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The paper seeks to focus on the management of art galleries in the context of contemporary visual art markets, viewed from the institutional and industrial network approaches. The aim is to understand the shaping of management practices. The characteristics of the visual art market, the immaterial value of products and the key role of relationships and networks, make the contemporary visual art market an insightful context to study the management practices.

A qualitative research method was chosen – altogether 80 interviews were conducted in European markets.

The contemporary art market can be seen as a network structure consisting of actors who participate in creation and change of the practices. The management practices of galleries were created and changed by imitations and through isomorphic forces. It is proposed that major changes in management practices originate mainly from financial reasons, where the driving force is to survive economically. The striking similarity of gallery management practices was interesting. The shared practices are used as means to create stability for the market.

A gallery manager should reflect the implicit norms and values of the art field in their art gallery management. The knowledge of these management practices is of importance especially for new galleries entering the market.

The theoretical contribution of the study builds on elaboration of the practices concept by combining aspects of the institutional approach and the industrial networks approach.

Recent advancements in wearable computing offer opportunities for art galleries to provide a unique experience. However, to ensure successful implementation of this new technology in the visitor industry, it is essential to understand user requirements from a visitor’s point of view. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate visitors’ requirements for the development of a wearable smart glasses augmented reality (AR) application in the museum and art gallery context.

Interviews with 28 art gallery visitors were conducted and an affinity diagram technique was used to analyze the interviews.

The findings reveal that wearable AR is in its infancy and that technical and design issues have to be overcome for a full adoption. It reveals that content requirement, functional requirement, comfort, experience and resistance are important when developing and implementing the wearable AR application in the museum and art gallery contexts.

Mapping user requirements in the wearable smart glasses AR context using an affinity diagram is a new approach and therefore contributes to the creation of knowledge in the tourism domain. Practically, the area of wearable technologies and AR within the tourism and visitor industry context is still relatively unexplored, and the present paper provides a first foundation for the implementation of wearable smart glasses AR applications in the museum and art gallery context.

Using the resources available through the Auckland City Council, the Auckland Art Gallery has managed to turn a simple database upgrade into a programme of work with much greater impact on the way information about the gallery’s collection is delivered to the public. The Council has adopted a value management methodology which identifies wide programme aims, costs and benefits for new initiatives. Although initially time‐consuming, the methodology allowed the programme to gain good management support and funding far greater than that originally envisaged. As well as migrating the collection database to a new system, staff have managed a range of projects including digitising the entire collection of 12,000 works, clearing copyrights as required, and cataloguing and scanning ephemera related to key areas of the collection. Work has also been carried out on Web‐based access to collection information as part of a re‐designed gallery Web site. This work raises questions about a shift in the role of a traditional art gallery and the necessity to employ additional skills to meet the opportunities offered by the digital environment.

A new form of “museum” has emerged which takes advantage of the Internet′s seemingly limitless format options for electronic presentation and ability to tailor in‐depth presentations to niche audiences. Constraints of ownership and geographic location are lessened as Internet‐based museums point to sources across the globe. Collections which are physically impossible to construct are being mounted electronically. Offers a sampler of museums and galleries around the world which are making use of WorldWide Web or Gopher servers.

Entrepreneurship, venture creation and business management.

The case is suitable for analysis in an undergraduates program specializing in entrepreneurship, business and management. The case could also be discussed in an executive development program on business ventures/business strategy/business management.

Since its inception in 1981, Abdul Rahim Al Fahim, CEO Paris Gallery decided that Paris Gallery would foray into French perfumes. At that time, he would have never thought that such a move would ever make him more than a shopkeeper. Now in 2016, Mr Abdul Rahim Al-Fahim has much to be pleased about the success that his organization Paris Gallery (Luxury stores in Dubai) has been able to achieve. He has been twice named as the Arab World’s most powerful retail sector entrepreneur. Certainly, it was his good fortune to be based in the great city, and his business venture has paralleled the exponential success of Dubai. As the concept of grand malls developed and flourished in UAE, Paris Gallery stores emerged and also prospered. Currently, Paris Gallery has 80 stores in the finest locations of the Middle East. This encourages family business owners in UAE to have ambitions for success and growth of their enterprises. This is especially true in a developing region that has rarely hosted such a high-end homegrown success story as Paris Gallery. The study of strategic positioning of Paris Gallery with a workforce of 4,000 employees and representing more than 550 international brands today shall help us in weighing the options of how businesses should proceed strategically.

The following insights could be elucidated by the case: familiarizing students with the business challenges in the retail industry in emerging markets such as the United Arab Emirates, and exploring future strategy options from the business growth perspective.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

The Micro Gallery is a computerised, interactive, public access information system, located in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. It provides detailed information about the Gallery's collection of paintings in an accessible form, using digitised colour images and touch screen technology. A member of the team responsible for its development, here discusses the evolution of the system, its reception, and the projects it has spawned.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse users’ attitudes towards online information retrieval and processing. The aim is to identify the characteristics of information that better capture the attention of the users and to provide evidence for the information retrieval behaviour of the users by studying online photo archives as information units.

