Economic sustainability of Cultural organizations

Abstract

In the last decades, often we heard about the growing phenomenon of foundations and the problems related to their sustainability. The evolution of cultural organizations can be explained by the interest aroused in the entrepreneurs and businessmen who consider sustainability as an increasingly and integral part of doing business in any type of industry. That is the reason why, the phenomenon of the diffusion of cultural organizations and cultural foundations have been multiplied in the last years. Nowadays, cultural foundations can be found in different sectors, they have a variety of goals and operational logics, and they own a surprising flexibility in organizational choices. We can underline some main characteristics of cultural foundations which can be considered as important. First of all, the independence of foundations which should be able to guarantee the realization of its aims, the fact that it can be innovative because in many cases it can be seen as tool to face particular problems related to the society, the culture or institutions, and its continuity because a foundations is something that is created to lasts. From what we can see, even if Italy is considered as the cultural and historical homeland of the World, there is a relatively small number of cultural foundations and it is not comparable in terms of resources and social presence with respect to the American, German and British scenario. This is caused by the different typologies of foundations that exists and by the multiple legal and financial environments that we find in every country. Cultural foundations can be seen as an economic unit which offer charitable services by accepting financial help from the general public. Accounting standards were created to encourage the appropriate use of funds, promote transparency and to help supervise activities. Moreover, they offer the support to managers and auditors during the review of financial reporting. Even if accounting standards might be complex, they are needed to safeguard the general public and to endorse comparability between cultural organizations. These regulations are created to underline the fact that these type of organizations are capable of produce a successful program or activity rather than focusing on the net income. In this cultural scenario, it has therefore begun a managerial and organizational transformation which yield to define strategies aiming at the internal growing and development of every organization. Starting from this concept, we will analyze the importance of the stakeholders’ management which is considered as fundamental element for the implementation of strategies used to reach the entity’s mission. The background is not just referred to forprofit organizations but also to those cultural institutions and no-profit organizations and their development; depending on the different cultural environment the number of stakeholders can change. More important than this is crucial understand why stakeholders in some particular situations or cases seems to do not be present. To be able to analyze this problem, we want to show the economic and financial relationships within the actors involved, how the resources are managed and how the factors of production are employed to reach the final mission. Moreover, we will focus on a case study which will emphasize the problem of stakeholders and sustainability issues in details. Lastly, there is a review of our discussed topics and the final conclusions.