The Conceptual Roots of Modern Museum Management Dilemmas

May 2012
Museum Management and Curatorship 27(2):129-147
DOI:10.1080/09647775.2012.674319
Authors: Alf Hatton

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 20th century. Do genuinely different types of museums exist with
different social purposes, thus quite distinct strategies and performance measures? It
is time for museums to ‘speciate’ into distinctly different institutions, with different
aims, outgrowing their 20th century default paradigm and for leadership to embrace
evolution of purpose, generating major transformational change.

Keywords:
Museums, social purpose, performance measurement, strategy, leadership, speciation,
evolution.

The roots of modern museum management dilemmas: museums’ social

purpose(s)?

Introduction
My central argument is that the conceptual roots of museums in classical times have
underpinned most museum management dilemmas and continue to do so. The
evidence is by an enduring, often polarised debate about social purpose, sub-surface
in museum discourse now. A notable exception is a week’s seminar dedicated to the
topic - ‘The Museum’s Social Purpose: Temple or Forum?’ (The Baltic Museology
School 2008).

Taking a long view of museological literature, drawing mainly UK references and

some non-UK viewpoints (e.g. Bradburne 2001), it seems to be the museum’s
conceptual framework that needs closer scrutiny, rather than one country’s
management of them as institutions.

I attempt to address a long-standing museum management issue: the complexities of

serving multiple purposes supported by multiple masters. I suggest a kind of
speciation, a new typology of museums is overdue, and that this is the next, really big
challenge for leadership, i.e. replacing the dominant paradigm where it still lingers.

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Such speciation should lead to museums perfectly clear about purpose (mission),
community/communities (markets, if you prefer, audiences), and a very small number
of key performance measures, well balanced between quantitative metrics gauging
progress against agreed aims/objectives (input, throughout and output) and qualitative
ones indicating effectiveness (pursuing outcomes).

Of course, paradigm shifts (Lakatos 1978) only work when a critical mass of
influences penetrates to core concepts, shared meanings and understanding. A huge
accumulation of evidence for change is needed before such break-throughs occur.
There is a very small research literature on how to recognise those strategic issues
which will become significant (see Dutton 1993, 1997; Dutton and Duncan 1987;
Dutton and Jackson 1987). The concept has not been explored in museums. A robust
and very public debate about social purpose and the sub-issues of measurement,
effectiveness, etc., might be illuminated by exploring this notion of ‘strategic issues’.

My aim is to provoke debate about the transformation of museums’ purpose well into
the 3rd Millennium.

Performance and measurement

After a survey of the "voluminous literature", Codrington concluded in 1936:

"It is, however, only too evident that the ideal museum has been built many
times verbally. What has never been done is to pin down the ideas that lurk
behind all this well-intentioned idealism and so to clear our minds as to what
can be done with a museum and, conversely what cannot." (1936, 464) [My
emphasis]

The museum’s social purpose(s), at least in the profession’s own literature,

warehouses a very wide range of ideas, continuously debated, and often arising,
disguised as it were, when management actions, especially management of change,
are discussed.

There is a continuing search for contemporary relevance, with occasional pleas for
more ‘traditional’ purposes, usually described as ‘narrower’, and if not preservation
and scholarship per se, then some “balanced mix”. Dickenson describes the gap:

"It must be emphasized here that the museum that diverts all its energy away
from its traditional roles as collector and preserver of the works of man and
the products of nature does so as its own peril... Too often, museum staffs feel
that the custodial function is justification enough for public acceptance. They
lose sight of the institution's larger social role." (1988, 149)

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A UK governmental agency appealed for “a balance… between collecting,
stewardship and scholarship, on the one hand, and presenting the results of that work
to the public on the other” (Audit Commission 1994).

This dichotomised debate persisted for a long time, even beyond western
perspectives: at times ‘Pan-Africanism’ and ‘Pan-Americanism’ have been posited as
the post-colonial museum social purpose in Africa and South America.

It is healthy for professions to engage continuously (i) in lively debate about their
institutions’ purpose and (ii) by extension contemporary utility. But it is also worth
acknowledging that this debate, as much as anything, is about the profession’s own
relevance.

However, it is unhealthy when debates remain polarised, sub-surface, or fog decision-

making, action, and service delivery to contemporary society, i.e. the ‘daily work’ of
all professions.

