In recent decades, arts and cultural management has become increasingly professionalized: Many countries around the world now have special programs and trainings for arts and cultural professionals. Additionally, work in cultural organisations and arts projects is increasingly based on evaluations and international exchange of experience. Nevertheless, their daily work practice often still is dominated by the gut feelings as well as subjective perceptions and attitudes of arts and cultural managers. This is despite the fact that arts and cultural management research has become an expert discipline in its own right, researching working practices and providing data, information and impulses for the improvement of arts and cultural management practices.

Thus, there is a gap between the results of arts and cultural management research and daily work in the organisations. This issue of Arts Management Quarterly aims to explore what causes this gap and wants to present examples of how it can be bridged. Possible questions for contributions to address are: What are current patterns of exchange between the two fields? How do researchers know what is of interest to practitioners? And how do practitioners learn about research findings? What do they need to gain more knowledge about the other field? What would be necessary to change work routines to be able to implement the acquisition and application of the other field’s knowledge? What obstacles are there to research-practice transfer? What is the role of cultural policy regarding the creation of corresponding frameworks? How can and should educational formats change in order to connect the two fields? And of course: What are good examples of projects where the knowledge transfer worked excellently and contributed to an improvement in a cultural institution or project?

We are looking for contributions from all continents, by arts and cultural managers from all sectors, by researchers, educators and actors from cultural policy. We are also interested in studies on the effectiveness and outcomes of exchange processes, formats, networks, and so on.