Creative Professionals As Influential Stakeholder Group in the Preservation and Development of Latvian Song and Dance Celebration Tradition

The Song and Dance Celebration is the most characteristic cultural tradition of Latvia which is included in the Representative list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. Vast majority of society (25 %) is involved in the preservation of this tradition in various levels and through various forms of participation. Thousands of amateur singers and dancers all over Latvia create the majority of participants in the Celebration. However, there are also smaller and hypothetically significant stakeholder groups such as municipalities, cultural policy makers and creative professionals, such as choir conductors and choreographers etc.

We aim to identify different groups of stakeholders involved in the process and to understand which are the most powerful ones and what is the role of creative professionals in the preservation of tradition. In the study we shall apply stakeholder analysis approach, starting from the presumption that stakeholders are groups and individuals who can affect, or are affected by, the achievement of an organization's mission (Freeman 2010: 52). We plan to understand who are the main stakeholder groups by drawing a stakeholder map. Second step would be to clarify their interests using the stakeholder’s matrix (Lindenberg and Crosby 1981), to identify the level of impact and power using the power versus interest grid (Eden and Ackermann 1998). We expect to understand the transactions among the organisation and creative professional group and to deduce their power and place in the stakeholder map and the organisational processes. Multiple data sources - qualitative semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and document analysis will be combined.

The stakeholder paradigm and its implementation in practice are still relatively unexplored. Potentially the study will have practical implications in the development of policies for the preservation of Song and Dance Celebration tradition on a national and local level in the future.