Museum social purpose can be further deconstructed:

• Is there unity of purpose, a ‘meta-purpose’, delivering a single, common

service to society?
• If there is, do museums have a monopoly? Or do they have competitors? If
so, how well are museums competing?
• Alternatively, do plural purposes exist, providing different services to society?
• Is there some scale of ‘museumness’ (Van Haven 1995) along which museums
can position themselves?
• Are there genuinely different museum types, fulfilling totally different
purposes, needing quite distinct measures?
• Do different purposes exist in different societies? Has there been change over
time, an evolutionary path from basic repository to cultural forum?
• How flexibly do museums respond to changing demands on them?

Changes of purpose, and emphasis in purpose, do occur and have even been observed
in more scientifically-oriented museums (Sheets-Pyenson 1987, 352) where one might
have expected less change, following orthodox museum rhetoric:

“ ‘the museum’ has persistently witnessed significant changes in its academic

and intellectual frameworks” (McPherson 2006, 45).

UK museums, within that dominant rhetoric, seem to have had difficulties justifying
purpose, and by extension, budgets, a constant in museum discourse, as far back as
the 1930's (Markham 1938).

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Social purpose and decision-making in general, does have very real consequences for
“day-to-day” operations:

• How is performance to be measured?

• Do measures-in-use reflect real or perceived social functions?
• Do measures applied actually generate assumptions about specific social
purposes, and by default, exclusion of others?

If we accept differing purposes do legitimately exist, then different measures are

needed to reflect differing outcomes. Such measures would need to be designed
specifically to measure each different purpose, as opposed to being obscured by
generic quantitative measures. Hooper-Greenhill (1988) memorably captured this
dilemma: “Counting visitors or visitors who count?”

A more balanced approach would be required to make sense of museum outcomes in

a world of different purposes. Some work is now appearing which addresses this, e.g.
Worts (2006), Hewison (2006), Holden (2006), Sibilio Parri (2007). Among others,
sustainability and cultural capital are emerging as key themes.

Over-simplified performance measures - visitor figures - will not address all purposes.
This then is the ‘mission critical’ future management challenge: to define a key
performance indicators set that accurately reflects a museum’s publicly stated
purpose.

Orienting museums primarily towards local citizens, visitors to the city, or both,
whilst not irreconcilable aims, at the very least suggests quite distinct marketing and
interpretation strategies, since these quite distinct visitor segments each require
different approaches in initial orientation and visitor services.

The locally-oriented museum may flourish with lower income generation. It will
have worked out that the key to satisfying a local population is repeat visits, building
a high frequent visitor base (Merriman 1989a; 1989b; 1991, 47 et seq.). Its “growth”
objective will be to increase the proportion of its local population who become actual
visitors. It will seek to diversify its audience across all the different communities its
stakeholders represent. In the UK context for at least the last thirty years, this has
meant attracting ‘non-traditional’ audiences: the “access”, “outreach” and “culture as
a tool for social inclusion” agendas (Hayes and Slater 2002). This museum will
operate more as a service than as a destination. It will design services/products
specific to each audience segment/user group needs and expectations.

Conversely, the inward tourist-oriented museum will do more in signage from major
arterial traffic routes, car parks, bus and train stations, and for pedestrians, more in
visitor orientation as a prerequisite to satisfying visits. More significant measures will
be dwell times and visitor spend. It will partner with other tourist agencies to increase

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visitor flow into the city – and the museum - aiming at ‘high value’ tourists who stay
longer and spend more, as well as other segments: day visitors; weekend visitors;
VFR (visiting family and relatives).

It will manage these different segments to iron out ‘peaks and troughs’ in its audience
seasonality, each segment likely operating at different points in the annual tourist
cycle. It will minimise operating costs where location permits seasonality adjustment,
i.e. not opening its doors to ever dwindling visitor numbers per hour. In other words,
it will use marginal cost as a key analytical tool.

Though clearly not irreconcilable goals, many UK museums still seem to aim to work
at both ends of this spectrum and many other points along it simultaneously, the “all-
purpose” paradigm. This may simply be an accumulation of roles, rather than
considered choice. Yet, failure to clarify a museum’s predominant role(s) perpetuates
the problem of the relatively undifferentiated product for the presumed homogeneous
museum audience (Hatton 1999, 292).

Lack of product differentiation fails to address visitor variation and varying degrees of
skills in reading museum exhibits. It fails to notice that the ‘nuclear family’ on a day
out or weekend ‘city break’ is seeking an experience altogether different from school
groups at various educational stages. The homogeneous museum audience simply
does not exist and only a very small number of museums have the resources to pursue
satisfactorily the “all-purpose” paradigm.

