Museum Practice. Группа авторов
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our minds wonderfully. Nonetheless, this approach can only be sustained for a limited period, and sensing the right time to ease off and adopt a more inclusive style of management is crucial to the successful implementation of culture change.
The importance of supportive governance needs to be stressed. Museums always have governing bodies, whether they are local authorities or a board of trustees, and culture change is impossible without their agreement. At TWM our governing body was the Joint Museums Committee, a body made up of elected councillors from the five local authorities of Tyne and Wear. It was the potential threat of these five authorities ending the joint funding agreement that always hung over TWM like the Sword of Damocles.
In fact, the Committee could not have been more supportive.5 The councillors welcomed the improvements that the new culture brought about. In particular, they could hardly fail to notice that visitor numbers began to increase as we invigorated the museum service with education work, capital developments, an increasingly varied exhibitions program, and a new emphasis on attracting non- traditional audiences and on professional marketing and fundraising.6 In 1994 TWM was cited as a success in that year’s Newcastle Labour Party Election Manifesto: an extraordinary turnaround, and proof that successful museums can prosper even in the most skeptical political environment.7 Anecdotal evidence and independent evaluation has confirmed that the revamped museum service has been successful in terms of social impact and other factors (Calzia et al. 2005).8
Committee support meant that we could take risks. And one of our biggest risks was to take over the management of the Hancock Museum from Newcastle University, which subsequently became the core of the Great North Museum. This was a major undertaking that could have gone wrong in so many ways, but in fact the new arrangements led to significant gains for the Hancock (including increased profile, audience growth, several awards, and improved fundraising) and a huge amount of credit for TWM (Great North Museum 2013). Moreover, assuming management responsibility for the Hancock meant that TWM staff were exposed to all manner of new practices and issues, and our success in turning around the museum’s fortunes acted as a demonstration of how good TWM could be, and a motivational example. It became a catalyst for change elsewhere in TWM.
During the 1990s, as TWM developed into a radical and effective museum service, we developed a written set of documents that culminated in our Statement of Purpose and Beliefs. Along the way we wrote a number of mission statements. The (rather clunky) one from 1995 reads: “Tyne and Wear Museums assembles and protects evidence of human and environmental development in Tyne and Wear and, where appropriate, elsewhere; and provides the fullest access to that evidence to people of all ages, background and abilities.” While the 1995 mission acknowledges the core collections-based role of TWM, significantly it follows this with the statement that “the fullest access” should be provided to these collections. In the TWM 1996 Corporate Plan this mission statement had been amended to read: “Tyne and Wear Museums assembles and protects evidence of human and environmental development, and, in making these fully accessible, strives to improve the quality of people’s lives in Tyne and Wear.” The 1996 mission statement was supported by a list of “aims,” which elaborated upon the brief mission, and included the express aim that TWM should act “as an agent of social change.”
What was happening was that TWM was edging away from the traditional view of the role of museums as defined by, for example, the UK Museums Association and ICOM, toward a position where the right of the public to access and benefit from collections becomes the overriding mission.9 This is a subtle but important distinction that reflects the need for museums to be acutely conscious of their socioeconomic environment, whatever their collections-based needs and priorities.
In May 1996 TWM’s senior managers held a “Strategy Day,” something we did on a frequent basis. We noted at that meeting that, in 1991, we had been suffering from political hostility, low staff morale, a low professional profile, declining funding, no strategy, and low visitor numbers. By 1996 we had become politically popular, staff morale was “quite good” (although members of staff were “tired”), our professional profile was strong, our fundraising was successful, we were now very strategic, and visitor numbers had more than doubled from 500,000 to 1.2 million since 1990 (Tyne and Wear Museum Annual Reports 1990–1998). We also noted that we had become far more cost-effective and ambitious, the funding from the National Lottery had changed our landscape dramatically, and that a possible Labour Government was on the political horizon.
High visitor numbers suggested that our focus on being relevant to local communities was working, but we could not rest on our laurels. In April 1998, I sent a note to TWM staff: “If ever we forget that our single most important performance indicator is the level of public support we enjoy (and earn) then our present Golden Age will be finished.” There was a growing acknowledgment within TWM that the primary purpose of museums is to provide a service to the whole of the public. This belief sat at the heart of TWM’s philosophy by the end of the 1990s, and was captured in our Statement of Purpose and Beliefs (mentioned above), a document worked on by scores of TWM managers and endorsed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in its Policy Guidance on social inclusion for museums, galleries, and archives in May 2000 (DCMS 2000, 29). This Purpose and Beliefs was clearer than had been our previous mission statements about TWM’s social role. Here is an extract:
Our Mission is:
To help people determine their place in the world and understand their identities,
so enhancing their self-respect and their respect for others.
We Believe that:
We act as an agent of social and economic regeneration.
We Pursue our Mission by:
Exposing our public to ideas, thus helping counter ignorance, discrimination and hostility.
Our Vision for the Future of TWM is for:
Total inclusion.
Thirteen years later, the current TWAM (now Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums) mission reads: “Our mission is to help people determine their place in the world and define their identities, so enhancing their self-respect and their respect for others” (Tyne and Wear Museums and Archives 2011).
It would be fair to note that the advent of the New Labour Government in 1997 had encouraged our explicit commitment to social inclusion at TWM, because social inclusion was a key government policy which shaped and was shaped by important research on social inequality (Fleming in Dodd and Sandell 2001). We felt able to be more expansive about our social aims, and when the Government decided to use the TWM Purpose and Beliefs in its policy guidance for all museums and archives, we felt vindicated in our approach. In letters written to me by the outgoing Government Ministers in 2001, both Secretary of State Chris Smith and Culture Minister Alan Howarth made reference to the example TWM had provided to the museum sector. Howarth wrote:
I have very much admired the way in which you have flown the flag not just for Tyne and Wear Museums, but for regional museums in general. You have demonstrated that first class practice is not confined to the national museums, and indeed you have blazed several of the trails that as Ministers we very much wanted the museums system to pursue.10
Case study 2: National Museums Liverpool
My most recent experience of redefining a mission and organizational values has been at National Museums Liverpool (NML), where I became director in October 2001. NML has been a national museum service since 1986. It is a group of museums in Liverpool and Wirral that hold world-class