Museums and Heritage Collections in the Cultural Economy: The Challenge of Addressing Wider Audiences and Local Communities

Abstract

Although more museums are opening now than at any time in the past, too little attention has been paid to the concrete ways in which cultural processes of commoditisation affect heritage production. How can collections speak to wider audiences as well as to local communities in ways that are economically sustainable? This is not a question that invites simple solutions. Turning to ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article focuses on The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle and Skokloster Castle near Stockholm to explore how these institutions negotiate public participation, engage new audiences, and adapt their operations to meet the demands of the cultural economy they operate in. Drawing on critical cultural theory, the article highlights how different cultural and economic contexts affect museums’ potential to develop, expand, and meet their objectives. The study explains how two particular museums struggle to open their collections to broader publics, which can be understood as part of a wider process of democratisation.

Striving to Grow: The Challenge of Re-imagining Nordic Heritage in North America

“…These were: Skokloster Castle, a 17th century castle and museum located in the countryside outside of Stockholm, Hallwyl Palace, a turn of the 20th century museum located in central Stockholm, Kulturen, an open air museum featuring dozens of buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries; and Kulturens Östarp, featuring an 18th century Scanian farmhouse, and agricultural fields that were being cultivated via techniques from the 18th century. While this article focuses on the Nordic Heritage Museum, for reasons of space, we underline here, that the conclusions we draw in this paper, correspond tightly with results we have come to in relation to the other five museums we have also studied (for findings from these museums see (Gradén & O'Dell 2017;2018a, 2018b, forthcoming 2019.…”

Crowdfunding and Museums: A Field Trip Exemplar in the United Kingdom

“…This approach enables younger audiences to become educated in the museum’s offerings while expanding the museum’s overall visitor base (Decker, 2015, p. 1; Falk & Sheppard, 2006, p. 90; Rovner et al., 2013). Museums welcome diverse audiences (Gradén & O’Dell, 2017) and particularly younger audiences’ active involvement because visitors’ statistics are one of the quantifiable measurements that justify a museum’s presence and existence (Clark & Stewart, 2012). Therefore, this activity explores entrepreneurship and crowdfunding as concepts which can leverage the city museum’s visitor statistics and support thus providing a context for entrepreneurial learning.…”

“…To link the fieldtrip to community based entrepreneurial experience, we asked students to identify how the museum might use crowdfunding to increase its online commercial presence, cultivate new audiences and partake in a new funding model for exclusive projects (Mollick & Nanda, 2015). Because museums in various countries might be seeking different ways to become more 'entrepreneurial' (Gradén & O'Dell, 2017), we anticipated that our culturally diverse and multidisciplinary classroom would find this crowdfunding exercise innovative and relevant even for countries other than the United Kingdom.…”

Multi-targeted ethnography and the Challenge of Engaging New Audiences and Publics

“…From the folds of sociology, Michael Burawoy (2004, 2013, 2016) and his peers have long made a case for the advancement of a public sociology that could engage with and strive to change the world. One could add efforts made by museum-bound scholars to engage with local communities, volunteers, and museum members (Gradén and O’Dell, 2017; Schultz, 2011) or their efforts to include indigenous peoples and artisans working with those institutions (Scott, 2012). Indeed, if we challenge the boundary that all too often artificially separates scholarship and the arts (cf.…”