competing explanations, although it is consistent with hypotheses 2, 3, and 4. Table 1 (‘General Model’) displays the results of regressions of the conformity index on size (measured as the natural logarithm of operating expenditures) and New York City location for all theatres; and on size for theatres outside New York and in New York, respectively. These two variables explain almost a quarter of the variation in the conformity index for all theatres, a substantial share; and size alone explains over one seventh of the variation among theatres outside of New York City. Strikingly, however, operating expenditures are only weakly associated with conformity among New York City theatres. The reason for this is undoubtedly the level of competition between Broadway and the resident stage in New York. The finding indicates that different explanations of program conformity and diversity are required for oligopolistic and competitive markets. This result is consistent with Peter-
P. DiMaggio
son and Berger’s American popular
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(1975) observations music in the 1960s.
about
change
in the heterogeneity
of
Community characteristics Adding the SMSA demographic factors to the general model (see table, 1, ‘Hyp. 1’) increases the proportion of explained variance ( R2) modestly but significantly for all theatres. Of the three demographic variables included, each has a small but notable effect in the predicted direction. Including the demographic characteristics reduces the impact of New York City location on conformity by more than a quarter, but increases the Table 1 Regression
analyses General GEN
I. V.S. L-OPEX NYC EDUC
0.545 0.329 - 1.291 - 0.306 _
of predictors
of repertoire
Model GEN-A
conformity.
Hyp. 1 GEN-B
0.638 0.385 _
0.120 0.097 _
_
_ _
HYP. 2 1-A
1
0.556 0.336 -0.920 - 0.217 -0.051 -0.151 - 0.130 -0.155 - 0.002 - 0.092 _
0.698 0.421 - 0.053 -0.181 -0.101 -0.111 - 0.003 -0.133 _
POP
_
INC
_
_
_
CAPAC
_
_
_
EARN
_
_
_
_
_
PAID
_
_
_
_
_
INT d.f. R2
0.133 157 0.239
- 0.729 121 0.148
1.148 38 0.010
1.915 152 0.275
7.069 113 0.225
2
2-A
0.569 0.348 -1.288 - 0.304
2-B
0.610 0.335 -
0.190 0.217 _
_
_ _ _
0.677 0.203 _
0.803 0.220 _
0.024 139 0.343
- 0.084 107 0.174
0.948 0.279 -0.018 - 0.292 1.575 21 0.244
General model is model with size and New York location as only independent variables. An ‘A after the model name refers to a model tested on only those cases outside of New York City. A ‘B’ after a model name refers to a model tested on only cases from New York City. (Because hypothesis 1 deals with measures at the metropolitan level, there is no Model 1-B.) I.V. = independent variables, INT = intercept, d.f. = degrees of freedom, R2 is the percentage of variation explained by the model. The hypothesis number refers to the text. Variable explanations. L-OPEX = natural logarithm of operating expenditures, NYC = New York City location (l= yes; 0 = no), EDUC = median education of metropolitan adult residents in years, POP = natural logarithm of metropolitan population, INC = number of family incomes in metropolitan area greater than $15,000 (in thousands), residualized on POP, CAPAC = natural logarithm of capacity of largest house, residualized on L-OPEX, EARN = percentage of income that was earned, PAID = the percentage of seats filled with paid attenders. Metric coefficients are directly above standardized coefficients.
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influence of budget size. Results for theatres outside New York City are virtually identical, with median education again the most important predictor. These findings provide strong support for hypothesis 1. Autonomy from the market Including measures of dependence on the market (table 1, ‘hyp. 2’) also increases R2 significantly over equations containing only size and location, for all theatres, for all theatres outside of New York, and for New York theatres only. For the full population, the major predictor is the capacity of the theatre’s largest house. In short, theatres with large houses to rent or maintain mount productions that are likely to fill the seats. The effects of market dependence, like those of budget size, are different in New York than in the hinterlands. Outside of New York, house capacity is the only important predictor of conformity: Once capacity is included in the equation the other measures have no effects. By contrast, for New York City theatres, house capacity has no effect on conformity when earned income and paid attendance are controlled. The positive net association between paid attendence and innovation suggests that New York theatres may be able to build regular audiences for innovative dramatic work. In short, these findings confirm hypothesis 2 for theatres outside of New York, but not for those in New York City. Market autonomy appears to be an important influence on innovation and conformity throughout most of the United States. This finding is consistent with reports by students of other performing art forms (see, e.g. Martorella 1982, on opera, and Arian 1971 on orchestras), and with a study of theatre subsidy in the United Kingdom (Austen-Smith 1980). Institutionalization The effects of most of our measures of institutionalization on conformity are weak ones. When one controls for operating expenses and location, age has no notable impact on repertoire conformity. Nor is there any evidence in support of the assertion that subscription audiences per se sabotage program innovation. And, if we define bureaucratization as the percentage of expenditures going to administration, there is no support in these analyses for the proposition that bureaucracy - at least at the levels that can be observed in contemporary U.S. resident theatres - affects innovativeness in regular ways. The one measure of institutionalization other than size that does have an impact on repertoire conformity (see table 2, ‘hyp. 3’) is the percentage of income that is earned (as opposed to contributed). But since earned income is also a measure of dependence upon the market, this is not a readily interpretable finding. It is interesting, however, that including earned income in the model for the full sample reduces the impact of size by more than 2056, suggesting that large theatres are more conformist, in part, because they are more dependent upon earned income.
P. DiMaggio
Table 2 Regression
analyses
of predictors
of repertoire
conformity.
