Museums, Resilience, and Public Service: The Organizational Implications of Socially Purposeful Practice
As the museum sector examines its role in society and the communities served, public service has broadened to include social development and community well-being, classified within this work as socially purposeful practice. Existing scholarship demonstrates that socially purposeful public service can explore and directly address contemporary societal themes to foster social welfare. Museological research broadly establishes the opportunities and challenges associated with socially purposeful public service: including the benefits, such as public support, and the potential challenges, like community backlash. However, research surrounding socially purposeful practice reveals a scholastic gap regarding the potential interplay of organizational resilience and such forms of public service. Grounded in interdisciplinary research, this work deepens the scholarship surrounding the relationship between the museum, resilience, and socially purposeful public service. With a qualitative approach reflective of the contextual nature of real-world settings and interplay of variables preventing isolation of the central research concepts, two case study museums - The Levine Museum of the New South (Charlotte, North Carolina, USA) and The North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, North Carolina, USA) - are examined. Through rich data from interviews, primary sources, and documents, the research questions are applied to inductively determine the potential organizational implications of socially purposeful practice in terms of resilience. From the data, this thesis has clarified the nuanced nature of socially purposeful public service, with the identification of implicit and explicit forms of socially purposeful practice. Furthermore, this research reveals that potential organizational benefits and disadvantages to such forms of public service tend to reflect both sides of loss and gain in terms of audience, stakeholder support, and financial development. Finally, the research also demonstrates the adaptive organizational strategy of each case study museum, which are structured within each respective institution’s policies and internal systems to optimize socially purposeful practice and overall resilience.
History
Supervisor(s)
Richard Sandell; Sheila WatsonDate of award
2024-06-18Author affiliation
School of Museum StudiesAwarding institution
University of LeicesterQualification level
- Doctoral
Qualification name
- PhD