Value is at the heart of museums

               There has been something of a hiatus as I have travelled (US, Canada and Ireland) and finished some major projects. All of it has relevance to the theme of museums and value and I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts and experiences with you.

               It began with an invitation from FARO, an organisation located in Brussels which works as an intermediary between the Flemish government and the cultural heritage sector. With elections approaching, FARO recognised the opportunity to get the public value of museums onto the political agenda. I was privileged to be invited as keynote speaker at their forum with representatives from the 5 political parties on the 29th April. Following my presentation, a moderated conversation took up the theme of the public value of museums with each of the politicians arguing the case from the standpoint of their parties.

               A second project has been guest editor of the most recent publication of the journal, Cultural Trends. When I was asked to be a guest editor 18 months ago, I did not hesitate to nominate, 'national approaches to measuring cultural value' as the theme of a dedicated edition. The volume has just been published with four articles, each outlining a different approach to the challenge that measuring cultural value entails at a national level.  Canada has adopted a Cultural Satellite Account while, in the UK, an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant is funding a major research project on cultural value and its measurement. New Zealand has a longer track record than most with two waves of data already available for analysis and Australia's Vital Signs project has started with the question of what policy makers need to know about the returns on public investment in culture.

               Another aspect of my work is related to the AHRC Cultural Value project mentioned above. I have been working with Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd from the Museum Studies Department, University of Leicester, on a critical review of two decades of UK literature. The subject of the review focuses on what the literature reveals about user value of museums and galleries.  The results have been fascinating and there will be links to blogs on the study. http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funded-Research/Funded-themes-and-programmes/Cultural-Value-Project/Pages/default.aspx.

               So all in all, an extremely busy and productive few months with many dimensions about museums and value to start new conversations. Thank you for your patience. Looking forward to your feedback on the forthcoming blogs.

Mark Moore was one of the earliest proponents of engaging the public as co-producers in creating public value. But he also clearly identified the public as the ‘ultimate authorisers’ of value. Kelly et al (2002) furthered his arguments for public engagement making a case from the perspectives of both principle and pragmatism. One the one hand, they argue that public preferences are at the heart of Public Value in a democracy where only the public can determine what is truly of value to them. Pragmatically, they point out that engaging the public makes sense for governments and institutions because it gives access to intelligence necessary to gain a better understanding of established preferences and to predict emerging attitudes and expectations.

From the perspective of public sector managers, if the priorities and expectations of the public shift, and the culture of a public body does not, then satisfaction and trust in the service may be undermined, a point attested to by research indicating  that service users are well attuned to the ethos of providers (Kelly et al, 2002, 24). Blaug, Horner & Lehki (2006, 7) are unequivocal:

If organisations are to create public value in their practices and use evaluative standards to measure their performance, then those values and evaluative standards must be authorised by the public.

What happens, then, when the values of an organisation and those of the public are at variance? When Moore talks about addressing ‘unmet social needs’ in the public realm as a focus for public value creation, it resonates strongly with the museum sector’s focus on the social impact agenda of museums. So what do we do when the public indicates that the social impact agenda is not what they value most about museums?

References

Blaug R. Horner L. and Lekhi R. (2006). Public value, politics and public management: A literature review. London: The Work Foundation.

Britain Thinks. (2013). Public Perceptions- and attitudes to- the purposes of museums in society. London: Museums Association.

Kelly G. Mulgan G. And Muers, S. (2002). Creating public value: an analytical framework for public service reform. London:  Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office.

Scott C. A. (2010). Searching for the public in Public Value: arts and cultural heritage in Australia. Cultural Trends, 19, 4, 273- 289.

Scott C.A. (2013). Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures. London: Ashgate.

This week, Ben Garcia, author of the chapter ‘Creating Public Value through Museum Education’ In Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures, considers whether public value can be ‘fun’.

When I first read Mary Ellen Munley’s question in this blog about public value goals central to the work of the museum and Marsha Semmel’s proposition that museums of value work to become more essential to their communities, I did not think first of beer tastings. But I recently had the opportunity to visit a museum programme in a city that prides itself on its beer culture, and where a large sector of the community engages around music and beer and burgers. So, is this museum –capitalising on existing community interests and providing an enjoyable experience for visitors in the process- doing something of public value?

Part of the challenge when thinking about public value, is that most of the literature comes from an advocacy or research perspective—and these are not realms known for fun. The messages are often reflective and usually directed to a worthy social goal. I have been thinking lately about fun. And about how that term applies to public value.

The beer-tasting event at The Museum of Man in San Diego which I attended last week is indicative of that museum’s wider strategy towards populist exhibitions that incorporate unexpected connections to current social issues. The tasting was one of several held in conjunction with a beer exhibition that features vessels and tools used for the production and consumption of beer throughout history and around the world. The objects were accompanied by informative and humorous labels about cross-cultural beer-making traditions and the exhibit included a wonderful interactive component related to beer terminology around the world.

Walking about the great hall, surrounded by a buzz of museum patrons sampling local beers and eating a variety of foods from area restaurants, I was thinking about the value of programs like these. Museums are often conflicted when the events that garner the greatest public response are those that lie farthest away from traditional notions of museums’ social value.