Organizational effectiveness has been an issue over time. In its current form, part of
the “new public management” (Hood 1991; Falconer and McLaughlin 2000), and in
the absence of clarity on purpose, museum effectiveness is moot. Even UK
government sponsored studies appear to have had little impact on actual practice
(DCMS 1999). The former Museums, Libraries & Archives Commission even
commissioned work on ‘Museum Trusts’, one aim of which was to establish a
methodology to “provide a suitable measure of effectiveness and efficiency” for
comparison between trust and non-trust museums. There is growing interest in
moving museums to trust status in response to budget problems, rather than as an
initiative to develop more strategic focus.

Interestingly, UK museums which do have clear strategic focus, and are often cited as
being more effective, are Independent Museums, trusts with well-established
entrepreneurial activities.

Museums’ conceptual roots

Though undoubtedly ‘modern’ as we now experience them, museum conceptual roots
can be traced back to Europe’s Classical Period. Institutes for scholarship existed
throughout the classical world and vied with temples and treasure houses, all of which
in some sense offered value statements: scholars’; priests’; wealthy owners’.

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Institutes collected manuscripts, objects of curiosity, and objects of scientific interest.
Temples assembled relics and votive offerings. The wealthy showed off their wealth
by collecting relics, curiosities, statuary. The further afield collected, the more status
bestowed.

These antecedents have been well documented (Lewis 1992, 5), and there is evidence
that such organised collecting is not just a European phenomenon (Ripley 1969, 19;
Lewis, ibid.).

The scope and development of conceptual roots over time can be illustrated
chronologically (Figure 1):

Figure 1: Accumulated social purpose

This illustrates the evolving museum form, roles acquired over time as societies
evolved, becoming multi-layered, moving towards a “greater critical and socially
substantive role” (Harrison 2002).

In the post-mediaeval period, monasteries, churches and the wealthy maintained

treasure houses, collections of curiosities and relics, perpetuating the classical world’s
museum-like activity. The collections of the wealthy then grew into the Cabinetti and
Wunderkammer of the 16th and 17th centuries, the ‘early modern’ roots of the modern
museum.

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There was ‘theory’ to underpin this in what became known as the ‘Van Quiccheberg
Principle’ (Lewis 1984; Greenhalgh 1989), building an “encyclopaedic model” with
collections, the ‘holy grail’ of museum thinking then and often since. Van
Quiccheberg authored perhaps the first book on museum theory: Inscriptiones Tituli
theatri Amplissimi in 1565. One Dutch university even has a Samuel van
Quiccheberg Award for the final year thesis (Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de
Kunsten).

That principle pervaded the establishment of modern public museums everywhere.

Many internationally well-known museums have their institutional ancestry firmly
embedded in such collections, often starting with a single collector’s assembly, e.g.
the British Museum, the Sir Hans Sloane Museum, and others. This marks the first
major historical shift, from private to public collections delivering the same perceived
benefits but to wider audiences.

The phenomenon is not extinct. In 1973, Sir Robert (1906 -2000) and Lady Lisa
Sainsbury (1912- ) donated their world art collection to become the University of East
Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre, opened to visitors in 1978. It now maintains many of
these ‘ancient’ museum functions, notably scholarship, not least in its thriving
postgraduate museum studies programme.

Some older social purpose notions are worth exploring. Colbert (1961) saw museums
as a federation of research institutes, believing that the Cabinetti were the true
precursors of the modern museum, with only two primary functions: preservation and
interpretation. The primary function is a repository for objects worthy of
preservation. Only secondarily, museums were about interpretation, via exhibition
and research, exhibition growing out of research, a fairly commonly held, and often
forcefully argued, view of purpose for much of the 20th Century.

Tourism directed at forming national identity is definitely not a recent purpose (Horne
1984). This notion of national identity has been revived very recently in the UK
(Harris 2011). However, Mead regretted the museum being allowed to become
“merely a place to go...” (1970, 23) [My emphasis].

The ‘modern museum’ really begins mid-20th century (Alexander 1979, 6-8; 88;
Lowenthal 1985, 75; Meyer 1979, 18), defined mostly in terms of its operations, i.e.
what it does:

• Collection - ‘heritage’ agency, assembling objects believed in need of

preservation, intervening to prevent decay or loss
• Research - academic evaluation of objects as ‘evidence’
• Exhibition - public exposition of new knowledge

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 • Interpretation – translation from scientific language into forms understandable
by the public
• Exemplars of Enjoyment, Recreation, or Refreshment (the original Muse idea)
(Weil 1983, 32-51)
• Education in the broadest sense, to learn what's new or simply to learn (ibid)
• Value-stating roles (ibid)

Welsh (2005) provides a different synthesis in a three-stage chronological

perspective:

“Museums as:

• What museums have been: Repositories; Educational; Celebratory

• What museums are becoming: Stewards; Learning Centers; Collaborative

• What museums could become: Conceptual; Reflexive; Complicitous”

This then marks a second major historical shift: from emphasis on what museums do
to the beneficiaries of those services, a switch from concentration on functions to
outputs, and possibly the beginning of an end to museum closed system thinking
(Peters & Waterman 1982, 91).

