Cultural Managers’ Education and Cultural Ecosystems’ Transfigurations : The Case of COSM Modules in Finland

This text deals with the example of cultural managers’ education format that follows the changes in cultural ecosystems that impact cultural professionals’ practice globally. The initiative called COSM (Culture, Organization and Sustainability Management) is tested in Finland and aims to re-define cultural management professionals’ role and competencies from the side of sustainability values. These values are approached in a particular way to adapt and strengthen the role of cultural managers when assisting all types of responsible or ethically balanced activities, in environmental, social, and economic sense. The goal of that format is also to strengthen sustainability values-oriented practices of leaders and employees of creative and cultural organizations or cultural heritage sites inside their ecosystems that include ethical and balanced cultural work environments. Finally, it deals as well with cultural professionals being prepared to respond to the unexpected and crisis circumstances. The sequence of the article content consists of three elements, the first refers to the metaphor of cultural ecosystems and gives the examples based on festivals. The second part of the article is the introduction of the COSM courses as the example case of the educational response to the current needs of the cultural management profession. The discussion on the cultural professionals’ identity is referred to in that fragment of the paper. The third component of the article presents the outcomes of the COSM educational experiment based on the feedback collected from participants. The concluding part is a summary that brings the perspective of cultural organizations' reality and the multiple roles of cultural professionals in the future.