Since the 1980s cultural management has been taught in German-speaking countries. At first there were only very few schools, but meanwhile there are numerous programs in the areas of cultural management, cultural representation and promotion, cultural work, etc. Initially, the development of the subject was determined by the idea of “professionalizing” cultural institutions by implementing instruments of business administration. The terms cultural marketing, cultural sponsoring, and cultural project management represent this approach. This well-known, more collage-like idea of cultural management of the late 1980s and 1990s that was oriented at mainstream business administration and mainly aims at techniques and frameworks seems to be increasingly replaced by an understanding of cultural management that places more emphasis on the content and the integration of the involved disciplines.

Firstly, this trend is based on the partly lacking practical acceptance that cultural management encounters, secondly on the emergence of a theoretical and methodical deficit, and thirdly on the changed professional framework conditions of cultural managers. If nothing else, a feeling of uneasiness regarding the concept of management may have led to this. Thus, after the founding and constitutional phase of cultural management in the 1980s and 1990s, a further development and the differentiation of the self-understanding of the subject`s representatives have taken place. In an exemplary form this can be seen in the discourse of the Fachverbandes Kulturmanagement, e.V., the association of academically teaching and researching cultural managers in the German-speaking area. Management of art and culture is now designed as a discipline between academic invention and practical intervention that acts in the area of tension of directly applicable knowledge how to act and knowledge how to reflect.

In its orientation, the Chair of Art Research and Arts Management incorporates this discourse. Arts management stands for an updated management concept that conceptualizes especially the sociological, aesthetic and organizational specifics of the cultural scene; art research mirrors the new content dimension of the subject cultural management, namely to open up the field less from economically determined, but more from aesthetically determined thought.

This change can especially be seen in the chair`s research projects and activities that combine academic and artistic research methods in an inter- and transdisciplinary way and thus manifest a new, theoretically founded and at the same time practically oriented understanding of cultural management.

The chair is a founding member of the Fachverband Kulturmanagement, e.V. and the Society for Artistic Research.

Areas of research are

- museum and concert research,
- visitor research,
- forms of staging,
- forms of the organization of cultural institutions,
- theory of cultural management,
- the logic of cultural politics,
- the aesthetics of business and
- art research.

The academic instruction focuses on

- arts management and cultural organization,
- cultural politics and cultural financing,
- audience development and forms of staging,
- art research and the theory of science.

Recent Publications (Selection)

Articles in Peer Review-Journals

• Tröndle, Martin / Rhomberg, Markus: Cultural Policy Discourses in the Media: How German mass media represent the public debate on the future of the classical concert, International Journal of Cultural Policy., 2011 (1): 1-17.
• Tröndle, Martin et al.: The Entanglement of Arts and Sciences: On the Transaction Costs of Transdisciplinary Research Settings, Journal for Artistic Research, 2011 (01) (unter Begutachtung).
• Tschacher, Wolfgang / Greenwood, Steven / Kirchberg, Volker / Wintzerith, Stéphanie / van den Berg, Karen / Tröndle, Martin: The Physiological and Behavioral Correlates of Aesthetic Perception of Artworks, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2011: xx-xxx (in Druck).
• Tschacher, Wolfgang / Tröndle, Martin: A Dynamic Systems Perspective on Fine Art and its Market., Futures: The journal of policy, planning and futures studies, 2011 (43): 67-75.

• Tröndle, Martin: Postkulturmanagement. Transdisziplinäre Forschung im Kulturmanagement am Beispiel des Forschungsprojektes eMotion, Jahrbuch Kulturmanagement 2009, Transcript, 2009 (1): 127-155.
• Tröndle, Martin: Systemtheorie, ein Versuch, Jahrbuch Kulturmanagement 2010, Transcript, 2010 (2): 13-42.
• Tröndle, Martin: Von der Ausführungs- zur Aufführungskultur, in: Tröndle, Martin (Hrsg.): Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form. , Bielefeld, 2009: 21-44.
• Tröndle, Martin: Methods of Artistic Research, in: Tröndle, Martin / Warmers, Julia (Hrsg.): Kunstforschung als ästhetische Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur transdiziplinären Hybridisierung von Wissenschaft und Kunst, Bielefeld, Transkript, 2011: 169-201.

• Bekmeier-Feuerhahn, Sigrid / Höhne, Steffen / van den Berg, Karen / Tröndle, Maritn et al. (Hrsg.): Theorien für den Kultursektor, Bielefeld, transcript, 2010 (Jahrbuch Kulturmanagement 2010).
• Bekmeier-Feuerhahn, Sigrid / Höhne, Steffen / van den Berg, Karen / Tröndle, Maritn et al. (Hrsg.): Kulturpolitik und Kulturwirtschaft, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2011 (Jahrbuch für Kulturmanagement 2011) (in Druck).
• Bekmeier-Feuerhahn, Sigrid / Höhne, Steffen / van den Berg, Karen / Tröndle, Martin et al. (Hrsg.): Forschen im Kulturmanagement, Bielefeld, 2009 (Jahrbuch Kulturmanagement 2009, Bd. 1).
• Schneidewind, Petra / Tröndle, Martin (Hrsg.): Selbstmanagement im Musikbetrieb. 2. komplett überarb. und erw. Aufl., Bielefeld, 2011 (in Druck).
• Tröndle, Maritn / Warmers, Julia (Hrsg.): Kunstforschung als ästhetische Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur transdisziplinären Hybridisierung von Wissenschaft und Kunst, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2011.
• Tröndle, Martin (Hrsg.): Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form, Bielefeld, 2009.
• Tröndle, Martin (Hrsg.): Das Konzert. Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form, 2. über und erw. Aufl., Bielefeld, transcript, 2010.