Art leadership in Turkey: A case study through Pozitif grubu

This thesis tries to discover, a style of leadership in arts organizations in Turkey, for the first time, that supports creative outcomes most effectively. This is done using ideas from leadership theories that appear in Chap 2. Pozitif Grubu,a well-established, for-profit company based in Istanbul, is analyzed as an art leader in two aspects: (1) bringing together music and masses using contemporary methods for the last 25 years;y; (2) as a record producer and distributer that successfully fuses Turkish music with world music so that "modernity evolves from local culture" as in Göle's book Engineers and Ideology. Since this is an empirical study on political leaders in Turkey that have come to power mainly because they were well-educated English-speaking engineers, I noticed a perfect match between them and the founders of Pozitif. The Case Study method that was utilized to analyze Pozitif includes: (i) summarizing interviews (published previously in the press) with the three engineer co-founders of Pozitif (ii) doing a face-to-face interview with Pozitif co-founder Ahmet Uluğ (iii) doing an Association Rule Discovery Experiment based on surveys filled out by 8 top executives. This experiment produced answers which could not have been attained by asking direct questions to respondents. Using an association rule discovery algorithm to find answers to questions that could not have been directly asked to respondents is a novelty that this thesis puts forward. Finally, Pozitif's leaders were assessed using the criteria of artistic excellence, international recognition, innovation and distinction, community ownership (of Pozitif's values), and financial stability. It was decided that Pozitif's leaders deserve top "grades" in all of these aspects.