neither public nor private: the hybridization of museums

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Journal of Cultural Economics 22: 127–150, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 127 Neither Public Nor Private: The Hybridization of Museums J. MARK SCHUSTER * Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A. Abstract. This paper takes a preliminary look at the hybridization of museums – the creation of a variety of mixed forms of governance incorporating both public and private governing authorities. Using data from three national surveys of American museums, the analysis documents the mix of types of governing authority and demonstrates how this mix varies across location, over time, and by museum type. The paper then estimates the extent of hybridization using several different indicators and speculates about its implications. The United States offers a particularly informative case because the general view is that American museums are (1) either public or private and (2) predominately private. While the second part of this view may still be a useful characterization of American museums, the first is no longer a particularly helpful way of understanding American museums, or, by extension, other cultural institutions, American or not. It is increasingly necessary to view cultural institutions through the lens of hybridization rather than privatization in order to improve our ability to document and predict their institutional behavior. Key words: museums, cultural policy, arts management, privatization 1. Introduction In a recent paper in which he explored the privatization of cultural organizations, Michael Hutter warned that organizational restructuring in the cultural sector was likely to create tensions between the private interest and the public interest that would be hard to reconcile. He foresaw these tensions being played out in the creation of new organizational hybrids: [A] rather new breed of legal hybrids is likely to emerge. These hybrids have rights to property and contract and thus establish the preconditions for suc- cessful private management. At the same time, they remain bound to their public good purpose through a variety of safeguards and intervention rights. As it stands now, the transformation to private law actors often gets stuck half-way: a new status is proclaimed and implemented, but the rules and reg- ulation of the public sector are not changed at the same time. In such cases, things are made worse by installing the second, deviating set of statutes. It becomes unclear to the decision makers which set of rules takes precedence. The result is a hybrid form that has the appearance of a private organization,

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Page 1: Neither Public Nor Private: The Hybridization of Museums

Journal of Cultural Economics22: 127–150, 1998.© 1998Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

127

Neither Public Nor Private:The Hybridization of Museums

J. MARK SCHUSTER∗Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,MA, U.S.A.

Abstract. This paper takes a preliminary look at the hybridization of museums – the creation of avariety of mixed forms of governance incorporating both public and private governing authorities.Using data from three national surveys of American museums, the analysis documents the mixof types of governing authority and demonstrates how this mix varies across location, over time,and by museum type. The paper then estimates the extent of hybridization using several differentindicators and speculates about its implications. The United States offers a particularly informativecase because the general view is that American museums are (1) either public or private and (2)predominately private. While the second part of this view may still be a useful characterization ofAmerican museums, the first is no longer a particularly helpful way of understanding Americanmuseums, or, by extension, other cultural institutions, American or not. It is increasingly necessaryto view cultural institutions through the lens of hybridization rather than privatization in order toimprove our ability to document and predict their institutional behavior.

Key words: museums, cultural policy, arts management, privatization

1. Introduction

In a recent paper in which he explored the privatization of cultural organizations,Michael Hutter warned that organizational restructuring in the cultural sector waslikely to create tensions between the private interest and the public interest thatwould be hard to reconcile. He foresaw these tensions being played out in thecreation of new organizational hybrids:

[A] rather new breed of legal hybrids is likely to emerge. These hybrids haverights to property and contract and thus establish the preconditions for suc-cessful private management. At the same time, they remain bound to theirpublic good purpose through a variety of safeguards and intervention rights.

As it stands now, the transformation to private law actors often gets stuckhalf-way: a new status is proclaimed and implemented, but the rules and reg-ulation of the public sector are not changed at the same time. In such cases,things are made worse by installing the second, deviating set of statutes. Itbecomes unclear to the decision makers which set of rules takes precedence.The result is a hybrid form that has the appearance of a private organization,

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yet the central decisions continue to be state-controlled. As a consequence,internal action will be more hampered than it was before. Such confusion mayeven be inevitable. But it would be advantageous to allow enough time beforea process of status transformation is judged as being successful. (Hutter, 1997,pp. 174–175)

Hutter is right to call our attention to this trend. It is highly unlikely that priva-tization will entail a choice between pure forms of public institutions and privateinstitutions; rather, it will entail a complex set of arrangements, each one slightlydifferent from the next, with responsibility for certain elements of the cultural insti-tution’s operations being vested in private hands but with responsibility for othersvested in public hands. He is also right to warn that a mixing of public interestsand private interests in the same institution is likely to produce a set of difficulttensions. With shared authority and shared responsibility, the institution will bepushed and pulled in a variety of directions not all of them mutually reinforcing.

But Hutter is wrong if he means to suggest that hybrids have yet to emerge. Ifnot yet the norm, hybrid public/private cultural organizations are already common,particularly among museums. In this paper I will take a preliminary look at thehybridization of museums, begin to document the extent of hybridization, andspeculate about its implications. I will pay particular attention to American mu-seums, which offer a particularly informative case because the general view is thatin the United States museums are (1) either public or private and (2) predominatelyprivate. I will demonstrate that while the second part of this view may still be auseful characterization of American museums, the first is no longer a particularlyhelpful way of understanding American museums, or, by extension, other culturalinstitutions, American or not.

2. Privatization, Hybridization and Museums

Lately there has been considerable discussion in the museum world concerningthe “privatization” of public museums. To many the privatization of museums isa shocking idea; it is almost unthinkable to consider changing the structure of ourmost valuable, collectively-held cultural repositories. They are precious resourcesto be nourished and sustained, not ephemeral organizations to be tinkered with.Yet, the environment within which society’s museums function is changing, andthe administrative structure of many museums has begun to change in response. Ofthe organizational responses to these changes undertaken by museums, many havetaken place under the banner of privatization; but, as with all such overarching ban-ners, to characterize the changes that are occurring in the structure and operationof museums by this one word risks oversimplification and misunderstanding.

Moreover, when one conceives of the world of organizations as binary – eitherpublic or private – one runs the risk of not observing the much more interestingvariations that inevitably crop up. Similarly, when one takes a snapshot of a con-

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stantly changing organizational terrain, one observes neither the direction nor thespeed of flux. If one changes one’s frame to allow for more than two taxonomiccategories as well as for the detection of trends and trajectories, one observes amuch more complicated set of museums, some of which are public and some ofwhich are private but most of which are neither. As Peter Boorsma and I haveboth argued elsewhere, taken together these are the primary reasons that the term“privatization” is woefully inadequate to the task of describing the many changesin institutional structure and governing authority that have been witnessed in or arebeing contemplated by cultural institutions (Boorsma, 1997; Schuster, 1997).

