Fiona McLean

A marketing revolution in museums

Traditionally, the purpose of a museum has been to preserve and conserve the collection in its care. Only recently has the notion of service to the public become a critical dimension of a museums operations. This paper reviews the extent to which marketing has been adopted by museums. It considers the historical legacy which has shaped the current context of museums, and which has consequently formed public attitudes and has inculcated the museum professions understanding of museums. A review of the museum marketing literature is conducted, and the main issues for the future of marketing in museums are derived. The paper concludes that although there has been a revolution in attitudes to marketing in museums, various factors have inhibited the wholehearted adoption of marketing.

The selection of management consultants

Although the public sector has become a major employer of management consultants, no research has previously been undertaken to investigate the purchase of management consultants in the public sector context. Outlines an investigation into the purchase of management consultants by government departments, focusing specifically on the selection decision. The UK and Australia were examined to ensure that the findings were not merely local phenomena. Research focused on the public sector decision makers’ guiding procurement principle, value for money, and the criteria and information sources both used and desired to assist the purchase decision. It was found that there was widespread and relatively uniform understanding of the procurement principle, value for money, although there appeared to be a lack of connection between this principle and procurement practice. Public sector decision makers also believed that they had adequate although not satisfactory access to information upon which to base their decisions while, significantly, it was revealed that these decision makers did not believe the selection decision for management consultants was, overall, difficult. Concludes that the implications of this research are twofold. First, it highlights the issues of “corporate memory” and information management, and their impact upon informed decision making, and secondly it questions the applicability of private sector research to public sector practice.

Introduction: Heritage and Identity

Taylor and Francis Ltd RJHS_A_138426.sgm 10.1080/13527 50500384431 International Journal of Heritage Studies 352-7258 (pri t)/1470-3610 (online) Original Article 2 06 & Francis 2 0 000Ja u ry 2006 FionaMcLean . cLe @gc l.ac.uk It is surprising, given the burgeoning of interest in identity in cultural studies, that there has been little discussion and even less research into identity negotiation and construction in heritage. It is even more surprising that this is the case given that it has long been held that heritage has ‘an identity-conferring status’.1 That status has increased resonance in an era when, particularly since the 1970s and 1980s, the focus in heritage has shifted towards the heritage audience. This ‘revolution’2 should arguably have placed heritage at the forefront of debates given that heritage, in both its material and intangible forms, represents the identity of people. It was to address this paucity of discussion that a seminar funded by the Economic and Social Research Council was organised on the subject of ‘Heritage and Identity’. The papers in this collection are drawn from this seminar which attempted to break new ground by considering issues of identity and heritage cross-sectorally and from both an academic and practitioner viewpoint. The eclecticism of the topics covered offers a wide-ranging discussion of the issues, but at the same time, and perhaps more significantly, suggests areas of common interest and policy direction. Although research into heritage and identity is at a nascent stage, there are some notable exceptions. Focusing on national identity, there are general edited works by Kaplan, Boswell and Evans, Fladmark, McIntyre and Wehner, and McLean, and articles by Macdonald and Munasinge.3 Particular focus has been given to Scotland by McCrone and his colleagues and McLean and Cooke; to Wales by Dicks and Mason; to Ireland by Crooke; to Spain by Holo; and to Hong Kong by Kenworthy et al. and Henderson.4 Non-national as well as national issues of identity have been tackled in edited collections by Macdonald and Fyfe, Graham et al., and by Howard, with other seminal works less explicitly tackling identity issues, such as Karp and Lavine, and Karp et al.5 The papers that follow add significantly to the debates on identity in its many forms. The issue opens with Sharon Macdonald’s thought-provoking examination of ‘undesirable heritage’ in Germany, taking as a case study the former Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. Macdonald uses the concepts of materiality and historical

Presumption, policy and practice

This article aims to analyse the basis for the construction of current policy designed to use museums and galleries as agents of social inclusion in Great Britain. It does this by first analysing their social role and their historical contribution to social policy. The article then goes on to present the findings of a research project that compared the rhetoric surrounding this issue with practice. It concludes that a series of issues are preventing the successful construction and implementation of policy. These are: a lack of policy coherence across different parts of the British Government; an inability to successfully measure social impact; a lack of institutional clarity about how to respond to policy guidance; and a lack of understanding about what constitutes social exclusion. The final and most significant difficulty is the lack of clarity about what can be expected from museums and galleries in this respect. The underlying question of how they function in society remains largely unanswered and means that policy is not based upon firm foundations.