And then I noticed that the museum had located an exhibition about cooperative businesses run by women in developing countries directly across from the beer exhibition. That space featured objects made by artisans and artists in cooperatives in South Africa, South America, India and elsewhere. The interpretation was an exploration of the socioeconomic factors that underpinned the scarce resources in these communities and a description of the efforts women had made on their own behalf to raise the community out of poverty. As I watched visitors move from the beer exhibition to the beer-tasting event to the exhibition about artist cooperatives I saw the Museum of Man model in action. And I saw fun and public value aligned.

We tend to be very serious when we talk about the role of museums in society.  I wonder if those of us who advocate for the public value of museums might do well to follow the example of museums like The Museum of Man and keep the “fun” in profundity.

This week, I’ve invited David O’Brien, author of Measuring the Value of Culture (DCMS, 2010) Value and a contributor to the book, Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures, to discuss why the idea of public value has experienced an uneven reception in Britain.

Museums, like most cultural spaces, are contested sites. These contests manifest themselves in many ways, often over the content and purpose of museums.  The contests focus on the value of museums. The value of museums is now a crucial way of arguing for funding in an era where, in the global West at least, budgets are being reduced. One influential way of thinking about value in museums has used a theory from public management, the theory of public value.

In the UK public value was highly influential in the earlier part of the 2000s and was closely associated with the New Labour administration of that time. It was influential for several reasons, chief of which was that it seemed to offer an alternative to the narrow focus on efficiency and economy that had come to dominate public management during the 1980s and 1990s.

However its direct influence was rather short lived. This was for three reasons. These three reasons illustrate both why public value was important for museums in particular and the cultural sector more generally, but also why it did not manage to capture policy makers in a permanent way.

First public value was an important way to capture the intangible aspects of organisations practice. In particular it aimed to explore how organisations did more than just provided goods and services. Public value showed how organisations created bonds of trust with local and national populations, moving beyond merely contractual or economic relationships. However in showing these aspects of organisations’ importance, public value didn’t fully specify how to measure or account for trust or relationships. This meant that what public value sought to highlight didn’t fit when the prevailing language of UK central government changed in 2010.

The source of much of this government language, irrespective of which party is in power, is the UK’s Treasury. Public value never had the full backing of the Treasury and as such was never fully embedded in how Whitehall thought about public services beyond the economic calculations. Public value was important for public bodies outside Whitehall, was influential with think tanks and was crucial to Prime Ministerial strategy for central government. However it did not penetrate the walls of the Treasury during its most influential time and, therefore, never really embedded itself in the way government, in the UK, thinks.

Finally public value was not used in a consistent way by the public bodies that adopted it. For the BBC it was initially a way of justifying funding and doing economic analysis. For the Arts Council, the UK’s main distributor of cultural funding, it was a method of doing market research with its clients and a rather limited range of ‘the public’. For the Heritage Lottery Fund, a distributor of heritage funding based on the UK’s National Lottery game, it was a means of measuring performance. These three uses were not the same and give an illustration of the range, and therefore lack of coherence, of public value in the cultural sector.

Museums must, therefore, be cautious before fully committing to accounting for themselves in the language of public value. The UK experience suggests that public value’s roots in American management theory leave it with an uncertain position if its political champions lose power and influence. Whilst its lessons have been important, public value may best be seen as one moment in a much larger conversation about the role and purpose of museums in contemporary society. It is a conversation that will only become more pressing in the coming years.

In Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures, Lisa Conolly’s chapter on ‘Measuring Public Value’ raises the question ‘does size matter’? In this blog, Lisa shares some personal reflections and provocations on whether ‘size’ is a meaningful measure of public value. She questions ‘size’ in relation to museum buildings, collections and web statistics and finds that ‘size’ is a slippery measure.

The Museum Cathedral

Most museums provide a physical space to be visited. Over the last four decades, huge sums have been invested to establish and refurbish museums throughout the world. Are the size of these investments in monetary terms and the size of the resulting buildings an indication of how much we value museums?  If increased capacity means that a museum is capable of welcoming more visitors, does the size of our attendances mean that a big museum is valued more than a small one?

Grand Collections

In a statistical survey, size matters because the wider your coverage and the bigger your samples the more sure you are about your understanding of the population and the validity of your results. For a museum, does a large, representative collection equate to greater validity, more authority and, therefore, more public value?

If a “collection” has a defined scope and coverage and a representative sample of relevant content, what measures do we apply to assess the significance of smaller, specialized collections where it is not the size but the uniqueness or the special selectivity (representing, for example, a particular historical period) that matters.

Virtually Everything Matters

We are all busy counting hits and downloads. Internet interactions can generate big numbers. But what does it mean? Thousands of hits and downloads may be generated by machine to machine communication. People can hit websites inadvertently while looking for something else. Are numbers of hits a valid measure of value?

Thousands of hits may represent thousands of website users but how do we assess the value to the public of these engagements? As a self confessed museum lover, I confess that my searches on museum web sites usually disappoint me. Virtual tours give a small – too small – sample of artworks or objects. I may be a ‘unique user’ but I often come away dissatisfied- I am seeking greater value than I am getting.This is a case where I believe size matters in a different way. Personally, as these exhibitions and collections are a public resource, I would like to see a much bigger virtual presence of our public museum content. If entire museum collections were online, counting the searches and downloads might give us meaningful indications of the public value of these collections.

Size does matter. But is it always a meaningful measure? What do you think?

Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409446439