If researchers working in the field of cultural policy are to be helpful in theprivatization debate, the interesting trend to pay attention to is not the movementfrom purely public to purely private; very few cultural institutions have followedthis path. Rather, the trend to which we should pay careful attention is the trend to-ward the creation of public/private hybrids, a trend that has spawned a wide, mostlyundocumented variety of institutional forms each with its own unique characteris-tics. In those countries in which wholesale privatization of cultural institutions isunder consideration, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, understanding thephenomenon of the hybrid museum should be of particular importance because itis highly likely that the policies that are being billed as privatization policies inthese countries are actually hybridization policies.

The literature on privatization in cultural institutions, which is only beginningto develop, tends to be of two sorts: a highly conceptual literature discussing thegeneral issues of privatization at a level of abstraction far too general to be of muchpolicy or management assistance and, at the other extreme, an anecdotal literaturefocusing on the situation of individual institutions, describing the changes that theyare undergoing with almost no link to a more general set of shared experiences andwith no attempt to generalize from those experiences.1 With respect to the lessonsto be learned from hybrid museums, there is even less that has been written –the one exception being the study materials developed for the annual ALI-ABAcourses on the “Legal Problems of Museum Administration” (Ullberg, 1992; Ull-berg, Singer, and Lawrence, 1990; Urice, 1995) – and almost no research that hasbeen conducted. Accordingly, in this paper my goals are modest: I will attempt todocument the extent of hybridization in the United States and suggest directionsfor further inquiry along these lines.

3. Forms of Privatization

Borrowing from Stephen Urice (1995, p. 2), the more general reorganization pro-cess with which we are concerned when we speak of the privatization of museumsis the transfer of authority over collections, buildings, operations, and/or responsi-bility for funding from one entity to another. One could easily extend this idea tothe transfer of authority over programming, exhibit design, or curatorial services,as well. (Any of these functions could be further disaggregated; operations, for

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example, could be split into food service, parking, security, maintenance, specialevents planning and programming, and the like.) In theory, responsibility for eachof these could be separately transferred from one authority to another. Each suchtransfer might be a transfer between two entities of the same type (e.g. from onepublic governing authority to another) or between entities of two different types(e.g. from a public governing authority to a private one or vice versa). One way toidentify a case of privatization would be to include all institutional reorganizationsin which a transfer of at least one element of a cultural institution’s operation froma governmental entity to a private entity takes place. Seen through this lens it isnot necessary that privatization be complete – that all elements of the museum’soperation be vested in a private entity – for some degree of privatization to havetaken place. Indeed, it would be surprising not to discover the existence of hy-brids. Because of their reliance on dedicated buildings and (nearly always) ondedicated collections, one might expect to observe hybridization among museums.The building and/or collection is often owned by an entity that is different fromthe entity that provides curatorial services, exhibit planning and design, and dayto day programming. Similarly, it is very common for cultural institutions to haveancillary organizations created to garner support for the institution and operatingin parallel with them. “Friends Of” organizations would be the most commonexample, but there are many other, less obvious examples. These would all fallwithin the category of hybrid organizations as well.

But what is most important is the recognition that the management and oper-ation of the museum can be separated into its constituent parts and those partscan be vested separately in a wide variety of responsible authorities. Not all of thepossible combinations would necessarily be a good idea, nor do all of the possibleorganizational arrangements exist in the field. And it would not be surprising todiscover that various combinations have come into existence for a whole variety ofreasons, not all of which proceed from managerial rationality.

What is clearest of all is that the museum terrain can no longer – if, indeed, itever could – be usefully divided simply into public and private institutions. But be-fore considering the implications of this realization, it would be useful to documentthe extent of hybridization. In the next section I turn my attention to American mu-seums and summarize what is known about the profile of the governing authoritiesof American museums.

4. Public or Private? The Governing Authority of American Museums

“While American art museums have always been public in one sense – fromtheir beginning they were open to the public and operated not for profit – inanother sense most of them were profoundly private at their start: private inthe sources of their funds, private in their control, and private even in the sensethat their senior staff was drawn from a privileged social class.”

(Stephen E. Weil, 1983, p. 4)

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“Profoundly private” is a fitting description of the origins of American art muse-ums, and it would probably be correct to assert that it is the predominant view ofthe current status of American museums. But, like many such generalizations, thisview has not been adequately tested empirically.

Over the past twenty-five years three different attempts have been made to mapthe terrain of American museums (National Research Center of the Arts, 1975;Price, DiRocco and Lewis, 1979; American Association of Museums, 1992). Eachof these studies included questions concerning the primary governing authority ofthe museum, and, thus, they offer a rough snapshot of the degree to which Amer-ican museums are “private” as opposed to “public”. Despite my protestations thatit is no longer particularly useful to view the organizational structure of museumsas a dichotomy between public and private, the data, because of the way in whichthey have been collected, push one to begin by exploring that dichotomy, and itis here that I will begin as well. (To be sure, these three studies used differentdefinitions of exactly what constitutes a museum as well as different methodologiesto identify the museum universe from which each of their samples would be taken.Yet, despite these differences, these data do help to indicate the extent to whichpublic and private forms play a role in the delivery of museum services to theAmerican public today.) Other information gathered in these studies points to thecomplexity of adequately documenting the mix between private and public andcan be used to suggest the extent of hybridization among American museums. Iwill return to this analysis in the next section of this paper.

Beginning at the highest level of aggregation, consider the distribution of gov-erning authorities forall American museums (Table I).2 According to the mostrecent data (1989), slightly more than 40% of all American museums have gov-erning authorities located in the public sector, while slightly less than 60% havegoverning authorities that can be considered to be private. The predominance ofprivate museums in the American context is not surprising, though some may besurprised by the fact that that percentage is not even higher. What is surprising,in the light of the belief that there has been a trend toward the privatization ofmuseums – whether this means that newly created museums are increasingly likelyto be created with private governing authorities or that public museums have beenprivatized becoming private museums is not important here – is the fact that thesplit between private and public has hardly changed over the eighteen years coveredby these studies (Figure 1). If anything, the percentage that is classified as “private”has declined slightly, but that change is so small as to be well within expectedsampling error.