Museums and the Active Citizen: Tackling the Problems of Social Exclusion

The aim of this paper is to attempt to determine the role of museums in combating social exclusion through facilitating active citizenship. It does this by presenting the results of an analysis that used a modified form of a model of citizenship created by Makela as a framework to explore the data generated by an empirical study. By focusing upon respondents in an holistic way, so understanding their experiences of museum based exhibitions and community development projects within the contexts of their lives, the study concludes that museums were able to overcome many of the barriers to active citizenship that were identified. However, it was also evident that they themselves were creating barriers as some were physically or intellectually inaccessible to a number of study participants. The most significant contribution of museums in developing active citizens was to provide a context for constructing a sense of identity and so develop greater self-confidence. The paper concludes that if the potential that museums have fostered is to be released government agencies need to work together.

The Impact of Museums upon Identity

The aim of this paper is to determine how socially excluded visitors to two museum exhibitions and two museum‐based community development projects use that experience to construct individual and social identities. In order to do this it will determine the ways in which the contexts of the exhibitions and community development projects were constructed and how and why visitors and participants make meaning in these contexts. To do this it uses the ‘circuit of culture’ as the basis of an analysis, the moments of which are representation, production, consumption, regulation and identity. The paper concludes that the process of defensive identity activity provides the mechanism through which participants and visitors mitigate their experience of exclusion and provides the basis upon which UK government policy using museums as agents of social inclusion might act.

Heritage builds communities: the application of heritage resources to the problems of social exclusion.

Abstract The concept of ‘social exclusion’ has become central to the UK governments political philosophy. The need to combat the causes and deal with the symptoms of ‘social exclusion’ has become vital to many policy initiatives. The use of heritage resources to help deal with social problems has been practised since the early years of the 19th century and can provide a community with a focus, identity and pride as well as making a contribution to regional economies. This paper traces the use of heritage resources in community regeneration programmes and demonstrates their lack of objectives and unplanned nature. A holistic multi‐agency approach is advocated to tackle social exclusion, with heritage playing a central role. Finally, the paper calls for research which will clarify the contribution that heritage resources can make and identify a framework within which heritage can realise its potential to build communities.

Museums and the construction of national identity: a review.

Abstract Issues of national identity are the subject of much discussion and debate, particularly in the fields of social and cultural studies. Museums lie at the centre of these debates, their collections, and the presentation and interpretation of these collections, being inextricably linked to national identity. This paper reviews these current debates within the social and cultural spheres, and locates museums within them. Its purpose is to develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which museums negotiate and construct meanings of national identity. The paper concludes that museums in turn have a significant contribution to make in developing our understanding of national identity.

Capital and the evaluation of the museum experience

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of how users of museums and galleries make sense of their experience. In order to do this it analyses the results of a research project that aimed to determine the ability of museums to ameliorate the effects of social exclusion. The results are analysed using the constructs of human, social, cultural and identity capital. The analysis presents a complex picture that contributes to an understanding of how the visitors to the exhibitions and participants in the community development projects considered made use of them as a context to make investments, which had a range of social benefits. The motivation behind these investments was that they allowed the individuals concerned to understand and in some cases modify the social world around them. This was carried out in response to the needs of those individuals at a particular time, which for the respondents was related to their personal experience of exclusion.

Service Elimination Decision-Making: Analysis of Candidates for Elimination and Remedial Actions

Despite the importance of service organisations′ ability to rationalise their service ranges and despite the recent calls from academics for more research on service elimination (Avlonitis et al. 2000), the empirically-based knowledge on the elimination decision-making process in service settings in general and in financial service settings in particular remains alarmingly sparse. Responding to this lacuna of knowledge the present paper presents qualitative and quantitative empirical evidence on a) the way in which British financial institutions analyse the deviant performance offinancial services, which have been identified as candidates for elimination and b) the remedial actions that they consider in order to restore a deviant performance, when possible and feasible. The evidence showed that the studied British financial institutions follow a largely informal and haphazard analysis procedure for candidates for elimination, even when a definite identification of the real problem behind the symptom of a deviant performance necessitates further and more well thought-out analysis. Moreover, the evidence pointed at the dynamism of the remedial attempts. As such, there is no golden rule that could, assign weights to the importance of the remedial actions fitting all financial services and all organisational and environmental circumstances. Instead the relative importance of the identified remedial actions proved to depend upon the method of delivery process of candidates for elimination, the service diversity offinancial institutions, the degree of customer orientation, competitor orientation and interfunctional coordination, the legislative requirements, the intensity of market competition and the rhythm of technological change.