Archive for the 'Museums generally' Category
Museums Have Visitors: They Don’t Serve The Wishes Of Market Analysts
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Increasingly, criticism is being voiced about the destructive effect of the market on civilized society. This has even reached the hallowed halls of museums. Two leading museologists Robert Janes, formerly of Glenbow in Calgary and Maxwell Anderson, now Director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and formerly of the Whitney in New York have criticised this trend.Janes (“Museums, Corporatism and the Civil Society” Curator The Museum Journal 50(2): 219-237, 2007) observes, “the prevailing worldview in North America is grounded in the belief that continuous economic growth is essential to individual and societal well-being”. He argues that this is enfeebling or diverting museums from realizing their unique strengths and opportunities as social institutions in civil society: museums, he asserts, must exploit their uniqueness, resist domination of marketplace thinking and seek ways of achieving meaning and sustainability within their communities.
Anderson (“Prescriptions for Art Museums in the Decade Ahead”, Curator the Museum Journal 50(1), 9-18, 2007) asserts, “rather than following a path towards community service or an educational mandate, the [museum] field has been led astray by a corporate mindset.” Anderson identifies the primary challenges facing art museums in rebalancing their mission, and suggests a series of remedies to the unrealistic economic model that threatens to exclude education as museums’ primary mandate.
Before dismissing what is said below as overly ideological, consider this statement from John Gray (School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics) reviewing (in The Guardian September 15, 2007) Naomi Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Allen Lane).
“Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.
“Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.”
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of eight books and his essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and weekly in the Guardian (widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas). In an article in the Guardian last year (22 February 2007) Ash said,
“What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.”
In the last 40 or so years much of the business world and many governments (as expressed by New Public Management or NPM, particularly in developed western countries, have adopted market (or “rational”) economics and corporatism. Market mechanisms, according to this approach, should be allowed to determine production and pricing and government should stay out of the way of entrepreneurial business ventures. The focus is on the short term because the emphasis is efficiency as assessed by return on investment reflected in stock price as spruiked by stock market analysists. Rather than seeking new products and markets and quality service, the market oriented business seeks increase in the wealth of shareholders. (To varying extents, Nordic and some other European countries have been less prepared to adopt the market economic model.)
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What exactly is New Public Management and has it delivered?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
New Public Management or NPM, is the transfer of business and market principles and management techniques from the private into the public sector. In the view of Wolfgang Drechsler, Professor in the Technology Governance Program at Tallinn University in Estonia, it is the most important reform movement within the public sphere over the last quarter of a century. The goal of NPM is, in Dreschler’s words, “a slim, reduced, minimal state in which any public activity is decreased and, if at all, exercised according to business principles of efficiency. NPM is based on the belief that all human behavior is motivated by self-interest and, specifically, profit maximization.”
Wikipedia describes NPM as “a broad and very complex term used to describe the wave of public sector reforms throughout the world since the 1980s. [NPM is] based on public choice and managerial schools of thought [which] seek to enhance the efficiency of the public sector and the control that government has over it. The main hypothesis … is that more market orientation in the public sector will lead to greater cost-efficiency for governments, without having negative side effects on other objectives and considerations.”
The application of NPM has had a great effect on governments in many countries and continues to do so in several countries including Australia and Canada. There is every reason why Boards and Directors of museums should be aware of these matters and doing their best to minimize the application of market economics and its outgrowths like NPM and Public Choice Theory.
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Advancing Museums and Organisational Change
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
There are several new items on museums as organizations and achieving change. Firstly, I have recently come across some excellent pieces relating to teamwork.
A Peter Day program on the BBC (which incidentally includes stuff about the Cambridge Boat Race team) featured amongst other people Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School. On her website there is a link to a podcast by her dealing with teams. The BBC piece is extremely interesting. Of course one of the reasons I liked it is that yet again it demonstrates what we can learn from other people and other organisations, in this case from the mobile phone giant Nokia and the University boat races on the Thames.
By the way, a recently broadcast piece on the ABC Radio National program “All in the Mind” dealt with apes and it would be a challenge to work out what one can conclude from that about how human groups work.
In the recently started ‘ning’ (an online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network) deals amongst other things with achieving organisational change and there is a post there which may be of interest.
Before finishing, a recent appointment to directorship of a large museum in Australia and the reaction to it highlights some of the challenges museums face. This is also dealt with in Museum 3.0.
Last, A paper entitled “Advancing Museums” has just been published in Museum Management and Curatorship.
Here is an extended abstract of the paper.
In the last 40 or so years museums, like many other nonprofit organizations, have focused to a greater extent on the demands of a market (or “rational”) economic model, adopted by most developed western countries – business and government alike - as a governing paradigm. Financial efficiency, restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing and fixed term contracts for senior staff have been major corporate developments. Boards have come to see their main role as oversight of executive management. Museum executives have been encouraged to be more entrepreneurial. Performance indicators have been introduced to show that museums contribute value for money.