It is, of course, possible that the trend toward privatization has been more pro-nounced recently and that data disaggregated by the age of the museum might pickup such a changing pattern, whereas these cumulative figures based on samples ofall museums founded prior to each survey mask it. I will return to this question ina moment; but for now these data, viewed at this level of aggregation, suggest that

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Table I. Distribution of governing authority of American museums – 1972,1979, and 1989

Type of governing authority Year of study

1972 1979 1989

Public

Municipal government 16.3% 9.5% 7.4%

County/regional governmenta 4.9% 8.2%

State government 11.8% 11.1% 11.2%

Federal government 6.2% 7.8% 4.2%

Public college/university 5.4% 6.4% 6.6%

Public school districta 0.9% 0.6%

All public 39.6% 40.6% 41.4%

Private

Private nonprofit 55.9% 53.4% 55.0%

Private college/university 4.5% 3.4% 1.7%

Private elementary/secondary schoola 0.1% 0.0%

Churcha 0.5% 0.7%

Other privatea 2.0% 1.2%

All private 60.4% 59.4% 58.6%

a Indicates categories that were not separately identified in the 1972 study.These museums were categorized as part of the broader categories.Sources:National Research Center of the Arts (1975),Museums U.S.A.:A Survey Report.National Endowment for the Arts. Washington, D.C. Ta-ble 1, p. xi; Price, Lewis C., DiRocco, Lisa, and Lewis, Janice D. (1979),Museum Program Survey, 1979. National Center for Education Statistics.Washington, D.C. Table D-1; American Association of Museums (1992),Data Report from the 1989 National Museum Survey, corrected version.American Association of Museums. Washington, D.C. Table B: 5-A, p. 60.

whatever trends were happening in the 70s and 80s had little effect on the overallrelative split between public governing authority and private governing authority.

This stability in the public/private split persisted even though the number of mu-seums grew dramatically over this period. The museum universe identified by thesethree studies grew from 1,821 to 4,408, and finally to 8,167. Even if one attributesa good deal of this growth to changes in research definitions and improvements inmethodology, one must nonetheless conclude that the absolute number of museumsincreased substantially. (Viewed another way, of the 8,167 museums included inthe 1989 museum universe, 40% had been founded since 1970.) But apparentlythis growth came more or less with the same mix of governing authority as existedprior to the early 1970s.

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Figure 1. Public/private mix of governing authority of American museums – 1972, 1979, and1989.Notes:This figure is based on a sample of all museums founded up to the date of each study.Definitions of the museum universe differed from study to study (see text).Sources:National Research Center of the Arts (1975)Museums U.S.A.: A Survey Report.National Endowment for the Arts. Washington, D.C. Table 1, p. xi; Price, Lewis C., DiRocco,Lisa, and Lewis, Janice D. (1979)Museum Program Survey, 1979. National Center for Educa-tion Statistics. Washington, D.C. Table D-1; American Association of Museums (1992)DataReport from the 1989 National Survey, corrected version. American Association of Museums.Washington, D.C. Table B: 5-A, p. 60.

Turning one’s attention to the next level of disaggregation in these data andfocusing on the various subcategories of both private and public museums (Table I),one discovers that the relative importance of the various subcategories of governingauthority has generally remained quite stable as well. Nevertheless, these disaggre-gated data point to two possible trends: (1) the percentage of all museums with afederal government governing authority has declined somewhat after rising in the70s, perhaps reflecting a leveling off in the creation of national museums; and (2)the percentage of all museums with a private university governing authority hasalso declined somewhat, again possibly reflecting a leveling off in the creation ofuniversity museums. (In the latter case there is arguably an upper limit – one wouldexpect that major universities would have museums, probably one each, and sincemajor universities are only rarely created, one would expect university museums toreach a natural saturation point.)

The1989 National Museum Surveydata allow museums to be categorized ac-cording to the decade of their founding. With this additional piece of informationit becomes possible to begin to explore the relationship between the type of gov-erning authority and the age of the museum. One manifestation of a trend towardprivatization in American museums might be that over time museums have becomemore likely to be founded with a private governing authority than with a publicgoverning authority.

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Figure 2. Public/private mix of governing authority of American museums by decade offounding, 1989.Note:This figure is based on the governing authority in 1989 of all museums existing in thatyear. It does not include the governing authority of museums that had been founded earlier butno longer existed in 1989, nor does it document changes in governing authority.Source:American Association of Museums (1992),Data Report from the 1989 NationalMuseum Survey, corrected version. American Association of Museums. Washington, D.C.Additional analysis conducted by Monnie Peters at the request of the author.

Looking at the mix between public and private governing authorities by decadeof founding reveals a pattern that is a bit more complicated than simply increasedprivatization (as viewed in this sense) (Figure 2). Roughly 60% of museums thatwere founded prior to 1930 have private governing authorities today (that is, as of1989); 40% have public governing authorities. For museums founded in the 1930s,however, the relative percentages switch: roughly 60% have public governing au-thorities while 40% have private governing authorities. This is not surprising asthis decade was characterized by substantial public investment to offset the effectsof the Great Depression. In contrast, museums founded in the 1940s and 1950s arethe most likely to have private governing authorities; over two-thirds fall in thiscategory. Museums founded in the 1960s, the years of the building of the GreatSociety, another period of substantial government expenditure, are those that aremost evenly split between public and private. And, finally, museums founded since1970 are once again quite a bit more likely to have private governing authoritiesthan public governing authorities. According to this measure of the extent of pri-vatization, the predominance of private governing authorities has certainly beenincreasing for museums founded since 1960, but this predominance is roughly atthe same level as for museums founded in the 1940s and 1950s.

One hypothesis worth testing might be whether or not in any given decade thepublic sector provides for a certain base level of museum creation with the privatesector providing for the additional growth in periods of significant museum expan-

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Figure 3. Percentage of museums with public governing authority by number of museumsfounded in each decade.Note: This scattergram is based on the governing authority in 1989 of all museums existingin that year. It does not include the governing authority of museums that had been foundedearlier but no longer existed in 1989, nor does it document changes in governing authority.Source:American Association of Museums (1992),Data Report from the 1989 NationalMuseum Survey, corrected version. American Association of Museums. Washington, D.C.Additional analysis conducted by Monnie Peters at the request of the author.

sion. Disaggregating the data by decade and plotting the relationship between thepercentage of museums with a public governing authority and the actual number ofmuseums founded in each decade does not support this hypothesis (Figure 3). Thedecade with the highest creation of museums,3 the 1970s, had a rather typical per-centage of museums with a public governing authority, and the 1960s, the decadewith the next highest number of museums created, actually had a somewhat higherthan average percentage of museums created with a public governing authority.The number of museums created in the 1930s is typical of the decades prior tothe 1950s, though the percentage of museums created with a public governingauthority was the highest of all decades.