HYP. 4
HYP. 3 3
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3-A
3-B
4-A’
4-A’
4-B’
4”
4h
0.620 0.366 - 1.748 - 0.403 _
0.538 0.325 - 1.336 -0.316
0.757 0.428
0.644 0.374 _
0.127 0.103 _
0.903 0.242 1.208 0.203 0.389 0.136
0.571 0.153 0.925 0.167 _
0.379 0.101 0.795 0.160 _
0.640 0.173 -
- 1.508 89 0.371
- 0.272 154 0.267
0.783 0.213 1.183 0.220 0.512 0.178 0.796 0.178 - 2.694 68 0.277
- 0.747 119 0.169
0.567 37 0.039
I. V.S. L-OPEX NYC EARN ART
0.417 0.252 - 1.142 - 0.270 2.089 0.264 _
0.583 0.339
0.011 0.009
1.142 0.121 _
2.916 0.657 _
ORG MGTOP
_
MGED INT d.f. R2
- 0.275 155 0.300
- 0.697 120 0.160
_ 0.413 37 0.434
_
a Model with survey respondents only, ’ Model with full population. Hypothesis numbers are keyed to discussions in text. An ‘A’ after a model number refers to a model tested on only those cases outside of New York City. A ‘B’ after a model number refers to models tested on only cases from New York City. I.V. = independent variables, INT = intercept, d.f. = degrees of freedom, R2 = the percentage of variation in conformity explained by the model. Vanable explanations. L-OPEX = natural logarithm of operating expenditures, NYC = New York City location (1 = yes; 0 = no), EARN = percentage of income that was earned, ART = theatre founded by current artistic director (1 = yes; 0 = no), ORG = theatre founded by an organization (1 = yes; 0 = no), MGTOP = hierarchical relationship between managing director and artistic director, as reported by former, with 1 = former superior, 0 = formal equality, and - 1 = latter superior, MGED = ‘1’ is managing director has educational background in administration, ‘0 otherwise. Metric coefficients are directly above standardized coefficients.
Note, however, that all of our measures of institutionalization except administrative intensity have modest positive correlations with one another and with size. It is possible that theatres, in an effort to achieve institutional stability, take on larger budgetary commitments which, in turn, encourage administrative differentiation, the cultivation of subscription audiences, and attempts to increase earned income. Nonetheless, on the basis of the cross-sectional analyses presented here, we can find only meagre support for hypothesis 3, and no support for the converse proposition that institutionalization engenders innovativeness.
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Organizational climate and manager preferences The final set of variables introduced into these models are measures of organizational origins and managerial preferences. Because the measures of manager background and of the relative authority of managing directors and artistic directors come from a mail survey which, because of nonresponse, includes only two thirds of the full population, the number of cases are different for different specifications of the model. The results prove sensitive to sample definition. Even so, they are perplexing in one respect. As expected, theatres founded by organizations (schools, governments, community groups) are somewhat less innovative than those founded by artists who are no longer involved with the theatres they founded. But, surprisingly, theatres founded by their current artistic directors tend to be less innovative as well, when one controls for budget size and location. (The zero-order relationship is quite different: As one would expect, theatres founded by their current artistic directors have more innovative repertoires than others.) Two other findings were notable, Theatres with managers who had formal training in administration have somewhat more conformist repertoires than others. and the relative authority of administrative and artistic directors (as reported by the former) influences innovativeness in the expected direction. Taken together, these results provide limited support for hypothesis 4.
6. Summary and conclusions We have tested four hypotheses about the relationship between environmental and organizational factors and artistic innovation in U.S. resident theatres. Substantial support exists for the proposition that market relations influence innovation: Indeed, access to potential patrons rich in cultural capital appears to make theatre repertoires more innovative, while dependence on the market (as opposed to grants and contributions) is associated with greater conformity. Other things equal, resident theatres with large, highly educated markets innovate more than theatres located in small places with less well educated residents. And theatres with smaller budgets to maintain, fewer seats to fill, and less need for earned income are less conformist in their programming than are large theatres with capacious houses and high rates of earned income. Institutionalization appears to take a toll on innovativeness if, by institutionalization, we mean large budgets and high rates of earned income; or if we see budgetary growth as causally prior to other influences on repertoire. On the other hand, if by institutionalization we mean age, structural differentiation, or the presence of subscription audiences (net the influence of size), then institutionalization has no negative impact. We found less evidence that such
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organizational factors as origins, manager preferences, and decision-making structure are systematically related to repertoire; but this may say as much about the adequacy of our measures as about the relationships in question. We also learned, unsurprisingly, that New York City is quite different from the rest of the United States. In New York, the effect of size on innovation is far less pronounced and the effect of earned income greater than in other regions. New York City resident theatres are less enslaved by the demands of a large house and appear better able to cultivate audiences with a taste for experimental fare. If the logic reflected in these findings is robust, we would expect that much temporal variation in artistic innovation may be explained in terms of change in the environments and structures of organizations. Indeed, in related work (DiMaggio and Stenberg 1985) we have found that many of the same factors related to conformity in these cross-sectional analyses, including dependence on the market and budgetary growth, also appear to have discouraged innovation over the decade of the 1970s. In their search for developments intrinsic to works of art, or grand shifts in prevailing cultural mentalities, students of culture have often neglected more mundane but perhaps more powerful influences on the vitality of artistic traditions. Explanations may be sought in demographic change, the expansion of education systems, alterations in the structure of cultural industries and in the ways in which arts-producing and distributing organizations are financed and governed. Increasingly, artistic innovation depends on the behavior of formal organizations. If we are to understand art, we must understand the dynamics of such organizations and the principles that govern their relationship to their economic and social environments.
References Arian, Edward, 1971. Bach, Beethoven and bureaucracy: The case of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Austen-Smith, David, 1980. On the impact of revenue subsidies on repertory theatre policy. Journal of Cultural Economics 4 (l), 9-17. Becker, Howard, S., 1982. Art worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint-Martin, 1976. Anatomie du gout. Actes de la Recherche and Sciences Sociales 2 (October), l-108. Coser, Lewis A., ed., 1978. The production of culture. Social Research 45 (2). [Special issue.] DiMaggio, Paul, 1983, Can culture survive the marketplace? The Journal of Arts Management and Law 13(l), 61-87. DiMaggio, Paul, n.d. ‘Nonprofit organizations in the production and distribution of culture’. In: W.W. Powell, ed., Handbook of research on nonprofit organizations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Forthcoming.]
