November 28, 2002 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards
by Francie Ostrower
Members of the boards of arts organizations must strike a balance to maintain their elite status while serving their organizations’ needs, says Francie Ostrower, senior research associate at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, in Washington. For this book, Ms. Ostrower interviewed 76 board members of four organizations, two museums and two opera companies.
Virtually all of those board members are millionaires, she writes, and their upper-class status influences their performance on the board, sometimes negatively.
In her interviews, Ms. Ostrower says, she noticed that board members often understand that their organizations are more likely to flourish if they adopt new approaches. At the same time, she says, many trustees worry that some changes will make their organizations less elite. For instance, when a member of an opera company’s board suggested that the company discontinue fully staged productions to save money, his colleagues laughed at the idea. The other board members would not consider the cutback because it would lessen the opera’s—and consequently their own—prestige. On the other hand, they recognized the necessity of expanding the organization’s audience, so the company adopted supertitles to make productions more accessible.
Ms. Ostrower points out that recruiting people who are capable of donating large sums of money and who have connections to other potential donors is a big help to an institution. However, problems with governance can arise, she warns, when a board includes a lot of people who make large donations but are not at all active in leading the organization. In addition, she says, board members often appoint their friends and acquaintances, so an elite board can be self-perpetuating.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, Ill. 60637-2954; http://www.press.uchicago.edu; 133 pages; $35; ISBN 0-226-63966-5.
