Diana Crane

The Academic Marketplace Revisited: A Study of Faculty Mobility Using the Cartter Ratings.

This study examines the characteristics of faculty who joined the top twenty departments in six disciplines between 1963 and 1966 in order to evaluate the relative importance of prestige of doctoral origing and scholarly performance in the selection for a position in these departments. While there is a weak relationship between rank of doctorate and rank of hiring department, graduates from departments with the highest ranks are much more likely to be hired by all the top twenty departments. When rank of academic affilation and levels of productivity, citations, and recognition are controlled, the proportion of graduates hired from the highest ranking departments remains the same. Among senior faculty, this proportion diminishes slihgtly when these factors are controlled. These findings suggest that, among younger faculty, prestige of doctorate rather than past performance is used as a predictor of future performance by those who are responsible for faculty recritment.

Book ReviewsMuseums and Money: The Impact of Funding on Exhibitions, Scholarship, and Management. By Victoria D. Alexander. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 204.

Victoria Alexander had the excellent idea of using organizational theory to examine an important and controversial issue: the effect of external sources of funding on the programs and management of American art museums. Specifically, Alexander addresses the question of how the shift in museum funding from private patrons to corporations, foundations, and government agencies in the mid-1960s affected the characteristics of museum exhibitions. Did the new funders impose new goals on museums that conflicted with the traditional aims of museum curators? Alexander’s review of several theoretical perspectives, including production of culture theory, resource dependency theory, strategy models, and institutional theory led her to conclude that museum administrators would attempt to reorient their policies to attract external funders, which in turn would conflict with traditional museum policies that were developed to establish the legitimacy of these organizations. To answer these questions, Alexander examined the characteristics of exhibitions mounted by 30 large and prestigious art museums between 1960 and 1986, using quantitative and qualitative data obtained from annual reports and from interviews with curators and museum directors. Unfortunately, her reliance on annual reports for quantitative data entailed a sizable amount of missing data, which substantially reduces the Ns in some of her tables. The majority of her statistical analyses deals with only 15 out of the 30 museums in her sample. Alexander’s data show a dramatic increase in the average number of exhibitions per museum per year as well as an increase in the number of funded exhibitions although unfunded exhibitions still substantially outnumbered the former. Analysis of the effects of different types of funders on the characteristics of museum exhibitions provides support for a resource dependency interpretation of the behavior of museum organizations. Both corporate and government funders tend to support blockbuster and traveling exhibitions but corporate funders particularly prefer “easy to understand” popular exhibitions that attract large audiences, while government funders prefer exhibitions of postmodern and contemporary art. Individual funders tend to support exhibitions of their own collections, reflecting the tastes of elite collectors. Alexander concludes that pressures from the new funders led to “a drastic reorientation of museums from internal matters . . . to external matters (exhibitions and audiences) . . . a move from a more elite mission to a more populist one” (p. 53). Since funded exhibitions represent only 21% of all exhibitions, an important issue is whether funders’ priorities affected the types of exhibitions funded internally. Analysis of the entire exhibition pool indi-