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DiMaggio, Paul and Kristen Stenberg, 1985. ‘Conformity and diversity in the American resident stage’. In: J. Balfe and M. Wyszomirski, eds.. Art, ideology and politics. New York: Praeger. (Forthcoming.) Flanagan, Hallie, 1940. Arena: The history of the federal theatre. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. McDonald, William, F., 1969. Federal relief administration and the arts. Columbus, OH; Ohio State University Press. Martorella, Rosanne, 1982. The sociology of opera. New York; Praeger. Mathtech, Inc., 1980. Conditions and needs of the professional American theatre. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division. Moore, Thomas Gale, 1968. The economics of the American theatre. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peterson, Richard A., ed., 1976. The production of culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Peterson, Richard A. and David G. Berger, 1975. Cycles in symbol production: The case of popular music. American Sociological Review 40, 1588173. Poggi, Jack, 1968. Theatre in America: The impact of economic forces, 1870-1967. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Salem, Mahmoud, 1976. Organizational survival in the performing arts: The making of the Seattle opera. New York: Praeger. Wolff, Janet, 1981. The social production of art. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Zeigler, Joseph Wesley, 1977. Regional theatre: The revolutionary stage. New York: DaCapo.
Poetics 14 (1985) 107-122 North-Holland
WHY DO SOME THEATRES INNOVATE MORE THAN OTHERS? AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS * Paul DIMAGGIO
and Kristen
STENBERG
The authors develop a measure of the ‘innovativeness’ of the repertoires of U.S. resident nonprofit theatres and test four hypotheses about the relationship between environmental and organizational factors and innovation. Access to potential patrons rich in cultural capital appears to make theatre repertoires more innovate, while dependence upon the market (as opposed to grants and contributions) is associated with greater conformity of repertoire. Theatres with smaller budgets to maintain, fewer seats to fill, and less need for earned income are less conformist in their programming than are large theatres with capacious houses and high rates of earned income. Holding size and dependence on earned income constant, there is no evidence that age, structural differentiation, or the presence of subscription audiences - all associated with ‘institutionalization’ - have either a negative or a positive impact on innovation. New York theatres innovate more, and are less negatively affected by growth and the market, than theatres elsewhere in the U.S. It is suggested that artistic innovation has come to depend overwhelmingly on the behavior of formal organizations and that, consequently, we must understand the principles that govern the relationship of such organizations to their economic and social environments in order to understand artistic change.
1. Introduction A central concern of both students of the arts and cultural policy makers has been the origin of artistic innovation. It is clear that the rate of creative
* We are grateful to Judith Balfe, Wendy Griswold, Richard Peterson, and Margaret Wyzomirski for useful comments on earlier presentations of this work. Computing support from the Yale University Sociology Department and Institution for Social and Policy Studies is acknowledged with appreciation, as is institutional support from the Yale Program on Non-Profit Organizations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the latter through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Collection of survey data was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts Research Division, and historical research benefited from a grant to the senior author from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. None of these persons or organizations should be presumed to subscribe to the findings or interpretations expressed in this paper nor to bear responsibility for any of its imperfections. Correspondence address: P. DiMaggio, Yale University, 88 Trumboll St. (154 Yale Station), New Haven, CT 06520, USA. 0304-422X/85/$3.30
0 1985, Elsevier Science Publishers
B.V. (North-Holland)
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innovation and cultural diversity is greater in some eras than in others and, at any given time, in some art forms than in others. But we understand relatively little about the causes of these differences. Theoretical accounts of innovativeness have often stressed the influence of general factors. Some have emphasized broad historical alternations among different forms of cultural mentalitieaffecting all creative realms in similar ways. Others have attributed change in creative fecundity over time to coincidental fluctuation in the number of distinguished individual artists. Still others seek explanations for change in the rate of artistic ferment in the intrinsic logic of art forms themselves. Although such approaches may have value in explaining long-term change, they tell us little about variation in artistic diversity and innovation in the short run. And they neglect the lessons of the ‘production-of-culture’ school: That the range of art that is produced results from the structure of rewards to which artists respond and the organizational systems that select and transmit artistic work to the public at any give time (see Peterson 1976, and, for a similar view, Becker 1982). We believe that innovation and diversity can best be understood by focussing on the level of analysis to which these concepts pertain: For the study of diversity, the appropriate level of analysis is the population of producers; for the study of innovation, the appropriate level of analysis is the single producer. In a previous paper (DiMaggio and Stenberg 1985) we documented and attempted to explain changes in diversity within the population of American nonprofit theatres between 1971 and 1981. In this paper, we focus on variation among individual theatres in innovativeness, with the object of explaining why some theatres produced more innovative and nonconforming dramatic repertoires than others at a single point in time. Because so much attention has been devoted to individual artists as source of innovation, it may seem odd that we study organizations rather than playwrights or directors. We regard the conventional focus of students of the arts on the individual creator as underestimating the extent to which works of art are socially constituted and controlled (see e.g. Wolff 1981; Becker 1982). Increasingly, formal organizations - art museums, galleries, record companies, publishing houses, symphony orchestras, and theatres - have become the key ‘gatekeepers’ (Coser 1978) determining the structure of artistic opportunity and regulating the flow of new works to the public. Given the centrality of organizations to the emergence and sacralization (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin 1976) of new artistic works and to the refinement and transformation of the dramatic canon, we treat the theatre rather than the creative artist as our unit of analysis. Our approach is unusual in that we attempt to measure directly the innovativeness of the repertoires of specific theatres and use quantitative analytic methods to assess the effects on innovation of specific aspects of these
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theatres’ relationships to their markets, environments, and organizational structures. We regard such a strategy as essential to understanding any process as complex and multifaceted as the artistic choices of theatres’ managements. Although not all questions are susceptible to such empirical approaches, they deserve to be employed much more widely in the sociology of culture than they have been heretofore.
