The conceptual roots of modern museum management dilemmas

2012/05/01 by Alf Hatton
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Museums and Cultural Heritage #Cultural Industries and Urban Development #Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research

paper · doi:10.1080/09647775.2012.674319

Abstract

The conceptual roots of museums in classical times are the roots of most museum management dilemmas. The professional literature reveals a continuous search for contemporary relevance, but continued to dichotomise collecting, stewardship and scholarship vs. services to various publics, only settling more or less on an all-purpose paradigm in the late twentieth century. Do genuinely different types of museums exist with different social purposes and thus quite distinct strategies and performance measures? It is time for museums to ‘speciate’ into distinctly different institutions, with different aims, outgrowing their twentieth-century default paradigm and for leadership to embrace evolution of purpose, generating major transformational change.

Citations

• A PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR ALL SEASONS?
• The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields

Related

• Museums and the ‘new museology’: theory, practice and organisational change
• A Discomforting Definition of Museum
• Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture
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• The definition of the museum through its social role