The conceptual roots of modern museum management dilemmas

Abstract

The conceptual roots of museums in classical times are the roots of most museum management dilemmas. The professional literature reveals a continuous search for contemporary relevance, but continued to dichotomise collecting, stewardship and scholarship vs. services to various publics, only settling more or less on an all-purpose paradigm in the late twentieth century. Do genuinely different types of museums exist with different social purposes and thus quite distinct strategies and performance measures? It is time for museums to ‘speciate’ into distinctly different institutions, with different aims, outgrowing their twentieth-century default paradigm and for leadership to embrace evolution of purpose, generating major transformational change.

Keywords:

• museums
• social purpose
• performance measurement
• strategy
• leadership
• speciation
• evolution