Managing Change in Museums and Galleries is the first practical book to provide guidance on how to deal with organisational change in museums, galleries or heritage organisations. Written by two authors who have direct experience of leading change, running change programmes and advising on change in more than 250 museums and galleries, the book identifies the various problems, issues and challenges that any professional in a museum or heritage organisation is likely to encounter and provides advice on how to deal with them. The book’s six parts treat change holistically, and help the reader understand what change entails, prepare for it and lead it, ensure that everyone in the museum is involved, understand what can go wrong and evaluate and learn from it. Each chapter is devoted to a specific challenge that is often encountered during change and is extensively cross-referenced to other relevant chapters. Including a list of helpful resources and suggestions of useful publications for further reading, this book is a unique guide to change in museums. Managing Change in Museums and Galleries is an essential resource for all museum practitioners – whether they be the people in museums and galleries who are leading change, or those affected by change as a leader, a member of staff or a volunteer.

Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces demonstrates how museums can enact institutional change by implementing systematic and structural approaches to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-elitist practices. This practical guide brings together museum and heritage experts, artists, organizers, and cultural workers to present thoughtful, polyvocal critiques and solutions for conceptualizing museums of the future. These authors embrace hybrid identities, complicate concepts of nationalism, straddle disciplines, and extend the concept, function, and literal place and definition of the “museum.” The book shows that museums must cultivate practices that center people, interrogate colonial legacies, take new approaches to curatorial ethics and caring for objects, and imagine new strategies for asserting the relevance of museums, to create institutional change. This resource challenges traditional approaches to museology by offering scholarly research and case studies alongside personal narratives and speculative fiction. Institutional Change for Museums will be an invaluable resource for museum professionals and cultural workers, including curators, educators, and researchers. It will also be beneficial to those studying or researching in Museum and Heritage Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Visual Culture, Social Justice, and Postcolonial Studies.

Museums and the Challenge of Change explores the profound challenges facing museums and charts ways forward that are grounded in partnership with audiences and communities on-site, online, and in wider society. Facing new generations with growing needs and desires, growing population diversity, and a digital revolution, the museum sector knows it must change - but it has been slow to respond. Drawing on the expertise and voices of practitioners from within and beyond the sector, Black calls for a change of mind-set and radical evolution (transformation over time, learning from the process, rather than a 'big bang' approach). Internally, a participative environment supports social interaction through active engagement with collections and content - and Black includes an initial typology of participative exhibits, both traditional and digital. Externally, the museum works in partnership with local communities and other agencies to make a real difference, in response to societal challenges. Black considers what this means for the management and structure of the museum, emphasising that it is not possible to separate the development of a participative experience from the ways in which the museum is organised. Museums and the Challenge of Change is highly practical and focused on initiatives that museums can implement swiftly and cheaply, making a real impact on user engagement. The book will thus be essential reading for museum practitioners and students of museum studies around the globe.

A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

Museums must change to illuminate the histories, cultures, and social issues that matter to their local population. Based on a unique longitudinal ethnographic study, Transforming Museum Management illustrates how a traditional art museum attempted to transform into a more inclusive and community-based institution. Using open systems theory and the Buddhist concept of mutual causality, it examines the museum’s internal management structure and culture, programs and exhibitions, and mental models of museum workers. In providing both theoretical and practical foundations to transform management structures, this accessible volume will benefit stakeholders by proposing a new culture and structure to arts institutions, to change practice to be more relevant, diverse, and inclusive. This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and advanced students of museum studies, cultural management, arts administration, non-profit management, and organizational studies.

Exhibitions for Social Justice assesses the state of curatorial work for social justice in the Americas and Europe today. Analyzing best practices and new curatorial work to support all those working on exhibitions, Gonzales expounds curatorial practices that lie at the nexus of contemporary museology and neurology. From sharing authority, to inspiring action and building solidarity, the book demonstrates how curators can make the most of visitors’ physical and mental experience of exhibitions. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work at over twenty institutions with nearly eighty museum professionals, as well as scholarship in the public humanities, visual culture, cultural studies, memory studies, and brain science, this project steps back from the detailed institutional histories of how exhibitions come to be. Instead, it builds a set of curatorial practices by examining the work behind the finished product in the gallery. Demonstrating that museums have the power to help our society become more hospitable, equitable, and sustainable, Exhibitions for Social Justice will be of interest to scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will also be valuable reading for museum professionals and anyone else working with exhibitions who is looking for guidance on how to ensure their work attains maximum impact.

The Personalization of the Museum Visit examines a fundamental shift in institutional behavior in museums located in the United States and the United Kingdom. Contending that art museums have moved toward a new paradigm of public engagement, it posits that modern museum visitors are treated as self-directed "clients", with the agency to make meaning for themselves. The book then considers how this change has come about, examining factors such as the onset of a new museology, an experience economy, and a marketing revolution. Drawing on extensive research undertaken at Britain’s Tate Modern, the book examines a range of issues, including visitor engagement, curatorial practice, and museum management. A visit experience that is customizable to the individual visitor, in which curators and marketers work together with visitor-clients to create an experience of personalized meaning, is, Rodney argues, rising in prevalence in the art museum field, but it is also being stymied by certain structural impediments. This book examines such obstacles, including institutional division of labor, long-standing conceptions, or misconceptions, of the museum’s mission, and the orientation of museums toward a certain conceptual model of their visitors. The Personalization of the Museum Visit is essential reading for scholars and students engaging with issues of visitor engagement, curatorial practice, and museum management. With a particular focus on the role of business interests and public policy, the book should also be of interest to those undertaking research in fields outside of museum and visitor studies.

In Thriving in the Knowledge Age, John Falk and Beverly Sheppard argue that museums require a radically new business model to survive the transition into the knowledge age. Only by shifting towards more personalized and community-based learning experiences can museums reverse the declining attendance figures of the twenty-first century. Written to provide clear answers to fundamental questions about the purpose and goals of the museum of the future, this visionary book is a must-have for museum professionals and trustees.

Museums as Agents for Social Change is the first comprehensive text to examine museum practice in a decolonised moment, moving beyond known roles of object collection and presentation. Drawing on studies of Mutare museum, a regional museum in Eastern Zimbabwe, this book considers how museums with inherited colonial legacies are dealing with their new environments. The book provides an examination of Mutare museum’s activism in engaging with topical issues affecting its surrounding community and Chipangura and Mataga demonstrate how new forms of engagement are being deployed to attract new audiences, whilst dealing with issues such as economic livelihoods, poverty, displacement, climate change and education. Illustrating how recent programmes have helped to reposition Mutare museum as a decolonial agent of social change and an important community anchor institution, the book also demonstrates how other museums can move beyond the colonial preoccupation with the gathering of collections, conservation and presentation of cultural heritage to the public. Museums as Agents for Social Change will primarily be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, history, archaeology and anthropology. It should also be appealing to museum professionals around the world who are interested in learning more about how to decolonise their museum.