Focusing on the level of government for museums with public governing au-thorities reveals interesting variations in the profile of governing authority overtime (Table II). The predominance of public governing authorities among muse-ums founded in the 1930s is due to a higher than average incidence of museumswith either municipal governing authorities (13.8%) or state governing authorities(22.5%). Municipal and state governed museums are similarly important amongmuseums founded in the 1920s, but proportionately fewer county and federal mu-seums lead to a predominance of private governing authorities among these muse-

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Table II. Distribution of governing authority of American museums by decade of founding, 1989

Type of governing Decade All

authority Pre 1900– 1920– 1930– 1940– 1950– 1960– 1970– 1980– museums

1990 1919 1929 1939 1949 1959 1969 1979 1989

Public

Municipal 6.9% 9.1% 11.7% 13.8% 1.5% 7.2% 5.1% 7.8% 8.7% 7.4%

County/regional 3.1% 9.8% 1.8% 6.0% 2.3% 8.7% 13.4% 8.8% 2.3% 8.2%

State 12.6% 6.0% 16.0% 22.5% 2.8% 8.2% 17.0% 5.5% 13.8% 11.2%

Federal 6.5% 8.6% 1.5% 7.7% 15.2% 6.1% 10.7% 6.5% 1.2% 7.3%

Public educational

institutions 12.5% 4.9% 9.6% 9.6% 9.7% 2.4% 3.2% 10.5% 7.8% 7.2%

All public 41.6% 38.4% 40.6% 59.7% 31.5% 32.6% 49.4% 39.1% 33.8% 41.3%

Private

Private nonprofit 53.1% 59.9% 58.0% 40.2% 68.5% 65.9% 47.5% 54.7% 61.6% 55.0%

Other private 5.2% 1.7% 1.4% 0.2% 0.0% 1.6% 3.2% 6.1% 4.6% 3.6%

All private 58.3% 61.6% 59.4% 40.5% 68.5% 67.5% 50.7% 60.8% 66.2% 58.6%

Total (n) 364 384 341 489 436 851 2,022 2,385 894 8,167

Notes:Columns do not always add to 100.0% and subcolumns do not always add to their respective subtotalsbecause of rounding errors. This table is based on the governing authority in 1989 of all museums existing inthat year. It does not include the governing authority of museums that had been founded earlier but no longerexisted in 1989, nor does it document changes in governing authority.Source:American Association of Museums (1992)Data Report from the 1989 National Museum Survey, cor-rected version. American Association of Museums. Washington, D.C. Additional analysis conducted by MonniePeters at the request of the author.

ums. Among museums founded in the 1960s, museums governed at higher levelsof government – country, state, or federal – have a higher than average incidence.Finally, among museums founded in the 1940s (during or just after World War II),federally governed museums are more prevalent than they are among museumsfounded in any other decade (15.2% as compared to an overall average of 4.2%).

Because Table II is based on current governing authority (as of 1989), analysesbased on these data remain less than satisfactory. A more persuasive manifestationof a trend toward privatization in American museums would perhaps be offered bydata that could indicate whether over time the governing authority of a museumis more likely to have changed from public to private than from private to public.What one would need to know is not only the type of governing authority at a par-ticular point in time (1989 in this case), but also what type of governing authoritythe museum had when it was founded and what changes in governing authorityeach museum has experienced during its lifetime. The existing data do not allowthis level of analytic sophistication.4

What other independent variables might help explain variations in type of gov-erning authority? One might expect that certaintypesof museums would more

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Table III. Public/private mix of governing authority of Americanmuseums by type of museum, 1989

Type of museum Type of governing authority

Public Private

Aquariums 70.0% 30.0%

Arboretums/botanical gardens 55.7% 44.3%

Art museums 31.4% 68.6%

Children’s museums 11.0% 89.0%

General museums 32.9% 67.1%

Historic houses/sites 52.4% 47.6%

History museums 34.0% 66.0%

Natural history museums 61.6% 38.4%

Nature centers 62.1% 37.9%

Planetariums 91.2% 8.8%

Science museums 34.2% 65.8%

Specialized museums 29.2% 70.8%

Zoos 67.3% 32.7%

All museums 41.4% 58.6%

Source:American Association of Museums (1992)Data Reportfrom the 1989 National Museum Survey,corrected version. Ameri-can Association of Museums. Washington, D.C. Table B: 5-C.

likely reside in the public sector than other types. According to the most recentAmerican data (Table III), a children’s museum is the type of museum that ismost likely to have a governing authority that is private (89%), followed by artmuseums (68.6%) and science museums (65.8%). On the other hand, museumswith highly specialized capital requirements and extraordinary operating expenses– planetariums, aquariums, and zoos – are the types that are most likely to havepublic governing authorities. Another factor here may be that there are many fewerof the latter sorts of museums, suggesting, perhaps, that there has not yet been aperceived need on the part of the private sector to support more of these in moreplaces. Another way of saying this is that because the possible design variations inplanetariums, aquariums, and zoos are relatively small and because each metropol-itan area arguably needs only one of each, one would expect less proliferation onthe private side of the ledger. Further speculation is beyond the scope of the currentpaper, but these differences in the mix of governing authority across museum typessuggest the need for further research to answer why different museum subsectorshave been constituted so differently.

Using these three studies to look at the public/private split for particular types ofmuseums over time is more difficult because of changes in the categories that wereused to report information on the type of museum. The report of the 1989 study

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Table IV. Public/private mix of governing authority ofAmerican museums by type of museum, 1972

Type of museum Type of governing authority

Public Private

Art museums 17% 83%

History museums 46% 54%

Science museums 51% 49%

Art/history museums 23% 77%

Other museums 48% 52%

All museums 39% 61%

Source:National Research Center of the Arts (1975)Mu-seums U.S.A.: A Survey Report.National Endowment forthe Arts. Washington, D.C. Table VI, p. 14.

Table V. Public/private mix of governing authority of Ameri-can museums by type of museum, 1979

Type of museum Type of governing authority

Public Private

Art museums 25.4% 74.5%

Children’s museums 32.4% 67.6%

General museums 42.1% 58.0%

History museums 35.7% 64.3%

Parks and visitor centers 87.8% 12.1%

Science museums 59.0% 40.9%

Specialized museums 26.7% 73.3%

All museums 40.6% 59.4%

Note: All rows do not add to 100.0% because of roundingerrors.Source:Price, Lewis C., DiRocco, Lisa, and Lewis, Janice D.(1979) Museum Program Survey, 1979. National Center forEducation Statistics. Washington, D.C. Table D-1.

gives much more detail on the type of museum (Table III) than the reports on eitherof the two previous studies (Tables IV and V).5 The category that has changed theleast in definition is probably art museums, and here there is a surprising result: thepercentage of art museums with private governing authorities has actually declinedfrom 83% in 1972 to 75% in 1979 to 69% in 1989. This is hardly an indicationof increased relative privatization among art museums, though, of course, someunknown part of this change may simply be attributable to differences in definitionand methodology across the three studies.

