Mapping the meanings of Cultural Leadership: The use of the term in the field of arts management

Given the (necessarily open-ended) discussion about the function of arts and culture in society, it is not surprising that there is a similar tension in deciding on the definition and content of the term ‘cultural leadership’. Most literature on the term can be seen as firmly – and problematically – rooted in Anglo-Saxon and European traditions of though. But in contrast to academic attempts to put an end to this debate by looking for a unifying definition of the term (quite impossibly, for that matter), this issue stresses the context specificity of the notion of “Cultural Leadership”. It embraces the idea that Cultural Leadership always is about relations (between people, departments within institutions, institutions and society etc.) and that the meanings of the term are relational as well, i.e. context-specific. The contri- butions of this issue reflect this diversity of meanings and show that defin- ing Cultural Leadership is like a dramatic battle for discursive hegemony on one of our central terms.