The paper analyses a unique quasi-experimental data of photo archive access counts collected by the author from an online newspaper. In addition to access counts of each photo in 500 randomly chosen photo galleries, characteristics of the photo galleries are also recorded. Survival (duration) analysis is used in order to analyse the factors affecting the share of the photo gallery viewed by a certain proportion of the initial number of viewers.

The results of the survival analysis indicate that users are impatient in case of longer photo galleries; they lose attention faster and stop viewing earlier when gallery length is uncertain; they are attracted by keywords and initial presentation and they give more credit to specific rather than general information categories.

Results of the study offer applicable implications for information providers, especially on the online domain. In order to attract more attention, entities can engage in targeted information provision by taking into account people’s attitude towards information retrieval and processing as presented in this paper.

This paper uses a unique data set in a quasi-experimental setting in order to identify the characteristics of online information that users are attracted to.

The purpose of this paper is to develop insight regarding art gallery members' identification with their galleries through the use of segmentation. The antecedents of a member's identification and subsequent involvement with the gallery are explored. Within the four regional art galleries analysed, the authors identify three different segments within the membership groups which illustrate the ways in which gallery members, who identify positively with their gallery, contribute to the organisation through behaviours such as the donation of time and money.

A mixed methods approach was used, including 11 in‐depth interviews with gallery staff and members and a survey (n=433) of gallery members. The in‐depth interviews were interpreted using content analysis and thematic analysis. The survey results were analysed using exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis.

The paper's findings suggest that gallery members can be differentiated in terms of the way that they contribute to their art gallery. Three types were identified: promoters, donors and committee members. A number of constructs were used to distinguish between each of the segments, including: member identification, satisfaction, prestige, visibility, contact quality and domain involvement from the current arts marketing literature. Four other constructs which emerged from the qualitative research were also used to profile the clusters: self‐enhancement, organisational culture, social responsibility and elitism which emerged from the qualitative research.

Profiling different segments in the market (membership) using sociodemographics, attitudes and donating behaviours allows marketers and managers to more effectively target the segments who can positively contribute to the organisation. Moreover it provides a greater understanding of the membership base and how various members are engaging with their institution. Current methods of marketing are becoming less ideal to obtain marketing objectives, with diminishing returns to scale on marketing programmes an issue.

An understanding of the differences between each of these member types will allow galleries to more efficiently use their finite resources. By tailoring offerings to each of the different segments galleries can maximise the value of their membership base. Further, the use of segmentation enables gallery managers to identify segments where members may be less or not engaged and its causes and potential solutions.

Many non‐profit organisations with a membership base, such as the art galleries sampled in this research, rely on the contribution of their membership to survive. Therefore understanding the relationship between the institution and the membership is important.

The paper is unique in the application of segmentation analysis to examine gallery members. It also furthers the current understanding of identification and its role in the relationship between organisation members and their behaviour as members. That is the role of identification in relationship marketing.

This paper seeks to propose a methodological tool for arts marketing, arguing that traditional approaches are not as effective as the newly developed visibility/involvement model in assessing the quality of a cultural organization's marketing strategy.

The innovative model evaluates art galleries' promotion materials combining their local, visual, and textual dimensions of meaning, drawing on three different theoretical and methodological areas of thought: critical discourse analysis, systemic functional analysis, and mediated discourse analysis.

The visibility involvement model can be applied by cultural organizations to discern their key audience, and thus, their communicative focus. It is also the foundation of practical recommendations to enhance a gallery's marketing strategy to either deepen or broaden their audience.

While the paper investigates the predominant meaning dimension of different groups of promotional materials, it does not investigate all relevant dimensions. Although, the proposed model provides insights into the quality of the art galleries' marketing activities, it only provides a rather vague distinction between the degrees of visibility and required involvement. This paper does also not account for the usability of the model for organizations outside the cultural sector.

The innovation of the newly developed model lies in the combination of these dimensions coming from three theoretical and methodological areas of thought: mediated discourse analysis, systemic functional analysis, and critical discourse analysis.

This is a case study on the implementation of shared services across back-office functions between the National Library of Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland in the period 2008 to early 2013. It describes the potential benefits of a Library doing business in a less conventional way, at a time when the public sector is facing challenges of high customer expectations and tight budgets. From 2004 the concept of building shared services in the cultural sector was promoted by the Scottish Government as a means of achieving improved performance and more cost-effective service delivery. The initial four attempts to create shared services in the cultural sector failed. This study looks at the first attempt that succeeded and draws out the factors contributing to that success. Key precursors to progress included finding common ground and developing trust between parties who were initially suspicious of each other, establishing an effective governance framework, obtaining ongoing commitment from senior management, and aligning everyone’s agendas to make them compatible. By 2013 the program had delivered a common Information Systems network, as well as two parallel finance systems sitting on the same server. In March 2013 the HR teams entered a phase of living together for six months to test their integrated operations prior to formally becoming a shared service, treating both the Galleries and the Library as a single client. Building a shared service with another cultural partner has been a useful, though demanding experience. Both organizations are better off for committing to sharing.