2. The American theatre and the resident stage Theatre in the United States has historically represented ‘ un art moyen’, never fully sacralized as high culture but, at the same time, since the rise of the cinema, not truly popular culture either. American social progressives employed the theatre as a means of political struggle and social improvement both in the nineteenth century (when anti-slavery and anti-alcohol morality plays enjoyed considerable popularity) and in the early 1900s when reformers used dramatic activity to educate immigrate children in urban ‘settlement houses’. During the early nineteenth century, middle-class devotees of culture in American cities formed numerous amateur theatre clubs, devoted to providing refined recreation through the presentation of community drama. At the same time, however, the bulk of the American stage was profoundly commercial. Drama and dramatists were considered unwholesome or irreligious at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and northeastern cities sporadically prohibited theatrical presentations (although promoters commonly circumvented such bans by terming their performances ‘lectures’ and emphasizing their instructional qualities). By the second half of the nineteenth century, a vigorous commercial theatre had developed, as the stock system sent touring stars on the ‘road’ to cities and towns throughout the United States. The stock system was succeeded by the ‘combination’ system, whereby touring and bookings were centralized in the hands of a few New York-based theatrical promoters - notably the Erlangers and the Shuberts - who forged theatre trusts that monopolized commercial opportunities throughout the United States. The effect of this system was to increase the viability of new plays, which the trusts had the market power to promote effectively, but to decrease the overall variation in repertoires and production standards, which were regulated closely from New York City. The autonomy of the playwright declined markedly, for the monopolists could demand cuts and revisions in scripts and would only produce those that appealed to the ‘lowest common denominator’ of the public (Poggi 1968). Consequently, like American television during the era of network domination, American drama was a mass medium, with little innovation and little diversity. The rise of film (Poggi 1968; Moore 1968) effectively eliminated local markets for dramatic productions and, with them, the power of the theatre monopolies. For many years, touring companies and live drama were absent
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from many American cities. (The exception was New York which, then as now, supported a lively and lavish commercial popular theatre in its Broadway district.) The disappearance of the national commercial stage, however, provided opportunities for the sporadic emergence of more artistically oriented ‘little theatres’ throughout the United States. With the wholesale creation of local theatre companies by the federal government during the economic depression of the 1930s the scale and diversity of dramatic activity ~ this time locally controlled and noncommercial - expanded and, until the demise of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939, innovation flourished, at least in some quarters (see McDonald 1969; Flanagan 1940). After the Second World War, entrepreneurs in several U.S. cities created small theatre companies, locally controlled, and devoted primarily to artistic rather than to commercial ends. In the early 1960s several of these theatres were embraced by the Ford Foundation, which provided large grants to new and existing ‘resident theatres’ over the course of the next decade. Stimulated by this infusion of capital, and by the availability of substantial financial support from state and federal government by the 1970s the resident stage became a small-scale social movement, with new theatres arising in hundreds of U.S. cities over the next twenty years. Although Broadway survives as the heart of the commercial stage, and much noncommercial production is undertaken by universities, local community groups, and other ensembles, the creative core of the U.S. theatre is currently the resident stage, a set of several hundred nonprofit theatres under the control of private boards of trustees, with full-time artistic directors and administrative staff. The larger of these own their own houses and mount as many as a dozen productions a year. The audience for the resident stage consists predominantly of well educated managers and professionals; among the larger theatres, most tickets are sold through subscription, whereby the patron purchases for one sum tickets to each of the theatre’s productions for a full season (Zeigler 1977). There is substantial variation among resident theatres in the nature of their repertoire but, collectively, the resident stage represents the focus of most artistic innovation in the U.S. theatre. This role has been stimulated by private foundations and the federal National Endowment for the Arts (and its affiliated state arts agencies), which provide grants to resident theatres to produce new (or rarely performed classic) plays, to hire dramaturges, and to facilitate the work of young playwrights. By comparison to both the era of the theatre trusts and the period of Broadway dominance, opportunities for the production of new work have expanded markedly. The receptiveness of resident theatres to a wide range of materials is a function of three aspects of the industry’s structure: Its relative decentralization, with control vested at the local level; its noncommercial charter, and consequent freedom from the need to maximize profit; and the availability of public and private grants in support of innovative work.
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There were approximately 620 nonprofit theatre companies in the United States in 1980 (Mathtech 1981). Many of these were very small, producing only two or three plays a year and presenting them to tiny local audiences. There were many fewer nationally visible and institutionally stable resident theatres, and these were members of a trade association, the Theatre Communications Group, originally founded by the Ford Foundation but, since the late 1960s an independent entity. The membership of this organization, which constitutes the population we have studied, includes almost all of the large resident theatres in the United States, most theatres that receive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and nearly all of the theatres whose directors or managers are influential in the national theatrical community. It excludes many local nonprofit theatres that have very few resources, that are very new, or that are primarily oriented to political or social rather than conventionally defined aesthetic goals. The resident theatres that are the population for this study represent the major port of entry for new dramatic work and the most visible sector of the American stage. Nonetheless, within the resident stage, there is much variation in artistic orientation. The repertoires of some local theatres are frankly commercial, catering to the most widespread popular tastes; while the productions of others are highly avant-garde and experimental. Still other resident theatres specialize in classic works that are rarely performed. In the remainder of this paper, we shall attempt to explain this variation in repertoire in terms of the environmental and organizational factors that influence these theatres’ choices from among the many available plays that they might produce.