Many historic notions of purpose connect easily with the later one of ‘civic pride’,
towns competing for better collections/museums, thus improved status. Many
Victorian museums were also based initially upon one collection.

A late 20th century version of this status league was some UK museums competing to
purchase ‘old masters’. It survives somewhat in the trend, from the 1980s onwards,
of relocating museums to redundant post-industrial sites such as docks. This does
appear to have had relatively positive economic regeneration effects. It even lurks in
the UK’s frenzied, grant-driven development of new “heritage visitor attractions” in
the 1990s.

That museums act as collective social institutions making cultural value-statements in

the widest sense has been observed from the 1970s onwards and by notable museum
professionals:

• Museums as a ‘non-verbal reality models’ (Cameron 1971, 16)

• Museums as sanitisation of the past(s) (Green 1985, 6)
• Museums as filters of taste - arbiter elegantiarum (Strong 1986, 19)
• Museums as collective community memory (Gurian 2006, 2), forming and
shaping that memory, being shaped by it.

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While latent purposes such as treasure, fetish, and symbolism, explicit or implicit,
have been acknowledged, purpose has broadened significantly to include notions such
as cultural centres and social instruments, museums becoming multifunctional with
developed social awareness and a drive for topical relevance.

Innovative thinking on relevance for art museums (Newsom and Silver 1978), and
more broadly recently (Silverman 1991, 1995; Silverman and Masberg 1996; Janes
and Conaty 2005; Worts 2006) was given impetus by two recent publications, one
covering a range of the social work museums can undertake , the other exploring the
audience-professional communication/interpretation gap in depth (Silverman 2009;
Janes 2009).

Yet all these notions of social purpose have been integral to museums since their 19th
century development as public institutions, and seem to have been in contention since
then. There were extremely high hopes in the 19th century for museum social
efficacy:

"museums and libraries began to be founded as a distraction and refreshment

for the working population. They were to raise the moral and educational tone
of cities - and counteract drunkenness and fornication." (Hewison 1987, 86)

Mischievously, one might suggest it was a good thing that there were no performance
indicators at that time! Or perhaps, museums do need to consider this kind of topical,
direct social agency?

The dichotomised debate on social purpose was deeply embedded. Perhaps most
striking was the dichotomisation itself. Museums were/are for one thing or another:
education vs. entertainment; scholarship vs. interpretation; conservation vs. access;
free admission vs. “commercial” operations; object-based scholarly and/curatorial
practice vs. accountability to a wider set of public(s); professionalism vs. audience;
connoisseurship vs. public experience; museums as businesses vs. museums as
educators; visitor expectations vs. available resources (Watkins 1994). Yet these
were not seen until much later as a spectrum of legitimate options.

Sir David Wilson, a former British Museum Director, called it the museum’s “twin
purposes” (1989). Gurian captured it perfectly: “object-focussed instructors vs.
client-centred includers” (2006, 3).

This is older, more established “formalist” (Ettema 1987, 64) lobbies contending with
newer, “analytical” (ibid, 74) ones, often identified in practice and rhetoric as object-
focus versus user-focus. It also marks the arrival of the “New Museology” (Vergo
1989).

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It is still being observed (Cameron 1992) and as an on-going tension. McPherson
argues that “despite the political deployment of a discourse of inclusion, the
fundamentals of museum culture have not changed over time (2006, 47).

Is addressing this strategic issue a central, regional or local governmental

responsibility: “He who pays the piper calls the tune”? In the interests of transparent
decision-making, how much influence should museum professionals have in view of
their vested interests?

It can also be seen as a quasi-moral dilemma, a function of the historical period in

which the ‘modern museum’ developed, perpetuating a Victorian ideal:

"...one of the cardinal principles of the mid-century; that public amusement

should be combined with education. Pleasure with instruction was what the
masses needed." (Steegman 1987, 230-1) [My emphasis]

Cameron suggested this was all a question of the institutionalisation of what were
previously individual reality models (1971, 16). When these became collectively
owned by communities or society at large, a conflict of interest in those values arose,
consciously or not. It has also been ascribed to the growth in subjects in museums
like social history, with differing academic approaches:

"competing approaches to the problem of linking artefacts and education...

not... self-conscious schools of thought so much as perspectives or tendencies
of thought, frequently based on unexamined assumptions about what history is
and what it is for." (Ettema 1987, 62-3 [My emphasis]

Contemporaneously, these issues can be reduced to a simple test of whether museums

serve the community as a whole, or specific sections of the larger community.
Measurement must reflect this too. Some measures will indicate what museums do
for society in general. Others will indicate what they do for targeted sections.

