When the Budget is Tight, Whose Heritage Counts Most? An Ethnological Study of Museums in the Cultural Economy.
Working with ethnological perspectives and ethnographic methods of participant observation and qualitative interviews, the objective of this project is to analyze the manner in which representations of cultural heritage in museums are affected by market forces (including demands that museums present to their stakeholders ever better quantified results in their annual reports) as well as the cultural context in which museums work today.
Central questions which this project will investigate are:
How are cultural economic pressures met and perceived by museums? How do market forces and the demands placed by stakeholders to draw in larger audiences, affect how heritage museums perceive the framework of their activities and thereby how they choose to produce new exhibitions?
When numbers “count”, and demands to attract large publics are ever increasing, whose heritage counts most in practice, and how do the pressures to quantitatively account for production affect the choices museums make to produce exhibitions.
How do the demands to quantitatively account (to actors such as the Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis/Myndigheten för kulturanalys) for a museum’s output and production affect its way of measuring its practice and activities as well as its manner of viewing and understanding itself and its activities? Might these demands have an impact on how museums target their potential audiences, choose partners for collaboration, or strive to involve local communities?
Final report
When the Budget is Tight, whose Heritage Counts Most?
An Ethnological Study of Museums in the Cultural Economy
The Research Question:
This project investigated the question of how economic realities, coupled with the cultural contexts in which museums operate, affect the manner in which collections and exhibitions are organized, managed, and developed as museums work to make themselves relevant in society. This project contributes theoretically to the fields of cultural economy, critical heritage studies and museum studies.
Objective:
The Objective of this project is to analyze how the production of cultural heritage in museums is affected by market forces as well as the cultural context in which museums work today.
Central questions were:
How are cultural economic pressures met and perceived by museums, and in what ways do they affect how heritage museums perceive the framework of their activities, and ultimately choose to produce new exhibitions, programs and events?
When numbers “count”, and demands to attract large publics are increasing, whose heritage counts most in practice, and how do demands to quantitatively account for production affect the choices museums make to produce and assemble exhibitions?
How do the demands to quantitatively account (to actors such as the Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis) for a museum’s output and production affect their activities and exhibition choices?
How the study was carried out:
The project was carried out over a period of five years (a longer period of time than planned due to the effects of COVID 19). The project worked with ethnographic methods of participant observation and qualitative interviews to study nine museums endeavoring to meet the challenges of today’s cultural economy. The study also analyzed annual reports, homepage content, and participated in digital meetings and events.
The project’s most important findings:
The project highlighted, defined, and analyzed the cultural processes behind the phenomenon of Hip Heritage (a term which the research team has minted, and which other scholars and people in the museum sector are discussing). Hip Heritage, involves a disposition to heritage that increasingly focuses on its potential as a commodity with a broadly marketable aura, rather than its potential as an identity marker with ties to the past and linkages to a delineable group of people (Gradén & O’Dell 2020a:130; 2020b: 183). Scholars have repeatedly asserted that heritage can be understood as uses of the past in the present for the purpose of shaping the future (Klein 2000:25, Siikala, Klein & Mathisen 2004, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998 & 2004, Smith 2006, 2021, Holtorf 2021). Such a perspective is important to appreciate. However, Hip Heritage, as we argue, is reactive. It implies a focus upon showcasing, mobilizing, and lifting forth that which is trendy, “hot”, and interesting in the present for the purpose of creating attention in a highly competitive and crowded series of cultural offerings and markets. Hip Heritage can involve the mobilization of the past but it often mobilizes contemporary phenomena in heritage contexts, and here there is a particular propensity to focus on exhibition and programs that highlight fashion, design, and art.
The project also lifts forth and analyzes the growing role secondary offerings (services and commodities not necessarily linked to the primary educational or cultural mission of the museum) such as those emanating from gift shops, restaurants/cafés, and the rental of facilities, play in fueling the museum’s economy, and helping it to create market buzz that attracts people to the museum. The study also underlines the fragility this can bring to a museum’s economy when those secondary offerings falter, as happened during the pandemic.