3. Measuring innovativeness Innovativeness cannot be measured directly because students of drama do not themselves agree about what constitutes innovation. Instead we measure ‘nonconformity’: The extent to which a theatre’s repertoire diverges from that of the other nonprofit theatres. We do this by creating a ‘conformity/nonconformity index’ to characterize each theatre’s repertoire. This index represents the mean number of times that each play produced by any given theatre was produced by all theatres in our population. By definition, theatres that performed popular works scored high on this index; theatres that performed unpopular works scored low. (A score of ‘1’ means that no other theatre produced any of the plays in a given theatre’s repertoire. A score of ‘5’ means that, on average, each play in the repertoire was produced by four other theatres.) Our data are based on the repertoires for the 1977/1978 and 1978/1979 seasons of the 165 theatres that were members of the Theatre Communications Group at that time. Why do we regard this simple measure of ‘nonconformity’ as being a
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measure of ‘innovation’? Although dramaturges could not agree on a definition of ‘innovation’, the nonconformity score was correlated at about 0.50 with their ratings of the popularity and riskiness of a random sample of the plays that were produced. We regard ‘innovation’ as occurring when new works are entered into the dramatic repertoire, and when old works that have fallen into disuse are brought back in. The measure does not address innovation in stage design or performance style, of course. But we believe that it is an efficient measure of what experts mean when they speak of artistic adventuresomeness and what most educated laypeople mean when they speak of ‘innovation’. The measure has the distinct advantage over expert ratings of being unambiguous and easily interpretable.
4. Explaining
variation in theatre conformity
In this section, we shall consider four sets of factors that may be expected to explain the innovativeness or conformity of theatre repertoires: Demand characteristics of communities; autonomy from or dependence upon the market for financial sustenance; institutionalization, and organizational climate or manager preferences. Community characteristics Case studies of performing arts organizations have illustrated vividly the extent to which such organizations may become prisoners of audience demand, mortaging their participants’ artistic aspirations in the interest of organizational survival (Arian 1971; DiMaggio 1983, n.d.; Martorella 1982; Salem 1976, and Zeigler 1977). The aesthetic opportunities available to a theatre director whose organization depends on earned income, as to some extent the resident theatres do, will depend in part on the socio-economic composition of the local public. We anticipate that innovative theatre is most likely to prosper in areas that have large populations, and where these populations contain relatively high proportions of individuals rich in cultural capital (Bourdieu and Saint-Martin 1976). Consequently, we predict that Hypothesis I: Conformity in repertoire is negatively related to metropolitan area population, median education, and the percentage of workers employed in professional or managerial occupations. Autonomy from the market Noncommercial theatres vary in the extent to which they are subject to market discipline. About half of the theatres in our population earned between 45% and 75% of their income in 1978/1979 from ticket sales, subscriptions, and, to a much lesser extent, fees from ancillary activities like touring, selling advertisements in playbills, or operating parking facilities or refreshment stands. Unearned income came largely from govern-
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ment grants, corporate gifts, foundation grants, private patronage and, in some cases, endowment income. By providing partial relief from the dictates of the market, such support may permit the selection of innovative repertoires. (This is particularly true of those grants from government and private foundations that are targetted to artistic goals.) Thus, our second hypothesis is that Hypothesis
positively
2: High rates of paid attendance related to conformity.
and large seating capacities
are
Note that we assume that audiences tend to be conservative and that theatres do not routinely educate their audiences to appreciate unusual or challenging fare. Other things equal, we expect that theatres that must keep attendance levels high will present more popular productions, rather than using the income that attendance yields to perform more experimental work. Note also that we expect seating capacity to affect conformity positively for two reasons: First, because it represents the number of seats a theatre needs to fill, and, second, because seating capacity is associated with expensive financial commitments to a large house. Institutionalization Institutionalization is the most difficult of our causal factors to operationalize, in part because its meaning - both in sociological discourse and in the resident theatre movement - is often obscure. In the American resident stage, ‘institutionalization’ has four related but distinct connotations: size; age; bureaucratization (measured here as the percentage of expenditures going towards administration), and the extent to which the theatre adheres to the norms of the field. We have inferred these norms from interviews, observation, and reading several years worth of newsletters and speeches given at resident-theatre convocations. The norms include cultivation of a large subscription audience; achievement of a substantial rate of earned (as opposed to contributed) income, and differentiation of the administrative structure, which we operationalize as the presence of a full-time employee other than the senior manager with primary responsibility for marketing activities. The orthodox view of institutionalization, fostered by the National Endowment for the Arts, service organizations, and many private foundations, stresses that a strong economic base, sound management, and a subscription audience provide theatres with the stability they need to plan ahead and to pursue their artistic goals. In this view, the institutionalized theatre develops an audience that grows along with it, enlarging its subscribers’; appetite for artistic challenges as it ensures its own survival through market success. By contrast, critics of institutionalization associate age with conservatism, size with stultification, earned income with enslavement to Philistine audience tastes, and managerial growth and differentiation with the displacement of
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artistic by financial goals. In this view, institutionalized theatres lose their innovate zeal: Influence gravitates to professional managers who place revenues above artistry. Dependence on the whims of subscribers makes risk-taking financially disastrous. Large-budget theatres build up burdensome commitments - to administrators, to patrons, and to large and costly physical plants ~ that make innovative programming impossible. Thus: Hypothesis
3: Institutionalized theatres - those with large budgets, high rates of subscription income, and differentiated administrative structures ~ are more conformist than less institutionalized theatres. Organizational climate and manager preferences A fourth perspective stresses organizational climate and the preferences of participants as factors of prime importance in determining the style of a theatre’s programming. Some theatres, so the argument goes, have powerful artistic missions, and such theatres continue to innovate or else go out of business. Others lack this vital sense of mission, and these become conformist in their repertoires. There are three versions of this argument. First, the circumstances surrounding the birth of an organization may be expected to shape its destiny. Theatres founded to realize specific artistic visions (for example, those founded by artistic directors who remain with the theatre) may be innovative, while those founded by formal organizations of non-artists (e.g. schools or community groups) will be more conformist in programming. Second, the identities and backgrounds of key personnel are likely to exert an influence on repertoire. Managing directors with theatre degrees and acting experience, for example, may be more likely to support innovative repertoires than those with managerial career backgrounds and no artistic experience. (The backgrounds of top administrators may also provide a clue to the values of the trustees who hired them.) Finally, organizational structure - especially the relative influence of the artistic director and the top administrator ~ may influence the extent to which artistic or commercial considerations exert greater influence on repertoire selection. These considerations lead to our fourth and final hypothesis: Hypothesis
4: Conformity in repertoire is positively related to (a) predominance of nonartistic over artistic forces in a theatre’s origins; (b) the presence of a managing director whose educational and career background is administrative rather than artistic, and (c) the dominance of the managing director over the artistic director in the theatre’s decision making.