A vivid example is the UK University Museums’ current dilemma. On the one hand,
their governmental body wants to assess them against contributions to general
research and teaching; on the other, the main ‘quango’ for research funds has had
them addressing their public stewardship of collections for some years (Heywood
2009)!

Knowing that museums’ civic responsibilities have always been in flux “in response
to social, discursive and economic imperatives” (Cameron 2008, 2) is not enough.
The profession has to develop the means of moving forwards to new visions of social
purpose, defined not by collections, funding agency, or emphasis in one or other ‘core
functions’. Failure to innovate on will be a failure of both museum and political
leadership.

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The third major historical shift, in the last quarter of the 20th century, was to de-
emphasise the “all-purpose” in favour of embedding a “multi-purpose” paradigm.
The dichotomisation of purpose was settled, more or less, in the late 1980’s/early
1990’s, evidenced by two publications: Excellence and Equity: Education and the
Public Dimension of Museums, (American Association of Museums 1992) and A
Common Wealth - Museums in the learning age (Anderson 1999).

Both espoused “and” in social purpose, rather than “either/or”; both prioritised public
service, specifically education over research and scholarship, the latter emphasizing
UK museums as centres for both formal and informal learning, and noting the arrival
of the digital museum within an emergent cultural network. For UK museums there
was also empirical evidence gathered from top decision-makers whereby
organizational survival depended on education being the strategic focus (Hatton 2001,
2005).

ICOM, too, acknowledges that museums must evolve line with social developments.
Its current definition dates from 2007:

“A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and

its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches,
communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity
and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment”.
(http://icom.museum/who-we-are/the-vision/museum-definition.html)

Have governments responded to the kind of open-ended social policy that museums
advocate? Unfortunately not - it is evident that their drives towards ever-increasing
efficiency by use of generic performance measures has excluded opportunities for
transformation, greater focus, and thus greater effectiveness, leading to a sort of
government-sponsored institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983;
Frumkin and Galaskiewicz 2004; Ashworth, Boyne and Delbridge 2007), in effect a
normative process antipathetic to creative strategizing!

This accumulation of often tacit social purpose may be the origin of museum myopia
(Janes 2008, email pers. com.), echoing Levitt’s marketing myopia (1960), i.e.
concentrating on ‘what’ at the expense of ‘why’. Merely stating what museums do
for society – but not why –left unargued, has bequeathed a tacit, assumed to be
understood by all, “good thing that has to be weighed against other good things”
(Wilding 1985, 122). So, the continuing need to justify relevance is unsurprising, and
the consequences for decision-making of not addressing this are also unsurprising.

A Value Chain Analysis of operations (Hatton 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 1994, 330)

clearly indicates that choice of purpose does exist. Secondly, choice clearly effects
strategy, and substantially ‘reverse engineers’ operations.

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Such different outcomes are perfectly feasible, demonstrated both by the profession’s
own thinking on social purpose expressed in its own literature, and its evolution from
“what” museums do to “why” museums do them at all. This is evidence of an
emergent and highly significant move from ‘operational’ to ‘strategic’ museum
thinking (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: A contemporary museum value chain model

This is the current watershed for museums, the potential for transition, to innovate
new forms by audience, communications media, or other as yet unexplored formats.
This ought to be their fourth major historical shift!

Policy and strategy

Social purpose was neither fully explored, nor significantly challenged by UK funding
agencies until the late 20th century when the Audit Commission (1991) took an
overtly managerialist perspective. As Piber et al have stated “accounting and
performance measurement is a device for governing activities, individuals and
budgets” (2007, 3) [My emphasis], identifying a values clash:

“Museums are caught between the expectations of their stakeholders and the
limited resources available... Both, different sets of values as well as different
perspectives on the generation of benefits lead to a certain cultural clash
between artistic freedom and managerial frames.” (ibid, 4-5)

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Yet, museums are more complicated than corporations. They have both public and
private funds, direct governmental support and earned revenues, are
“professionalized, value-driven… offering ‘intangible’ products and services, in a
mixed public and nonprofit sector economy…” (Hatton 2007, 117). Unfortunately,
most management theorising focuses on large organisations, from which the
corporate, ‘strategy’/’mission statement’ liturgy derives. Museums fall into an
altogether different category:

“… organizations… [that] have problems of decision making under

complexity, uncertainty, and conflict… housing cooperatives, unemployed
workers’ groups, community health councils, environmental pressure groups,
tenants’ associations, trade union branches, community centres, etc.”
(Rosenhead 1989, 8-9).

