The Pursuit of Responsive Museum Governance: Community Engagement in Turkish Public Museums

Abstract

The public museum sector does not remain untouched by the main trends and changes in public administration, even if it has some different characteristics from other government agencies in terms of administrative priorities and purpose. This is why the sector has been largely influenced by the prevailing administrative model of the era. Today, community engagement has become one of the main topics in the sector in parallel with the changes in public administration. Thus, the objective of this study is to propose and test a model that explains Turkish public museums’ community engagement performance. Findings of the research show that goal clarity is the most important factor in the community engagement performance of Turkish public museums, whereas museum infrastructure is surprisingly the least significant factor. Furthermore, this study reveals the positive correlation between the fulfilment of endogenous and exogenous functions of the public museums. Therefore, any effort to make them more engaged in their community should not be regarded as an alternative of their primary functions, namely endogenous functions.

Keywords:

• responsive governance
• public museum
• community engagement

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr Danilo Reyes and Dr Maria Faina Diola for their suggestions. I also acknowledge the comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

¹ The model is depicted and discussed in the following chapters.

² For more on social capital, see Bourdieu, 1986; Putnam, 1993; Coleman, 1998; Diola, 2009; Coradini, 2010; Lin, 1999; Portes, 1998; Herguner, 2012; Frane & Rončević, 2003.

³ In reliability test, as the rule of thumb in social science researches, the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient should not be below 0.5, and it should be preferably above 0.8. As seen in Table 3, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the items to measure museum infrastructure may be deemed as low. However, the number of items in the scale affects the internal consistency coefficients, and internal consistency coefficients (i.e., the Cronbach’s alpha) are likely to increase as the number of items increases (Nunnally, 1978; Gliem & Gliem, 2003). In this study, considering the poor return rate of lengthy questionnaires in the previous researches about the public museums, the current research deliberately kept the questionnaire short and did not add extra items to the questionnaire to increase the Cronbach’s alpha. However, higher internal consistency coefficients may be achieved in the future researches by adding a few items into the questionnaire.

⁴ To protect the building, in 2008, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MoCT) banned all the cultural activities in Hagie Sophie Museum. Following year, in 2009, cultural activities were also restricted in Topkapi Palace Museum by the MoCT (CDRF, 2009).

⁵ Sample size may be calculated according to different precision levels, which is also called margin of error. Precision level for the size of population below 2000 may be ±5%, ±7%, or ±10% (Israel, 1992).

⁶ Type I error: In case we reject the null hypothesis even if the findings are actually due to chance, we cause type 1 error; to avoid the probability of this happening is to use a strict level of statistical significance.

Type II error: We cause type II error, in case we retain the null hypothesis although the research hypothesis is correct (Eysenck, 2004).

⁷ If the direction of any effects is predicted (e.g., loud noise will disrupt learning and memory), then you have a directional hypothesis, which should be evaluated by a one-tailed test. If the researcher cannot predict the direction of any effects, then the hypothesis is a nondirectional hypothesis, which should be evaluated by a two-tailed test (Eysenck, 2004). In this study, we cannot predict whether the gender, civil status, or age will affect the evaluations of the museum professionals in a positive or negative way.