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Public Governing Authority

Private Governing Authority

Figure 4. Public/private mix of governing authority of American museums by region, 1989.Source:American Association of Museums (1992),Data Report from the 1989 NationalMuseum Survey, corrected version. American Association of Museums. Washington, D.C.Table B: 5-B, p. 61.

On the other hand, the data suggest that the percentage of history museumswith private governing authorities has grown – from 54% in 1972 to 64% in 1979to 66% in 1989 – but the actual degree of change may again be masked by changesin categorization. (The category “history museum” is clearly less consistent acrossthe three studies than the category “art museum”.) “Science museum” is the othercategory that appears in all three studies, but an interpretation of these data iscomplicated by the fact that aquariums, planetariums, natural history museums,and zoos were all separately identified in 1989, while they were combined intoother categories in the two earlier studies. Once again, perhaps these tables raisemore questions than they answer. Is the change in the mix of governing author-ity somehow a result of differences in methodology across the three studies? Itseems unlikely. If not, why has the mix changed so markedly for certain types ofmuseums? This, then, is yet another area that would benefit from further inquiry.

In the American context, location may be a particularly helpful independentvariable in explaining variations in the private/public mix of governing authorities.One might expect that the regions of the country that were settled first and wherenonprofit cultural institutions grew along with or even prior to government wouldhave higher percentages of private governing authorities than other regions of thecountry, and this is indeed borne out by the data (Figure 4).

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Table VI. Distribution of governing, authority of American museums by region, 1989

Type of governing Region All

authority New Mid- Southeast Midwest Mountain/ West regions

England Atlantic Plains

Public

Municipal 6.2% 4.1% 5.4% 8.7% 8.9% 11.3% 7.4%

County/regional 0.0% 5.9% 7.4% 10.7% 12.6% 7.7% 8.2%

State 6.3% 8.3% 19.1% 5.0% 8.5% 16.6% 11.2%

Federal 10.2% 8.3% 9.7% 1.8% 7.3% 8.7% 7.3%

Public educational

institutions 2.8% 2.5% 11.2% 10.8% 6.4% 5.9% 7.3%

All public 25.5% 29.2% 52.9% 36.9% 43.7% 50.1% 41.4%

Private

Private nonprofit 67.3% 66.5% 43.4% 60.1% 53.9% 46.7% 55.0%

Other private 7.2% 4.3% 3.8% 3.0% 2.4% 3.2% 3.6%

All private 74.5% 70.8% 47.1% 63.1% 56.3% 49.9% 58.6%

Source:American Association of Museums (1992)Data Report from the 1989 NationalMuseum Survey,corrected version. American Association of Museums. Washington,D.C. Table B: 5-B, p. 61.

Two-thirds of the museums in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states haveprivate, nonprofit governing authorities, whereas only 54% of the museums in theMountain and Plains states and 47% of the museums in the Western states haveprivate, nonprofit governing authorities (Table VI). The Midwest appears to fall inbetween. The Southeast states seem to offer an interesting exception to this overallpattern; here state museums and museums of public educational institutions (them-selves primarily state agencies) are relatively more important than in other parts ofthe country; combining these two categories, roughly 30% of the museums in thesoutheast have public state level governing authorities. One wonders whether thisis a legacy from the Civil War and the importance of state identity and states’ rights.In the West, some 22% of museums have a state or public educational institutiongoverning authority. Regional variation in the relative importance of county andregional museums, on the other hand, appears to reflect the relative importance ofintermediate levels of government in various regions of the country.

5. The Extent of Hybridization in American Museums

Identifying hybrid public/private museums in these data is more difficult. The defi-nition of governing authority that respondents were asked to follow changed subtlyfrom the first two studies to the third. The 1972 and 1979 studies both emphasizedownership of assets as the key to which authority was to be considered as the gov-erning authority: “governing authority” was defined as the agency or organization

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which ultimately owned the assets, including collections and installations, but notnecessarily the buildings and grounds.6 The 1989 National Museum Survey, on theother hand, focused the question of governing authority on the locus of manager-ial responsibility, perhaps recognizing the complicating presence of mixed forms:“governing authority” was defined as “the entity that has legal and fiduciary respon-sibility for the museum (this body may not necessarily own the collection or thephysical facility) and may include not-for-profit boards, appointed commissions,governmental bodies, and university regents” (American Association of Museums,1992, p. A4). But, whichever definition was used, no direct means was providedwithin the study to identify a hybrid public/private museum. Nevertheless, severalquestions were asked that can be used to begin to triangulate in on the degree ofhybridization among American museums.

Given the definition adopted for governing authority in the 1972 and 1979 stud-ies, the logical place to which to turn first is to the ownership of buildings andgrounds. To what extent is ownership of buildings and grounds vested in differenthands from governance?

When it turned its attention to this question, the final report of the 1972 study re-stricted its attention to a subset of museums: the 56% of museums identified as hav-ing a private, nonprofit organization as their governing authority (Table VII). Forthese private, nonprofit museums, to what extent was ownership of the buildingsand grounds vested in a different group?

As a rough first approximation one can approach these data by assuming thatif the buildings and grounds of a museum with a private, nonprofit governingauthority were identified as being owned by a private, nonprofit organization, itwas the same organization. (In Table VII, the cells representing this combinationof governing authority and ownership are in boldface.) What is interesting, then, iswhere the governing authority and the owner were clearly different entities.

In 1972, 26% of all museums with a private, nonprofit governing authority hadbuildings and grounds that were owned by a public agency or institution, and an ad-ditional 9% had buildings and grounds that were owned by a private owner that wasdifferent from the nonprofit governing authority. By this crude measure, over one-third of all museums with a private, nonprofit governing authority were hybrids,and nearly three-quarters of those were public/private hybrids. Science museumsand “other” museums were more likely to be hybrids than were art museums,history museums, or art/history museums, but substantial proportions of each ofthese groups of museums were still hybrids.

The final report of the 1979 study handled the question of facilities ownership ina slightly different manner. Respondent museums were simply asked whether theirfacilities were owned or operated by an entityother thanthe governing authority,with no further specification as to the type of authority that owned the facilities.Still, these results provide another sense of the degree of hybridization (Table VIII).

