A Struggle of Capitals Over the Identity and the Cultural Offering of Festivaletteratura: The Organizational Impact of Audience Development

In this chapter, we explore the case of Festivaletteratura, the most important Italian literary festival, which in the last few years experienced an internal struggle over its cultural offering and cultural identity. Part of the organizational staff, fearing an ageing of the audience, started an audience development project aimed at using the knowledge acquired as a source of cultural capital. Conversely, those organizational bodies not willing to change the cultural offering of the festival relied on symbolic capitals acquired over the years. We make sense of the moves and countermoves of the agents involved in this symbolic struggle through the concept of institutional work, aimed at maintaining or disrupting existing institutions, and show that the most relevant institution in this case is composed by the programme meetings, where the actual cultural offering of each edition of the festival is defined.