"Much ado about Management. Managerial Rhetoric in the Trasormation of Italian Opera Houses"

In the article "Much ado about Management. Managerial Rhetoric in the Trasormation of Italian Opera Houses" Luigi Maria Sicca and Luca Zan take a critical look at the organizational and management changes that in recent years have swept through Italian opera houses – the shrines of grand opera for opera lovers the world over. The winds of “managerialization” – a watchword that has affected most arts institutions across the European continent (Pick- Anderton, 1996; Sicca, 1997; Fitzgibbon and Kelly, 1997; Zan, 1998, 2000) – have perhaps blown strongest of all in the world of Italian opera, with a reform that has altered the status of opera houses, making them private foundations (Sicca, 1998). It seems appropriate to inquire into the organizational and management consequences of this transformation, for the process is subject to a contradiction in terms. In Italy, as elsewhere, it involves profound and delicate organizational and management changes, but here these are being made by means of national legislation. This comes as no great surprise in a country that introduced management accounting into the public sector by law, surely a case of “management by decree” (Marcon and Panozzo, 1998). In this context the reform has undoubtedly made a great impact, radically modifying the status quo. Whether the results correspond to the intentions is open to discussion. Our approach involves a close reading of the texts of the reform and the specific data concerning one institution, the Fondazione Teatro Comunale of Bologna, focusing on the rhetorical nature of management (McCloskey, 1986; Czarniawska, 1997; Gratton et al.,1999; Zan, 2000; Harris and Purdy, 2000). Our material was gathered from available public documents (laws, ministry documents, financial statements and reports) and numerous encounters with the people who are experiencing the ongoing reform from within, making sense of the text and the terminology used by the practitioners and reconceptualizing the most prevalent metaphors (Deetz,1986; Morgan, 1986). The dynamics of an organization cannot be grasped if one ignores the context of economics and industrial policy and the interchange between the micro and macro levels. In the same way, in order to understand the structural and dynamic problema facing the Teatro Comunale of Bologna, we constantly tried to take account of both national cultural policy and the actual experience of the individual organization (Bennett, 1995; Berenson, 1996; Gray, 1996). On the other hand, structures and meanings of public policy are difficult to understand without investigating the effects at the level of individual social action. The paper is structured as follows: in the second section we analyse some of the key legislative measures in light of management rhetoric. In the third section we consider the impact of the reform at the global level, looking at some quantitative data regarding the 13 national opera houses in terms of the participation of private investors in funding, and the changes introduced into the distribution of public funding (by means of the Fondo Unico dello Spettacolo, or FUS, the single fund for the performing arts). In the fourth section we investigate the micro level by assessing the impact of the new management on the Teatro Comunale of Bologna, before offering some conclusions in the final section.