In some ways these figures provide a better measure of the degree of this typeof hybridization because they take as their base all museums, not just those with

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142 J. MARK SCHUSTER

Table VII. Distribution of ownership of building and space

Owner of buildings and space Type of museum All

Art History Science Art/history Other museums

museums museums museums museums museums

Municipal government 16% 12% 26% 12% 33% 18%

County government 1% 8% – 2% 1% 4%

State government – 3% – 2% 2% 2%

Federal government – – 1% 1% 1% a

Public college/university 1% – 2% – – 1%

Public school district – – 2% 2% 2% 1%

All public owners 18% 23% 31% 19% 39% 26%

Private nonprofit organization 70% 67% 65% 73% 55% 66%

Private college/university 3% – 2% – – 1%

Church or denominational group a 4% 2% 6% – 2%

Individual person or partnership 7% 2% 2% 2% 3% 3%

Other 2% 4% – 1% 4% 3%

All private owners other than private

nonprofit organization 12% 10% 6% 9% 7% 9%

a Less than 0.5%.Notes:Columns do not always add to 100.0% because of rounding errors. The base for this table isthe 56% of museums whose governing authority was a private, nonprofit organization.Source:National Research Center of the Arts (1975)Museums U.S.A.: A Survey Report.NationalEndowment for the Arts. Washington, D.C. Table 187, p. 370.

a private, nonprofit governing authority. About a fifth of all American museumshad facilities that were owned or operated by an entity that was a different entitythan their governing authority. This still does not tell us about the extent of pub-lic/private hybrids, as opposed to public/public hybrids or private/private hybrids,but it does set an upper limit. Of the 21% of museums owned and/or operated bya different authority, 64% were owned by a different entity, 12% were operatedby a different entity, and 24% were owned and operated by a different entity. Thislast group is perhaps the most puzzling as it includes museums whose governingauthority neither owns the facilities nor operates them.

The design of the 1989 questionnaire allows several approaches to the questionof hybrid forms (Table IX). The percentage of museums whose facilities are ownedor operated by an entity other than the governing authority appears to have grownfrom 21% in 1979 to 30% in 1989. Once again, though, this figure only providesan upper limit on the percentage of museums that are public/private hybrids. The1989 National Museum Survey also looked at the extent to which the collectionsof museums were owned by a different entity: nearly one-fourth of all museumsreported that their collection was owned by an entity other than the governing

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Table VIII. Percentage of American Museums with facil-ities owned and/or operated by an entity other than thegoverning authority by type of museum, 1979

Type of museum Percentage with facilities

owned and/or operated by

another entity

Art museums 23.8%

Children’s museums 42.1%

General museums 27.8%

History museums 20.1%

Parks and visitor centers 7.0%

Science museums 18.5%

Specialized museums 24.7%

All museums 21.0%

Source:Price, Lewis C., DiRocco, Lisa, and Lewis, JaniceD. (1979)Museum Program Survey, 1979. National Centerfor Education Statistics. Washington, D.C. Figure 29, p. 91and Table 47, p. 98.

Table IX. Percentage of American museums with management by mixed entities, 1989

Percentage of museums whose facilities are owned or operated by an entity

other than the governing authority 30.1%

Percentage of museums whose collections are owned by an entity other than

the governing authority 24.7%

Percentage of museums with a separately incorporated friends organization,

foundation, guild, etc. whose sole purpose is to provide services or raise funds 34.5%

Note:Missing museums were almost exclusively smaller museums, so these percentage arelikely to overstate the level of mixed management for all museums.Source:American Association of Museums (1992)Data Report from the 1989 NationalMuseum Survey, corrected version. American Association of Museums. Washington, D.C.Table B: 8/9/10, p. 67.

authority. Finally, over a third of all museums reported that they operated in parallelwith a separately incorporated friends organization, foundation, or guild.

Thus, these data suggest the degree to which mixed forms might exist amongAmerican museums. Yet, with respect to facilities, collections, and affiliatedfriends-of organizations, the involvement of another entity does not necessarilymean that it is evidence of a public/private mix; both entities might be public, bothmight be private. So, 30% is an upper limit on the percentage of museums whosegovernance and whose ownership of facilities are in separate sectors; 25% is anupper limit on the percentage of museums whose governance and whose ownership

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Table X. Prevalence of boards of trustees or equivalent overseeing bodiesin american museums by type of governing authority, 1972

Type of governing authority Percentage of museums with board of

trustees or other overseeing body

Public

Municipal/county government 72%

State government 59%

Federal government 23%

Public educational institution 33%

Private

Private nonprofit 93%

Private educational institution 48%

Source:National Research Center of the Arts (1975)Museums U.S.A.:A Survey Report.National Endowment for the Arts. Washington, D.C.Table 150, p. 296.

of collections are in separate sectors; and 35% is an upper limit on the percentagewhose governance and whose friends-of organizations are in separate sectors.

One other indicator as to the extent of hybrid museums can be teased out ofthese data by looking at the relationship of governing authority to the use of boardsof trustees or other oversight bodies. The final reports from both 1972 and 1989offer some data along these lines. (The data from 1979 have not been reported inthis way, though presumably the raw data exist.)

The 1972 data are not particularly helpful in identifying hybrid forms becauseone would expect that there would be a board of trustees or some other type ofoversight body overseeing the museum’s operations (Table X). By combining thesetwo the opportunity to identify hybrid public/private forms of organization is lost.What is most surprising in these data is what is not said – the high percentageof government museums of various types that had no such oversight body: 41%of state government museums, 77% of federal government museums, and 67% ofpublic educational institution museums.

The 1989 data, on the other hand, do offer a view of this type of hybridizationbecause the 1989 questionnaire asked explicitly about the presence of a “not-for-profit board with fiduciary responsibilities”, allowing the presence or absence ofsuch boards to be related to governing authority (Table XI). As one would expect,a very high percentage of private museums (91.8%) have such a board, but nearlya third of public museums do so as well, indicating a public/private hybrid. Thispercentage is highest for municipal and county/regional museums, which is proba-bly to be expected because of their more local roots, whereas few federal museumshave such a board. In this case, a politically appointed commission likely takes the

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Table XI. Prevalence of not-for-profit boards in American museumsby type of governing, authority, 1989

Type of governing authority Percentage of museums of this

type with a not-for-profit board

with fiduciary responsibilities

Public

Municipal 43.5%

County/regional 51.7%

State 31.2%

Federal 3.2%

Public educational institutions 23.5%

All Public 31.9%

Private

Private nonprofit 95.0%

Other private 45.1%

All private 91.8%

All museums 67.5%

Note: Because of missing responses these data actually underesti-mate the percentage of museums that have a board. Three quartersof the missing museums have a parent organization and that parentorganization may well have its own board, which also serves as themuseum’s board. Most of the remaining one quarter have a governingauthority that is a private nonprofit organization, which must by lawhave its own board.Source:American Association of Museums (1992)Data Report fromthe 1989 National Museum Survey, corrected version. AmericanAssociation of Museums. Washington, D.C. Table B: 11-C, p. 70.

place of a not-for-profit board, explaining why the percentage of federal museumswith a separate oversight body was so much higher in the 1972 study.