A final important result of the study was to highlight and problematize the growing role a diverse pool of entrepreneurs (from consultants conducting market segment research and focus group interviews, to craftsmen and women maintaining, repairing and preserving museum objects and buildings) play in facilitating museums’ ability to develop and move forward into new futures. Also important here are new categories of museum professional from fields such as HR, event management, experience producers, and retail managers, among others.
An important conclusion that the project emphasizes is the fact that museums are in a period of intensive change. A great deal of scholarship has focused on museums as cultural institutions and as educational institutions. However, there is a greater need for cultural and social theorists to understand museums as businesses. Other scholars have pointed to the role museums had in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to help form and produce “good citizens.” As this project has pointed out, this is not necessarily the primary role museums see themselves as playing in contemporary society. A critical question is, what role can, and will, museums play in society in the future? This is an important question that requires further research.
New research questions:
A new and exciting field of inquiry that is generated out of this research concerns how elements of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), in the form of traditional skills, crafts, and knowledge can come to be revalued and attributed new meaning through time. What we have seen, and something which the craftsmen and women whom we have studied attest to, is the growing interest their works has seen, especially in recent years of uncertainty, against the background of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. How is knowledge that is encapsulated in permaculture, thatching, timbering and clothes making gaining new significance in Sweden today, and what role might museums play in spurring this growing interest? How may museums’ work with traditional forms of craftsmanship contribute to the development of social and cultural resilience in times of uncertainty?
How the research team has spread results and collaborated:
The research team has published international peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes, and books. They have organized workshops, conference panels, and presented results at Museum Organizational Meetings. The team has presented research results at the Swedish Spring Museum Meeting (Vårmötet) in 2025 (The conference s dedicated to people working in museums). The research team has organized an international workshop entitled Mobilizing Heritage in Museums to Promote Inclusion and Engagement. The workshop took place at Lund University in August 2023, and included presentations made be staff and leadership of such museums as The Smithsonian, Western Kentucky Museum, Michigan University Museum, Kulturen in Lund, and the Regional Museum of Scania. The team organized a session (that included folklorists and museum personnel) at the American Folklore Society’s (AFS) Annual Meeting in 2023 entitled Heritage on the Move in the Name of Democracy. A second AFS session was organized in 2024 entitled Mobilizing Heritage in Museums to Promote Inclusion and Engagement, that included presentations from the Regional Museum of Scania (and other American museums). The director of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) attended this session and requested that it be repeated in Las Angeles at AAM’s annual meeting in 2025. This extremely prestigious invitation shows that the research team s breaking international ground on research on museums and heritage. The research team is currently working with the Regional Museum of Skåne to develop a new permanent exhibition that includes the heritage of people who have come to Sweden in the past, but particularly in the last 50 years.
An Ethnological Study of Museums in the Cultural Economy
The Research Question:
This project investigated the question of how economic realities, coupled with the cultural contexts in which museums operate, affect the manner in which collections and exhibitions are organized, managed, and developed as museums work to make themselves relevant in society. This project contributes theoretically to the fields of cultural economy, critical heritage studies and museum studies.
Objective:
The Objective of this project is to analyze how the production of cultural heritage in museums is affected by market forces as well as the cultural context in which museums work today.
Central questions were:
How are cultural economic pressures met and perceived by museums, and in what ways do they affect how heritage museums perceive the framework of their activities, and ultimately choose to produce new exhibitions, programs and events?
When numbers “count”, and demands to attract large publics are increasing, whose heritage counts most in practice, and how do demands to quantitatively account for production affect the choices museums make to produce and assemble exhibitions?
How do the demands to quantitatively account (to actors such as the Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis) for a museum’s output and production affect their activities and exhibition choices?
How the study was carried out:
The project was carried out over a period of five years (a longer period of time than planned due to the effects of COVID 19). The project worked with ethnographic methods of participant observation and qualitative interviews to study nine museums endeavoring to meet the challenges of today’s cultural economy. The study also analyzed annual reports, homepage content, and participated in digital meetings and events.
