Culture Management by Wroblewski, Lukasz

Chapter 1 
The meaning and essence of the cultural sector 
1 Culture and its divisions 
The source literature contains many different definitions of culture. This complex 
phenomenon is the subject of description and study by various disciplines: sociology, 
cultural anthropology, ethnography, cultural economics, and the emerging new discipline of 
culture management (including strategic and marketing management). Each of these 
disciplines studies and describes culture from its own perspective, leading to a lack of 
agreement regarding basic theoretical and methodological issues, which can even be seen in 
the different ways of understanding the main concepts used to describe socio-cultural reality, 
its phenomena, and its processes. Verbal and terminological disputes are not uncommon, in 
which the interpretation of the author‘s statements is inconsistent with their intentions. This 
is because when cultural researchers, workers, and managers who are directly involved in the 
promotion of culture use the same terms and descriptive phrases, they do not necessarily 
speak about the same objective reality, even when using the word ―culture‖ (Grad and 
Kaczmarek 2005: 11). 
Culture is one of the fundamental concepts of contemporary humanities, and although the 
use of the term only became widely popularized in the twentieth century, its etymological 
origin dates back to classical antiquity. The Latin word cultura originally meant simply the 
cultivation of soil, but Cicero, in the Tusculanae Disputationes, expanded its use to 
intellectual phenomena, calling philosophy the culture of spirit (Kłoskowska 1983: 9). 
Considering the etymology of this word, we could say that it describes everything that man 
does and that surrounds him, with the exception of the natural world. In the broadest 

meaning, culture is the entire material and spiritual heritage of humanity collected, 
preserved, and enriched over the course of its history, passed down from generation to 
generation (Polish language dictionary 1995: 1015). According to Szczepański (1965: 47), 
culture is the entirety of the material and non-material products of human activity, values,
and practices recognized, objectified, and adopted within any collectivity, transferred to 
other collectivities and to future generations. 
Tackling the issue of management and strategic marketing in the cultural sector, it is 
necessary to define the concept of culture, which delineates the scope of the characterized 
phenomena. When we compare the uses of the word ―culture‖ as used by cultural managers, 
employees of cultural institutions, and cultural industries, and where culture is understood as 
a result of research in such disciplines as philosophy, sociology of culture, or cultural 
anthropology (ethnology), we note significant differences. In the first case, in official 
nomenclature, culture is simply used to refer to ways and means of disseminating culture, i.e. 
the form of disseminating culture (cultural activities). In this case we can speak about a 
practical and administrative understanding of culture. According to this approach, culture is 
―the whole of a specific type of projects: soirées, sightseeing tours possibly combined with 
visiting museums and architectural monuments, reader contests, folklore festivals, activities 
of various types of amateur groups: singing, dance, theater groups, etc.‖ (Kmita 1982: 5-6). 
In this sense, culture becomes synonymous with ―cultural life‖, that is, the collective 
participation in public forms of the dissemination of culture. In the second case, it is difficult 
to talk about a single notion. There are plenty of different theoretical and academic concepts 
of culture; with all their diversity, however, none of the theoretical and academic concepts of 
culture coincide with that block of events and group activities which are referred to as 
culture in practical and administrative terms. 
Ethnological scientific literature devoted to culture has grown so much that an overview 
and the systematization of this concept has become a vital necessity. The most 
comprehensive overview of this kind thus far is presented in the 1952 paper by Kroeber and 
Kluckhohn. A critical overview of the concept of culture made by Kroeber and Kluckhohn 
takes into account six types of definitions of culture, or actually six different aspects which 
tend to be emphasized in various definitions, but rarely occur on their own or 

Culture Management by Wroblewski, Lukasz