Olga Kosińska

“It’s Fun at First”. Cultural Blogging – Between Late Capitalism and Non-Work

Capitalism in its contemporary, late form does not break away from its constitutive principles – that is the actions aimed at accumulating resources – but significantly changes nature of the key capital. No longer land or labour, but knowledge, information or technology become the elements determining the position of a person on the market. Under these circumstances, the notion of “non-work” emerges, which includes activities seemingly unrelated to capitalist priorities, but still not in the direct opposition to them. One of the areas of such non-work phenomena was the Polish cultural blogosphere. Its representatives are an example of how people operating in the field of culture – especially on the Internet – combined instrumental and existential values in their activities. For this combination to be effective, it requires the collection and interpretation of relevant data that enables us to measure the achievement level of the goals set. In the case of the surveyed bloggers – also due to the specificity of their work – these measures were often not used properly.

Artists Must Eat as Well. Possibilities of Undertaking Completely Non-profit Cultural Activities

Difficulties with financing cultural activities are a subject of many analysis throughout the years as well as many attempts of finding a way to construct a balanced cultural policy at both the state and local government level. Facing those, culture is a sector that is at the forefront of attempts to raise funds for independent initiatives in a non-standard way. The article presents the analysis of three cases of cultural projects of a fundamentally non-institutional and bottom-up nature, as well as crossing sector boundaries. It points to the difficulties that such activities face, while identifying the existing potential and willingness to undertake non-financially motivated cultural actions. In connection with development of the phenomenon of self-organization in culture, as well as the privatization and deinstitutionalisation of cultural participation, there is a need to change the approach of financing cultural activities and actively going beyond the existing framework of cooperation in this field. 

Digital Shadow – “Shady” Elements of Internet Fandoms

Contemporary socio-economic changes affect organizations and management. Management processes more and more often concern spheres and groups that go beyond the “traditional”understanding of the organization. Among them are online communities such as fandoms. Along with the process of organizing, the organizational shadow is emerging. Organizational shadow is defined as “a set of unacceptable features, tendencies, aspirations rejected in the process of socialization” (Kostera 2014, s. 23), the appearance and functioning of which is negated or hidden within the organization. Fandoms are governed by slightly different rules, often more variable and more difficult to identify than in formal organizations. That does not make them free from “shady”elements such as certain people, activities, features and values that do not match the current shape of the community. The article describes fandoms as new, informal organizational forms and subjects of management processes, and then identifies examples of the emergence of organizational shadow within them. These are three main causes of such a shadow manifestation –excessive control (e.g., of the forum moderator), undisclosed actions of administrators of the internet platform used by the group, as well as negligence (e.g., forgetting someone’s contribution to the project). The conclusions indicate the need for a further, in-depth identification of the elements influencing the development of the shadow in non-standard organizational forms.

When a project swallows an organization. Projectification in cultural non-governmental organizations and organizational imagination

Abstract

Projects have a widespread presence in the non-governmental sector. Sometimes, they make it possible to perform tasks which would otherwise remain uncompleted due to insufficient funds, for instance. At the same time, however, the increasingly common phenomenon in smaller NGOs is when one large project swallows the organization along with its more modest initiatives. With time, the Cracow’s foundation under scrutiny, which operates in the cultural sector, has evolved from a self-help organization engaged in a number of minor activities, often completely devoid of external funding, into an entity focusing all its strength and resources on one large annual project funded from grants. In her autoethnography combined with the material from individual in-depth interviews, the author, who is both a participant of and a witness to these changes, describes the process of the main project having supplanted the grassroots initiatives, which has resulted, inter alia, in the disintegration within the foundation. Simultaneously, she provides at least a partial solution to this problem in the form of organizational imagination understood as a management style oriented towards people with all their needs and capabilities as well as towards taking action based on far-reaching trust in people.

The Impact of Cultural Blogers on the Decisions of Their Readers in the Area of Participation in Culture

In the face of changes that take place in socio-economic aspects of reality, particularly in the field of culture, it is worth looking at the previously rarely considered in analysis social actors such as cultural bloggers. Their influence on attitudes and decisions regarding the participation in the culture of their readers remains unknown to the broader research perspective. Among them anonymous online surveys have been made that allowed for cautious drawing of several conclusions: regular blog readers passively read subsequent entries, but actively search for them, moving the discussion to social media; blogs about culture are trusted sources of opinion and knowledge among the readers; readers also admit that blogger entries and opinions have had an impact on their decisions in the area of cultural participation, but at the same time they have been selectively approaching the content offered to them. The research was of quantitative and preliminary nature, therefore it does not give the right to formulate more in-depth and general conclusions – they point, however, to the interesting, and usually omitted in the analysis links of modern education and cultural discussion.