Value is at the heart of museums

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

The contributors to the book, ‘Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures’ come from a variety of countries. This week, Marsha Semmel from the US discusses ‘why public value matters for US museums’

Thank you, Carol, for the opportunity to participate in this blog.

I first learned of Mark Moore in January 2003, when I began work at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a U.S. federal culture agency. My boss, IMLS Director Robert Martin,gave me a copy of Moore’s Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government and urged me to read it. Later, I heard Mark present at the annual meeting of the Urban Libraries Council.  I got a deeper immersion in his work when I participated in a multi-year public value project Mark did with 13 U.S. state arts agencies under the auspices of The Wallace Collection (Creating Public Value Through State Arts Agencies, 2005).  

For me, the power of Moore’s strategic triangle model was—and remains--its recognition that every institution functions in a dynamic environment, with the continued challenge of maintaining effective equilibrium in response to this fluid context.  The model acknowledges the necessity of attending simultaneously to external and internal forces, with “public value” playing an essential role in an organization’s success and survival.

The public value debate is alive and well in the United States today, with passionate and divergent views on causes and remedies for such issues as income inequality, the appropriate role of government at all levels, employment and job skills, health and well-being, the quality of education, access and privacy, and the impact of technology. Underlying many of these debates are different –and passionate--perspectives on community, values, and the future.

How can museums navigate –and add value to – their publics on these and other issues? I believe that museums can ‘make a difference,’ for individuals and for communities, in support of our missions, but not without intention, adaptation, and collaboration. Many U.S. museums are already addressing such pressing challenges as early learning, digital literacy, civic engagement, environmental awareness, nutrition, creativity, and personal “meaning making” and fulfilment. They are customizing programs to individual interests and preferences, leveraging the learning power of mobile devices and tablets, co-creating programs and projects with their publics (and thereby enriching their own knowledge and content), and joining in community-wide collaborations to systematically achieve and document “collective impact” in meeting a specific educational or community development goals.

These museums seek to understand their communities and work with others (individuals and organizations) to strengthen their roles as responsive community anchor organizations.  Their leaders and boards are recognized throughout their communities for their authentic engagement in –and commitment to--raising the bar for all community members. They understand and transform their core mission and strategic plans in order to expand public access to their offerings and become more essential to communities.

They make the necessary internal structural, budgetary, operational, and staff changes (including recruitment and training) that respond to their community’s (audience’s) public value needs and changing authorizing environment.They recognize the importance of imagination, experimentation and innovation, and they understand that this is a long-term commitment--a marathon rather than a sprint.

So where are our concerns?

These museums exist, principally, as isolated examples.

Too many other museums remain mired in old models, fearful of or reluctant to change, unable, as emcArts CEO Richard Evans notes, to “leave the shore” of the familiar for today’s new terrain.  In order to move forward, it will be necessary for museums to (1) adapt and embrace the current environment of learning, networked collaboration, and evolving public interests; (2) document and articulate their impacts to current and potential authorizers, publics, and partners; (3)  undertake the necessary leadership, governance, and operational changes that will be required to thrive in today’s global knowledge society.