Corporate Cultural Responsibility

How Business Can Support Art, Design, and Culture

Michael Bzdak

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000585131
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoria: Unternehmensführung

Is corporate investing in the arts and culture within communities good business? Written by an expert on the topic who ran the Corporate Art Program at Johnson & Johnson, the book sets out the case for business patronage of the arts and culture and demonstrates how to build an effective program for businesses to follow.

As companies seek new ways to add value to society, this book places business support of the arts in a corporate social responsibility context and offers a new concept: Corporate Cultural Responsibility. It discusses the issues underlying business support of the arts and explores new avenues of collaboration and value creation. The framework presented in the book serves as a guide for identifying the key attributes and projected impact of successful and sustainable models. Unlike other books centered on the relationship of art and commerce, this book looks at the broader and global implications of Corporate Cultural Responsibility. It also usefully sets the discussion about the role of philanthropy and corporate social responsibility and the arts within an historical timeframe.

As the first book to link culture to community responsibility, the book will be of particular relevance to corporate art advisors and auction houses, as well as students of arts management and corporate social responsibility at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Chapter 1 Defining a Role for Business in the Arts Promising Patronage Practices

DOI: 10.4324/9781003099222-2

After all, “culture” is traditionally associated with meaning and creativity, with works of the imagination and aesthetic practices that are far removed from the pursuit of economic profit. “Commerce,” on the other hand, has traditionally been regarded by social scientists with disdain, signaling a vulgar and materialistic world devoid of morality, where human agency is subordinated to the logic of capital.

Peter Jackson

The nineteenth century witnessed an increase in industrialist patrons committed to providing social, economic, and cultural resources to their employees and communities. The most notable examples include Saltaire, a model village established in 1851 by Sir Titus Salt, just outside of Bradford, West Yorkshire; Bournville, a suburb of Birmingham founded by George Cadbury in 1879; and William Lever’s Port Sunlight, a company town including an art gallery and a theater, built in 1888. The self-contained community Port Sunlight represents a holistic approach to planning and design that provides for all aspects of employees’ lives. A company publication paints a complete picture of the town, which incorporates manufacturing, housing, a church, sports facilities, and cultural amenities (Lever Brothers, 1953). Influenced by the Garden City movement, Bournville and Port Sunlight embodied an emerging corporate paternalism with a humanistic focus. Lever believed in the power of art, architecture, and design to foster a company culture that would inspire and galvanize the workforce (Rowan, 2003). Saltaire, the Victorian village housing employees of Salts Mill, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site as “an outstanding example of mid-19th century philanthropic paternalism, which had a profound influence on developments in industrial social welfare and urban planning in the United Kingdom and beyond” (UNESCO, 2001).

These models from the United Kingdom reveal the aspirations of individual industrialists who sought to provide workers with optimal work-and-living experiences. Each example underscores a reaction to an urban context that was often viewed as inhumane, unhygienic, and dehumanizing. They leveraged architecture, design, and culture to alleviate the challenges faced by a growing corporate workforce. Humanizing the work environment in the wake of industrialization was the hallmark of an emerging corporate cultural responsibility in these early examples. These nascent alliances of culture and commerce highlight the use of art and architecture to improve conditions for workers while raising new questions about a company’s obligations to society. A defining feature of these three large-scale efforts is their focus on long-term planning and the associated commitment of financial resources, reflecting a belief in the future success of the business as well as the legacy of the firm. These voluntary paternalistic models were admired and copied by other industrialists and many still exist today.