All this gives museums utterly different dimensions to more traditionally corporate
organisations.

Zan (2000) explored a very public embodiment of this values clash at the British
Museum. An example receiving far less press was the Natural History Museum’s
new HR policies (Smedley 2007), where a combination of new director and new head
of HR generated strategic shifts in “thinking” about the nature of the museum and its
workforce:

“One of the challenges that the museum has is... getting people to recognise
that the museum is bigger than the sum of the individual parts. Being a
corporate citizen is just as important as being a citizen of, say, the botany
department. That’s a really significant driver of everything we’re doing in
HR.”

Another complexity is that “Museums, like many other heritage attractions, are
essentially experiential products.” (Prentice 1996, 169), but can appear to have made
little adjustment in practice:

“Museums have traditionally been less reliant on direct revenues from their
visitors, and more on sources perceived – now with less certainty – as assured
into the indefinite future,,. This has retarded the development of an audience-
orientation…” (MacDonald and Alsford, 1995, 131).

UK Museums seem to assume long-term existence, rather than having to compete for
continued existence in lightly or unregulated markets as in some other countries, e.g.
the USA. They work mainly on a principle of indirect economic exchange, rather
than direct, i.e. taxation in return for goods/services that many who pay, and have no

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choice in paying, will never utilise. Thus, most museums seem to make decisions on
political and economic factors, rather than formal managerial frameworks.
They do provide valuable benefits not listed in mission statements to many
communities. Communities support museums financially in return, if somewhat
passively. Over time, these benefits – economic impact, quality of life, sense of
community, etc. – become tacit purpose, rarely explicit.
The assumption cannot go unchallenged that once opened, all museums achieve
perpetual existence as of right. Each places a continuing burden on the public purse.
Yet the UK has no systematic review process for this strategically unmanaged,
publicly funded, part of the heritage landscape.

Leadership development – the way forward

Key issues for future museum leaders, in addition to maintaining or growing audience
share, attracting new audiences, and innovating to do so, will be balancing public
funding, grants and donations with greater and more sustainable income generation,
thereby lending an even more ‘entrepreneurial’ dimension than demanded previously.

To do this, they must provide visitor facilities and experiences appropriate to their
selected audiences, based on ‘real time’ user data, and actively research non-users. In
short, they must begin to embed market research as routine.

One UK policy that both informed leadership and changed practice notably was
‘Renaissance in the Regions’, with workforce development a key theme for the ‘Hub’
museums created. There are now fears for its continuation under current financial
constraints.

This kind of collaborative working was not entirely new: good examples existed
before ‘Renaissance’, e.g. GLLAM - the Group for Large Local Authority Museums
(1999), and SLAM - smaller local authority museums (2001), both formed for
benchmarking.

UK National Museum Directors also recognised leadership capacity as an issue, took

action to address it, setting up a Working Party, actively supporting the Clore
Leadership Programme, and proactively establishing ‘Leading Networks’ for existing
leaders:

“To build individuals’ capacity and strengthen and sustain leadership within
the sector, encouraging individuals to develop their skills and gather
appropriate experience.” (www:nationalmuseums.org.uk/)

The Clore Leadership programme is probably the most high profile initiative. Their
report (Clore Foundation 2002) emphasized leadership rather than management, and

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barriers such as the ‘culture of professionalism’, identified earlier in the Holland
Report (Museum Training Institute 1997).

One has to wonder again at the low status of ‘management’ relative to ‘leadership’
(Holmes and Hatton 2008), yet, unpicking ‘museum leadership’ rhetoric reveals
extensive discussion of ‘management skills’.

Peacock counselled that there is “a gap in our [museums’] understanding about how
change happens and how we can to shape its outcomes” (2008, 334). Leadership is
about navigating change. Leadership development is about developing change
capacity and capability.

The need is for a broad-based leadership whose purpose is to create environments in

which others’ contributions are optimised, and where collaboration is generated
within museums, across heritage and other agencies, with communities and online,
delivering results across organisational boundaries.

The profession has to develop both strategic thinking and transformational leadership
to develop museums well beyond the 20th century “all-purpose” paradigm and
management skills adequate to the complex tasks of routine transactional decision-
making, not one or the other.

