The balance of art and business between local and global needs: the role of HRM practices

Despite several studies analyzing for example the characteristics of creative people and their personal networks (Florida, 2002; Montanari, Riboldazzi and Gallo, 2009), work arragenments and careers (Faulkner and Anderson, 1987; Menger 1999; Haunshild, 2003; Jones 2002, 2004; Storey et al. 2005; Haunshild and Eikhof, 2009), research on HRM practices in the creative industries still seems to be limited (Haunshild 2003). In particular, few attempts have been made to understand whether and how a cultural organization can use HRM practices to manage the tensions between art and busines and between its local and global characters. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to explore these issues by analyzing the case of ATERBalletto, the most important Italian ballet company. In so doing, we adopted an inductive case-based methodology (Yin, 1994; Eisenhardt 1989), combining different data collection methods.