Next week, Amanda Boehm-Garcia and Joan Kanigan will join me for a conversation about the expertise problem in museums and the shift from outputs to outcomes in the cultural sector as part of the MUSEUMS AND CHANGE webinar series.
Before that conversation, it’s worth understanding the broader context. I’ve written before about how individual museum professionals default to outputs — but there’s a structural dimension to the problem that’s worth exploring. Museum professionals who want to organize work around outcomes face broader forces that constantly pull them back toward departmental silos and museum-shaped outputs. These constraints aren’t localized to any one institution — they’re a circulatory system that no institution exists outside of. That’s the environment Amanda, Joan, and every other museum professional who is working to realize this outcome-centric change is navigating, and it’s worth understanding why the resistance runs so deep.
Naming the forces at work
If we accept that every department in a museum can perform well but the institution as a whole can still struggle to succeed in terms of its overarching mission or strategy, we have to wonder why museums persist with expertise-driven departmentalism at all. Why not take a wrecking ball to the whole thing and start over? And why do new museums opening today willingly embrace structural deficits that come with these expertise-minded divisions with all their inherent limitations?
I found a good explanation for the persistence in the work of W. Richard Scott, who describes three mutually reinforcing pillars: regulative (explicit rules and requirements), normative (professional values and career structures), and cultural-cognitive (taken-for-granted assumptions that operate below conscious awareness). Museums face coordinated pressure at all three levels simultaneously all the time — almost like a circulatory system of resistance. The blood that fuels museums’ identity is also what prevents them from solving the relevance question that’s plagued them for decades.
Regulative pressure can be seen in things like AAM’s Core Standards requirements, which map to traditional departmental divisions. Museums that want to be accredited by AAM have to demonstrate capacity in each area. Perhaps it’s possible for museums to still demonstrate to AAM that they are deserving of accreditation if they didn’t have these traditional divisions, but it’s easier to go along to get along. AAM’s diagnostics — the accreditation process itself — may have some value to the institution. There’s a presumption that the badge of approval has some influence on public opinion. Perhaps the most tangible benefit is that some foundations may require accreditation. Still, if a museum leader is genuinely invested in delivering outstanding experiences and providing unique value to the communities it serves, and if we agree that departmentalism is a force that undermines value generation, it may be worth considering whether your museum wishes to contribute to a system that reinforces traditions that undermine your potential. Of course, AAM isn’t the only example of regulative pressure — funding mechanisms exert coercive pressure. Perhaps in an outcomes-driven future, museums will do something similar to what they’ve had to do for DEI initiatives. Have people do the work but under different names. “Here’s what we say your title is on paper, here’s what you actually do and why you do it, which is what matters. We’re not going to let regulatory bodies prevent us from fulfilling our role in this community or receiving the funding we need to do so.”
Normative pressure can be seen in things like museum studies programs that structure curricula around traditional roles. It’s arguably unfair that we would expect museum professionals fresh out of college to forget everything they’ve learned (however implicitly) about the value of specialized expertise in favor of a cross-functional approach that centers around delivering value to humans through experiences that just happen to utilize curatorial or educational expertise in an as-needed way (”Hey, why did I take out all these student loans!?”). Professional associations amplify all this beyond the cradle of education by using different functions as organizing principles at every level — from discipline-specific associations to discipline-specific programming meant to further professionals’ careers. There are exceptions like MuseumNext, which takes a more thematic and expertise-agnostic view of professional learning and networking, but the exception is arguably just more evidence of the prevailing norm. For those who want to adopt a more conscious stance on this question of transitioning from outputs to outcomes, you might ask where you’re spending your time, attention, and money when it comes to professional groups. Every choice you make rewards siloed thinking or challenges it.
Cultural-cognitive pressures are perhaps the most challenging to overcome because addressing these kinds of pressures means that you’re violating the taken-for-granted reality that we operate in every day. For example, what feelings emerge when you try on a statement like, “Our museum doesn’t have a curatorial department” or “As a curator, you’ll be in charge of communicating the value of our museum through social media, newsletters, and our website”? You probably feel some degree of discomfort or resistance to these kinds of expertise-challenging statements. You might feel like you can’t be a “real” museum without these identifiers or you may feel like your museum would struggle to hire “real” or “quality” museum professionals if you mixed identities.
These three mechanisms work together to create what organizational theorists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell call “isomorphic pressure” — forces that make organizations similar over time. DiMaggio and Powell call these Coercive, Mimetic, and Normative isomorphisms. I’ll spare you more nerdery on that — just to point out that it’s interesting to see how different thinkers in different fields arrive at similar conclusions, which is always a good sign that we’ve found a valid and likely useful frame for a problem.
Where agency lives within the constraints
There’s no easy way to address these systemic challenges. There are a number of approaches that people have tried with varying degrees of success in different contexts — Amanda Boehm-Garcia and Joan Kanigan are testing some of these right now in their institutions. That’s what we’ll explore next week.
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but I’m hopeful that simply recognizing when regulative, normative, or cultural-cognitive constraints are subtly influencing discussions and decisions at your museum creates space for choice. You won’t dissolve those forces, but you have more agency than you might assume. You can decide whether to devote your time, money, or energy to normative activities that reinforce departmental thinking. You can challenge the value and trade-offs in pursuing the approval of governing bodies and how that effort affects the culture of your workplace and, by extension, the value you provide to the communities you support.
Amanda leads curatorial, learning and engagement, and visitor services at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. Joan directs the Western Development Museum. Both are navigating these structural forces while working to shift their museums toward community outcomes — recognizing structural resistance not as a problem to solve completely, but as a reality to work with strategically.
Next Thursday, we’ll explore what that looks like — Register here.