5. Analyses The data used in the following
analyses
come from three sources. Conformity
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indices were calculated from information in the biennial directory of the Theatre Communications Group for the 1977/1978 and 1978/1979 seasons. This directory also provided data on each theatre’s operating expenditures, the region of the United States in which it was located, annual attendance, the percentage of its income that was earned, the seating capacity of its principal house, the number of subscribers, and the circumstances under which it was founded. Information on the socio-economic composition of the metropolitan areas in which the theatres are located was coded from the 1970 decennial census of the U.S. population. Data on the characteristics of top administrators and on the relative position of artistic and managing directors came from a mail survey of the population’s theatres by the senior author. Data on the presence or absence of marketing directors are from a telephone survey of the theatres by the senior author. Ordinary least squares regression analysis was used in all of the analyses reported below. The purpose of this form of analysis is to gauge the statistical impact of each independent variable on the conformity score, net of the effects of all other independent variables. We report two coefficients estimating the impact of each independent on the dependent variable: A ‘B’ (or ‘metric’) coefficient, reflecting the effect on the dependent variable of a unit rise in the independent variable; and a beta coefficient, which transforms the B coefficient into a common measurement scale ranging from - 1.00 to + 1.00 for all independent variables. (In tables 1 and 2 the beta appears below the B coefficient.) Following convention, we treat coefficients of less than 0.20 as small, between 0.20 and 0.40 as moderate, and greater than 0.40 as large. Although we shall use the conventional language in describing coefficients as measurements of ‘effects’, the reader is reminded that our data are cross-sectional and that generalizability is restricted to the population under consideration. The reader should note as well that varying item and survey response rates in the data sources employed required analyses to be undertaken on varying numbers of cases. Because of the relatively small size of the population of theatres, separate regression equations were executed for each set of factors identified as potentially influential. Size and location The most striking results of these analyses are the consistent impact of two factors - location and size of budget - on theatre conformity. Theatres located in New York City are much less conformist than those in any other part of the United States. The typical play produced by the average New York City theatre was presented only 1.84 times by all theatres in the sample during the two seasons considered here. By contrast, the mean conformity index for theatres in the next most innovative region (the midwestern and central states) was 3.06. Southeastern theatres were somewhat less adventuresome than others. Notably, northeastern theatres outside of New York City were about as conformist as those in the rest of the United States.
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As we shall see, the difference between New York City and other regions persists no matter what controls are introduced into our models. There are probably three distinct reasons that New York City is unique. The first has to do with demand factors: There are simply more potential consumers in New York City than anywhere else in the U.S., and more well educated professionals with a taste for artistic innovation. Second, the labor market for theatre professionals is more crowded in New York than anywhere else. The abundance of actors, directors, technicians, and stage managers supports theatrical innovation by (a) creating a pool of surplus labor that subsidizes productions through low wages; (b) providing ready materials for the artistic entrepreneur, and (c) creating the density required to sustain aesthetic ideologies that legitimate material sacrifice in the interest of art. Finally, the number of theatres in New York City - Broadway and Off-Broadway showcases as well as resident theatres - is itself a factor in stimulating innovation. In most American cities, a single major theatre holds a virtual monopoly of regular programming. In New York, competition encourages differentiation and different theatres occupy different niches. Because the commercial Broadway stage entertains the causal theatre-goer more lavishly than resident theatres can, the latter are pressed towards innovation as a competitive strategy. If the effect of New York City location on theatre conformity can best be explained in terms of consumer and labor markets, the effects of operating budget size are more ambiguous. For budget size may represent unmeasured aspects of market dependence, institutionalization, or organizational structure. Because levels of government and private giving in the U.S. are relatively low in absolute dollar terms, most large theatres must make up the bulk of their budgets from earned income. Large theatres tend, as well, to acquire the stability, prestige, and community legitimacy associated with institutionalization. And large theatres tend to have more differentiated administrative components. Consequently, the negative impact of size on innovativeness is overdetermined and does not permit us to distinguish among competing explanations, although it is consistent with hypotheses 2, 3, and 4. Table 1 (‘General Model’) displays the results of regressions of the conformity index on size (measured as the natural logarithm of operating expenditures) and New York City location for all theatres; and on size for theatres outside New York and in New York, respectively. These two variables explain almost a quarter of the variation in the conformity index for all theatres, a substantial share; and size alone explains over one seventh of the variation among theatres outside of New York City. Strikingly, however, operating expenditures are only weakly associated with conformity among New York City theatres. The reason for this is undoubtedly the level of competition between Broadway and the resident stage in New York. The finding indicates that different explanations of program conformity and diversity are required for oligopolistic and competitive markets. This result is consistent with Peter-
P. DiMaggio
son and Berger’s American popular
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(1975) observations music in the 1960s.
about
change
in the heterogeneity
of
Community characteristics Adding the SMSA demographic factors to the general model (see table, 1, ‘Hyp. 1’) increases the proportion of explained variance ( R2) modestly but significantly for all theatres. Of the three demographic variables included, each has a small but notable effect in the predicted direction. Including the demographic characteristics reduces the impact of New York City location on conformity by more than a quarter, but increases the Table 1 Regression
analyses General GEN
I. V.S. L-OPEX NYC EDUC
0.545 0.329 - 1.291 - 0.306 _
of predictors
of repertoire
Model GEN-A
conformity.