In Copenhagen, philanthropist J.C. Jacobsen developed a model of community and cultural responsibility in the Carlsberg brewery, named after his son, Carl. In 1876, Jacobsen set a visionary precedent when he transferred a controlling stake in the business to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, under the auspices of the Carlsberg Foundation. Although there are other Scandinavian companies governed by foundations, the Carlsberg Group remains the only global brewery owned entirely by a foundation. In 1902, Carl Jacobsen signed a deed transferring his own brewery, New Carlsberg, to the Carlsberg Foundation and founded the New Carlsberg Foundation, still a major funder of the arts in Denmark. He had already formalized his commitment to cultural responsibility with the New Carlsberg Glyptotek, an art museum opened in 1897 with his personal art collection at its core. According to the New Carlsberg Foundation’s website, its grants (totaling some DKK 170 million in 2019) fund donations of artworks to museums, decorative projects, and art research, along with a non-earmarked fund available for other art-related purposes (New Carlsberg Foundation, 2021).

Italy’s Crespi d’Adda was commissioned as a company town by a textile manufacturer in 1878 and, like Saltaire, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in 1995. Like Bournville, it included all the amenities of a self-contained community, including a health clinic, school, and theater. Although the company closed in 2004, descendants of workers still reside in the village (Figure 1.1). The story of Pirelli, founded in Milan, follows a similar path, except it remains a successful company today. Founded in 1872 by Giovanni Battista Pirelli, the company expanded outside of the city center to Bicocca. In the early 1920s, as the industry continued to grow, Pirelli developed the campus into a workers’ village known as Borgo Pirelli, in collaboration with the Istituto Autonomo per le Case Popolari (IACP), where “principles of scientific management met those of industrial paternalism” (Kaika and Ruggiero, 2016). These examples from the early days of the industrial revolution underscore the humanistic possibilities of capitalism guided by the moral vision of individual corporate leaders acting on behalf of their employees.

Figure 1.1 Cotonificio Benigno Crespi, 1878, Villaggio operaio di Crespi d’Adda. Photo courtesy of Luigi Matteoni

Often labeled utopian, these initiatives reveal an emphasis on the human and cultural aspects of business. As industrialization expanded in the United States, the company town became an increasingly commonplace phenomenon. In 1880, George Mortimer Pullman, producer of the eponymous sleeping car, commissioned an architect and a landscape designer to plan a self-contained corporate community, with a bank, theater, and library, outside of Chicago (Crawford, 1995). Robber-baron philanthropy supported a range of civic and cultural efforts, most notably Andrew Carnegie’s generous financing of more than 1,500 public libraries throughout the country, from 1886 to 1917. Douglas Klahr argues that Carnegie actually created a noncommercial brand along with these democratic civic spaces for learning and interaction. However, Carnegie’s generosity came with conditions: in order to apply for a grant, a community had to demonstrate that it could sustain the library’s operation. This usually meant that municipalities had to vote on a tax bond and, for many reasons, women were invited to participate in the vote—many years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920 (Klahr, 2019).

As industrialization became the norm in the early twentieth century, new opportunities were available to architects and designers. In 1883, Emil Moritz Rathenau formed the German Edison Society for Applied Electricity, which eventually became Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), founded in Berlin in 1887 and inspired by Thomas Edison’s experiments with electricity. In 1907, architect Peter Behrens was hired as design consultant, and his span of engagement included architecture and product design, as well as developing an overall corporate image. The iconic Turbine Factory, designed by Behrens in 1909, marked a new approach to monumental industrial architecture. In addition to its massive scale and lack of ornament, the building was inscribed with a logo cast in concrete in the gable. Behrens was responsible for innovative changes in overall design at AEG, including logos and products, creating a more progressive image for the company.

