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Abstract
This paper presents an empirically grounded mapping of the organisational identity that science centres in the UK are trying to carve out for themselves against the backdrop of developing organisational strategies and multiple external pressures, expectations and perceptions. I attempt this through a relational analysis that views the science centres’ organisational identity formation as constituted by and through a dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy that subtends the differential relationships science centres seek to cultivate vis‐à‐vis what I describe as the ‘parent’ fields – namely, science, formal education, the leisure industry and the museum. Science centres seek to stage a unique encounter of these four parent fields – an encounter that appropriates many significant dimensions of these fields without duplicating them. Through my analysis I hope to capture some of the key tensions and dilemmas that science centres and their organizational actors have to grapple with, the balancing acts they have to perform, and the complex organisational identity that is being forged in the process.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation – Centre for Teaching and Learning, grant ESI‐0119787, awarded to King’s College London in collaboration with the Exploratorium and UC‐Santa Cruz.
Notes
1. The two science centres in this study – henceforth referred to as the Westside and the Lowland Centres – are ‘generalist’ interdisciplinary science centres whose exhibits cut across many science specialisms. They are both large science centres that contain additional educational facilities alongside the exhibitions, such as laboratories, classrooms, large format film theatres, aquaria and planetaria. The Westside and Lowland Centres’ visitor numbers are in the range 250,000 to 750,000 per year, and have an annual turnover of at least £3 million (ECSITE‐UK Citation2001b). Both were founded by virtue of Millennium Commission funding. In total, 20 staff members were interviewed over the period April–August 2005. The staff interviewed were acting in a cross‐section of professional roles and divisional units – education, outreach and liaising with local communities, human resources, marketing and exhibit design.
2. Mulkay and Gilbert studied the scientists’ discourse across two distinct contexts corresponding to two distinct genres: namely, the formal academic paper and the context of the informal conversation where they talk about the experiments and findings that they report on in the academic papers. They found that the scientists’ language in the two contexts presented not only two distinct genres, but brought into light two modes of argumentation and reasoning. They identified two distinct registers that corresponded to the two modes of argumentation: the formal register presenting a detached, impersonal account of the research process for the sake of maintaining a claim to objectivity, which contrasts with the informal register. Reference to the dependence of experimental observation on theoretical speculation, the determination of experiments/data by theory, the pre‐existing commitment to certain theoretical positions and beliefs – all of which are suppressed in the formal register – are allowed to come through in informal conversations where scientists talk about their research findings.
3. In fact, some people outside the community of science centres see them as failures, especially if assessed against their objectives of promoting public understanding of science, let alone producing future scientists. Peter Cannon‐Brookes wrote in Citation1997:
Although not a popular view in museum education circles, the brutal truth is that hundreds of millions of pounds/dollars have been poured into museums and science centres in recent decades with a view to improving the public understanding of science and technology, and on the rare occasions when any serious attempt has been made to quantify the results of this ‘investment’, the conclusions drawn are profoundly depressing … It is some thirty years since the first science centres opened their doors in the United States of America and now that the second generation is passing through the educational system it might be expected that the programmes of formal and informal education in science and technology so diligently fostered by the museums and science centres would have resulted in significantly greater understanding of both topics within the community. They have not. (Cannon‐Brookes Citation1997, 201)