In summary, an analysis of American museums based on primary governingauthority alone would conclude that on the order of 40% of museums are “public”and 60% are “private”. Moreover, it would conclude that this relative split haschanged hardly at all over the last 25 years; these data at this level of aggregationindicate no strong trend toward privatization of American museums.

Taking the analysis one step further, the data summarized in Tables VII–XIsuggest that between one-quarter and one-third of American museums are actuallyorganizational hybrids. At least as far as museums are concerned, a simple cat-egorization into two broad categories – public and private – is quite misleading.Because of differences in the ways in which the data were collected in the three

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studies, it is very difficult to come to any conclusions about whether hybridization,particularly public/private hybridization is increasing.

If by privatization of museums most countries have in mind the creation ofhybrids rather than the creation of completely private institutions – indeed, veryfew ministries of culture seem prepared to relinquish ownership and control overcollections and possibly even buildings – and if there are lessons to be learnedfrom American museums, then surely those lessons are to be learned from hybridmuseums. To date, however, these museums have not been understood as a separateclass with their own interesting characteristics, experiences, and lessons. It is onlywithin the last five to seven years that they have even been given a name in theresearch literature. It is here that research should focus if it is to help illuminate theprocess of privatization in the United States and elsewhere.

6. Implications for Further Research

In this paper I have attempted to describe in a new way the American museumterrain. As with any such positive approach, the logical next research questionshave to be ones that ask “Why?” Why are certain types of museums more likelyto have public governing authorities than other types? Why has the percentageof museums with public governing authorities for certain types of museums goneup over time while it has gone down for other types of museums? Why is theregeographical variation in the mix of governing authority? I have only begun tosuggest ways to go about answering these questions.

It would also be fruitful to expand this analysis to a cross-national comparison.With the increased discussion of autonomization and privatization of museums ina variety of countries, cross-national comparisons will be made, and they ought tobe made carefully and responsibly.7 Are there differences in the mix of governingauthority across national contexts? If so, why? Are there different trajectories thatare being experienced in different countries? If so, what explains the differences?The comparative task will, of course, be considerably more difficult because itwill necessitate teasing out subtle cultural differences in what is meant by “publicgoverning authority” and “private governing authority” if, indeed, these terms areuseful at all.

But the most important implication of this paper, it seems to me, is that onceone recognizes the existence of public/private hybridization in cultural institutions,one begins to understand a whole variety of organizational and managerial issuesin a different way. For example, many of the internal conflicts that are, from timeto time, discussed in the popular and professional press can be understood as theresult of hybridization in which various interests have come into tension with oneanother. The research implications of this recognition are twofold: (1) we should besure to launch research initiatives that focus oncase studies, carefully documentingthe form of hybridization in each case, mapping the various interests that are incor-porated into the institution’s organization structure, and delineating the benefits

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and costs that have accrued to each of those interests from hybridization; and(2) research initiatives ought also to consider carefully institutionaltrajectories,documenting how institutional structures have changed over time, whether towardincreased “privatization” or increased “publicization”, how those changes haveplayed out in the operation and management of the institution, and what the resultsof those changes have been. To date the literature is populated more with opinionsthan with research findings. To be sure, a more theoretical approach attempting todevelop general principles from which one might deduce specific results would alsobe of great use, but without attention to case studies and institutional trajectories,it is hard to imagine how truly grounded theory will be developed.

I have attempted to explore these implications more fully elsewhere (Schuster,1998), but here let me briefly mention a few American cases to demonstrate justhow fruitful such an inquiry might be, particularly for those places that are onlynow considering some form of hybridization as part of their policy concerning thefuture of state museums. Each of these cases (and others like them), when fullyinvestigated, would raise a number of interesting research questions.

• The Milwaukee Public Museum was created in 1882 when the City of Mil-waukee accepted some 20,000 objects and specimens from the Natural His-tory Society of Wisconsin for the purpose of creating a public museum. In1976 Milwaukee County purchased the museum from the City of Milwaukeein recognition of the county-wide services performed by the museum (TheWolf Organization, 1995, p. 48). It has since been turned into a public/privatepartnership managed by a nonprofit corporation which leases its facilitiesfrom the County.8 At that point the County appointed the initial membersof the board, each for three-year terms. Now the museum’s board is self-perpetuating, but every person under consideration must appear at a publicmeeting and prove he or she has a real interest in the museum and its future.Unusually, the media are permitted at all board meetings. To ease the transi-tion to private museum status, Milwaukee County provided a guaranteed (incurrent dollars) level of support to the Museum for the first five years. (TheCounty also agreed to fund major capital expenditures.) (McIlquham, 1993,p. 16)

• The Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, founded in 1936 bya group of citizens, was originally governed by an independent nonprofit or-ganization. At the outset the museum had a facility but no collection. In the1940s a support Auxiliary was created to raise funds to acquire artwork. In1976 the museum became a department of the City of Charlotte, but morerecently it has once again reverted to private, nonprofit status. All collectionsacquired through the Auxiliary belong to the nonprofit entity that formerlygoverned and now once again governs the Museum. During the time that itwas a department of the City the private Board remained active and raised

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148 J. MARK SCHUSTER

funds for programming while the City paid all staff salaries except for thedirector of development. (The Wolf Organization, 1995, pp. 60–61)

• It is not unknown for an independent nonprofit support organization that wasfounded to help with funding to gain in influence and want to take over theparent institution. Or, the state might perceive the affiliated support organiza-tion to have been unusually effective and then decide to pass off even morefunding and managerial responsibilities onto that organization. Either mighthappen smoothly or with contention. In the case of the San Jose HistoricalMuseum this process led to the nonprofit support organization, the San JoseMuseum Association, taking on a much wider role for itself, becoming an in-dependent programming organization with its own activities. Never officiallydesignated the single oversight group for the Museum, it became a competitor,seeking its own funding and developing its own programming. The City ofSan Jose finally had to call in an independent consultant to help sort out howto reconcile these two countervailing forces. (The Wolf Organization, 1995,p. 10)

