Purpose: Policy change is frequently framed as resulting from governmental strategy based on explicit preferences, rational decision making and consecutive and aligned implementation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical perspective of institutional work as an alternative approach to understanding policy change, and investigates the construction of resources needed to perform such work.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on a case study of the process wherein the idea of cultural and creative industries was introduced into Lithuanian cultural policy. The main data generating methods are document studies and qualitative interviews.

Findings: The analysis demonstrates the ways in which the resources needed to perform institutional work are created through the enactment of practice, and through the application of resourcing techniques. Three such techniques are identified in the empirical material: the application of experiences from other fields of practice, the elicitation of external support, and the borrowing of legitimacy.

Originality/value: The study offers an alternative approach to studies of policy change by demonstrating the value of institutional work in such change. Further, it contributes to the literature on institutional work by highlighting how instances of such work, drawing on a distributed agency, interlink and connect to each other in a process to produce policy change. Finally, it proposes three interrelated resourcing techniques underlying institutional work.

This article examines the transfer of creative industries as a policy idea to Lithuania. Tracing the stages of the transfer and analysing its consequences in the local cultural policy field, this paper argues for the importance of studying cultural policy process. The findings reveal that the process of the international transfer of creative industries mattered, because it generated wider transformations in cultural policy field by having ambiguous effects on local power relations. The policy idea of creative industries opened the cultural policy field to new actors. As a result, competition for scarce state funding increased, but cultural organisations gained access to the European Union structural funds. In all, creative industries as a policy idea significantly transformed Lithuanian state cultural policy, in that it led to a reassessment of both the practices and identities of cultural organisations.

One of the contemporary “turns” in management studies is the “performativity” turn. In this paper, we present a genealogy of the concept of performativity as it has been used in management and organization studies (MOS). Starting with the work of Austin, Bateson, Goffman and Lyotard, we move on to more recent debates surrounding the use of the concept by Butler and the STS researchers Callon, Latour and Law, as well as how their ideas have been further translated within MOS. The focus is on how the concept is defined and on the areas of study where performativity has been used. Taken together, the approach to performativity employed has implications for how the concept is understood and translated. Finally, we discuss the particular ontological position of the performative perspective, and its methodological consequences.

This chapter responds to recent critiques of the public uses of histories of the Holocaust and communist crimes in Lithuania by exploring the creation of the Museum of Genocide Victims and Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum in Vilnius. It has become a cliche to argue that Lithuanian public sector organisations, particularly museums, emphasise the terrible legacy of communist crimes and that they tend to forget - and even actively avoid making public - information about the killings of Lithuania's Jews. Participation of ethnic Lithuanians in the Holocaust, such critiques argue, is particularly obscured. This study provides empirical data which questions this view: it brings to attention the history of Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum, the existence of which has so far been overlooked by many scholars. In addition, this chapter suggests that in order to better understand the development of museum exhibitions about difficult periods in Lithuania's past, the Holocaust and communist crimes, it is necessary to go beyond the prevailing theoretical framework which analyses museum exhibitions as representations. Given that museums are highly heterogeneous organisations, which function as a result of collaboration (but not necessarily consensus) among many different actors, it is useful to study them as public knowledge regimes, a theoretical perspective developed by Michel Foucault and his followers. This Foucauldian approach is enriched with the organisational theory of 'institutional entrepreneurs', promoted by Paul DiMagio, which focuses particularly sharply on the potentially controversial role of individuals in creating and institutionalising organisations.