Knowledge sharing barriers in cultural organizations

Purpose - The importance of culture in contemporary society is steadily increasing; people are paying attention to issues like cultural heritage, values, cultural products and cultural development more and more. Each of these is connected with spiritual, emotional and cognitive knowledge although the studies that have been developed so far neglect the relationship between knowledge management and cultural management. Therefore, we aim to determine the main barriers that appear in the process of knowledge sharing in the cultural organizations from Romania. How is the process of knowledge sharing developed? What barriers interfere? How do the cultural entrepreneurs deal with them? Design/methodology/approach - We propose an exploratory research, based on an ethical and qualitative approach in which we combine the results of a comprehensive literature review with the ones generated by a structured interview. The literature review focuses on the articles published in Scopus, Emerald, EBSCO, ProQuest and Sage databases. The results serve as a starting point in developing an interview guide for the Romanian cultural entrepreneurs who represent our research population. Then, we present interviews conducted with 8 representatives of Romanian public and private cultural organizations (managers, employees and entrepreneurs). We aim to determine how they are sharing their knowledge inside and outside their organization's boundaries and what are the institutional and cultural obstacles that they have to overcome. Data collected are processed using Nvivo software and research techniques like systematization and tabling are applied. Originality/value - This methodology focuses on the main cultural and institutional obstacles which Romanian cultural entrepreneurs have to overcome in order to share their knowledge inside and outside organization's boundaries. Practical implications - The outcomes of the application have both theoretical and practical implications. On one hand, we propose a nexus between knowledge management and cultural organizations. Knowledge creation, sharing and use seem to be ignored by researchers from the field of cultural entrepreneurship. Therefore, by bringing the obstacles that interfere in the process of knowledge sharing from the cultural organizations to the forefront we extend theory from both fields of research: knowledge management and cultural management. On the other hand, we facilitate the development of cultural organizations by monitoring their practices and signalling the challenges they face regarding knowledge management.