Hyp. 1 GEN-B
0.638 0.385 _
0.120 0.097 _
_
_ _
HYP. 2 1-A
1
0.556 0.336 -0.920 - 0.217 -0.051 -0.151 - 0.130 -0.155 - 0.002 - 0.092 _
0.698 0.421 - 0.053 -0.181 -0.101 -0.111 - 0.003 -0.133 _
POP
_
INC
_
_
_
CAPAC
_
_
_
EARN
_
_
_
_
_
PAID
_
_
_
_
_
INT d.f. R2
0.133 157 0.239
- 0.729 121 0.148
1.148 38 0.010
1.915 152 0.275
7.069 113 0.225
2
2-A
0.569 0.348 -1.288 - 0.304
2-B
0.610 0.335 -
0.190 0.217 _
_
_ _ _
0.677 0.203 _
0.803 0.220 _
0.024 139 0.343
- 0.084 107 0.174
0.948 0.279 -0.018 - 0.292 1.575 21 0.244
General model is model with size and New York location as only independent variables. An ‘A after the model name refers to a model tested on only those cases outside of New York City. A ‘B’ after a model name refers to a model tested on only cases from New York City. (Because hypothesis 1 deals with measures at the metropolitan level, there is no Model 1-B.) I.V. = independent variables, INT = intercept, d.f. = degrees of freedom, R2 is the percentage of variation explained by the model. The hypothesis number refers to the text. Variable explanations. L-OPEX = natural logarithm of operating expenditures, NYC = New York City location (l= yes; 0 = no), EDUC = median education of metropolitan adult residents in years, POP = natural logarithm of metropolitan population, INC = number of family incomes in metropolitan area greater than $15,000 (in thousands), residualized on POP, CAPAC = natural logarithm of capacity of largest house, residualized on L-OPEX, EARN = percentage of income that was earned, PAID = the percentage of seats filled with paid attenders. Metric coefficients are directly above standardized coefficients.
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influence of budget size. Results for theatres outside New York City are virtually identical, with median education again the most important predictor. These findings provide strong support for hypothesis 1. Autonomy from the market Including measures of dependence on the market (table 1, ‘hyp. 2’) also increases R2 significantly over equations containing only size and location, for all theatres, for all theatres outside of New York, and for New York theatres only. For the full population, the major predictor is the capacity of the theatre’s largest house. In short, theatres with large houses to rent or maintain mount productions that are likely to fill the seats. The effects of market dependence, like those of budget size, are different in New York than in the hinterlands. Outside of New York, house capacity is the only important predictor of conformity: Once capacity is included in the equation the other measures have no effects. By contrast, for New York City theatres, house capacity has no effect on conformity when earned income and paid attendance are controlled. The positive net association between paid attendence and innovation suggests that New York theatres may be able to build regular audiences for innovative dramatic work. In short, these findings confirm hypothesis 2 for theatres outside of New York, but not for those in New York City. Market autonomy appears to be an important influence on innovation and conformity throughout most of the United States. This finding is consistent with reports by students of other performing art forms (see, e.g. Martorella 1982, on opera, and Arian 1971 on orchestras), and with a study of theatre subsidy in the United Kingdom (Austen-Smith 1980). Institutionalization The effects of most of our measures of institutionalization on conformity are weak ones. When one controls for operating expenses and location, age has no notable impact on repertoire conformity. Nor is there any evidence in support of the assertion that subscription audiences per se sabotage program innovation. And, if we define bureaucratization as the percentage of expenditures going to administration, there is no support in these analyses for the proposition that bureaucracy - at least at the levels that can be observed in contemporary U.S. resident theatres - affects innovativeness in regular ways. The one measure of institutionalization other than size that does have an impact on repertoire conformity (see table 2, ‘hyp. 3’) is the percentage of income that is earned (as opposed to contributed). But since earned income is also a measure of dependence upon the market, this is not a readily interpretable finding. It is interesting, however, that including earned income in the model for the full sample reduces the impact of size by more than 2056, suggesting that large theatres are more conformist, in part, because they are more dependent upon earned income.
P. DiMaggio
Table 2 Regression
analyses
of predictors
of repertoire
conformity.
HYP. 4
HYP. 3 3
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3-A
3-B
4-A’
4-A’
4-B’
4”
4h
0.620 0.366 - 1.748 - 0.403 _
0.538 0.325 - 1.336 -0.316
0.757 0.428
0.644 0.374 _
0.127 0.103 _
0.903 0.242 1.208 0.203 0.389 0.136
0.571 0.153 0.925 0.167 _
0.379 0.101 0.795 0.160 _
0.640 0.173 -
- 1.508 89 0.371
- 0.272 154 0.267
0.783 0.213 1.183 0.220 0.512 0.178 0.796 0.178 - 2.694 68 0.277
- 0.747 119 0.169
0.567 37 0.039
I. V.S. L-OPEX NYC EARN ART
0.417 0.252 - 1.142 - 0.270 2.089 0.264 _
0.583 0.339
0.011 0.009
1.142 0.121 _
2.916 0.657 _
ORG MGTOP
_
MGED INT d.f. R2
- 0.275 155 0.300
- 0.697 120 0.160
_ 0.413 37 0.434
_
a Model with survey respondents only, ’ Model with full population. Hypothesis numbers are keyed to discussions in text. An ‘A’ after a model number refers to a model tested on only those cases outside of New York City. A ‘B’ after a model number refers to models tested on only cases from New York City. I.V. = independent variables, INT = intercept, d.f. = degrees of freedom, R2 = the percentage of variation in conformity explained by the model. Vanable explanations. L-OPEX = natural logarithm of operating expenditures, NYC = New York City location (1 = yes; 0 = no), EARN = percentage of income that was earned, ART = theatre founded by current artistic director (1 = yes; 0 = no), ORG = theatre founded by an organization (1 = yes; 0 = no), MGTOP = hierarchical relationship between managing director and artistic director, as reported by former, with 1 = former superior, 0 = formal equality, and - 1 = latter superior, MGED = ‘1’ is managing director has educational background in administration, ‘0 otherwise. Metric coefficients are directly above standardized coefficients.