• The Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia’s history museum, is one of a hand-ful of American museums that is widely viewed as having been privatized. Itwas founded in 1938 by radio pioneer A. Atwater Kent, who purchased thehistoric building – the original home of the Franklin Institute – and gave itto Philadelphia to become a museum devoted to the history of the city. In themid 1990s the City of Philadelphia notified the museum that all municipalfunding would terminate in three years. The museum developed a long-rangeplan that included privatizing the museum’s board. Before it was privatizedit had operated with a seven-person board of trustees, a 25-person board ofdirectors, and two support groups run by two nine-person boards of trustees.The long-range plan proposed a single 27-member board. (Urice, 1995, p. 5)

• The California Museum of Science and Industry had been operated by the Cal-ifornia Museum Foundation, a private non-profit foundation, under contractwith the State of California. The State Legislature terminated the contract asthe result of a dispute over who should select the successor to a controversialexecutive director, reflecting deeper divisions over who was responsible forwhat aspects of the museum’s operations. (Pristin, 1989)

A set of careful studies of cases such as these, sensitized by the idea of hybridiza-tion, would shed considerable light on the implications of the various organiza-tional restructuring decisions that one might make with respect to museums. Indoing so, we should not lose sight of the fact that the organizational structures ofour museums are the result of decisions that society makes, they are not set in stoneeven though their imposing edifices may make them seem that way. We would dowell to remember Stephen Weil’s admonition, “. . . [T]he museum itself is not somearchetypal form that we who work in it are striving to bring into being but, rather,

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a constantly evolving social artifact that, for the moment, is ours to shape”. (Weil,1990, pp. xiii–xiv)

Notes

* I am grateful to Stephen Urice, Director of the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and to AlanUllberg, Associate General Counsel of the Smithsonian Institution, both of whom suggestedthat it would be interesting to focus more analytical attention on hybrid museums (and, byimplication, on the hybridization of other cultural institutions). I am also grateful to MonniePeters, Project Manager of the 1989 National Museum Survey, who provided me with a correctedversion of the final data report from that study and performed additional analyses of the surveydata at my request. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for the ideas contained in thispaper nor for the interpretation of these data. The original version of this paper was preparedfor the conference, “The Economics of Museums”, University of Durham, U.K., 21–22 March1998.

1. The first major exception to this is Boorsma, van Hemel, and van der Wielen (1998).2. Because of the wide variety of management forms of American museums, it is not entirely a

trivial matter to identify the type of governing authority for each museum, and each of thesethree studies used different procedures. Suffice it to say, though, that these differences probablyplay little role in my analysis because of the high level of aggregation of the results I am reportinghere.

3. The data on which this analysis is based do not actually count all of the museums founded ineach decade. They are based on asking museums that existed in 1989 in which decade they werefounded, so this is only a rough measure of museum creation by decade.

4. Of course, it is a combination of these two factors – museums being more likely to be foundedwith a private governing authority and, once founded, being more likely to change their govern-ing authority from public to private than from private to public – that constitute the phenomenonof privatization.

5. The categories for museum types offered in the original questionnaires of both the 1972 and1979 surveys are at a finer level of detail that was reported in the final published reports. Withaccess to the original data, one could, presumably, create a set of categories that might be morecomparable across these studies.

6. In 1972 respondents were allowed to check multiple categories, but responses were finallycategorized into only one; in 1979 respondents were instructed to check only one category.

7. For a further discussion of this see Schuster (1997).8. For an account of how this transition was managed see Rosen (1994, pp. 41–44).

References

American Association of Museums (1992)Data Report from the 1989 National Museum Survey,corrected version. American Association of Museums, Washington, D.C.

Boorsma, Peter B. (1997) “Privatizing the Muse ‘and all that jazz’ ”, paper presented to the con-ference,Privatization/Désétatisation and Culture: Limitations or Opportunities for CulturalDevelopment in Europe?Boekmanstichting, Amsterdam, 11–14 June.

Boorsma, Peter B., van Hemel, Annemoon and van der Wielen, Niki, eds. (1998)Privatization andCulture: Experiences in the Arts, Heritage and Cultural Industries in Europe.Kluwer AcademicPublishers, Dordrecht.

Hutter, Michael (1997) “From Public to Private Rights in the Arts Sector”.Boekmancahier32: 170–176.

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McIlquham, John (1993) “Museums Turn to Nonprofit Status for Survival”.Non Profit Times(January): 1 + 16.

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Price, Lewis C., DiRocco, Lisa, and Lewis, Janice D. (1979)Museum Program Survey, 1979.National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, D.C.

Pristin, Terry (1989) “Conflict on Display: Termination of Private Foundation’s Contract at Museumof Science and Industry Sparks Turmoil”.Los Angeles Times(6 August): F 1 + 13.

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Schuster, J. Mark (1997) “Deconstructing a Tower of Babel: Privatization, Decentralization, Devolu-tion, and Other Ideas in Good Currency in Cultural Policy”.Voluntas8: 261–282.

Schuster, J. Mark (1998) “Beyond Privatization: The Hybridization of Museums and the Built Her-itage”, in Peter B. Boorsma, Annemoon van Hemel, and Niki van der Wielen, eds,Privatizationand Culture: Experiences in the Arts, Heritage and Cultural Industries in Europe.KluwerAcademic Publishers, Dordrecht.

The Wolf Organization, Inc. (1995)The Future of the San Jose Historical Museum, report preparedfor the City of San Jose, California, March 1995.

Ullberg, Alan D. (1992) “Roundtable on the Public/Private Museum: Accountability, Management ofPersonnel and Revenues, and Related Issues”. Background material prepared for the ALI-ABACourse of Study,Legal Problems of Museum Administration(March). Chicago, IL.

Ullberg, Alan D., Singer, Gerald R., and Chalmers, E. Laurence, Jr. (1990) “The Hybrid Pub-lic/Private Museum”. Background material prepared for the ALI-ABA Course of Study.LegalProblems of Museum Administration(March). Houston, TX.

Urice, Stephen K. (1995) “Privatizing the Public Museum”. Background material prepared for theALI-ABA Course of Study,Legal Problems of Museum Administration(26–28 March). SanFrancisco, CA.

Weil, Stephen E. (1983)Beauty and the Beasts – On Museums, Art, the Law, and the Market.Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.

Weil, Stephen E. (1990)Rethinking the Museum and Other Meditations. Smithsonian InstitutionPress, Washington, D.C.