Research evidence
Research suggests leaders can reframe ‘issues’ as organizational tensions (Huxham
and Beech 2000) that need to be managed more effectively, not as conflicts in need of
resolution. Much energy could be saved by this simple shift in ‘thinking’ alone.

Unusually for museums, there have been a number of empirical studies that present
convincing evidence that leadership development and strategic thinking are the way
forward. Bradford (1991, 1992) addressed strategic management through practitioner
interviews on marketing practice. Abraham and others (1999) found leadership to be
critical to effectiveness. Fisher (2002) elicited views on the extent of audience focus,
another effectiveness critical issue. Suchy (1998, 1999, 2004) addressed leadership
by name and unsurprisingly finding it critical to success. The so-called ‘soft skills’
needed for multiple partnership working, ‘leadership’s bedrock’, emerged from a
strategic thinking study (Hatton 2001, 2002, 2005).

The latter revealed that top UK museum decision-makers’ majority activities then
consisted of:

• “Building alliances internally and externally

• Multi-agency working
• Managing key figures upwards
• Engaging in PR and advocacy

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 • Managing relationships
• Managing Elected Members
• Managing relationships with Chairs and Trustees, and
• Dealing with the role of politics and politicians”.

These skills precisely underpin the broad-based leadership referred to above. Some
respondents even went so far as to state the need for ‘culture change’. It is possible to
observe new forms of strategy now emerging as museum leaders embrace these new
job dimensions.

They are also ‘high order’ interpersonal behaviours likely to be addressed in

leadership development. They underpin existing transformational changes towards
greater collaboration, networking and partnership. They are the ‘stuff of leadership’
in all organizations (Mintzberg 1973, 1975; Kurke and Aldrich 1983).

This is about finding the ‘space’ for management to ‘look up’ from the daily juggling
of competing stakeholders and priorities, so as not to over-emphasize the struggle to
maintain funding and to ‘park’, momentarily, the transactional and the routine. In
doing so, they may be inspired to ‘scenario plan’ greater transformation, realizing
strategic ‘leaps’ away from the lurking ‘all-purpose’ paradigm towards more varied
and focused, ‘speciated’ roles, intentionally pursuing two or more strategically
selected purposes toward a ‘best fit’ in their particular cultural ecosystem.

Two thirds of this research, and my theorizing from it, has UK roots, but not all.
Abraham et al and Suchy conducted international surveys. So, it is important to re-
emphasize other very different museum histories, governance structures and
trajectories for “purpose” exist. US museums, for instance, have long relied on
diverse revenue sources, few being guaranteed permanent futures, and most have
long-developed audience orientation and sensitivity to changing economic forces.

Discussion
The convergence of key themes in research and emergent practice is significant.
Profound benefits exist for leaders in spending time with colleagues, away from day-
to-day work pressures, thinking and reflecting about leadership, and of course, the
museum’s social purpose, as Baltic colleagues have done, building a community of
museum leadership practice (Wenger 1998).

Communities of practice survive on ‘constituencies of meaning’, some sort of

professional orthodoxy.

“… institutional theory highlights cultural influences on decision making and

formal structures. It holds that organizations, and the individuals who
populate them, are suspended in a web of values, norms, rules, beliefs, and

16
 taken-for-granted assumptions that are at least partially of their own making.”
(Barley and Tolbert 1997)

Museum leaders are no different from other leaders: they work within a ‘bounded
rationality’, one reason museums can seem to be resistant to change. In other words,
the conversations that bind museums together also paradoxically generate resistance
to change.

This is one reason why museum decision-making is so internally consistent (Hatton

op. cit.), within the bounded rationality of the default paradigm. It is also why radical
change and far more rigorous strategizing about alternative museum futures seems
very unlikely without the catalyst of the current UK funding reductions.

Lack of overt, conscious thinking about a fuller spectrum of purpose is a pressing

strategic issue. Current UK museum orthodoxy needs to begin to address proactively
all the issues in the public sector operating environment with the potential to become
strategic. The fading all-purpose paradigm seems to be just one dimension to the
problem. The current financial crisis leading to budget cuts, possibly closures and
other short term responses, is but another.

This ‘meta-issue’ has been pointedly aired, in response partly to the current world
recession, partly also, one suspects, from long experience of managing unexplored
complexity in museum social purpose:

“And how are we going to lead our way out of this? Hopefully by not making
the same mistakes after the last recession where we struggled on manfully
with the same issues, not fighting for change, allowing money when it was
here, be it Heritage Lottery Fund or Renaissance, to paper over the cracks and
mask significant revenue challenges and museums on the brink of collapse.”
(Lees 2009, 14)

It is to be hoped that the political rhetoric of inclusion and accompanying need to

attract mass audiences caused by the need to generate income during the last major
crisis (Stephen, 2001), is not repeated so narrowly this time, missing the opportunity
for paradigm shift.

