Assembling the New: Studying Change Through the ‘Mundane’ in the Museum as Organization

Abstract

Change is highly valued within the museum sector and related literatures. Despite this emphasis, it is claimed that the field struggles to adequately understand and explain change processes, and that new critical and methodological tools are needed to move discussion forward (Peacock 2013). This paper offers one possible route by developing an anthropologically informed, ethnographic approach to studying the museum as organization. Illustrated through selected empirical materials from the case of the refurbishment of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the paper focuses on a period immediately following this major capital project. It argues that change is implemented and sustained by the many different players and practices constituting the inner life-worlds of museums as organizations. By analysing the mediatory capacities of, what in some frameworks might be considered, ‘mundane’ everyday activities (such as maintenance work and tour-guiding) the paper seeks to expand understandings of what shapes the dynamics of change in museums.

The Diplomatic Museum: A Latourian Perspective on the Civic Role of Museums

“…An important strand of new museology took partial inspiration from postmodernism and, more specifically, the French historian-philosopher Michel Foucault, and studied museums as disciplinary and nation-forming institutions (Ames, 1986;Bennett, 1995;Sherman, 1994). Later the Foucauldian concept of governmentality has been used in this discourse (Bennett, 2015), as well as Latour-inspired assemblage perspectives (Bennett & Healy, 2009;Jones & MacLeod, 2016;Macdonald, 2009;Morgan, 2018;Waterton & Dittmer, 2014). We want to offer a different reading of the political that is not present in this literature.…”

“…Latour is a well-known and well-used scholar within museum studies. Notably, he has been used to understand the agency of non-human objects that museums maintain and present (Arnold, 1996;Bennett, 2013;Dibley, 2011;Harrison, 2013;Larson et al 2007;Message & Witcomb, 2015;Morgan, 2018;Morris, 2003;Svabo, 2011;Waller, 2016;Yaneva, 2003). We recognize the importance that Latour's work on the agency of things has had in museum studies.…”