Abstract
The pluralistic nature of the Public Art and Culture Organization (OACP) implies a particular organizational identity. As a disseminator of specialized knowledge, it is composed of a diffuse power and multiple objectives. The OACP is pluralist, as it is traversed by divergent institutional logics. While political and artistic logics form the basis of the Public Artistic and Cultural Organization, the introduction of a managerial logic presupposes, at the same time as a rise in stakeholder power, a management by performance, which places the intermediary manager in a position to deal with this institutional pluralism. However, the literature shows that the competencies of the intermediary manager are poorly understood, even though he or she is recognized as being in direct contact with the ambiguities of the organization. Our problematic therefore concerns pluralistic organizations with institutional logics that can generate tensions between artistic, political and managerial issues, and the manager in these organizations responsible for reducing these tensions. The identification of these competencies is the focus of this research. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the Economies of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991), we analyze data from a qualitative field study of Public Art and Culture Organization managers and stakeholders. Our results identify different types of competencies: specific and generic competencies, while the competencies we call cross-competencies enable us to deal with institutional pluralism. The contribution of this study therefore lies in the production of a typology of competencies, from the angle of the figure of “l’acteur competent” who possesses a “savoir-agir” (Nachi, 2015) in order to form agreements between institutional logics.