Simultaneously, there have been substantial and vitally important advances in understanding of the learning experience in the museum environment, an experience which depends significantly on prior knowledge and contributes to individual identity and. Dramatic developments in information technology have also led to a great increase in public accessibility to knowledge about the collections.
A review of high performance forprofits and nonprofits and the most effective museums shows that best practice involves understanding the ‘industry’, a challenging work environment and attention to recruitment. Strategy for the executive leader means creating and communicating a vision encompasing unique deliverable value and appropriate organizational values. In all high performing organizations there is great attention to recruitment and to training and development.
A revised agenda for museum boards and executive leadership is developed and some other challenges are identified. Boards and executive leaders must seek advances in strategic issues which only they are responsible for; performance indicators must reflect that focus, not operational issues.
Visual Velcro and Interpretation in the Museum
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
In an article in the November/December 2007 issue of Museum News published by the American Association of Museums (p 57-62, 68-73) entitled “Visual Velcro: Hooking the Visitor”, Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) develops a very interesting metaphor to describe the way visitors to museums engage with art. The article contains an excellent summary of the latest thinking about interpretation, especially the use of electronic devices such as audio guides, PDA’s and mobile phones.
A Velcro patch (originally inspired by a burr caught in dog fur or velvet’s fuzzy surface) consists of a strip of tiny loops. Samis asks us to imagine that the visual impression an artwork creates is like Velcro. Unless “it has a hook that can fit into one of the loops on your specific Long Term Memory (LTM) “patch,” it will glide right by and be forever forgotten. If there is something in the artwork, however, that strikes you—a figure, a vivid color, a bodily sensation resulting from the artwork’s massive or minuscule scale, a memory trigger or implied narrative connection—then we can say that artwork has “Visual Velcro.” It has hooked into your cognitive structure and stands a chance of remaining in your memory.”
Samis goes on to summarize how technologies can help the hooks of artworks engage with the loops of our LTM. It is well understood that interpretive plans have to acknowledge not just who the visitors are – their identity – in terms of background and entrance narratives. In using the increasingly common analog and digital devices it is essential to understand what each kind of device delivers and what the visitor expects. (As he says in his concluding comments, this does not mean that text on the wall is not useful.)
Samis sets out to answer the questions about state-of –the-art interpretation, to what end various devices would be used, how visitors respond and how the visiting experience can be augmented most meaningfully and at the same time least intrusively. Very interesting examples are given from many different art museums. According to Samis, the watchword in planning would be “Design for Experience, Not for Hardware”.
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Lessons from the wider world of Organizational Development
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
If Nobel prize-winner Richard Feynman can learn something about a major theory of physics from watching the way plates thrown across a university refectory wobble, why wouldn’t climbing Mount Everest and the problems in the paediatric cardiac surgery program of the Bristol Royal Infirmary potentially give us useful insights into our own organizations?
Three areas of research seem to me to be of particular interest: leadership, governance and organizational development. Existing parts of this site deal with these areas.
The papers dealt with in this post and related page concern organizational development, the way organizations work, what does and what does not effect and affect change and the progress toward outcomes which advance the organization and the people in it. They include some of the more important research papers published in the last 10 years.
In the translation from a previous version of the site to the present one, certain changes occur inevitably and sometimes losses. Unless one is very vigilant, these may go unnoticed. So it is with these important references about organizational change which I have frequently quoted in published papers.
Although the list was completed in 2003, some of the articles are of long-term importance. The articles deal with issues such as lessons learned from climbing Mount Everest – and the accidents that can happen in such a high risk pursuit - and how hospitals work. These are included because of my abiding belief that useful lessons are to be found in all kinds of unusual places. After all, if Nobel prize-winner Richard Feynman can learn something about a major theory of physics from watching the way plates thrown across a university refectory wobble, why wouldn’t climbing Mount Everest and the problems in the paediatric cardiac surgery program of the Bristol Royal Infirmary potentially give us useful insights into our own organizations.
I especially commend the papers by Nitin Nohria, William Joyce & Bruce Roberson on successful change, by Karl E Weick & Kathleen M. Sutcliffe on a major problem at he Bristol Royal Infirmary, by Dan Lovallo & Daniel Kahneman on the effect optimism has on executive judgement, Robert Chapman Wood & Gary Hamel on innovative approaches to grant giving in the World Bank, by Lynda Gratton & Sumantra Ghoshal on the way conversations influence people’s attitudes and behaviours and, of all things, a critique of transaction cost analysis by the wonderful (late) Sumantra Ghoshal and Peter Moran: anything but boring, this paper actually demolishes much of the favoured basis of governance theory and practice.
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