The idea of hiring a corporate artistic advisor was a novelty and came at a time when scientific management theories were popular among leading companies. Behrens’s presence at AEG certainly helped to differentiate the company in an age of growing consumerism. His approach to design also signaled the private sector’s receptivity to Modernism, furnishing a new design vocabulary along with an opportunity to demonstrate a progressive identity. It is no surprise that Walter Gropius was part of Behrens’s circle, given his interest in developing a new language for industrial architecture. Behrens was grounded in the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, Düsseldorf Art Academy, and Deutscher Werkbund, where he was part of ongoing dialogues around concepts of utility and beauty in the contexts of industry and culture. A testament to his commitment to functional aesthetics, Behrens designed his own home in Darmstadt and all of its furniture and accessories, including a set of drinking glasses for the dining room, now part of the Corning Museum of Glass collection (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Peter Behrens, Set of Drinking Glasses with Ruby Glass Feet (1900–1901). CMOG 2007.3.118. Gift of the Ennion Society. Image licensed by The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY (www.cmog.org) under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Unfortunately, little is known about AEG as a corporate patron or the company’s motivations for engaging Behrens. The AEG case does, however, present an interesting precedent in the union of art and culture with industry and design. At the time industrial companies were faced with rapidly improving technology, a growing workforce, and an evolving responsibility to stakeholders. From the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, scientific management became a tool for industries to increase efficiency and standardize work processes. As Modernism evolved, architects became aware of the changing nature of work and the workplace. Mauro F. Guillén sums it up: “Technology merged with style, science with history, efficiency with creativity, and functionality with aesthetics” (Guillén, 1997). Modernism as espoused by Behrens, Gropius, and others provided the private sector with both a new approach to design and the opportunity to bridge the gap between culture and industry.

The marriage of functionality and aesthetics was embraced in the United States just as architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright rose to prominence. The Wasmuth Portfolio—or more formally, Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright—was published in Berlin in 1910–1911, marking Wright’s influence on a number of individuals associated with the Bauhaus. Wright’s work for industry, beginning in 1904 with the Larkin Building, may also have influenced the development of corporate architecture in Europe. The design of the Larkin Building signaled the desire to offer comfort, dignity, and respect to employees with features such as access to natural light, a YWCA, a library, and a music lounge hosting weekly concerts. The building’s interior was remarkable for its collection of allegorical sculptures and inspirational quotes inscribed on monumental columns; the art collection was one of the first corporate collections in the country, and the use of text in architecture was ahead of its time. Wright bridged modern industry with craftsmanship and design.

In Philadelphia, the Curtis Publishing Company, known for hiring artists to illustrate the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, also commissioned a new office and printing plant on Independence Square in Philadelphia in 1909. One of the highlights of the building was a mosaic mural in the lobby designed by Maxfield Parrish and executed by Tiffany representing an early effort at integrating art into corporate buildings. The Curtis Publishing Company established a Division of Commercial Research in 1911 which marked an early effort to establish marketing research as part of a publishing enterprise. Curtis also provides an interesting view into American consumers in the 1910s and 1920s where there continued to be a chasm between the agrarian population and the urban and more industrial cities (Ward, 2005).

While America became known for rapid industrial expansion, Henry Ford and Fredrick Winslow Taylor were renowned for what became known as the “efficiency movement.” In 1911, Taylor published The Principle of Scientific Management, setting off decades of debate among business and labor leaders. Taylor’s approach was to seek improvements in all aspects of production through rigorous measurement of worker activity and movement. While not universally accepted in the United States, especially by labor activists, the theories were widely read elsewhere. Adam Arvidsson has shown, for example, how Taylorism was popular in Italy as early as 1914, while the country struggled to modernize its factories and economy (Arvidsson, 2003). As Guillén has pointed out, there are many elements of Taylorism that complement some of the foundational and aesthetic tenets of Modernism (Guillén, 1997). Taylor’s ideas set the stage for subsequent efforts to organize and manage human labor, indirectly affecting the design of factor...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Defining a Role for Business in the Arts: Promising Patronage Practices
• 2 Modernism and the Corporate Campus: Buildings, Design, and Responsibility
• 3 Formalizing and Normalizing Business Patronage of the Arts
• 4 The Tensions of Patronage: Sponsorship, Brands, and Philanthropy
• 5 Cultural Responsibility and the Public Good
• 6 Building a Better Case for Support of Culture and the Arts: Five Recommendations
• Conclusion
• Index