The project’s most important findings:
The project highlighted, defined, and analyzed the cultural processes behind the phenomenon of Hip Heritage (a term which the research team has minted, and which other scholars and people in the museum sector are discussing). Hip Heritage, involves a disposition to heritage that increasingly focuses on its potential as a commodity with a broadly marketable aura, rather than its potential as an identity marker with ties to the past and linkages to a delineable group of people (Gradén & O’Dell 2020a:130; 2020b: 183). Scholars have repeatedly asserted that heritage can be understood as uses of the past in the present for the purpose of shaping the future (Klein 2000:25, Siikala, Klein & Mathisen 2004, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998 & 2004, Smith 2006, 2021, Holtorf 2021). Such a perspective is important to appreciate. However, Hip Heritage, as we argue, is reactive. It implies a focus upon showcasing, mobilizing, and lifting forth that which is trendy, “hot”, and interesting in the present for the purpose of creating attention in a highly competitive and crowded series of cultural offerings and markets. Hip Heritage can involve the mobilization of the past but it often mobilizes contemporary phenomena in heritage contexts, and here there is a particular propensity to focus on exhibition and programs that highlight fashion, design, and art.
The project also lifts forth and analyzes the growing role secondary offerings (services and commodities not necessarily linked to the primary educational or cultural mission of the museum) such as those emanating from gift shops, restaurants/cafés, and the rental of facilities, play in fueling the museum’s economy, and helping it to create market buzz that attracts people to the museum. The study also underlines the fragility this can bring to a museum’s economy when those secondary offerings falter, as happened during the pandemic.
A final important result of the study was to highlight and problematize the growing role a diverse pool of entrepreneurs (from consultants conducting market segment research and focus group interviews, to craftsmen and women maintaining, repairing and preserving museum objects and buildings) play in facilitating museums’ ability to develop and move forward into new futures. Also important here are new categories of museum professional from fields such as HR, event management, experience producers, and retail managers, among others.
An important conclusion that the project emphasizes is the fact that museums are in a period of intensive change. A great deal of scholarship has focused on museums as cultural institutions and as educational institutions. However, there is a greater need for cultural and social theorists to understand museums as businesses. Other scholars have pointed to the role museums had in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to help form and produce “good citizens.” As this project has pointed out, this is not necessarily the primary role museums see themselves as playing in contemporary society. A critical question is, what role can, and will, museums play in society in the future? This is an important question that requires further research.
New research questions:
A new and exciting field of inquiry that is generated out of this research concerns how elements of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), in the form of traditional skills, crafts, and knowledge can come to be revalued and attributed new meaning through time. What we have seen, and something which the craftsmen and women whom we have studied attest to, is the growing interest their works has seen, especially in recent years of uncertainty, against the background of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. How is knowledge that is encapsulated in permaculture, thatching, timbering and clothes making gaining new significance in Sweden today, and what role might museums play in spurring this growing interest? How may museums’ work with traditional forms of craftsmanship contribute to the development of social and cultural resilience in times of uncertainty?
How the research team has spread results and collaborated:
The research team has published international peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes, and books. They have organized workshops, conference panels, and presented results at Museum Organizational Meetings. The team has presented research results at the Swedish Spring Museum Meeting (Vårmötet) in 2025 (The conference s dedicated to people working in museums). The research team has organized an international workshop entitled Mobilizing Heritage in Museums to Promote Inclusion and Engagement. The workshop took place at Lund University in August 2023, and included presentations made be staff and leadership of such museums as The Smithsonian, Western Kentucky Museum, Michigan University Museum, Kulturen in Lund, and the Regional Museum of Scania. The team organized a session (that included folklorists and museum personnel) at the American Folklore Society’s (AFS) Annual Meeting in 2023 entitled Heritage on the Move in the Name of Democracy. A second AFS session was organized in 2024 entitled Mobilizing Heritage in Museums to Promote Inclusion and Engagement, that included presentations from the Regional Museum of Scania (and other American museums). The director of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) attended this session and requested that it be repeated in Las Angeles at AAM’s annual meeting in 2025. This extremely prestigious invitation shows that the research team s breaking international ground on research on museums and heritage. The research team is currently working with the Regional Museum of Skåne to develop a new permanent exhibition that includes the heritage of people who have come to Sweden in the past, but particularly in the last 50 years.