Note, however, that all of our measures of institutionalization except administrative intensity have modest positive correlations with one another and with size. It is possible that theatres, in an effort to achieve institutional stability, take on larger budgetary commitments which, in turn, encourage administrative differentiation, the cultivation of subscription audiences, and attempts to increase earned income. Nonetheless, on the basis of the cross-sectional analyses presented here, we can find only meagre support for hypothesis 3, and no support for the converse proposition that institutionalization engenders innovativeness.
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Organizational climate and manager preferences The final set of variables introduced into these models are measures of organizational origins and managerial preferences. Because the measures of manager background and of the relative authority of managing directors and artistic directors come from a mail survey which, because of nonresponse, includes only two thirds of the full population, the number of cases are different for different specifications of the model. The results prove sensitive to sample definition. Even so, they are perplexing in one respect. As expected, theatres founded by organizations (schools, governments, community groups) are somewhat less innovative than those founded by artists who are no longer involved with the theatres they founded. But, surprisingly, theatres founded by their current artistic directors tend to be less innovative as well, when one controls for budget size and location. (The zero-order relationship is quite different: As one would expect, theatres founded by their current artistic directors have more innovative repertoires than others.) Two other findings were notable, Theatres with managers who had formal training in administration have somewhat more conformist repertoires than others. and the relative authority of administrative and artistic directors (as reported by the former) influences innovativeness in the expected direction. Taken together, these results provide limited support for hypothesis 4.
6. Summary and conclusions We have tested four hypotheses about the relationship between environmental and organizational factors and artistic innovation in U.S. resident theatres. Substantial support exists for the proposition that market relations influence innovation: Indeed, access to potential patrons rich in cultural capital appears to make theatre repertoires more innovative, while dependence on the market (as opposed to grants and contributions) is associated with greater conformity. Other things equal, resident theatres with large, highly educated markets innovate more than theatres located in small places with less well educated residents. And theatres with smaller budgets to maintain, fewer seats to fill, and less need for earned income are less conformist in their programming than are large theatres with capacious houses and high rates of earned income. Institutionalization appears to take a toll on innovativeness if, by institutionalization, we mean large budgets and high rates of earned income; or if we see budgetary growth as causally prior to other influences on repertoire. On the other hand, if by institutionalization we mean age, structural differentiation, or the presence of subscription audiences (net the influence of size), then institutionalization has no negative impact. We found less evidence that such
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organizational factors as origins, manager preferences, and decision-making structure are systematically related to repertoire; but this may say as much about the adequacy of our measures as about the relationships in question. We also learned, unsurprisingly, that New York City is quite different from the rest of the United States. In New York, the effect of size on innovation is far less pronounced and the effect of earned income greater than in other regions. New York City resident theatres are less enslaved by the demands of a large house and appear better able to cultivate audiences with a taste for experimental fare. If the logic reflected in these findings is robust, we would expect that much temporal variation in artistic innovation may be explained in terms of change in the environments and structures of organizations. Indeed, in related work (DiMaggio and Stenberg 1985) we have found that many of the same factors related to conformity in these cross-sectional analyses, including dependence on the market and budgetary growth, also appear to have discouraged innovation over the decade of the 1970s. In their search for developments intrinsic to works of art, or grand shifts in prevailing cultural mentalities, students of culture have often neglected more mundane but perhaps more powerful influences on the vitality of artistic traditions. Explanations may be sought in demographic change, the expansion of education systems, alterations in the structure of cultural industries and in the ways in which arts-producing and distributing organizations are financed and governed. Increasingly, artistic innovation depends on the behavior of formal organizations. If we are to understand art, we must understand the dynamics of such organizations and the principles that govern their relationship to their economic and social environments.
References Arian, Edward, 1971. Bach, Beethoven and bureaucracy: The case of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Austen-Smith, David, 1980. On the impact of revenue subsidies on repertory theatre policy. Journal of Cultural Economics 4 (l), 9-17. Becker, Howard, S., 1982. Art worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint-Martin, 1976. Anatomie du gout. Actes de la Recherche and Sciences Sociales 2 (October), l-108. Coser, Lewis A., ed., 1978. The production of culture. Social Research 45 (2). [Special issue.] DiMaggio, Paul, 1983, Can culture survive the marketplace? The Journal of Arts Management and Law 13(l), 61-87. DiMaggio, Paul, n.d. ‘Nonprofit organizations in the production and distribution of culture’. In: W.W. Powell, ed., Handbook of research on nonprofit organizations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Forthcoming.]
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DiMaggio, Paul and Kristen Stenberg, 1985. ‘Conformity and diversity in the American resident stage’. In: J. Balfe and M. Wyszomirski, eds.. Art, ideology and politics. New York: Praeger. (Forthcoming.) Flanagan, Hallie, 1940. Arena: The history of the federal theatre. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. McDonald, William, F., 1969. Federal relief administration and the arts. Columbus, OH; Ohio State University Press. Martorella, Rosanne, 1982. The sociology of opera. New York; Praeger. Mathtech, Inc., 1980. Conditions and needs of the professional American theatre. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division. Moore, Thomas Gale, 1968. The economics of the American theatre. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peterson, Richard A., ed., 1976. The production of culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Peterson, Richard A. and David G. Berger, 1975. Cycles in symbol production: The case of popular music. American Sociological Review 40, 1588173. Poggi, Jack, 1968. Theatre in America: The impact of economic forces, 1870-1967. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Salem, Mahmoud, 1976. Organizational survival in the performing arts: The making of the Seattle opera. New York: Praeger. Wolff, Janet, 1981. The social production of art. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Zeigler, Joseph Wesley, 1977. Regional theatre: The revolutionary stage. New York: DaCapo.