Fifteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Museums, facing new demands from communities, need to adjust their roles and actions in order to keep up with the changing market and power dynamics among different stakeholders. The portrayal of a museum in mission statements is supposed to be responsive to changing social values and expectations, so as to signal legitimacy. Such clear and up-to-date definitions are both beneficial for internal staff members to stay focused on particular priorities and for external audiences to know what to expect and how to evaluate during their visits. What’s more important than these simple statements is through what ways do museums achieve those missions. It is not uncommon to observe a decoupling between what is said and what is done. In fact, previous research on museums has found that many tended to include ambiguous terms that are difficult to measure, and thus led to a lack of accountability. To get a better understanding of how museums redefine their identities and their work in response to the changing environment, I design a study to examine museums’ mission statements and program service accomplishments. Content analysis is conducted with text collected from tax forms 990s. Research questions are focused on 1) over time (2012-2020), what changes have happened in terms of museums’ definitions, 2) how well they have carried out different aspects of their missions on the ground, and 3) where matches or mismatches between words and work have been more likely to happen.