Preserving the past: an accountability study of the annual reporting practices by leading museums in USA, UK and Europe.

Abstract

Museums as custodians of important cultural heritage assets attract significant sponsorship from government and communities and a need exists to understand how the resources made available are being spent, to maintain and increase the value of these assets. The significance placed on museums warrants further investigation into their accountability and the purpose of this paper is to analyse museums reporting practices, as a way to discharge performance accountability. The reporting practices of the world’s leading museums in the USA versus those predominately located in the UK (with a small focus on Europe) were examined, compared and contrasted, in order to suggest better practice for improved accountability in in annual reporting so as assist in improving the governance of museums. To assess the annual reports, a modified version of a research instrument which works in conjunction with the balanced scorecard framework to evaluate performance accountability, namely the Museums’ Performance Accountability Index (MPADI) by Wei, Davey and Coy (2008) has been adopted. Evidence is found that the four perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard were emphasized differently between USA and UK/European institutions. The findings demonstrate areas of strength s but also recommend improved reporting practices for museums. The study draws out a number of detailed observations which offers suggestions for better practice in reporting by museums. Until recently there has been little research on the performance and accountability of this sector. This work assists in addressing this deficiency.

The Quality of Annual Reporting by Italian Museums: An International Comparison

“…This preliminary activity resulted in a final set of detection and classification rules. Finally, to enhance comparability with the findings of Botes et al (2013), and in order to test the alignment of the research team on the scoring procedure, the highest and lowest scoring annual and activity reports of that study have been taken into consideration and scored by researchers. No relevant differences in the assessment have been discovered between independent valuations or actual valuations and the previous findings.…”

“…A few studies focusing on the quality of museum reporting and accountability practices have been conducted: for instance, Jackson (1991) in the United Kingdom, Weil (1994) in the United States, Rentschler and Potter (1996) in Australia, Pignataro (2002) in Italy, Christensen and Mohr (2003) in the United States, Gstraunthaler and Piber (2007) in Austria, Da Silva Menezes, West (2009) in Portugal andDainelli, Manetti, andSibilio (2013) in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, UK, and US. Wei et al (2008) and Botes et al (2013) tried to evaluate the quality of museums' annual reporting using the already cited MPADI and MPADI2. As mentioned before, the two indices are inspired by the BSC approach proposed by Kaplan and Norton (1996).…”

“…In order to improve the MPADI, Botes et al (2013) added four performance indicators on strategies and critical success factors (under mission and objectives); reputation (under customer/stakeholder); directors' remuneration (under financial position), and online connectivity (under learning and growth). The 22 performance indicators of MPADI2 are shown in Table 1.…”

“…Wei, Davey, and Coy (2008) have use an altered version of the BSC approach to create a Museum Performance and Accountability Disclosure Index (MPADI) that measures the level of information museums in New Zealand and the United Kingdom provide to their stakeholders. Drawing on their preliminary conclusions, Botes, Diver, and Davey (2013) used a modified version of the disclosure index (MPADI2), finding evidence that the four perspectives of BSC are emphasized differently in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European institutions. This study examines Italian museums in order to assess the quality of annual reporting and compare the results with those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and European.…”

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ABSTRACTWe study the quality of disclosure and the level of accountability of Italian museums using MPADI2 index (Wei et al 2008;Botes et al 2013) on a sample of 13 annual reports which, given the legal status of some entities, encompasses the activity of 93 Italian public and private museums, many of which are within the most visited in Italy and worldwide. The results allow for an international comparison with the annual reports of a panel of USA, UK and European museums which have undergone the same MPADI2 analysis, giving an interesting insight about museum different disclosing practices across countries.

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