Leadership in Cultural Organizations: Meaning Construction, Symbolic Legitimacy and Research Gaps. A Structured Review

Cultural organizations activate at the intersection of economic production logic and the symbolic logic of cultural meaning creation. This dual nature confers a distinctive organizational status, requiring specific forms of leadership, particular legitimation mechanisms, and structural tensions that are irreducible to general managerial models. Despite the centrality of leadership to organizational performance in the cultural sector, the international literature remains theoretically fragmented and geographically concentrated. The present article offers a structured review of this literature through a bibliometric analysis of a corpus of 297 documents indexed in Scopus for the period 2006–2026. Three complementary analyses were conducted using the bibliometrix package for R: a performance analysis examining annual scientific production, most productive countries and authors, and document-type distribution; a keyword co-occurrence network analysis identifying four thematic clusters; and a thematic map classifying research themes by centrality and density. Results show a significant acceleration of academic interest after 2020, a pronounced Anglo-Saxon geographic concentration, and marked theoretical fragmentation with no dominant authors or consolidated schools of thought. Most critically, the keyword network and thematic map confirm the near-total absence of sensemaking, symbolic legitimacy, and Bourdieusian field-theory perspectives in the existing literature - though these are central to understanding the actual mechanisms of leadership in cultural organizations. The article identifies four structural research gaps and argues for developing an integrated psychological-sociological-managerial framework to address the specificities of cultural leadership across diverse organizational types and geographic contexts, including Eastern European settings that are currently underrepresented in the field.