The alternative would be speciation, developing a new museum typology with single -
or dual at most - foci: community; education; object; interpretive form; even debate,
Cameron’s ‘Temple’ (1971) or Bradburne’s ‘laboratory for change’ (2001).
Speciation should lead to a range of ‘new millennium’ museums, still including, of
course, the large internationals (British Museum, Smithsonian, etc.), even large
regional museums, and smaller local ones. Some no doubt will cling to the default
paradigm as ‘safe’.

17
But, it should include many more museums with more tightly-focussed specialisations
in forms of interpretation (first or third person; ‘still theatre’; other ‘live’
interpretation; other forms of interaction), or even one audience group/market
segment (children; tourists; senior citizens; families; those in formal education, etc.).

That is, during the museum’s fourth transition, strategy will shift from the current
output focus to an outcome focus.

The paradigm shift can be illustrated by comparison with hospitals (Pheysey 1993,
175) organised simultaneously by:-

• function - medical, nursing, administration, support services

• type of client or patient - men, women, children, the old
• serial work stages - admissions, treatment, convalescence, discharges
• catchment area - regions, districts
• “transformation” effected - surgical, orthopaedic, obstetric
• time - out-patients, short stay, long stay
• workload stability - emergencies, acute or chronic conditions

The equivalent museum paradigm shift would be:-

• as now, function - curatorial, conservation, documentation, design,

interpretation, security, administration, support services
• customer, client or visitor/user - men, women, children, the old
• occasionally now, work stages - curatorial, conservation, documentation,
design, interpretation, security,
• the current museum ‘landscape’ - catchment area - regions, districts, cities,
neighbourhoods
• an older museum specialisation, “transformation” - archaeology,
social/industrial history, visual/decorative arts, ecology
• time - day-trippers, school parties, local residents, casual, occasional or frequent
visitors (Merriman 1991, 47), special interests (local archaeology/history
society, local wildlife group, etc.)
• workload stability - object identification, local arts groups using facilities,
exhibition visitors, school groups, holiday play activities

This new schema offers new ways of organising museums that reflect different
purposes and focuses tightly on questions of who museums users are, and what
“products” or “services” museums provide.

Their strategic decisions will be at least as robust as current museum decision-

making. But “millennium museum” achievements against more focussed goals will
be both more measurable and thus more noticeable to public and stakeholders alike.

18
None of this need cause anxiety for leadership - only exciting challenges! Strategic
shifts in mission occur now, only more often as reactions to funding crises – as now -
than proactive planning. What a pity to waste future talent repeating the reactive
cycles of the past, without seizing the opportunity for incremental institutional
learning and museum evolution!

Hopefully, what will have all but disappeared is the paradigmatic ‘one size fits all’
default whereby too many museums still strive to be ‘all-purpose’, carrying out the
same functions, providing much the same type of visitor experience for all types of
visitor. The new speciated museums will be confident in their decisions, in effect,
working in different fields or ‘industries’ (education, tourism, community cohesion,
etc.), not ‘dipping a toe’ in all at the same time or each episodically.

Museums must make more transparent, conscious choices about social purpose, what
they offer, to whom, and advocate those choices forcefully, or face the possibility of
growing irrelevance in the face of this millennium’s communications and media
advances. The Internet and Web 2.0, in this alternative museums future, will not be
mere “add on’s” and there will be many more ‘digital-only’ museums.

Now is the right time for leaders to use their political skills and innovate much more
in social purpose, explore social relevance more publicly, and perhaps, experiment
along the way!

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Biopic

Alf Hatton trained as a curator at Sunderland Museums, then held directorships in

Monmouth, Ipswich, Coventry and the Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery, Glasgow
University, interspersing these with academic posts at University College London,
Birmingham and Nottingham Trent Universities, Strathclyde Business School and the
North East Wales Institute. His interests are in psychological approaches to
leading/managing, decision-making, strategy, and organisational change. Previous
museum-related research includes organizational culture, performance indicators,
strategic decision-making and outwith museums, complexity in organisational change
and development.

Contact details:
Dr Alf Hatton,
Tel/fax: +44(0)1292500671
Email: [email protected]
Address: 22, Station Road, Fisherton, DUNURE, KA7 4LL, Scotland

27